Free Pepsi Point

I’m not playing this game with pepsi, so here, 1st come 1st serve:

VEA9H
TGQKA

Ok, why is it tuesday morning and I feel like I was run over by a semi truck, and immediatly follwed by a VB bug. Not the new ones mind you, but the original…

Not again…

Today continues this week’s tradition of technology being useless. I got home planning to do a little laundry for next week before I went to bed and caught up on sleep for the first time this week. When I called home I was informed by a rather despondent mother that the new washer is not spinning out the water just like the old one was doing before it blew up. I got home and was greeted by Micheal, with a “I’m getting a carpet ball table”. Yet another thing done around here for the kids that will get next to no use. So I took a look at the washer and sure enough it’s not spinning water out. My first thought is that it’s overloaded but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I set it to run again and went to bed. I was asleep for no more than an hour when I was awoken with a bellow of my name. When I got back down stairs to figure out what the emergency was I was told, “It still didn’t work”. Yeah well sorry, I’m not a god I can’t just wave my hand and have things fixed. The only thing I can figure is that the power dips during the beginning of the spin cycle when the washer draws the most power, the power dip then resets the controller circuitry. As a test I switched the outlets in use by the washer, and the dryer. I hope this will prove to be a fruitful choice but I just don’t know. As it stands my confidence level is so much lower than it has been in a long time. I’m trying to look at it as a check to keep my ego from getting out of control but good grief, have I really been this cocky?

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Worlds shortest personality test…

Saw this on a bunch of peopels blogs today… I figured what the heck, why not…

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The light at the end of the tunnel is blown… Sorry…

Technology at work seems to have been somewhat sane today. This evening was a different story altogether. I got a call on the way home from a friend trying to change his channel on his wireless router and every time I would start to tell him what to do my cell phone would loose signal and drop the call. I finally gave up and text messaged him. Then I called Verizon and complained and had a crystal clear call the entire time I was complaining to them. Typical… I got home had dinner started laundry and then discovered a bunch of spyware on my mothers computer. So I spent the next hours and a half removing it. I have a pretty good idea where it came from… Ahh the joys of being an admin at home as well as work.

Gremlins must die!

Ahh it’s Wednesday, and the gremlins are still floating about. Today while finishing up a new report for our system that will automatically import interlibrary loan (ILL) items from our ILL system into our main library system I could not for the life of my get the system to run this report. Or any other custom report for that matter. Now having only just learned how to create custom reports last week I’ll admit I am new to it. However I have been using Perl for almost 10 years and am not a newcomer by any means. I checked, and re-checked and re-re-checked my code and there was nothing wrong. I finally decided to exit the library system user interface and go back in. Guess what… everything started working fine. <sigh> Damn gremlins. After work though I spent some much needed quality time with some friends. We talked, had pizza, talked, laughed joked etc. It was nice. They too are having tech issues, I really think it’s something in the air. Their problem is a pretty easy fix though. One of their neighbors put up some wireless cameras (2.4 ghz band) and their wireless network access on the laptop has stopped working. I told them what to do to fix it so hopefully they won’t have anymore troubles.

Technology is evil

Today started out relatively painless. Notice I said “started out”. At lunch my co-worker and friend Kendall announced to me that he was leaving for another job. That’s a pretty tough one to take, as he has been my right hand, my buffer, my creative consultant, and etc… etc… for the past 5 years. I don’t blame him at all for it as the new job pays a lot more than here. Well that made me less interested in working. At that point another friend asked me if I knew anything about private IM systems he could use in his office. I suggested Jabber and after a while we decided I could toss it on one of his servers for him. I started the process not really thinking much of it as I have done this sort of thing more times than I can count. Of course when I went to install it there were a couple needed libraries and such that were out dated so I downloaded then and started their compile. About halfway though the compile the system gave me a “insufficient disk space message” I’ve run into that before and just went to delete the original tar.gzips for the libraries I was working on to free up space and that’s when I discovered that “rm” would not work. I got the response “sh: rm command not found” Excuse me? Uh ok… I type: “ls /bin” and hit enter. “sh: ls command not found” WTF?!?!?!?!? At this point I was panicked pretty badly. So I notified the owner of said server and he tried his website on the server… nothing… I tried logging in on a second session on the box: nothing. We sheepishly tried a reboot and no real surprise the system will no longer boot. CRAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I apologized profusely for the trouble and vowed I will fix it and have it back up and better than before. So I will be getting the box this weekend to rebuild it. I can only assume the hard drive died in the middle of the compile I was working on. That or once again there was a mysterious memory fry…
Having talked to a couple other techies they too agree with my initial diagnosis so at least I don’t think it’s anything I did wrong. As I have been racking my brain trying to figure out what I could have done.

Technology woes

I’m beginning to think there is some sort of strange force at work in the world. It almost seems like the WWII gremlins have returned with a vengeance. At least that seems to be the case where my life intersects with technology, which is pretty much everywhere. This past week has been pretty rough for a lot of reasons. I’ll try to start at the beginning…
Sunday morning the main server for the library I work at blew up. Thankfully for me I did not find out about it until Monday morning. Upon arriving at work my boss informed me she could not get signed on. I check on my workstation and found the same to be true. I then noticed an email from the server guy in I.T. informing me that it had died on Sunday and that HP would be there by 8am to fix it. It took most of the day Monday to get our system back to life. The error messages the system would give were very cryptic. They attempted to repair it by replacing just about every component in the machine. Once they replaced the motherboard the error messages pointed directly to memory issues. Of course, the memory was the only replacement part that HP had not sent. The tech called in to have it sent over, and to our horror was told they do not have the memory in stock. After informing him that this was mission critical and we REALLY needed it back HP decided to send someone down with the memory for Kalamazoo MI. The memory was supposed to be here by 3:30. By 5:15 it still had not arrived and we were rather irritated. (Have I mentioned I don’t get paid for any work past 4:30) We finally discovered that the memory had indeed arrived around 4:45 and was delivered to the receiving department for the college NOT to the I.T. department as it should have been. So the campus server guru, the HP service tech, and myself headed over to receiving with a sinking feeling in our stomachs… Sure enough, they were all gone for the night. Thankfully the night custodian manager managed to get us into the shipping office where we were able to retrieve the badly needed memory. Upon our return the HP guy installed the memory and restarted the server and things came up relatively unharmed. Thank god the memory blew up during a backup so the system was in a clean state with none of the library software actually running corrupting data. I spent another 3 hours manually running jobs that did not run, checking over data and finally loading in the days standalone system data.

Me? Best man? Really?

Tony asked me to be best man in the wedding today. I hope I don’t screw that up…

SIRSI API Training this week

This week I will be attending SIRSI API training. I’m not to worried as I pick stuff up pretty easily. I will have to force myself to use VI though. Oh well 🙂 It’s got its benefits just like any other editor and I’m not one of those editor bigots.