First came the word that twenty Compaqs were due, all loaded (down) with Windows XP. Then came the knowledge that our anti-virus system required an upgrade in order to support Windows XP.

And now… I have to engage in a comprehensive upgrade of the IBM Client Access software, both on the AS/400 itself and on the majority of our hundred-or-so desktop PCs.

According to IBM, one must run Client Access V5R1 with a service pack or (preferably) V5R2 in order to support Windows XP clients. We’re running V4R4. I now have a support request in to get the appropriate media to upgrade Client Access. Even if it shows up tomorrow, it’s still going to be the middle of next week before I can even start rolling out these Compaqs. And I don’t expect it to show up tomorrow, since Encoda Systems hasn’t bothered to respond to my support request yet.

Did I mention that nine more of the streaming servers will be arriving next week for me to prep? And that the top brass want those machines prepped and shipped off, oh, about yesterday-ish?

The XP rollout just went from annoying to infuriating, and there’s not a damned thing I can do about it today but wait for other people to give me what I need. (Like, say, a cot in the next room, all the cocoa I can drink, copious amounts of chinese food, big stacks of music, and new versions of Norton Anti-Virus and IBM Client Access.)

Smart money says I’m working right through Christmas. I’m still taking Wednesday off to see Two Towers, though. Especially the way things are going lately.

Don’t mind the maniacal laughter, folks. It’s just Karel, trying to gather up the shreds of his sanity. (“You can’na fool me, there ain’t no sanity clause!” – Chico Marx, from some Marx Brothers movie. Possibly ‘Night At The Opera,’ but I’m not sure about that right now.)

Monday: Spent until almost 2:00 desperately looking for a fix to the AS/400 issue only to find out it was a bad port on the 3Com switch. Unplugging the jack — yes, just unplugging the Cat-5 cable from the switch — caused the switch to fully reset itself. Whoops. The AS/400 is now jacked into a D-Link switch and so far I haven’t heard any complaints since. Could this be the second 3Com to go south this year?

Tuesday: Department Heads meeting in the morning, Access Control computer rebuild the rest of the day.

Of course there’s always the usual collection of small fires to fill out any given day. But that’s why you haven’t heard from me this past couple of days. And don’t expect things to get better any time soon.

Why?

The Compaqs are coming. The Compaqs are coming. Twenty of them, any time now.

Nineteen of the twenty expected new Compaq computers arrived today. (We already knew that the 20th machine was backordered. It’s okay.) They run Windows XP. I need to get them prepped and distributed as soon as I can so I can get back to the PD Streaming Project.

“But wait! No, really, wait. Sorry, Karel, but you can’t start prepping these machines until tomorrow. You see, the version of Norton AntiVirus you have isn’t recent enough to support XP. You have to wait until morning, by which time the folks at Corporate should have been able to push out the new version to your servers.”

Tomorrow morning I’ll be hitting the ground running, trying out Tapscan and the other Arbitron software in addition to figuring out the best way to install the Groupwise client. It should be… fun. Yeah, fun. Uh huh.

Oh yeah, and I’m going to snag one of these bad boys for my own evil purposes. Which is to say, I’m going to keep an XP-based machine on hand so I can learn the ins, outs and quirks. Color me strange but I don’t want to spend the next year making tech support visits where I look like a clueless newbie. I make a fool of myself often enough as it is, you know?

So here’s how it went down. The email server, that is.

I discovered a few weeks ago that one of the mirrored drives in the email server had died, probably quite some time ago. Nothing major, it was just one of the pair of drives that stored every email message for Entercom Portland. With the volume nearly at capacity, I figured that instead of replacing the one dead drive we could double the capacity while getting back that mirroring we’re so fond of.

The drives arrived last week. I didn’t want to try my luck with the remaining drive any longer than necessary, so yesterday became “replace hard drives in email server” day.

But it’s never just that easy, is it? First I had to find a place to put all of that data. Ah, the old 34-gigabyte partition on the main fileserver. Next, how to transfer it. Just drag and drop on the admin workstation, piece of cake! Wrong. Windows 2000 and Netware sometimes play poorly together. The first few megabytes of data transfered quickly, then it dropped to an absolute crawl. We’re talking a few dozen kilobytes every few seconds.

To hell with that. Plan B was to use Mihoshi, one of my handy-dandy Linux boxes. For all that she’s running a tired old copy of RedHat 6.2, she’s still got some life in her. Long story shorter, Mihoshi ran the file copy just fine.

Of course, it was still 17 gigabytes of data over the wire, so it took a few hours. About seven of them. I wrote, I moved a salesperson from one cubicle to another (don’t ask), I chatted with supercool people.

So it came up on 6pm and I could finally start swapping drives. It was over the next two hours that I learned something. I learned that Compaq is evil. Did you know that you cannot simply replace a hard drive in a Compaq server? Oh no, you can’t. You have to run the array configuration utility with the bad drive still in place so you can tell the array that you’re not going to use that drive anymore.

Idiots.

I finally got the new drives in, again, and the server was happy. Mihoshi leaped into action to put back all the files she’d taken off of the server just hours before. This of course took another few hours, though oddly not as many as on the outbound transfer.

The restoration transfer completed at 1:37am. I didn’t bother running ‘rsync’ to double-check the transfer, I just fired up the Groupwise server modules. Luckily for me it worked perfectly.

After that I just hung out and cranked out NaNo word-count until a bit before 5:00 when the first busses were heading out of downtown. By the way, it was colder than a penguin’s backside out there at 4:45am. Oh yeah.

And now I’m at home. I got a few hours of sleep in, but Hannah is due to arrive any minute now and there’s just no way I’m going to have any peace while she’s here. Cute kid, but loud. Did I mention that her favorite word is “mine”? Ah well, she’ll grow out of that. I hope.

So at the end of a long, frustrating day at work (cubicle reassignments, short tempers, big-shot new salespersons, managerial short-sightedness) how fun is this:

I round the corner, computer chassis in hand, and look at the new decorations on the window of the Traffic department’s office. Big sheets of white paper with drawings and numbers all in red. Ah, they’re goal thermometers for three of the sales teams. You’ve seen them before, nothing special about them… Wait a minute. They’re kind of… wide. And the mercury bulbs are shaped… oddly.

And as these thoughts cross my brain, the KKSN/KRSK Sales Manager calls out, “Those are thermometers, right Karel?”

“Um… no they aren’t, Steve!”

That’s right, folks. The goal charts for Kisn, Rosey and Sunny are big red penises.

The poor unfortunate lady in the Traffic department who sits in that corner of the office has already stuck things to her side of the window to obscure the, ah, view. Later on the much-put-upon Traffic folks and I had a good laugh about how this proves that the Sales department is just a bunch of dicks.

There are worse ways to end a long week of work than to share a laugh with your coworkers, especially if other coworkers provided the joke.