So I haven’t updated in a day or so. I’ve really only been doing boring work things such as preparing to move a bunch of Promotions folk from office to office, directing my intern in the removal and rewiring of the server-room bench, hopping-to on a bunch of tedious file permissions issues on the server, checking activity logs on a half-dozen or so servers, answering email questions and just generally trying to stay on top of the “situation.”

It’s not exciting. When you get right down to it, excitement is the last thing you want in this job. If it’s exciting, something’s usually gone awry.

Yeah, I totally failed to do the Friday Five again. It was a busy day.

Now that I’ve downed a mug of steaming hot cocoa, I’m ready to take on the day’s tasks: Assemble the other two (of four) future Enco workstations in anticipation of the specialist’s arrival tomorrow morning; swap out the video card in what used to be the Entercom webmaster’s computer; make some progress on the standby server for Entercom’s future webserver; hook up the PC for a new NRK salesperson; type up plans for a proper Entercom webhosting facility.

Not necessarily in that order, but pretty close. Here’s hoping your day is a bit more fun.

So how has my workday progressed? Very interestingly.

I met my intern today. Yes, a couple of times a week for the next six weeks I’ll have my very own lackey. Mind you, he’s supposed to be gaining valuable work experience and knowledge, so I’m going to expose him to as many things as possible during the time we’ll have. Should be interesting.

The corporate website, www.entercom.com, should be hosted here in our facility by some time late this week. There’s a laundry-list of things Corporate wants me to do so that everyone will feel comfortable with this situation. I get to provide a standby server, syslogging and as much firewalling as I can throw into the mix, and soon. Should be interesting.

Next week we’re having an Enco expert come out and upgrade four of our production workstations to bigger, faster machines. I get to pre-assemble them, of course. Turns out, though, that the motherboards we bought don’t match the processors we have. The heatsink for the 1GHz Pentium III doesn’t even fit in the space available on the motherboard. We probably have to buy four new motherboards, and soon. Should be interesting.

Having spent a couple of hours at the office last night in an attempt to resolve the Tapscan issue (“which one?”) and then coming in again this morning extra-early to do the same, I’m now quite very groggy and tired and such. If my journal entries this afternoon ramble more than usual, I apologize.

Tapscan is incapable of running on a NAS device. I moved it over to the system volume of our main fileserver, a trusty Netware server which had hosted the application for years, up until this past weekend in fact. Viola… or not. It started crashing every time any salesperson tried to create or load a schedule. No no, very bad.

By 10:00 last night I was stumped and frustrated. By 7:20 this morning I was back in my office and struck by inspiration. I think I have a bruise inside my skull to show for it. If I could show the inside of my skull, that is.

I discovered that my account worked just fine. The fix was to set “write” and “modify” permissions to the data directory for Tapscan. Regular users still can’t create or erase files, but apparently there are market data files that users need to be able to change. Who knew? It was working the old way for years.

Twenty minutes into my workday and the problem that had stumped me the night before was totally solved. Then I went to the department head meeting (during which we didn’t get around to discussing The Tipping Point, we’re going to do that another day) and then I’ve spent the remainder of the workday running all over the building putting out small fires. I also needed to fix a bunch of small permissions problems on the new storage drive.

It’s been a crazy couple of days, and I’m very tired. Tomorrow I’ll be more coherent, I assure you.

I’ve already written plenty about the most recent development in my job, so I’ll just link to the articles in question:

Memorial Day Migration

Wild And Crazy P: Drive

That covers the work stuff, anyway…