Today was: hooking up video for a laptop in the training room, re-rebuilding the West Conference room PC (damned Intel motherboards and their damned built-in NICs), preparing and beginning a Linux From Scratch install on Zero, removing all OpenAFS code on account of it being damned obnoxious, suffering through two more short failures of Northwest Link’s network, installing and configuring and skinning Trillian on Ryoko because Zero isn’t really a good machine to chat from right now.

Yeah, that’s about it. I’m sure there’s more, but none of it bears mention.

I would like to state for the record that running Groupwise is preferable to running Outlook. Along the same lines, death by beheading is preferable to death by starvation.

Corporate email is having all kinds of trouble this week. I’m certain that it’s a problem I’ve had with Groupwise in the past, namely that one corrupt message in the processing queue can bring down the entire server. As of this writing, incoming mail is sporadic, outgoing mail doesn’t seem to be working (although Corporate claims that it should be) and there’s no way to know when things will be back to normal.

In addition to that bit of jolly good fun, the T1 that carries the streaming audio as well as data to and from the kgon.com machines here in the building had another spate of strangeness this morning. The problem seems to have solved itself, but I have the phone number of someone at Northwest Link if it goes bad again. Once again, if the T1 goes down then this website is useless.

My ongoing task for the day is to rebuild the computer for the west conference room. Its hard drive failed in the classic click-of-death fashion. This sucks pretty hard, since it had all of the Panja programming software installed as well as the Smartboard drivers and various other nifty software and data. Grr. I hate relying on spinning metal disks for data storage almost as much as I hate relying on flimsy plastic strips wrapped around spindles for data backup.

At a little before 4:30 this afternoon, Northwest Link‘s main router crashed. It took over ten minutes for them to restore operation, and during that time the T1 to Entercom Portland was useless. Hence no database for this site, no IRC chat, no streaming audio for those three stations that still do streaming, and a host of other useful functions were cut off.

I suppose that ten or fifteen minutes isn’t that bad in the great scheme of things, but until Invite.net upgrades their MySQL server I have to rely on a machine at work to host the database. I don’t like being dependent on Entercom hardware to keep this site operational.

I knew that today was going to be a fun day at the office. You don’t go through what we did Friday without having a frenzied Monday afterward.

Two computers had to be flushed and Windows’d. Various printer drivers needed installing. Sleep mode needed disabling on one PC. Acrobat Reader needed installing on another. The mixer icon needed enabling on yet another.

Maybe tomorrow I can get some real work done. Nah, why start now?

Some fifteen salespersons will be translocated this afternoon starting at 2:00pm. Guess who gets to hook up all the computers, monitors, keyboards, mice and speakers?

I’m probably going to be at this well into the evening, unless some miracle occurs and I get a lot of well-coordinated help. Oh well. I didn’t have any plans for the evening anyway, other than watching the new episode of Farscape.

Mmmmmmm, Farscape.

Just to prove that the universe really is a perverse and insane place, today was even more frantic than yesterday for me. I got up bright and early for the Department Head meeting, which went well. Afterward I fixed a couple of small problems, then went to the office of the KGON/KKSN-FM Program Director to replace the power supply in his computer.

Little did we know that this would be only the beginning of the fun for Mr. Harlow and I. Upon rebooting, we found that he couldn’t get onto the network. Replacing wires and fiddling with jacks didn’t help. Taking out the network card and re-seating it after blowing away the dust seemed to, but then the video settings went haywire.

After some more fiddling around, I decided that the better part of valor was going to be a full replacement of his computer. I proceeded to prep the last of our Dell Optiplex GX1 refurbs, which performed beautifully like all of the others we have of that line. There was one catch, however. Arbitrends won’t install on a too-recent combination of Windows 98 and Internet Explorer. Great.

So with radio trends coming out tomorrow, Mr. Harlow’s computer and mine are both waiting on a CD-ROM overnighted from Arbitron to be able to download and manipulate the trend data. No stress, folks, it’s only the most important metric radio stations are measured by.

In other news, a printer cable came unplugged; the call screeners needed burping; a color print job wouldn’t print; file permissions on the network needed massaging; RCS software needed upgrading; another power supply and CPU fan need replacing later this evening; the Rosey studio computer was misbehaving for a few minutes. Just another fun-filled day on the job! I love this place.