In between dealing with the usual assortment of network space issues, printer problems and other nonsense, I get to place the rebuilt West Conference Room computer back into its Smartboard enclosure. I also get to spend an hour or so in a conference call with the rest of Entercom’s erstwhile IT/IS team. Mind you, half these folks are engineers first and computer techs second. I’ll probably compile more stuff on Zero while I have the “mic mute” button toggled. I don’t have anything of value to contribute, as I’m well ahead of the standard Entercom computering curve.

No false modesty, it’s just that Entercom Portland is unusual (Hah!) in having a dedicated IS staffer. That would be me, for those of you following along at home.

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.