What would Brian Boitano do? Apparently, he’d get himself a better-paying gig with a good chance for advancement.

Brian Blair, of the same National Broadcasting School class that also propelled this little grey duck into the Radio Biz, is leaving KFXX today for greener pastures. He started his internship a couple of weeks before I did, some 10 years ago or so. (Fall of ’91, November-ish I believe.) While he stayed in the actual broadcast production side of the business, I realized where my strengths weren’t and eventually ended up the MIS instead of an air talent.

In a weird sort of way, it’s the end of an era. Brian and I had something in common unique to any other two people in the building, and I’m going to miss that. It’s not as though we’ve been “best buds” over the years, but we’ve always been friendly and cordial.

There aren’t many left from those strange, heady days of the early ’90s, back up in the Kelly building with KGON and KFXX. Given my wide nostalgic streak, I’m going to quietly mourn the passing of good old days while I also wish Brian the best in all the days of his future.

This is lovely. At just after 5:00pm Pacific Time, our email server simply stopped communicating over the network. TCP/IP and IPX connectivity simply vanished, though the Groupwise NLMs continued to chug along, oblivious to their castaway status.

Over half an hour later, and I’m still waiting for the “DOWN” command to complete so I can reboot the thing. And no, I’m not terribly inclined to hard-reset this box. It’s ornery enough as it is without throwing graceless drive dismounts into the equation.

And even when/if I get it running again, there are two more worrries: Restarting the voicemail server, and wondering what the hell went wrong… and if it’s likely to happen again.

Gee, couldn’t be that corporate-mandated Service Pack install, could it? Nah. That couldn’t possibly be it. No way.

Last night went rather well, all things considered. I’m quite pleased. I came in this morning and there was no lynch mob outside my door… that’s always a good sign.

Today? I’m rebuilding Yet Another Promotions Computer, this time the scannerbox. I was hoping to just repair Photoshop, but it just didn’t go as planned, so once again it’s start from scratch. Ah well, it’s what they pay me for, isn’t it?

I’m having problems with display corruption on Ryoko with the Mozilla browser. Maybe it’s the nVidia drivers, maybe it’s X, maybe it’s Mozilla, maybe it’s XScreensaver. We’ll find out, won’t we?

Oh, and I think I have nearly every Cowboy Bebop mp3 available anywhere. Yay! Lots of good listening… though also lots of weird listening.

Someone else got a package in the mail today. Lucky for me, inside that package was another package with my name on it. What’s inside, you ask? A pair of CD-ROM discs, one for each of my Entercom-network Netware servers.

So here it is, 8pm Tuesday night and I’m running service pack installs. They said they wanted it done ASAP, and this is about as ASAP as it gets.

Another thing I did today was to (finally!) put together a spreadsheet detailing which Linux boxes have what version of the different daemons and services. This will help to deal with those security alerts and what-not. For instance, this was my chance to upgrade to proftpd 1.2.5rc1 to deal with a security hole in previous releases. (I actually dialed down proftpd on a couple of machines… no point!)

If all goes well (and there’s no reason why it should) I could be home in a couple of hours.
ProFTPd website

So it was another three-weeks Sunday visit yesterday. Do the backup of the AS/400. Check. Do the email maintenance. Check. Fix Carol Soler’s display problem. Check. Rebuild a computer for Jason Parrish. Check.

I also managed to do some neat things to Ryoko’s Linux side. It’s my second attempt at doing Linux from scratch and I must say that I’m very, very pleased with the results. No more RPM dependencies! No more mismatched libraries! No more mysterious distro clutter! I love it.

Next up for Ryoko? E-17 if I can manage it.