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?