greyduck.net

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.

Today was one of those “hit the ground running” days. What with two of the stations’ sales teams preparing to swap cubicles on Friday, the excitement level is rising steadily this week. Some of today’s highlights include:

• Production One’s Orban Audicy work station broke down. Turns out to have been a failed power supply, almost exactly like what happened to Production Three’s Audicy a couple of weeks ago. The power supply has been replaced and the Audicy is back in service.
  
• The Linux server that the Audicy workstations log into is running a Netware emulator which seems to have needed a swift boot to the rear. So I rebooted that box and waited ten minutes while the storage drive was “scanned.”
  
• One of our new AE’s needed to be gently informed that yes, you actually must click “OK” to log into the network when you boot your computer in the morning; otherwise you can’t print, run the specialized sales software or get at any of your files on the network. Whoops.
  
• I changed out the lame-assed D-Link print server in the KNRK studio for an Intel we had sitting around doing nothing. Hopefully the NRK airstaff will be much happier with their printer now.
  

And that’s about it… so far. After all, it’s only 1:30.