October 17

4 hours at sfos.
Today was my first day of work. I now finally work over in the sfos IT department. It is 20 hours a week on week days and is 1pm-5pm. So 4 hours a day in the afternoon except for the weekend.

The first that happened when I got there was go to Gary's office. He showed me the layout of all the floors and how far the sfos IT departments reach is. Basically sfos IT fixes the usda lab and faculty computers as well as sfos's own lab and faculty computers. All of this happens in the sfos building (I forget the real name of it), and the neighboring Irving building. After showing me the floor plans for the buildings. He took me on a tour of them so I would know the layout of the place so I wouldn't get lost. Although I'd certainly never get lost in those rather small buildings, but I certainly do need to know where everything is so that I don't take 10 minutes or longer finding a department because poor old me just memorized the basic hall layout instead.

We went to all the floors of the sfos building. Including the floors between floors (Reminded me of "Being John Malcovich" in which the main characters job took place in between floors). Gary was also telling me that he's still documenting the data and telephone equipment and cabling, and that it gets a lot harder since one of the switch cabinets he needs to get into doesn't belong to sfos, so he has to call up the owners for the key. He wants to finish documentation pretty badly.

After the tours of the buildings and the floors. Gary and I delivered a boxed desktop Dell computer to someone in back. This is where I got to demonstrate my being able to lift 50 pounds or more. We eventually went back to the room where the computer they got for me I was setting up for myself and talking to Mark at the same time. Mark got my user account changed over to admin so that I could install software and customize my work computer anyway I wished. I was doing this for a while until some old dude came in with a complaint and request for help. I don't remember the old dudes name, but I followed him back to his office. His computer had locked up and was frozen; he didn't know what to do and was also hoping that if possible his work could be salvaged.

By the time we got to his office, his computer was all fine. But, the word document he was working on was like hidden in some redundant old IE5 system folder with a funky file name. So I saved his document to his desktop with a name for it that he told me he wanted it to be. Now he can find the document in an obvious place. After that I attatched to an email for him. 2 thins appeared to have happened with his computer. The first one being that some time in the past I his computer must have been upgraded to xp from win98 instead of a fresh install of xp. I'm thinking of this because xp comes with IE6 and not IE5 (doing an upgrade install to a newer version of windows is not really as great an idea as a fresh install). The second thing that his computer must have been doing something very processor intensive in the background for one hell of a temporary slow down, because his computer wasn't locked up when I got to it. I totally forgot to do what Mark said was an awesome thing to do, which is look at the event viewer of computers running windows that have problems. Oh well, i don't think it was really necessary in this situation.

The rest of the day was me setting up my computer even further. I was downloading ubuntu to install and run in windows with it's wubi installer. I was customizing my credentials to a much more preferable system name and password. Then I was copying cd after cd of what Mark said was the recommended software to be stuck with when fixing computers. It consisted of xp, office 2003-2007, roxio, and something else.

By the time the day was going to come to an end. Gary came back in and showed me around the sfos website, what I could do in there, and cataloging procedures for hardware. After this, I just signed my time card and left at 5 and said that I'd be back on monday.