October 24

20 hours at sfos

This week was pretty interesting. Last friday didn't mean much to me. More of an orientation than anything. This week I actually got to do stuff. I was taught how to use the ticket system first off. Which enabled me to start on and finish problems accordingly to the system of work that is in use over in the IT department.

I ended up working a lot this week with steve jewett. He uses a mac from 2004. He was one of my long running projects for most of the week. I first installed office 2008 which i think was last week. This week, I found a way to archive his emails. Mr. jewett isn't too much of a fancy to work with the rest of the sfos IT department. Mark, gary, and chris all hate his machine. In retrospect, I find Mr. Jewett's computer more than capable to do what he needs to do. It's a little slow on opening office 2008, but nothing unsatisfactory at all. I managed to backup his archived emails. His computer only liked backing up the emails to my mp3 player as opposed to the IT departments external 250gb hdd. That ran over night. The next day I found out that Mr. Jewett's computer didn't have a dvd burner, but his laptop did. Either way, i showed him how to burn data dvd's with his laptop. The next problem was in the fact that it took forever to get his emails off of my thumb drive. Most likely due to the different naming conventions that macosx supports for files. Burned his archives to a dvd and gave it to him. He was happy, until his office 2008 didn't want to remember his tab settings. I have yet to solve this one.

Later in the week I've been working on an on going project that involves breaking the mirror in centos 5 for a server using raid. I've been picking at it all week to best use a scheme that i can come up with. So far i've broken the mirror, but i desire to remove the raid implementation altogether so an update can be run successfully because of extra hard drive space from removing the raid implementation completely. One failed attempt which I thought was really funny was when I popped in my gparted livecd and removed the raid flag from the partitions on the drives. This resulted in a kernel panic. So I just restored the raid flags on the partitions and made the system operational again. This would most definitely break the mirror, but I sort of wanted a working computer afterwards.

One lady desired to have the classic menus from office 2003 in office 2007. She ended up finding trial based software that enabled this, and if she liked it, to purchase it for 30$. I immediately looked for a free alternative. Found one, experimented with it on my work computer, got it to work, and made it work on her computer, and she liked it.

Bodil bluhm was one of the other people I ended up working for. Her ticket was to install macfuse and the ntfs-3g driver. Macfuse lets you incoporate different file system compatibility in macosx. Coupled with the ntfs-3g driver. This gave her ntfs rw capability in macosx. This was mainly for an external 160gb external drive that she had. I was going to format it to fat32 for her just to ensure she has no other problems with it on other computers aside from the fact that she has ntfs capability in macosx now. My knowledge of macosx leads me to the theory that it has no formatting utilities. I think I'll make an appointment with her later so I can bring her external drive to my work computer and format it to fat32. Fat32 ensures compatibility with all computers today as opposed to ntfs which is mostly just used on partitions of which windows is installed on. While I was over at her office, I had her let me into her husbands office a room over to let me install macfuse and ntfs-3g on his mac. My hunch turned out correct though, he already had it installed and his wife's external ntfs drive worked great on it.

I ended up disassociating an sfos computer in the Irving building with Jock (forget his last name). I removed the sfos tag, removed the sfos documentation on this computer, removed the sfosadmin account, and changed the main administrator lab account password on the computer. I changed the password to "diaperwearer" (I really couldn't get the cartoon chowder on cartoon network out of my head...was thinking of using "cryingpoopybaby"), I figured this would be more digestible for Jock who apparently was having too good of a day. The temporary password replacement I was going to do was "fartknocker". Either way, it didn't matter what the replacement password was, as Jock was going to go in and change it to his preference anyway which was the idea. The disassociation of the sfos computer worked great, except I through away the sfos tag. I later learned that I need to save these when performing disassociations in the future for keeping up with sfos IT documentation.

I ended up formatting some linux hard drives. In this event using my gparted livecd, I accidentally formatted my own hard drive on my work computer. This didn't bode well for me. My computer had some major problems attempting to reinstall windows 3 times along with a failed attempt of a kubuntu installation. I eventually got windows xp back on there with several missing files during installation...it seems to work fine, hopefully the upgrade to sp3 that I performed fixed that, I really don't know. My computer has some seriously screwed up cd/dvd drives. Not to mention the fact that there's no other dvd burners available to toss in my computer WHICH WOULD BE VERY HELPFUL. For dvd's, I just go one computer over and burn them. Much to the dismay of chris who likes to keep his one hell of a crappy beauty of a vista install only managed by him. I really don't see what he's getting at. Unless he sees my moving to windows, to ubuntu, to windows, then using my bootable linux drive as my main OS's for the week as insane (I'm pretty demanding with operating systems that I use myself...no one in the world will make the perfect OS, although ubuntu and mandriva have come very close, but no cigar). In the least, I have great hopes for microsoft and their repository (microsoft update). Maybe later in the future it will be able to update all software in the operating system instead of just MS products so that way java, yahoo, firefox, msn messenger, google desktop, microsoft update, and adobe all don't need their own separate updaters running simultaneously (this ideal is extremely retarded involving the decentralized nature of 3rd party software for windows users with unnecessary processes running in the background).

I did end up getting sent to a lab that was deserted. Before going there, me and gary were able to see if the room was empty first before I got there saving me a trip had there been a class in there. I was still on webcam working on this computer in the lab a building over. I just had to find out what video card was in the computer. I loaded up my mepis livecd which saves me the trouble of having to open up a computer to document all of the hardware inside of it. Lucky me, the livecd found out all data involving all of the hardware in the computer except the video card. So i opened it up anyway, wrote down the information. It was an msi 8600gt oc. Basically, way overkill for an office or school computer since that's a pretty good 3d gaming card. I don't know why gary bought these cards, buying a low end 3d accelerator in the least would have been more humane for the computer that's barely if not even use the 3d power a midrange nvidia card can offer. I then noticed an ugly habit that I've seen popping up with the increased usage of flat panel monitors. Flat panel monitors get packaged with a DVI and analog VGA cable with inputs on the flat panel for both cables. Users end up hooking up both of these cables simultaneously into the monitor and dual hookups which have almost become standard on most video cards today.

This is yet another retardation of the average computer user not RTFMing. Having the dvi cable and the vga cable hooked up simultaneously can seriously confuse the computer into not knowing which video output to send the video signal through which can result in no picture. One cable or the other please. Turns out the second cable on this computer I was working on was actually for a purpose instead of stupidity. To put it shortly, the video card had dual dvi's, the main dvi cable for the monitor, and the vga cable with a dvi convertor plugged into the second dvi output on the video card which was for the projector. I left this alone. This was a good use of both dvi hookups on the video card.

I also helped chris install a scanner for some lady. I later went back to test out the scanner and suggested which program the lady should use when scanning stuff. Very funny, the scanner came with trial scanning software also (only one of the applications installed for the scanner was). I also put the scanner replacement clip it came with on top of my work computer to eliminate the "what am I supposed to do with this?" question which is regularly asked regardless of the fact if the replacement part that came with whatever device has been marked with lettering that says "replacement part".

This is the main stuff that happened for my first week. I think I settled in pretty good and am having some fun with my next monday objectives sort of planned out. I do plan on learning on how to understand gary better. I can understand mark really good, but not gary so much. Gary shows me a bunch of stuff I need to know, but at what seems almost random timing and leaving me close to perplexed. I'll understand why he's showing me what I need to know, but not the full steps of why and how. I end up asking some questions which still leave me with almost perplexed answers. Gary's way of presenting stuff is a little awkward to me (probably because I'm dyslexic). What i've been doing is doing my best at getting more exposure to the way gary talks. And asking others like chris and mark about what gary was talking about along with just hoping for the best when I set out to do something that involves what gary was talking about. Next week should be all fine though, I'm putting a pretty good effort forward I think at understanding gary.