February 13th

13 hours

Last week was very crappy for me when i was sick. In fact i shouldn't have gone to work at all. I was rather annoyed then because that was the week i had planned for everything to follow a solid schedule. Then i was foiled by a virus.

This week ended up being that week of which i plan the rest of my semester around. I was able to follow my normal work schedule with nothing in my way and go to all of my classes. This made me happier.

This week was rather normal i'd say. I ended up getting two old defunct computers updated and working properly with whatever memory upgrades i could toss into them. It's quite obvious that 2gb minimum of memory is needed for todays multi-application environment extreme. I don't like this because it shows a big waste as computing changes. The release of the windows vista hungry for power hardware as well as macosx doesn't help either. I'm glad to know that the release of windows 7 is going to be lighter, linux has always been light, and i'm not sure about macosx since it's only run on apple computers. The continuation of support for windows xp is great and all also, but vista really does supersede xp in more ways than one. Workers up at sfos keep complaining about vista, and i don't know why. Vista is not that much different compared to defunct xp. Then again, as soon as windows 7 comes out, microsoft will finally have something light enough and not defunct to toss onto netbooks.

I also inspected an old pentium 3 gateway. It was a good machine, just very slow on start up. This rendered the machine too sluggish so i put it in surplus to be taken away. I did salvage the hard drive and processor. The processor was for me as a keepsake and the hard drive put into the hard drive bin in the IT office.

This week also had a lot to do with posters. I ended up printing one last week, but the people who made the poster kept on wanting to change it. Least to say their second iteration with far distanced shadowy text was impossible to read. I was tasked with printing the last iteration which had fixed fonts and a removed background. But, it had improper dimensions. Even worse was the office 2007's print preview was different than the print preview for a queued print job in the poster printers browser software. I ended up printing half a poster at first when i noticed some text was getting chopped off near the bottom region of the poster. I sighed, changed the printing dimensions again, and selected scale to paper. This fixed the problem, and devised a way for the poster to hang in the air to dry over two chairs for a day or two.

This also goes toward one of my goals with this job. Messing around with technology i have not messed with before. It was rather successful. The only inefficiency was the print preview comparisons which got annoying.

I also ended up donating a dvd drive from my own personal computer hardware stash. I brought it up for the soul reason that one oceanography commons computer's had an old dvd-ram drive that was too slow. Installing software from an external usb 2.0 dvd drive was much faster. So i replaced the dvd-ram drive with my dvd drive and it was much faster. I also dusted the hell out of that computer combatting it with a can of air. Cleaned the keyboard, and also replaced a really crappy keyboard on one of the other computers with something cleaner and higher quality.

I took the old keyboard back up to the office, and put it on the ground with my foot and just ripped the cable out of it. Mark just looked at me with a horrified expression on his face just curious why i was destroying something potentially useful in front of him. Until he realized that it was the nasty keyboard that he asked me to replace earlier from the oceanography commons and put it into surplus afterwards. I thought this was very funny. We put a note on it saying how it was a wireless keyboard that didn't need any batteries and i returned it to the oceanography commons.

The only thing that ever goes into the surplus pile is broken equipment. I don't know if they just call it surplus for a joke, about the only things i've found in the surplus pile that do work is old crt monitors, and maybe the occasional 10 year old mac. We salvage a lot of equipment from computers and other stuff before we put them into surplus. Further backing the notion that the surplus pile is a non-functioning garbage pile.

Up in the office we do have a shortage of adequately sized ddr memory sticks. We have nothing more than all of the 256mb ddr sticks in the world. This over at sfos is pretty useless, since this means we can no longer provide a memory upgrade every now and again for people who need it. Everyone needs at least sticks of 512mb or 1gb sticks. The age of computing that used the 4 256mb ddr stick combo a couple of years ago for 1gb total of ram is starting to rear it's head again as i'm having to work on these perfectly fine old computers this week. If i could upgrade their capacity for memory if i had bigger sticks on hand, i certainly would.

There was also more matlab installs happening this week. Since the new version of matlab is very restrictive with it's license, i've also seen an alternative R which is free and opensource rearing it's head as i am getting tasked with installing this and many others installing it themselves.

For other things going towards my goals for this intership project. I got to mess around with more server software. Actually functioning server software too. I have taken on the duty of black listing spam email addresses with the baracuda firewall occasionally. Usually depending on whether or not i receive spam in my sfos email. I got some spam in my sfos email this week. I checked it out and blocked it. Much earlier at sfos last semester i did reply to a bogus email saying it was from the UAF help desk. Written in bad english asking for my UAF credentials. I replied promptly with the name kennedy mcgrouger and some random password of my own creation. Sadly i have not gotten a reply which i would have enjoyed reading (probably because the address that sent it to me got blacklisted also).