March 20th

14 hours

This week was pretty busy like spring break was.

Lots of people are getting dymo label printers, so i installed one of those. Testing those things is fun too. I also had to print a lot of posters. There was one day i couldn't figure out why the poster printer was working. It just kept on loading up print queues and not doing anything. In the mean time of troubleshooting, i also got duplex printing working for a lady one office over, and helped her coworker by installing end note.

While working on the poster printer, i installed adobe acrobat pro, since only reader was installed. Acrobat pro lets you export pdfs to other formats, sometimes the poster printer doesn't like to properly render pdfs, so now i can turn pdfs into pngs and the printer liked that better for the few pdfs it didn't like to render properly in the printers print preview software. I also learned a lot more about how to properly print posters.

I discovered that the poster printer had been paused. I quickly resumed it, didn't know you could pause a printer, but i can see where this feature would be handy. After it was unpaused it was able to start popping out posters.

I then called up everyone who needed posters and left them messages in their voice mail telling them to stop by the IT office and pick them up when they can.

One of my supervisors ended up being out for a day. So i was left alone for a little bit. One lady grabbed her poster and i heard her ripping up the 36x48 sheet of paper it was. She shouldn't have made a crappy looking pdf in the first place. This happens sometimes where people making pdfs or powerpoint files for their poster graphics do some things that just don't work or look like crap. The most obvious horrors are when people make posters with text that's on the very edge of the pdf. I hate having to turn on scaling just to make sure everything is within the print margins. Another horror less common is when people use low resolution graphics and wonder why they look like crap after the poster is done failing to realize that the low resolution graphics they used to make a poster pdf on big dimensions looked like crap in the first place. A less common poster horror is when people try to have shadowed text, that's just a no-no. It looks horrible, and even worse when the foreground text is slightly brighter than the darker background text. This ends up playing a trick on the eyes making you not know which text is the foreground and should be read, and the shadowing not being spaced out enough that it's unintelligble anyway.

For the most part we usually get a hold of people if their poster wont print, or should be modified first. Somen posters look just fine anyway and the person just ended up not liking how it looked anyway. Yet again as if they couldn't tell what it was going to look like in the first place since they made the poster pdf.

I was supposed to get a hold of a professor and give him admin priviledges for his sound analyzing software called raven so it would work properly. My supervisors expect his machine with admin priviledges to crap out eventually. The average computer user is just use to a set of graphicals images they've been trained to use in the wysiwyg environment. They only know what "next" and "finish" on an installer means and fail to realize other small things for other installers like the checkbox for installing the yahoo, aol, or google toolbars, and then wonder where out of the blue they ended up with a toolbar for their browser not realizing they put it on there themselves.

This professor was always gone whenever i was working this week. So i just left him a voice message telling him when to stop by and catch me and why.

I'm also helping a lady purchase memory for her computer. She was going to buy it locally, but it turns out that it'd be a lot cheaper buying it online with shipping. We'll do this next week.

That new worker that started working of whose office computer i made work. I had to install her keyboard and mouse software for her microsoft wireless mouse and keyboard so the function keys that she actually uses would work. I also installed america online instant messenger for her which is the new thing for worker communication over the network in her department. One worker in her department also noticed that copyit 3.0 was not loading. It was loading, it just didn't pop up anywhere on the screen even though task manager said it was there. It also did the same thing with the newer version of copyit. This problem will get to be studied in more detail next week.

I also ended up going to another computer i set up in another building for the purpose of seeing if i had actually made it part of the domain. It was part of the domain, just the user didn't select at the login screen the domain name with her username and password. That's ok since my supervisor didn't really finish her domain user account anyway. She was able to login. I get to go back their next week and give her admin priviledges. Since my supervisor wants me to do that next.

I also went back to the mac cube guy and got everything in that 500mb folder of archived backups from 1993 after renaming some other files in a triple check. It copied smoothly on a slow usb 1.1 connection to my thumb drive. The cube also lacks a cd burner (would have been faster). The cube is also without dvd capabilities, luckily for installing the new version of macos 10.4.xx there's an external dvd drive in the office for me to get that done with.

Some things are a work in progress for later dates. I don't really care, it's fun, and glad i have projects to work on.