Computers are my life. Sad I know. But they feed me and they entertain me. Ironically I don't like to use the shift key. I make the effort in this blog and if I have to send an email to someone I don't know very well. But aside from that, I use lowercase wherever possible :)

So last night I couldn't post cause the webserver was down. The only thing of vague interest that happened yesterday was that I found that it takes a very long time to shut down computers if you have set them to clear their page file on shut down and the machine is very old. We have an old Dell 2400 with 3x9gb disks in a raid 5. With the "clear pagefile on shutdown" security option set it took five full minutes to shut down. Turned it off and all is well. Silly thing is, newer servers work just fine with this setting. Oh well.

So then I get home and the webserver is not responding. Call Campbell, as we haven't been paged yet. He had a joyous night at the exchange while I foolishly didn't turn off the pager and it woke me up every half hour until I finally turned the damned thing off at 3am.

Today was a bit of a non-event. We had a last minute lunch outing at which I ate a terribly big lunch. 10pm and I still haven't felt hungry. Might have some cheese so I don't wake up *tomorrow* at 3am :) Also spent three hours labelling some of my USA photos. Didn't get very far. Spent most of the time looking at maps and street directories of Sydney and LA to figure out what I took pictures of.

The smallest tank is just about setup for the kribs. Not sure if the filter will be good enough, there's still a lot of crap around. Or the light, just using a halogen desk lamp to try and make the plants grow enough to soak up the nitrates.

1. The Weather Pixie The weather pixie is dead! She's gone! What's the story? No response from dns server
2. Decapitation Alert A couple of weeks ago part of our building fell off during heavy wind. Today they were taking no chances, taping off the whole area in front of the building in case more fell off during today's high winds
3. Blackout Our area was blacked out for an hour today. There go all the computers. And the clocks

100 things about Kazza the Blank One. Bren has had one of these for ages, and I've been thinking I should probably put one together. Just recently Dave and Dennis put theirs up, so I thought I would too. Some of my ideas were stolen shamelessly from them :)

Still sorting out a bulk lot of lego I got yesterday. It actually turned out to be several pretty much complete sets, one of which I wanted, one more big space set, and a couple of other sets, including a couple of ancient ones from the mid seventies. It's a very sad state of affairs when I'd rather be building lego than eating or sleeping. Had a very late dinner and going to be a late night to bed.

Never did figure out that active directory problem. Pretty much given up on the idea and will probably just contact the remaining 60 or so accounts that are left after I sorted through them today and just check them manually. Not going to be a lot of use in the future though. I wonder what the stats are for 95/98 machines.. I know that about 10% of the computers we have a macs, but no idea about old windoze versions...

Weekend that is.

Spent a decent chunk of Saturday afternoon stressing over a couple of emails I sent to some people at cia and a problem with one of the websites on gamera. I was absolutely flabbergasted at the "support", or rather lack thereof given by one of the support guys. Some dude had sent an irate email cause noone had responded to the last one and he'd be stuffed around for months with an account setup. The support guy's response was "have you got a statement that you've paid?" I have to say that if I'd sent that irate email and gotten that response I'd be utterly furious. Anyway I called him on it, but I should probably have counted to 10 before sending it, as it ended up going to the staff list, and I'm a bit worried about the implications of it when everyone else reads it tomorrow. I'm not even supposed to be doing support mail, let alone telling the staff there how to do their jobs. Anyway. The other thing was I stopped a website cause it was killing the server, but noone called the owner, so he was a bit grumpy when he realised his site was down. So I spent ages wondering if I could have handled the two incidents any better.

We had another episode of "Cafe Church" today which was pretty cool. Got to sit around tables and have fruits and cheese and cakes while discussing Romans.

The only other thing I managed to achieve this weekend was to combine two half working computers to get one complete working computer. I've been putting off this task all year because I feared it would be "too hard". Well I was right. Ram problems, floppy drive problems, network card problems. It took *hours*. But at least now I have a system that I can do some testing of Cold Fusion MX. I'm sure I've ranted about Cold Fusion before, but if I haven't, ***don't use it!!!!!*** It's the crappiest software I've ever had to work with. Version 4.5 worked, but every time I did an upgrade after that there were problems. When we installed the Cold Fusion MX 6.1 updater, it completely broke access database connections, and hasn't worked since. I emailed their support but they said it was not within the realm of their free support. We called them and they quoted $500 per "incident". It's crap and Macromedia is a crap company.

Hrm how did that degenerate into a rant? :)

Watching The Sound of Music now.. will go to bed when it's done. Was kept up half the night by power outages at the exchange which kept my pager buzzing in overtime.

A week ago Jim mailed the staff list and said "we're setting the domain password policy to expire passwords next week, change your password this week to avoid being forced to do it next week when you login on Monday." Of course, a decent chunk of people completely ignored him, and this morning had all sorts of weird and wonderful issues trying to log onto their computers. Sometimes it wouldn't accept old passwords, sometimes the new passwords just wouldn't work, sometimes people weren't even logging onto the domain, so couldn't change their passwords, they just lost access to domain resources. Now if these lusers had just taken the time to read Jim's email they could have avoided the chaos that ensued today. We were all running around like crazy just to get people logged onto their computers. But you can never tell these sorts of people. *sigh*

The upshot of all of this is that we now have forced everyone to change their crappy passwords that they've had for years and no amount of asking/pleading was going to get some people to change them. With the move to active directory and a new security policy being developed centrally, it was a good a time as any to start tightening things up a bit globally. Now these people have no excuses, because everyone else had to the same day also.

That's how long my w2k server was up for before the blackout the other night. Four days short of a year! Pretty impressive for a little w2k box - it's only a PMMX 233 with 256mb ram. And it was nowhere near using up its resources - the memory line was still almost at the bottom. Oh well. At least it gave me a chance to move it into the other room, I'd been holding off moving it so I wouldn't have to break its uptime record :)

The heat/humidity is suffocating. Trying to move computers and hubs and network cables and switch box cables and getting stressed cause I was feeling sweaty, which makes me sweat even more and then stress out more. arghghh! Bit of a vicious cycle really.

anyways, here's a friday five:

1. Are you superstitious?
Not really.

2. What extremes have you heard of someone going to in the name of superstition?
dunno

3. Believer or not, what's your favorite superstition?
Well the one I'm most likely to believe in, even though I don't, is that if you go out without an umbrella it's more likely to rain. I suppose that's not really even superstition but there you go

4. Do you believe in luck? If yes, do you have a lucky number/article of clothing/ritual?
Rationally no, everything's God's will.

5. Do you believe in astrology? Why or why not?
Nup. Load of rubbish.

hrm not a terribly interesting Friday Five. oh well. Time to go find alcohol, or food, or both.

I shoulda stood in bed today. I was contemplating taking the day off, but decided I had too much work to do. So I went in, but I really should have stayed home, as I didn't achieve a single thing, except to frustrate myself over microsoft. For example, how the f@#% do you do a dump of all the users in all the groups in AD? Dumpsec used to do it nicely in NT4 but doesn't seem to work in AD. That and other questions remained unanswered because while there may be a wealth of information out there on AD, sifting through it to find specific answers has overwhelmed me.

I did, however, find this little gem here:

"Group Policies can be used to define which programs are to be installed on which computers. This can be done by department, with web development getting Photoshop and Flash, sales getting Outlook and Excel, and technical support getting Quake."

Almost made my day worthwhile ... nahhhhh

They keep me up late and make me get up early.

Sooo looking forward to a sleepin.