Friday Report

When your day begins with an earthquake, where else can the day go but up?

We had a minor trembler here in the greater DC area, a mere 3.6 magnitude. Still, it was enough to wake me up at 5:04am even if it was all over before I could figure out what was going on. There was only some minor trembling of the house for perhaps five seconds. My first thoughts were the usual suspects: a low flying jet, a passing heavy truck, severe weather, an industrial accident and such. None really fit the bill but there was an alert on WashingtonPost.com within a half hour confirming it was an earthquake. Whee!

I did return to sleep by 6am but was up & about by 9. Office activity was relatively quiet, allowing me to dash to the data center in the late morning to collect two packages from shipping & receiving. One was a replacement for a failed hard drive from IBM; I had already fixed the problem in one of my servers weeks ago using a spare disk so there was no urgency. The other package was a router shipped from the mothership in Foster City, CA --which I wasn't expecting until next Monday.

Most of the balance of the day was spent working on a friend's series of computers. One machine was suffering performance problems from the Norton Antivirus package given to him by his ISP, Comcast. We disabled some of the non-security functions on it to help gain back some performance.

The next computer seemed to be taking its sweet time in shutting down but otherwise worked well. I could have spent some time on it but since the box is slated for replacement soon, we opted against further investigation.

One laptop couldn't connect to the wireless network. The problem was obvious: its WinXP configuration didn't know how to handle WPA encryption used by the network. We added service pack 3 but there are some further software tweaks required to get it up to speed; since we'd need to cable it directly into the home network to get the patches & updates from Microsoft, we deferred this for later.

On the next laptop, we upgraded Vic Ceder's CSDS software from a 2007 package to the latest & greatest. The upgrade itself was smooth but since CSDS now parses calls just a little differently, a huge number of pre-written sequences will have to be modified to make them go.

Traffic home was a little heavy but I made good time, caught up on some minor issues and we headed off to happy hour downtown.

We had a good turn-out tonight: I counted 14 bodies in our little huddle. We opted against joining them for dinner to conserve some cash --the budget had been hammered severely this week-- and to work on using up the leftovers at home.

We have a full weekend of activity coming up but I'll save that for updates as they happen.

Friday Report

When your day begins with an earthquake, where else can the day go but up?

We had a minor trembler here in the greater DC area, a mere 3.6 magnitude. Still, it was enough to wake me up at 5:04am even if it was all over before I could figure out what was going on. There was only some minor trembling of the house for perhaps five seconds. My first thoughts were the usual suspects: a low flying jet, a passing heavy truck, severe weather, an industrial accident and such. None really fit the bill but there was an alert on WashingtonPost.com within a half hour confirming it was an earthquake. Whee!

I did return to sleep by 6am but was up & about by 9. Office activity was relatively quiet, allowing me to dash to the data center in the late morning to collect two packages from shipping & receiving. One was a replacement for a failed hard drive from IBM; I had already fixed the problem in one of my servers weeks ago using a spare disk so there was no urgency. The other package was a router shipped from the mothership in Foster City, CA --which I wasn't expecting until next Monday.

Most of the balance of the day was spent working on a friend's series of computers. One machine was suffering performance problems from the Norton Antivirus package given to him by his ISP, Comcast. We disabled some of the non-security functions on it to help gain back some performance.

The next computer seemed to be taking its sweet time in shutting down but otherwise worked well. I could have spent some time on it but since the box is slated for replacement soon, we opted against further investigation.

One laptop couldn't connect to the wireless network. The problem was obvious: its WinXP configuration didn't know how to handle WPA encryption used by the network. We added service pack 3 but there are some further software tweaks required to get it up to speed; since we'd need to cable it directly into the home network to get the patches & updates from Microsoft, we deferred this for later.

On the next laptop, we upgraded Vic Ceder's CSDS software from a 2007 package to the latest & greatest. The upgrade itself was smooth but since CSDS now parses calls just a little differently, a huge number of pre-written sequences will have to be modified to make them go.

Traffic home was a little heavy but I made good time, caught up on some minor issues and we headed off to happy hour downtown.

We had a good turn-out tonight: I counted 14 bodies in our little huddle. We opted against joining them for dinner to conserve some cash --the budget had been hammered severely this week-- and to work on using up the leftovers at home.

We have a full weekend of activity coming up but I'll save that for updates as they happen.