Monday, January 3, 2005
Breakfast: cream of wheat, sliced fresh banana, cinnamon, brown sugar. It's a pretty good day at work, considering I had been gone for 2 weeks. Under 100 e-mails, and none of them severe emergencies. Joel got me and Patrick a late Christmas present—a Xyliss food chopper. We had been discussing this particular kitchen appliance a while ago, and he very sweetly remembered that we didn't know how useful they could be. Helped a returning student reactivate computer accounts for Cindy. Downloaded tarballs of the website for archiving to CD-ROM. Posted info about a class for Chris because of trouble with the listservs. Updated student databases regarding a returning student and a departing student. Notified other systems owners of these changes. Answered questions about removing USB drives for Melissa. Joel showed me a table runner he made with his new sewing machine. The table runner he made was luxurious—gold on one side and deep red on the other, a silky or satiny material, with tassels at each end. It looked very professional, and I was very impressed. He also showed off his copy of a news magazine autographed "To Joel" by Coach Pat Summit. Lunch with Joel at the cafeteria. Helped a student with problems with e-mail warnings. Helped a student with laptop problems. She had had 2 anti-virus applications installed at the same time which caused her computer to slow to a crawl. Uninstalling one of them fixed the problem, and I performed other security and performance enhancements as well. Tweaked the firewall to resolve problems seeing the web server from outside, reconfigured ZoneAlarm on inside Windows clients for trusted IPs, got Samba working mostly by using the Webmin-Samba guide written by James j. Murray of Appleton, Wisconsin. I now have access from within HTML-Kit to the web server root. All the traffic is internal, protected by the server's firewall. Next step, for tomorrow maybe, set up regular disaster recovery backups of the new server to the new Iomega rev drive which is installed on a Windows computer in the home network. Once this last piece is in place, I'll be able to start backpopulating journal entries. I still haven't tried recovering data from the crashed drive. Dinner at home with Patrick: pork loin, baby shrimp and lima bean with mixed greens, baked potato, garlic naan. I worked on the server a bit, and then We watched The Simpsons: Homer versus Patty and Selma. Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: Reviving Advanced Hypertext. Send some thank you iCards late tonight. Bed.