Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Ordered 3 new computer workstations for the office. Chris is considering not migrating to the Windows 2000 Server plan that ITS advocates. He's unhappy that we'll need 2 servers instead of 1 based on their requirement—one server to act as a primary domain controller and another to act as secondary. This almost doubles our cost of purchase and takes up workspace and the maintenance costs are also doubled, so it was not something to which I was looking forward. However, our other option would be to stick with Windows NT 4.0 SP6a for any server applications we want to run. The decision to not migrate is feasible to a point, so I gave him our other options: set up separate Linux servers using the old Optiplex GX110s we have recently freed up in our workstation upgrades to Optiplex GX240s.—I updated the PSPG contact information page. I also updated the application workshop page for James—the August 30 workshop is closed. Notified Ena that 3 computers were ready to be sent to surplus or donation. Redid the Fall 2003 schedule for first-year students in InDesign using Debrah's version in Microsoft Word—we want these to be a little prettier than they have been in the past, and Word doesn't give us the control we need over tables. I designed a new Microsoft Word template several months ago, but when Debrah tried to use it we found that Word's handling of tables was very inconsistent—we couldn't get it to behave exactly how we wanted. InDesign is better, but some things still aren't perfect. For example, in InDesign 2.0 when I attempt to change only 3 of the 4 borders of a single cell in a table, InDesign does the opposite of what I expect! It took me about 15 minutes playing with it to figure out how it worked—there's something seriously screwy with how its "Strokes and Fills" user interface was designed.—Dinner at home by myself because Patrick is meeting with Daphne and Aaron about Lodestar and whether to change the tagline, which currently reads: "an online journal of the finest gay and lesbian literature." Spent 3 hours changing a network card in one of my computers. The old card was a Netgear FA310TX. The new card was a Netgear FA311TX. I needed to do it because the RJ-45 connector on the old one didn't hold the cable properly, so it provided only an intermittent connection based on the weight of the cable—if we nudged the cable into the card it'd work for about another day. It took a long time because this computer has no floppy drive, and I didn't remember to copy the FA311 drivers onto it over the network before putting the new card in. I ended up getting the drivers over to it using SmartMedia and a USB reader. However, I then made the mistake of updating to the latest network card drivers on Netgear's Web site. For the FA311TX, the version 1.6 drivers that come on floppy with the network card worked better for me than the version 1.8 drivers that are on Netgear's Web site. All was working fine with the 1.6 drivers, but after installing the 1.8 drivers, my computer would hang upon boot with a blue-screened Windows Protection Error complaining about VSDATA95 and VxD something blah blah blah. (This is Windows 98 SE.) Rebooting in Safe Mode and uninstalling ZoneAlarm got past the Windows Protection Error, but the Windows "feature" of always using the most recent driver found in the driver library kept reinstalling the 1.8 drivers and crashing my system. I deleted all the 1.8 driver files and verified that all references to "311/312" were gone from the registry (since the 1.6 drivers specify the network adapter's name as just "FA311" whereas the 1.8 drivers specify the network adapter's name as "FA311/312"). I rebooted and removed all network adapters listed. I reinstalled the network adapter using only the 1.6 driver files, rebooted and installed the network components I needed, then configured my static IP, DNS, and gateway. This is a gross oversimplification of the process, and it feels like I had to reboot about 50 times, but I fixed it and now all is well with that machine. Patrick finished all his major corrections to Second Island today, so this is is a significant milestone for the novel. He wants to add a few more details, but then it's ready to print and send to Mitchell and our volunteer editors.