Wednesday, September 17, 2003
As of 6:45 AM, the School of Pharmacy site is still unavailable. All I can say is, "You were warned" as well as "You listen to Short Round, you live longer!" In the morning I sent out a status message reporting the outage, then later got an "urgent" call from Rob Duca asking what was going on and told him maybe he should be asking Bruce that question. After all, it was Bruce who sent out the (premature) e-mail saying Everyone—thanks and congratulations on a successful project! The downtime was extended by perhaps 2 hours because, as Julie relates, there was only one person in ITS (or maybe ENS) who could flip the necessary switch after the port scan and clearance by isecurity was given. Another Web developer on campus sent me a reply to my status message with simply: "Gotta love ENS." The site was reported to be live again around 12:37 PM today—total (possible) downtime: 18 hours 35 minutes, and I can only think of Bruce and Kraig saying earlier, "We've done this before." I surveyed the first-years at orientation and more than half tried to get to the site last night and found it was down. Wireless testing with Ian Gwin, whom I met for the first time. We tested in the lobby of Cole Hall: only a weak signal, but ITS does not claim to have wireless installed in Cole Hall. MSB1: most of the classrooms had people in them so we couldn't test them all, but the ones we did had good to excellent signals except (I think) S-182. C701: all good to excellent signals. Toland Hall: we couldn't check because a class was in there. Kristina, Melissa, and I went to the New Student Fair to help out but they had everything under control, so we milled around to see the booths. People kept thinking we were students even though I was badged indicating I was staff, and they kept shoving free stuff in our hands, so we eventually got bags and did trick-or-treating. I got a Rec Sports water bottle, Edge Active Care gel shaving cream in Natural Cool with Eucalyptus flavor, Reed's Root Beer individually wrapped roll candies, a SoBe Power bar (milk chocolate with power fruit infusion (and Patrick thought "Power Fruit" referred to a gay political organization), Nexxus Therappe shampoo and Humectress conditioner samples, a coupon book for Millberry Union, a letter opener with the bookstore's logo on it, and a variety of handouts which eventually went into the recycling bin after Patrick and I looked them over. Intermittent mail and network outages all afternoon. I called ITS and asked why no one bothered to share the outage information from 4 hours ago and the response was, "We're not that fast." In-deeed! I thought. Some mailing list adjustments. Began reformatting Mike Lemont's computer with Win XP to get rid of the viruses it caught. Dinner at home with Patrick: leftover lasagna, bread. 5dollar sites went black—don't know why. This means I'm locked out of my e-mail for now. Wah! Couldn't work on Lodestar, so went to bed early at 9:00 PM. Brought home the Oyster we ordered for Patrick a few days ago. The box is very nice and thoughtfully designed—a comfortable handle is built in to the top of it. I am anxious to see it set up, but we don't have time tonight.