6:30 AM Ah, what a glorious morning. Here I am, bright and early, ready to go...

Nope. Didn't work, it's still Monday. Sigh.

Had an OK weekend, aside from having to work yesterday through a four-hour power outage. It was planned, and our back-up systems worked perfectly, but our power-out procedures call for someone to sit here and watch the power guage. I don't know what we'd do if the power was still out when it hit zero; our plans don't say. Yell "Lift-off?" Start cranking a hand generator? (Let's see... how hard would you have to crank to generate 7 amps at 250 volts?) Who knows, but that's what the plan says, and I always follow plans. Well, usually.

And speaking of plans, I'm not going to get anything done today, between the usual Monday meetings and training people on how to use the alarm system. It's not difficult; when the ear-piercing alarm sounds as you open the door, enter your code plus the "Off" command, and wait for the green light. If that doesn't work, do it again. If that doesn't work, do it twice in succession, with a three second pause. And if THAT doesn't work, pick up one of the many ringing phones (they'll all ring, as a matter of fact) and tell the alarm company their stupid alarm system doesn't work. And if THAT doesn't work, smile at the nice policeman. See? That wasn't difficult. But for some reason, people keep setting the damn thing off. At $200 US for every false alarm. I keep telling the police the alarm's real, not fake - can't they hear it? That's not a good argument to make, apparently.

Tuesday

6:50 AM Tuesday is much better than Monday. Really. At least, I hope it is...

A few links to start of the day; here's the transcript of Bill Gates's keynote speech from Comdex, here's a link to a very... um... unusual supercooling experiment; they claim to have overclocked a 486 SX 25 to 275 MHz, for about 3 minutes. Of course, they also claim that the videotape and all their notes were destroyed when the processor died, so who knows. And finally, having spelunked for hours on the Microsoft site, I finally found the install file for the Digital Dashboard - and an hour after finding it, they moved it again. So here's a copy of it, if anyone's interested in Exchange 2000 and Outlook.

Other than that, there's not a whole lot going on. Still experimenting with Exchange, and it's getting pretty hairy. For example, the official procedure to install Instant Messaging is over two pages of single-spaced 10 pt. type. And that's a simple one.

But it is interesting. And it all works. It's complex, yes, but it's doing complex things. Already, my users (or rather, those users who have test accounts) can check their email from anywhere, from any machine, and see all their messages and the replies they've sent. They can do anything they need to from any web-enabled machine, and do it all securely using public-key encryption. We have instant messaging in the office that never leaves our network; the developers love being able to send source code without concern for security. And so far, it hasn't had a problem that I didn't give it through playing with things the manual said not to. (A very educational way to experiment with software.) In short, this is a program that does what it's supposed to, does it well, is well documented, and doesn't have a horrendous amount of "undocumented features." All in a Beta 3 program. Amazing.

Well, I'm off to harass more users. Later.

Wednesday

6:40 AM Wednesday already? What the hell happened to Tuesday?

Actually, I know what happened to Tuesday; it was devoured by llamas. (Locusts has already been done. <g>) About the only things I accomplished were loading RedHat 6.1 on my linux box, and hiring a "Minion." That's not his official title, of course, but it's close enough.

The RedHat install went pretty well. The machine is that same as all the test boxes - PII 400, 256MB RAM, 8GB hard drive, ATI RAGE II+ video card, no sound, and a 24X CD-Rom. I'm not sure why, but on the first attempt, the Expert install crashed while copying RPMs to the hard drive. A reboot and the exact same settings installed flawlessly, so I'm writing it off as a gremlin attack. (You don't get gremlin attacks? I don't believe you...) Right now, I've got the machine running from the command line, although Gnome and Enlightenment are loaded and configured. I've FTP and Apache running for experimentation purposes, along with Sendmail, but most everything else is turned off. It'll be a few more days before I've gotten the whole thing tightened down to where I want it, but it's a start.

The rest of my day was spent trying to get an HP JetDirect print server working. For those of you who've never used one, it's basically a parallel port mated with a network card. You can configure the card through telnet (my preferred method) or by using a built-in Java based GUI interface through your web browser. You set an IP (or IPX, DEC, or AppleTalk) address, give the device a name, and it works as a sort of network-based parallel port. I connected it to our Brother MFC-7200FC fax machine/color printer/copier/scanner/video capture device/toaster oven to use as a network printer. (OK, I was kidding about the toaster oven.) Why, you ask, when we have an HP 4000N and an HQ 4050N? Because it's there! Well, actually, because it prints in color. The problem is, although I can see the device fine through pinging it, telnetting to it, and browsing to it, I can't get NT to print to it. It seems Brother decided, in their infinite wisdom, not to support NT when they wrote the drivers. That's OK, though, they say, because you can use an Epson LQ-2550 driver to emulate it. Which would be fine - except that the Epson driver refuses to work through a network port. Snarl. Hiss. Spit. Or I can pay a $30 "upgrade" fee to get a CD-Rom from Brother that includes NT drivers. Snarl. Particularly when the documentation for the bloody thing claims it supports NT. Grand Bother. So I called Brother - "Why do you make claims that aren't true? This misbegotten pile of crap you call a printer DOES NOT WORK WITH NT." Sure it does - with the Epson drivers.

Piffle.

Speaking of piffle, how many people laughed out loud when Buffy the Vampire Slayer's old buddy Spike used the term "Piffle" last night? Believe me, I did. Even more amusing, we had the closed captioning on (handy when you aren't paying fuill attention to the babble box) and they actually spelled it correctly. That's more rare than you might think. It wasn't enough to completely save the day, but it was amusing.

More as time and inspiration permit.

Thursday

8:00 AM "Good morning, good morning, you've slept the whole night through, good morning, good morning, to you..." Bleh. Minnesota childhood flashbacks; waking up in the morning to the sound of Dad's favorite Talk Radio announcers (neither of them singers) singing that song as loud as they could. Every morning. I don't know why I'm thinking about it; must be too much blood in my caffeine stream again. Time to up the dosage!

I watched Real Genius with my wife the other night. That is a hilarious movie; it reminds me of the dorm we both lived in when we met. Picture a frat house, but populated with Aerospace Engineers and other assorted space geeks. Of course, none of us looked like Val Kilmer, but hell, it was just a movie. And I don't recall creating ice in the stairwells, although there was one time at the Halloween Pumpkin Launch where I got my kilt caught on the launch rail... Never mind.

Today is going to be spent playing with Exchange and Linux (as usual) along with a YANTI this afternoon. Joy oh Rapture. Then it's time to start on a few hush-hush projects, and we'll have to see how that comes out.

I know, it's a short update, but what can I say? I'm boring...

Friday

8:30 AM TGIF. And I really, really, mean that. Next week will be pretty hellish, though, even with the short work week (here in the US, at least.) My boss is going on vacation, beginning noon today, back the Monday after Thanksgiving. In the meantime, I get to find a way to purchase twice the machines for half the money, train a new tech, build the new phone support center, and in general keep this place from collapsing into a hole in the ground. So business as usual, then, as you can see. <g>

I don't know how long Brian's had this on the bottom of his Daynotes page, but it caught my eye this morning:

"Daynotes - THE Home for the best the web has to offer (advice best taken with a grain of salt) Daynotes are (usually) daily web journals, following in the tradition of Dr. Jerry Pournelle. Often hi-tech, sometimes lowbrow, occasionally political and usually irreverent. We aim to please.

We do? Hell, that's my problem. Here I've just been shooting from the hip, and you guys are AIMING!!! Why didn't anyone tell me???

More later. Gotta try out this Exchange server some more. (Working with Exchange on one box and linux on the other. Just sounds vaguely wrong, doesn't it?

---

4:50 PM Another day shot to hell. Ah well. I did actually accomplish a lot, as I can see from looking back on things, but it wasn't everything I NEEDED to accomplish. Piffle. Then again, if I got upset every time THAT happened, I'd be in a mental ward. Or maybe I am in a mental ward... hmm. Interesting theory. This bears thinking on.

Two bits of email regarding my observation that Brian's actually AIMING to please, while I'm just shooting from the hip...

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Bilbrey [mailto:bilbrey@pacbell.net]
Sent: Friday, November 19, 1999 10:27 AM
To: matt@rearviewmirror.org
Subject: "We aim to please"

I don't use we in the daynotes collective sense, nor in the royal sense.

I use "We" in the schizophrenic sense....

Schizophrenia means never having to say you're alone.

.b <g>

No it doesn't. Yes it does. No it doesn't. Yes it does. No it doesn't. Yes it does. No it doesn't. Yes it does. <SMACK> OK, I'm better...

-----Original Message-----
From: Jaydonalds@aol.com [mailto:Jaydonalds@aol.com]
Sent: Friday, November 19, 1999 4:29 PM
To: matt@rearviewmirror.org
Subject: wtf

You asked for this life, accepting Tom's arguments. TA-TA-TA

John V.

Hey, this is America, buddy. I'm not responsible for anything. I'm the victim, damnit! Those crazy Canucks... <seg>

Going out with friends to see "The World is Not Enough" (unless it has fast cars, faster women, and lots of explosions.) Should be fun; I always have a good laugh at the new Bond films. It's so hard to find good villains these days, now that they've all retired and run for office.

Saturday

Sunday