No updates today. Wanna make something of it?

2:30 As you might be able to tell from the above, yesterday was not a good day. Office stuff. But, I'm still here, and still playing with things. I guess that's a good thing.

Still working on Windows 2000 Server things. Lots of interesting things popping up, good and bad. One bad - not-good, anyway - is that the MDAC is now part of the operating system. Trying to reinstall it, to repair damage, reset bad settings, or whatever, fails. A snotty little error message pops up and informs you that beginning with version Windows 2000, the MDAC is part of the OS. No other explanations, no possible hint of a remedy. Trolls through the newsgroups turn uip solutions, none of them fully satisfactory. The best solution, of course, is the old standby - reinstall the OS. Fortunately, this is relatively painless under Win2k. As a matter of fact, I started it, went to lunch, came back, and everything was running. A SysAdmin's dream. <SEG>

Another dream; the Terminal Services server and client. I've pcAnywhere and 2rd party telnet programs on NT for years, but this is excellent. I'm installing SQL Server 7 on a test machine right now from a window on my desktop while I type this. Made easier by the mysterious appearance of a new 21" monitor on my desktop. Now where did that come from? (Nyah, nyah, you can't have one...)

And with that bit of childishness, it's back to work for me. Have an excellent day.

5:45 PM Another fun day. I was here, in the office, until 1 AM this morning working on several upgrades to our systems. Then I was in the office at 7:30 this morning dealing with various system problems. I'm now very, very tired and very, very cranky. But it's almost over. One more task to finish and I am done for the day.

Got two new pieces of hardware in the mail today; two new Matrox Millenium G400 dual-head video cards. I could really use on of those, but that's not what they're for, sadly. Instead, they're going to our graphics designer - which is going to prove to be a difficult machine-replacement process - and to our conference room machine. Why the conference room? Because, you see, the conference room computer drives both a 17" monitor at the workstation and also a built-in projection system for presentations. Since it's built-in to the room, it doesn't have the usual "Aux Out" video port - or rather, it does, but in the ceiling where it does little good - and so we were using a video splitter cable instead. That worked, but left artifacts and shadows on the monitor. So the decision was made to upgrade to a dual-video card, one side for each graphics device. The install was a dream; the software that comes with the card installed flawlessly on Windows 98. I want to try it on Windows 2000, and I think that's what we're going to do with the Graphics Designer.

And on that note, my machine is slowly dying for the first time in weeks. Time for a reboot - the first since January 7th, according to my logs. Much better than NT4.