At home we have four cats, including "the two kittens".  If this (see bottom link) happens to me when I'm home for spring break / the summer, I think I'm going to move out to a cardboard box in the backyard with suitably long extension cord and network cable connections running back into the house ("the two kittens" are indoors only).

 

☺

I went to work again, since I'm now on my semesterly schedule.  Not much happened.  Feel free to stop reading after the title above.

Basically, I talked to one of the other IT guys, then I talked to my boss, then I talked with another IT guy, then I started reinstalling a PC (it got reassigned to a new user).  So, not much happened.

The most interesting part of the day was that we wont be using Gateway as a vendor anymore, after the shitty support we got for the NAS box (I should write a few follow-up posts to the one I wrote here about that), and now it turns out that Gateway hasn't been filling our orders correctly for the last few months.  So no more Gateway.  Yay.

 

Updated 2004-01-12 20:40: I got the image to work via db hacking.

 

The link isn't coming out nicely AT ALL.  phooey.

 

Anyway, text version:

 

96 <hand graphic>

 

 

 

<frownyFace>

I dropped my HP TC1000 yesterday.  It was going into the slip case, and while zipping it up it just kind of slipped out.

 

Ouch.

 

Shortly after the beginning the lengthy drop from an altitude of 2 feet, it impacted the ground.  Impacts with computers are bad.

 

The actual collision occurred along the bottom edge of the unit, where the speakers are located.  Now, I find speakers builtin to notebooks to be extremely annoying (although people are getting better about knowing how to toggle MUTE on the volume controls), but dropping a whole Tablet along the speaker edge in retribution doesn't seem very...effective.

 

ANYWAY, there wasn't much damage (too bad speakers...<cackle>I'll get you next time my pretties!</cackle>).  The batter latch gave out and the battery popped out, and the casing on it is pretty much toast now.

 

Did I mention that I dropped my primary battery during Winter Break and chipped parts of that casing off?  Well, I did, so it was the backup battery that got hosed.  So now I'm stuck with a primary battery that's back in the unit, being held in with tape.

 

Despite my extra warranty coverage, batteries aren't covered for anything beyond the first year.  Last I checked, a new battery was hundreds of dollars.  This sucks.

 

So ya...things haven't been going so well with the Tablet PC for me lately.

</frownyFace>

The RSS Feed generation engine has been replaced.  The old feed will continue to work, but the new feed has additional features.  Get it now from the XML link to the right, or http://www.ntldr.net/RssFeeds/Blog.aspx?Channel=Full.

Well, I'm back at school and a new semester has started.  And since it's just starting, I should have slightly more free time to work on things.

 

So I'll unveil the site change plans I've got right now.

I had this lengthy, detailed blog post written.  Then I clicked "Save and Close", and encountered a Security Timeout.  GAH!

The last two days at work have been pretty boring.  I just couldn't quite get into the swing of things after Finals.  Today kind of eased that transition by abruptly knocking me into whatever mode I was in during the summer.

 

I came in an hour later than usual, due to a rapid and highly planned covert operation that consisted of me whacking the alarm clock a couple of times and thus setting my alarm for an hour later when it first went off this morning.  Apparently my arm knew more about what was gonig to happen today than I did, because hindsight indicates that this was an unusually intelligent decision on the part of my (sleeping) arm.

 

Anyway, when I came in, the IT Director and Network Admin are sitting in the server room (within which my "office" resides), staring at the console.  This is A Bad Sign.  "SRVR8 went down."  The console displayed the reimaging tool off the restore cd's for that Gateway 860 NAS box.

 

It was at this point that I got knocked back into IT Pro mode instead of disaffected CS college student.

 

Apparently the box locked up between 11:48 PM and ~12:15 AM last night.  The IT Director arrives here first, and noticed that the drive mappings onto the server weren't working.  Since the system was locked, he powercycled it.  When it came back up, the OS couldn't be found and of course wouldn't boot.  And so the Network Admin was called in.

 

The Network Admin couldn't get the NAS box to boot off of what he thought were Windows Server 2003 and Recovery Tool discs, so he apparently fell back on the restore CD approach.  It was shortly after that that I showed up.

 

The good news is that the OS reinstall worked well.  The system was back online by 1 PM today.  It was also surprisingly painless, with none of the data being damaged (nice 3 hour chkdsk there...) and all the settings other than static IP, domain membership, and shares being pushed down via GP.

 

On the brighter side of things, everyone got their bonus checks today.  Now I can pay off a third of the taxes on my scholarships from last spring!

Well, this weekend I decided to make an effort to get VPN services working with ISA 2004.  And it worked!

 

It was actually pretty easy too.  ISA 2004 made it a snap to setup, and I found an article on Technet telling me EXACTLY what certificates to get to for the computers to allow L2TP and EAP to work.  The only snag I ran into (and it was a MAJOR snag) was getting the client certs.

 

For some reason when I try and get a certificate for any user, an error about "the specified user could not be found".  Since I was in a hurry, and only had one user account that needed a certificate, I ended up just having that user login to the CA computer directly, where the certificate issue worked fine.  Wierd...

 

The other problem I ran into was that the WinXP VPN client wouldn't work with cerficates created using the "Windows Server 2003 User" template.  In fact, the only certificate template I could use that resulted in a useable configuration was the Administrator template.  Again, wierd...

 

So there are a few issues that need to be looked into to get everything working perfectly.  In the meantime, at least I can connect in over the VPN and enjoy remote / WLAN access.