What a busy week! Just now got a chance to begin posting this weeks goings on. On Monday I got the call to fix the CNC shop server. Coincidentally the power supply was discovered dead the same day Bresnan was to come in and install their Internet service. Luckily I already had a power supply from a clone of the same PC I had refurbished last year. Plus I grabbed some RAM for this. Although it only recognized half of it’s capacity, I installed 256 to get 128 out of it. Oh well… it won’t be in service too long. It only had 32MB previously, so still much farther ahead. Bresnan was amazed at what they’d have to do to get their service into the building. Being so tall and on the opposite side of it’s destination. They ended up doing what I had suggested even! Crossing the ally two times and enter through the phone conduit. They got it running and we’re happy with the speeds so far!
Tuesday through Thursday I spent troubleshooting the AS400 connection going to our second “Building B”. They manufacture shipping containers there for exporting. So they have one node over there to our main office. Coincidentally when they have trouble we have trouble with our packing slip printer. The beauty of serial networked connections. I think it’s called twin-ax? So I spent most of my time building a PC from old parts to connect the modern way. Last summer I installed a wireless connection between the buildings using two access points with boosters mounted inside PVC boxes outside both buildings. Started with putting Windows 2000 on this PII 300MHz box using a Dell by proxy. You see we only had it on a restore CD so… well we won’t get into that here okay. Anyway… plopping the HD back into the destination box and booting up, it freezes during boot up. So I figured there must have been some difference with the HD parameters between the two boxes. I then put it back into the Dell and installed Windows 98 but this time putting in in the Dell just for speed. Again back in the other box it freezes but only after some new devices are installed. I discovered something was corrupting the registery. This was fixed by removing some of the Windows updates and skipping the loading of the registry. I get into Windows and reinstall the updates. This seems to smooth out the flawed registry! You would think it was smooth sailing after this, but then I get keyboard problems. Switching keyboards doesn’t help. Some combination of removing the keyboard and booting, failing, rebooting with keyboard does the trick. BTW this is an old IBM tower. Okay so once in the Building B more troubles including boot failures, bad monitor and tight network security. Geez Louise! Needless to say I am working on a different, hopefully not so possessed PC for them. For the time being they are running.
On and off through the week I have had to attempt getting another PC for our QC dept. It has been ready for them for weeks but was just waiting for the chance for them to accept it. They have been too busy to let me set it up that is. Two troubles cropped up here. Wireless network and COM1 problems with some ancient DOS application. As of yesterday I have gotten the COM port working but now have software problems… possibly OS incompatibility. I need to call to find out and then maybe just upgrade! For now I have two wireless networks for him to choose from: one is secure and the other is open but farther away. Yeah yeah… it’s open! Working on it! So the secure AP is closer but seems that every time this exterior door opens I loose connection. Strange but also I’m not getting DHCP to move through either. Seems to be working fine for the mentioned IBM box in the Building B warehouse. For the time being it’s just using the farther but open AP.
Made2Manage sent their customization consultant Wednesday and Thursday. I feel it was a good visit. However my co heart data analyst seems to be showing truer colors now. I am suspecting she is contributing to some failure in the process of our migration. At times the boss wants to just fork out the money to get this show rolling but she consistently steps in and makes show stopping issues and then blames it on money. Next would be the training issues. These ppl have been trained over 2 and a half years ago and have had a bad experience during this training due to technical difficulties. I had a ton of training a couple summers ago and a lot has changed to that point even. My experience was rather smooth. Problem is we have some flunkies that can’t handle being in a class scenario where you have to pay attention and try to lean something new. We also have such a flexible system now that they don’t want to tie themselves down to one way of doing things. There is a pride issue at play too. Our way is the only way! What does it hurt to see how others in the industry are doing things? Then of course nobody wants to be doing it the M2M way because it’s their way and not any one way. Our ppl don’t want to learn with some bogus test company. They want to train with our own part numbers. Waah Waah! A bunch of whining basket cases. I say model with the damn test company data, learn what works and doesn’t, customize and then maybe model again with our data. It’s all very time consuming and may require hiring a consultant to model with, but we’d be moving forward. We’re into something like our third year migrating!
Tonight will be a fun one! Our babysitter finally called last night to agree to watch the kids this evening. We were wondering if she was avoiding us. Anyway our community group will be rehearsing for this weekends sermons at church. One of the pastors asked if we would do a skit for all four services. It’s probably only for the first few minutes of the services. I chose to take care of the kids early on so not to worry about what to do with them. I wanted Kassie to do the skit because she used to do this stuff in high school drama class/club. She needed to get more involved in the group anyway. She has taken care of the kids too many other times like this. Then after the rehearsal we head to our normal biweekly community group meeting. Our community group has a passion for serving. So many of us do little things for the church and community, I feel that the church picks on us to be examples. This is our second group we have joined. The first was with an older group but we were there because our mentors were apprenticing with them. They moved to Laurel and thus giving up leading a group so we needed to get with a group more of our age and with kids. We are still a bit younger than most and so are our kids but we are getting some younger. We have sort of a love/hate feeling about our group too. We hate making preparations to go but love the fact that we did go. I keep thinking it’ll get better but I really should expect it to get worse. You see Satan attacks you most when he sees that you are getting out of his grasp. How’s that for making sense? I have to share one quote from someone I chat with often. He has a major lacking of moral values and he was getting upset with me for my lack of political involvement. He wrote “I encourage you to get involved with me in politics… because I think it has more of an impact on people than a church visit every Sunday.” You draw your own conclusion. I chose to ignore what he said. At that moment I couldn’t respond while my blood pressure was cooking. The truth of the matter is that what he says may have an immediate point but my purpose is not for my future life but goes much further than that. I choose to do the things in my temporary life for eternities sake not just the here and now.
I had a nice surprise yesterday. One of my mentors called for lunch unplanned. I just so happened to be available. This week was so busy that I hadn’t had time to eat much but to work during the chow. I let him know about how I was feeling down from the previous Thursday morning with my accountability partners news. I was happy to hear that I wasn’t far off key for feeling this way. He too thought it was not a very cool thing. I’m so happy that he is always honest with giving it to me straight. I informed him about how God has been so good to us over the past couple months. Not that he never is… it’s just that we have grown to put such faith in God and he has shown faith in us.
So I suggested offering a couple quality versions of a mp3 format. He took the bate! So now he wants me to draw up a plan for the transition. We don’t want to scare the folks already used to this system at hand. Cool, then we could measure the stats to see what ppl like. Now if I could figure how to incorporate using Linux to do this from home. Time to think about this now.
