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Sunday, 8 April 2001
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Today was an unusual day for me. I spent the whole afternoon with my daughter doing "dad" things. It was so great. Now I'll be the first to admit that even in my prime, I was never interested in sports. Much less am I thus inclined after years as a sedentary nerd. But my daughter, for some reason, has to play every sport she can get her hands on, whatever's currently on offer at school or in the town. Fortunately, she's much better than I was. So today, to celebrate the first gorgeous day (75 degrees F and cloudless) since I don't remember when, we went to the park and practiced her softball, which is currently the flavor of the month. White Legs on Parade, baby! We laughed our way through 30 mph winds, and slogged through ankle-deep mud on the just defrosted ball diamonds. Then after a supper of hot dogs and macaroni salad, we went out and shot baskets. I found out I'm almost good enough to play girls' Junior Varsity. Ha. But at least my daughter had ample opportunity to laugh at her old dad's pathetic dribbling. Ask her who won, though... It was a great day, and I thank God for it.
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Monday, 9 April 2001
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Today it looks as if our HP 12/24-gig DAT tape backup drive may be lunched. It mangled a tape last week, and I bought a new cleaning cartridge for it. Tried it out Friday... I wasn't thrilled with the result. It's supposed to be automatic — just pop the cartridge in and it does its thing. Well, I'm no expert, but it seemed to me as if maybe it ought to take more than about five seconds for said thing to be done. But no, it blithely popped the bugger back out as if all was well. OK, said I, let's try a backup. So a popped in a Friday tape and left. This morning, as you might expect, I found that the backup had failed. So it looks like I'll be spending some more time with a phone in my ear...
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Tuesday, 10 April 2001
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Heard back from HP yesterday about the Jornada. Oddly enough (ha), they don't seem to believe that a screen which fractures while being carried with the cover closed in a pocket contains any design defect. I'm stunned. Not. I'm also going to be a little over $200 poorer. This morning I faxed them back my capitulation, complete with VISA number. Like I said, it costs too much to simply write off after two months as a Bad Idea (though it apparently was). I figure I'm marginally better off having a $700 Jornada that having a $500 9-ounce paperweight. As I've observed before, I am a stupid man.
On the bright side, the tape drive's up again. After coming in Monday morning to a failed Friday backup, I tried manually formatting and retensioning the tape, and then ran the job again. This morning the server presented me with the successfully-written tape cartridge sticking out of its mouth in the proper fashion, like Fido with his master's slippers. Good server! I just have to replace the Wednesday tape, which got mangled in classic fashion, with little wrinkled dangly bits sticking out the front. And we're good to go.
And my little CAT5 wiring endeavors went well. I almost think I'm getting the hang of this. Though I'll never win any prizes for speed. But I'm neat. Neat is good. Except in emergencies, I'll take neat over speedy any day.
And... today's the day the bills come due for my Sunday afternoon unsedentary exertions with my daughter. I should've remembered — it's always the second day after the exercise that the muscles really start to protest that they've been abused.
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Wednesday, 11 April 2001
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We have a couple of engineers slated to go to a training class next Monday. They're supposed to bring notebooks with 256 megabytes of RAM and Windows NT 4. Geez! But NOT Windows 2000. Try buying a notebook that way. Well, you probably can, but it ain't purty. So we have a couple new Gateways, one fresh out of the box, for which NT4 was NOT an option. This is gonna be fun. The other Gateway is a couple months old, and was available with NT, so presumably I'll be able to find drivers. Yuck. C'mon, programmer guys... NT is OOOOOOLLLD now, and even 2000 is aging. GET WITH THE PROGRAM! You have no idea what hoops you're forcing us support weenies to jump through. Now I'm gonna hafta build two new notebooks starting with blank hard disks, which I just ordered online, priority overnight. And since the notebooks aren't identical, I can't just do one and Ghost it. Guess I know what my next couple days are gonna look like...
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Thursday, 12 April 2001
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10:44 a.m. and no notebook hard drives. For this we paid $40 to FedEx? We're burning daylight here. I love being on salary — what you don't finish by Friday night, you get to work on during the weekend. To be fair, that's seldom bitten me yet. But it looks as if it will this time.
As an aside, I'll just mention that I'm astounded and tickled that even notebook hard drives are now pretty cheap. Those two I was supposed to see this morning were $86 apiece, for brand new IBM 6-gig slimline models. I bought my first hard disk by mail order, out of the old Computer Shopper; the one that looked like an oversized phone book. I got it from a dealer who specialized in refurbished drives. I ordered a 30-meg Maxtor MFM drive for about $300 if memory serves. I was tickled to death when they actually shipped me a 40-meg Seagate. Now a 40-gig drive is half that. Prices have gone from about $10-15 per megabyte to about $3-4 per gigabyte. 1000 times the data, half the price or less. And now Intel is threatening to kick-start its P4 processor sales with up to 60% price cuts... These are the good old days. And odds are that next year will be the even better old days. And so it goes...
AFTER LUNCH...
Well, a phone call to me new friend (j.g., probationary) Troy at GlobalMicro established the fact that They Screwed Up. He's going to refund half of the extortionate Priority Overnight shipping cost, and still ship it to me that way Right Now. So if my luck changes, I'll have the hard drives in my hands tomorrow morning. And then the fun begins. I HATE putting NT onto notebooks. But I guess we don't always get what we like in this life. But as Puddleglum the Marshwiggle justly observed in C. S. Lewis' The Silver Chair, "Life's not all frog's legs and eel pie." Words to live by.
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Friday, 13 April 2001
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Well, believe it or not, the hard drives came in before 9:00 a.m. And other than one notebook mysteriously refusing to install a sound driver, they both work just fine. I unilaterally declared the sound functionality to be "non-critical" and packed it up. The other one was perfect. I still don't like NT on notebooks, though.
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Saturday, 14 April 2001
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No entry.