Well, I finally got my cable run. Of course, I stepped through my ceiling first. *sigh*

*sigh* Here I sit, tired to exhaustion, waiting for the weather to clear in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. How did I end up here? *sigh* Oh, my what a story. I'll keep it short, though. Once again, I'm paying for someone else's short-sightedness. The beat-up, old hardware in our Baton Rouge office curled up its toes and died yesterday afternoon. Or, at least part of it did. And, since we couldn't quite seem to get it up and running remotely, I was "volunteered" to go fix it.

Well, I ran into a little snag running cable. Literally. I managed to get through the top plate and into the wall at the right spot, but when I actually tried to pull the cable, it snagged on the roof before it even got out of the server room closet! I'll have to get up into the nasty part of the attic to fish it around the snag. Though, I may try to push it up through with the fiberglass pull rod and see if it gets past the obstruction. Either way, I didn't feel like getting all nasty in the attic anymore, so I was done for the night.

Well, Day 1 of cable running didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped. For one thing, I found out just how wimpy my cordless drills are. But, let me start from the begining....

Okay, so I *still* haven't been all that great about keeping this up to date, but I have an excuse. My wife and I got the house. In fact, we just finished moving in this last week. Now, we're surrounded by boxes. But, somehow, I don't mind. After all, we have *all* our stuff, no more storage facility, and we *still* have more room than we did in that stinking little apartment!

Well, it sure has been a long time since I did any updates on this page! In fact, it's been literally months!! I can explain...

So, you'd think with all that this past week, things would be getting better, right? Well, think again. Apparently, the network has more issues than even *I* was aware. NDS (Netware Directory Services) and GroupWise (the e-mail program) were way out of synch. The bad part about this is that someone, who works for me, kept resubmitting an update. In short, we tried too many updates without out allowing these two systems to synch up and now they're broken. Mind, it didn't help much that we didn't find it until things were really bad. I think that was due to my being absent from the office.

On a *really* positive note, the nightshift police took a real interest in my Palm and my folding keyboard. They were totally amazed at my typing into such a tiny device. Hey, at least they kept me company for a few minutes. I think I'll ask them about vending machines and then go back and play some Area 51 in the video arcade. At least there's that to do while I wait. Afterward, maybe I'll take a nap. (As if that could happen with the noisy cleaning crew!) I wonder what they serve for breakfast in the airport?

Here I sit, at 12:25am, in the lobby of the New Orleans airport waiting until 6:00am so I can go home. "Why?", you ask. Well, I'll tell you. If for no other reason than to look busy so that the nice police officers stop looking at me like I'm some kind of vagrant. It all started a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed that the chuckle-head who was the Network Admin before me had not gotten all the servers onto the latest set of service packs. When I asked my boss about this, he was somewhat surprised, since he'd been told that everything was up to date. Not hardly.

Well, last week, I saw black helicopters flying over fields West of my office. Now, Anne thinks that I've been watch too much First Wave, but I swear there were military helicopters flying around out there. Gosh, it's weird having a window... I saw all that, incidentally, because I was using my second machine to get the screen captures that Novell wants for my corporate licensing agreement self-audit. (Oh, boy, is my job fun, or what?) Anyway, that machine faces the windows in my office. Well, for those of you that care, I've just about gotten my new bookstore done.