I have an important announcement. The portal will break your mind....
The Help Desk has long been a home to the armchair conspiracy theorist. Common is the complaint from the Trusty Help Desk Tech that the Network Group is forming an evil plot, or that a certain user is trying to drive them crazy. Often times I am left to admonish said worker with the age old pearl that ignorance is a much more likely explanation than conspiracy. Late last Friday afternoon we were busy ghosting the Help Desk workstations when I noticed that the progress on the main workstation was going slowly. I wondered why, and then realized that I had probably chosen the wrong drive (there being three, the diagnostic partition, the c drive, and the e drive or backup drive). I canceled the reboot and went to check out the C and E drives, strange, the data was intact, where did the ghost image go - -oh my god the USB backup drive -- the one Peter backed up his 40 gig of data on!
In the positive side I learned that: 1. the new ghost program seems to ignore partitions (good to know) 2. you can ghost to a USB drive, 3. when you're being chased by a big Bulgarian guy crawl through passages he can't fit through.
My sincere regrets Peter. We are now all hoping that your computer comes back from HP without a reformatted hard drive, but if it doesn't remember mercy is the grater part of valor.
While everyone is enjoying the nice weather that summer brings to the States, I am enjoying the intense rainshowers and humidity of Hong Kong. To keep all my fellow helpdesk employees up to date, I flew into Hong Kong on June 5th, then proceeded to travel with my parents to Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Shanghai--these are some of the largest cities in China. It was an amazing trip with tons of sites. Chinese history is so extensive and exciting. We visited 2500 year old forts and the people were just so brilliant in their strategic planning of the forts. I saw large lakes where I learned some of the most famous Chinese folktales and love stories. After traveling, I arrived at school at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). It's HUGE campus and it overlooks the harbor. It's absolutely beautiful. It's quite a change from small town Lexington because of the multitude of people and many forms of public transportation.
But beyond all the schooling, it's very humid in Hong Kong and there was a construction mishap that broke a water pipe so all of CUHK has no water. It's quite sad to not have a shower, but just a bucket of water. Yep, it's dramatic for the girls. Anyhow, hope everyone else is having a good summer and i'll write more of my adventures later!
While the rest of you are working away at your job, internship or whatnot we are having a very productive summer here at the HD. Than and Shawn managed to kill an entire army of robots, or trolls, or something that were attacking their base yesterday, and Than has figured out how to buy a new car using just frequent flyer miles and rebate coupons. I have been spending my time catching up on all the liberal talk radio that I missed when I was performing my job during the school year. Sadly, now that I have completed that task, I have nothing to do. I guess I could clean my office, but I believe the mess adds to my job security. By appearing to be disorganized and on the verge of catastrophe I have am guarding against the possibility of anyone wanting to take over my position. I think this is the same strategy that Than and Shawn used against the trolls.
In the too strange to be true category I believe that Robert Whitener came in last night after hours and cleaned the Help Desk. The only other likely explanation is that Than or I did it, so I am placing my money on Robert.
With a simple mouse-click, I finally achieved a goal that used to seem unthinkable--and for many years impossible: the elimination of support in our core network for the once mighty Novell IPX protocol that's been in use here since the late 1980s.
Although we have not used any IPX for a number of months once the last of some legacy servers were retired, it's been enabled on the Tucker 8600 (and in 2 past generations of core network equipment across campus) since we first went from a bridged network of hubs (which passed any protocol) to an increasingly routed network starting in the early 90s.
When we outgrew the single-network group of hubs, we started a simple routed environment with three networks: academic 192.X, student 240.X and administrative 224.X, each with its corresponding IPX network....oh, I just can't go on. I'm all misty-eyed with nostalgia
Tom
We, at the Help Desk, will observe a minute of silence in recognition of this great, but now redundant, protocol
Remember Knoppix? The live-bootable linux distribution cd... well now there's Whoppix. This new distribution is specifically designed for wannabe hackers and the like.
Unfortunately, its wicked effective. Here are some videos of people cracking into other systems... each is pretty frightening....
http://www.whoppix.net/demos.html.
well, just dropping by and saying hi to all the people I know, have worked with, and haven't met.
wish you all the best!
peace ^_^
Most tragic news story I have ever read.
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050531/ENTERTAINMENT/505310403/1005/ENTERTAINMENT. I really don't believe it. It can't be true.
Dammit. Yet another sugar-momma that just slipped through my fingers. Hopefully GEICO will pay well.
But seriously... how long does everyone think this will last. I'm gonna give it 1 month, but it will be about 2-3 months before they actually file for the anullment.