Work

Burning the midnight oil

I came to the SWDCMA office at about 6:00 Saturday afternoon. As you can see from the datestamp on this entry, it is now almost 5 a.m. on Sunday morning. I’m still here.

The reason I came here was to install the Battery Backup unit I mentioned in my earlier post, as well as install a modem that we purchased at the same time in another computer that was going to go to a home user and therefore needed a modem to allow it to dial in.

Well, the Battery Backup was installed easily enough. I unhooked the old battery backup, hooked the new one up, setup automated monitoring of the battery status on the server, then moved the old battery backup (which still worked fine but didn’t provide battery power long enough for the highly important use of the servers) to a workstation in the network where the battery backup it had was not functioning…. at all.

The modem was another story, I took the old non-functioning modem out, stuck in the new (Better, i.e. more expensive) one, fired it up and… couldn’t get it to dial out. Well perhaps the old modem wasn’t bad at all, perhaps it was the computer? I updated everything on that thing, formatted and reinstalled Windows 2000 from scratch (which took HOURS because the format took 2 hours in and of itself), updated the BIOS, everything I could think of, and the modem would not dial. I even tried upgrading it to XP (just to see if it was Windows 2000’s problem), still didn’t work. I then took the computer out to another place in the office and tried plugging it into another phone jack. Low and behold, it fired right up, just fine dialed out and sent me a fax.

Note, for my reputation’s sake, I should tell you that the old modem was tried at multiple jacks, so my thought was that it was the computer, and didn’t think about moving the computer around and trying other phone jacks.

Now realizing I’m an idiot for not trying that earlier, I realized I now had to format and reinstall 2000 again because they didn’t want XP on that machine. So several hours later, I’m now finishing up and will be ready to go home in another hour or so, only to go back to church an hour or so later.

At least in all the time I’ve been formatting and reinstalling I’ve taken the opportunity to fire up my laptop and work on upgrading this blog to a new version of the software that runs it. And then afterwards, go make all my personal tweaks to the skins and templates and plugins.

So even though I’ve done a lot of unnecessary work tonight, I have still had a somewhat productive evening