Is it the weekend yet?
Is it the weekend yet?
I got a pretty funny image in my e-mail this morning, here it is:
Of course, I was two in 1978, so I didn't really have much to invest...
April 28, 2000
April 27, 2000
Dell-icious
Dell-icious
I just saw on the web that one of my favorite magazines, PC Accelerator is folding. It's a rather juvenile magazine, but it's fun to read a magazine which included blood alcohol contents with every review when they did their flight simulator roundup. The page on their site which announces the end of the magazine says that we loyal subscribers will probably get a subscription to PC Gamer to compensate us for our loss. The only problem with this is that I already subscribe to that magazine, so I fired off a quick e-mail to the subscription department, like PCXL suggested, here's what I got back:
Hello!
Thanks for writing PC Accelerator! We
have just received your
customer service inquiry and and we are
looking into your questions as quickly as
possible. Please allow 2 to 3 days for a
response (if one is required) so that we may
adequately review your records. Donít forget
to include your full name and address along
with any other specifics with all
correspondence. We value you as a subscriber
and look forward to helping you in any way
that we can!
Okay, fine, a standard auto-responder, but then five minutes later, I got this e-mail:
Your customer service request has been received by PC Accelerator. You should receive an email response in 2-3 business days.
Umm, thanks, but I got that from the first message, do I really need two pieces of mail to explain this concept to me? Needless to say, I don't have high hopes...
When I got back from the Microsoft event last night, there were four big Dell boxes stacked near my desk. Inside were our new Optiplex GX110 desktops. These are the first 733mHz machines I've ever used, and they're FAST. So far, my only gripes are that for some weird reason Dell puts the Windows 2000 Product ID number on the side of the machine, so you see this rather ugly Microsoft sticker there, and that the cases are sinfully ugly.
April 26, 2000
I want a cable modem in my office.
I want a cable modem in my office
Just got to work to find this message in my inbox:
The ICN is experiencing problems with one of their Frame Relay
switches. This affects our Internet access and connectivity, which is somewhat intermittent at the present time, but down more than it is up. There is not an ETR at this time.
This is becoming an almost weekly occurrence, not to mention the ICN is slow, and the four T1's connecting UNI to it are saturated.
Luckily, I'll be out of my office most of the day, as I'm going to Des Moines for the Microsoft Quarterly TechNet Briefing.
I'm looking at taking this course to prepare myself for our big Windows 2000 conversion. We're currently a Windows 9x shop (yuck) but I've previously worked in a Windows NT 4.0 environment. The class is somewhat pricey, but you get 5 days of training for your two grand.
April 25, 2000
Back in Business
Back in business
I answered my own problems with Norton AntiVirus and Eudora, after looking around on Symantec's site. This article explains that it sets up a proxy server on the local machine, and that's why it reconfigures Eudora to attempt to get the mail from 127.0.0.1. John VanDyk also experienced the fact that this feature doesn't always work.
Another interesting feature that I encountered yesterday, in dealing with Norton AntiVirus, is that it won't let a user without Administrator rights scan for viruses on a Windows 2000 machine. The program will report that the file is infected, and then denies them access to the file. This article describes how to give users the ability to scan and remove the viruses themselves, but I haven't decided yet if it's better to have them call for an admin to come do so, to ensure that the viruses is eliminated. Any thoughts?
I received my new Samba shirt from Nerdgear yesterday, and there was a small flaw in it. I sent off a quick e-mail to the fine folks there, and they told me to keep the shirt and they'd send me a replacement as well. Thanks for the great service! If you don't know what Samba is, go here.
Hurrah! I can finally connect to this site again, it was down most of yesterday.
April 24, 2000
Third time's a charm
Third time's a charm...
I'm in the midst of installing Windows 98 on a Gateway Solo 2300 laptop. It can be somewhat challenging installing Windows onto a blank hard drive on a laptop when you can only use either the CD-ROM drive or the Floppy drive, not both at once. I think I've finally got it down to a science:
1. Boot from Windows 98 Startup Disk.
2. Run fdisk and partition the hard disk. Reboot to Windows 98 Startup disk.
3. format c:
4. sys c:
5. copy the contents of a: to c:\
6. edit autoexec.bat and change the a:\ in the path to c:\
7. edit setramd.bat and change the reference "a:\findramd" to "c:\findramd"
8. Put the CD-ROM drive in, with the Windows 98 CD in it and reboot. If all goes well, you'll boot from the hard disk, and it'll detect the CD-ROM.
9. Make a directory called Win98 (or whatever you want) and copy the contents of the Win98 directory on the CD-ROM to it.
10. Go to C:\win98 and run setup.exe, this will install Windows 98 from this directory, meaning you'll never be prompted to insert the CD when you're on the road and you need some silly driver you've never used before.
I finally got the fax I was waiting for from FileMaker. This was the third time we'd called them about this, and the third time they said they were faxing it. This time, I refused to get off the phone until the technician I was speaking to personally faxed the information to me. He was nice about it, I think he understood my frustration at having to call three times to receive a simple fax.
April 23, 2000
Professional Strength Athlons?
Professional-strength Athlons?
I'm going to quote myself from Slashdot: Are any of the BIG system vendors (Gateway, Dell, Micron, etc.) selling corporate Athlon systems? I'd love to implement some, but so far all I've seen are systems aimed at consumers. Gateway has their Select line, but I want my systems to come with Windows 2000 on them, as well as having the management features of the Dell Optiplex line or the Gateway E-XXXX lines. The other thing preventing me from using Athlons, at this point, is the numerous gripes I've heard about getting X video card to work, or the right RAM, etc. I don't mind doing a lot of research and fiddling with my own machine, but things like that can become a nightmare when you have to support 250 of them!
Is anyone using Athlons en masse in a professional environment? I don't really have any concerns about using AMD chips, I just want to be able to purchase business-class systems based on them.
Happy Easter to those who celebrate it, and happy April 23 to those who don't!
April 22, 2000
On The Road Again
On the road again...
I'm at my grandparents' house for the Easter weekend, having to dial-in from the Sony VAIO I grabbed from work. Connecting at 26,400 baud is a shock when you're used to having a cable modem.
What would a visit home be without having to provide some tech support? The bearing in the CPU fan on my grandparents' IBM Aptiva was going out, so it sounded pretty bad. It took me a little over two hours of criss-crossing Mason City to find a Socket 7 cooling fan. It was at the second Radio Shack I tried, and outrageously priced at that! Fifteen dollars for a part that would normally cost me $7.50! I'm not sure who the genius is who made the label for this part, it reads: "For Pentium Processors from 75 to 200 mHz" Gee, I guess those with 233mHz Pentium chips are out of luck, not to mention everyone with a Cyrix, Winchip, or an AMD processor. For the record, it's working fine with their K6 at 233mHz.
April 21, 2000
Helter-Skelter
Helter-Skelter
I have no idea why, but when I installed Norton AntiVirus 2000 on the associate dean's computer this afternoon, to remove the W97M.Panther virus he'd been e-mailed, the Eudora plug-in reconfigured his POP account from "username@acad.uni.edu" to "username/acad.uni.edu@127.0.0.1" Needless to say, this didn't work too well, as he isn't running a POP server on "localhost".
NeoMagic is quitting the graphics chip business, according to this story over at News.com. Hurrah! Their chips were rather underpowered for my tastes, especially when compared to the Rage Mobility chips from ATI. It's too bad I'll still have to use one of them this weekend on the Sony VAIO I'm taking home...
Still no fax from FileMaker, I'll call them again on Monday...
My office is a mess today, as you can see below. The Bad News is that this has pretty much disrupted my entire day, since I've hardly even been able to check my e-mail, much less get any work done at my desk. The Good News is that we're getting more power and network jacks in my office. We were on a single circuit with the whole lobby of the building, and a classroom next to me as well. If we plugged in more than 5 computers at a time in this office, we'd trip the breaker! It's a good thing I've got everything on a UPS. Here's a snapshot:
April 20, 2000
Things that make you pull your hair out...
Things that make you pull your hair out...
I still haven't gotten that fax from FileMaker...
I hate CD drives that are mounted sideways. I just spent 20 minutes retrieving a faculty member's Chicago CD from his Gateway E3200. One of the little prongs that holds the CD in apparently got pushed back in, so when the CD tray came out, the CD stayed in the computer. I should mention I also hate the E3200. You can use it as a desktop computer, or turn it on the side, hence the sideways CD-ROM. The computers are compact, but not very expandable at all, not to mention being a pain to work on. They're the iMac of the PC world.
Well, it looks like Iowa State has a position open for a Systems Support Specialist II working for the library. I'd love to go back to working at ISU, but the thought of working with Microsoft Access all day makes me shudder.
From Macintouch: "You may want to warn your readers that the Apple 17" studio display monitor will ONLY work with the Beige G3 if (if and only if) you use an Apple brand VGA-to-Mac Adapter. No TIL or "read me" mentions this limitation. I underwent Herculean efforts using various bands of adapters, some with dip switches, other without, and none worked. Finally, someone at Apple confirmed that you needed one of their adapters. Few stores stock their adapters, much less know about the need for an Apple Adapter. ComputerWare, who sold me the monitor, and CompUSA do not even stock the Apple adapter. I had to buy it direct from Apple." These are the kind of problems I hate to troubleshoot, the kind that make you want to pull your hair out when you do find the solution, because it's so simple.
April 19, 2000
Holy Hail Storm, Batman!
Holy hail storm, Batman!
From OSOpinion: Apple's secret stragegy: Destroy Windows While I do think that Mac OS X will be very cool, if implemented well. I doubt that Apple will be producing an identical x86-compatible version as well, they depend on their pricey hardware sales too much to let everyone run Mac OS X on their PC's. While they may win a new round of converts to their OS if they did make such a move, Apple is too used to having control of both the hardware and the OS, they'd flounder if they tried to support the millions of possible configurations of PC hardware.
I got my first four boxes of Penguin Mints yesterday from ThinkGeek. They're like Altoids, but without sugar and with caffeine. My nifty new Tux polo shirt came too!
My boss asked me to call FileMaker this afternoon. We upgraded our server to FileMaker Server 5, in the hopes of getting some issues with our task-tracking database resolved. He'd called them once already about the issue, they promised to fax us some information, it never showed up. I call up their help line, enter my incident number, and am told that the incident is closed. I have to hang up, I call back, and choose to enter our support number again, and I'm told that it's expired! After an exasperated call to our sales rep, who transferred me to a different tech support number, I sat on hold for 20 minutes, then reached someone who told me that yes, apparently, our incident was accidentally closed, and he'd fax the info right away. It's been a half hour, and still no fax.....
I installed Storm Linux successfully today. I've only played with the distribution for a half-hour or so, but I'm impressed so far. It's based on Debian, and has a really nice graphical installer. The CD came free with my first issue of Maximum Linux Magazine.
Last night I set up a "JunkBusting Proxy Server" using the free software available from JunkBusters.com. I feel like a bit of a hypocrite, since I do use eAds banners on my personal site, but I have to pay for the domain and hosting costs somehow! :) If you'd like to see what it does, configure your web browsers to use 24.6.200.172 as a proxy server, you'll want to connect to port 8000. You probably won't want to use this permanently, as it's on my home system, and my cable modem doesn't have much in the way of upstream bandwidth.
From 32BitsOnline.com, Will Rambus Go Bust? I'm hoping so! I looked over some of the systems that Dell is selling, and they want $360 to add an additional 128MB of RAM! I could get a machine with 512MB of SDRAM for less than one with 256MB of RAMBUS!
I awoke this morning to the sound of thousands of marble-sized hailstones hitting my roof. Thank goodness my car was in the garage!
April 18, 2000
Day One: Here Goes Nothing!
Welcome to my new site-
Providing technical support is an interesting job. You really have to keep a sense of humor about it, or you'll go crazy inside six months. The purpose of this site is to provide some (hopefully) interesting tidbits throughout the day, related to the stupidity of users, the gaffes of technology companies, and my ongoing quest to become adept with Linux.My name is Seth Bokelman, and I work as a "Computer Support Specialist" for the College of Humanities & Fine Arts at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa. If you're really interested in knowing more about me, read my autobiography or visit my personal web site.
Finally, I'd like to give a shout out to John VanDyk who is a Frontier guru, and turned me on to the idea of doing this with his Manila site.