America The Beautiful

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

In the last several days, when the TV has been filled with images and stories of great tragedies.  I think three musical moments have touched me the most, each having brought tears to my eyes.

The first was the impromptu singing of "God Bless America" by the U.S. Congress on the steps of the Capitol, when they regrouped, following a day of terror.

The second was yesterday, at the playing of the "Star Spangled Banner" by the Coldstream Guards in London, during a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.  It was the first time they'd ever played it, and they played it before their own anthem, as a show of solidarity and compassion.

The third was just now, during the National Prayer Service in Washington, when the soloist sang that verse that I put at the top of this page.

Yet Another Wedding

My girlfriend and I spent the weekend in Carroll, Iowa, at yet another wedding.  We have three to go to this month, two down, one to go.  This one was for a good friend of mine from high school, and was a nice affair, except for the unnecessarily long Catholic wedding ceremony.  It took well over an hour, and we non-Catholics weren't even supplied with the script, so none of us even responded during the times we were supposed to.  Why couldn't he have married a nice atheist girl instead?

After the reception, I was elected designated driver to haul a bunch of high school friends to Ruby's, a local bar.  We checked out the topless G-String joint next door (the girls wanted to, and I swear I am not making this up).  It was disappointing to say the least, though I will say this, if you're looking for budget strippers, Carroll, Iowa has you covered.  They did things for a buck that cost $20 at the only other nudity-related bar I've ever been in.

Fortunately, the other half of the bar had Monkey's Uncle playing, and they turned out to be a pretty good cover band.  They had the crowd rocking along, and even did a pretty passable version of Billy Joel's "Piano Man", complete with harmonica.  The drinks at this bar turned out to be pretty cheap too, a round for the five of us came to only $10.50, which isn't too bad for two bottled premium beers, two mixed drinks, and my Pepsi. We left a little after 1:00 a.m. and went back to the Super 8 to crash.  If you're ever in Carroll, it has TWO Super 8 Motels, which is surprising for a middle-sized Iowan town, not to mention confusing if you made your reservation over the phone, and didn't pay any attention to the address of your destination.

We ate at Hickory Park on the way back through Ames yesterday, and stopped to check out the Reiman Gardens, since they've been expanded this year.  I ran into Donald Lewis there, who works with John for the ISU Entomology Department where I did computer support as a student.  He remembered me from doing all of the Y2K checks on the computer equipment, which dragged up a whole bunch of memories of boring computer work that I'd rather forget.

I got home to find a snotty message from one of our faculty members who couldn't figure out how to log in to his computer.  It wasn't exactly a difficult problem, he simply wasn't replacing my username on both the Novell login screen and the Microsoft login screen, even though this is discussed in bold in the documentation that we gave him when we created his Netware account.  I'll give him points for persistance, if not for reading comprehension, as he called my house 5 times this weekend, and stopped by my house twice.  Fortunately for him, I was on the other side of the state, saving him from a probable black eye, as I don't really like to do computer support on my days off, especially at my front door, and certainly not for user-error type of questions.

Cavity Search

I spent yet another afternoon in the dentist's chair today.  I'd recently finished my four visit root canal saga, only to be informed that I was due for a check-up and cleaning.  Fortunately, my teeth got a clean bill of health today, though I hate when they scrape the tartar off the insides of my lower front teeth.

The dentist pointed out that two of my old massive fillings would probably have to become crowns at some point, should they become damaged or have any decay develop near them.  I told him that he'd already used up all of my insurance money for this year, so he'd have to wait until next year to wring any more out of me.  I'll have to brush those two teeth especially well, I guess...

I got back from the dentist just in time to get drenched in the rainstorms that rolled through the Cedar Valley this afternoon.  I had to put my "Visor" in the plastic bag with my Subway sandwich to avoid ruining it in my mad dash from the parking lot to Sabin Hall.  I had an umbrella in the trunk of my car, but I'd have gotten just as wet retrieving it as I got running to the building.  I think my building needs an underground parking garage.

Brace Yourself

I'm gimpy.  My left wrist had been bothering me for the last couple of weeks, so I decided to have it looked at.  Yesterday, I called an Orthopedic office, but they told me I needed to see my family doctor first.  Unfortunately, I didn't have one here.  I chose one out of the phonebook at random, and he's turned out to be a good guy, and one of my co-workers takes her entire family to him as well, though I didn't know that before I chose him.

They got me in this morning, and he determined that I have some "soft tissue damage" to my wrist.  Basically, I've injured the tendons/ligaments there by carrying around a lot of heavy and awkward computer equipment at work.  He gave me a dorky brace to wear, and told me to let him know if it helps.  After wearing it for only half a day, it has definitely decreased the amount of pain I was having in the wrist, so hopefully I can avoid the steroid injections that would be the "next step" in treating me.  I'm avoiding lifting all of the heavy equipment for the next few weeks, so I can give this time to heal.  This makes me feel a bit useless at work, since I have to get my student helpers to babysit me.  One of them has strep throat, so she's not in any shape to be moving heavy objects either.  Looks like the faculty are going to be moving their own computers if they want them repaired quickly...

I did finally get our "FTE" figured out for the Campus Agreement we're interested in signing.  I came up with a final number of 198, which we'll multiply by around $50 to license our Microsoft products for the next year.  A lot of the other admins on campus are wary of making a deal with Microsoft, but my figures showed that we were spending at least that much now, without having as much software or being able to update every machine like we could under the new agreement.  Any thoughts on this controversial licensing program?

Still Kickin'

Relax, I'm still alive!

The month leading up to the start of classes becomes quite hectic for your average technology person working in an educational setting.  You've got new lab machines to set up, new faculty to baby-sit, new classrooms to get going, new workers to train, and the occasional network SNAFU thrown in just to make life interesting.

My goal was to start updating this weblog once classes started again, and life returned to normal.  It took a week of classes for things to settle down, but I'm starting to get a little more free time in my daily routine.

Here's my interesting link for today, the Code Red Vigilante.  This is a neat little Java program that'll respond to any machine infected by Code Red with a message warning the user that they need to clean up their machine.