"A comet usually too faint to be seen with the naked eye has brightened by a factor of a million since Tuesday, suggesting its surface may have cracked open and expelled clouds of dust and gas."

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn12837-comet-brightens-mysteriously-by-a-factor-of-a-million.html

Also, the Wikipedia article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17P/Holmes

Sounds like it'd be something neat to take a look at. According to the wiki article, it's dropped from a magnitude of 17 to just 2.8.

It's been rather busy for the past few days. One of our stores lost both internet access and phone systems early on in the week due to a fairly major accident at the construction site a block or two away. Apparently there were a few power, data, and phone lines torn up when one of the vehicles dug in the wrong spot. This knocked out both the primary connections as well as our redundant lines.

The problem with modern workplaces is that they come to a grinding halt without computer access. Interestingly enough, they managed to sell more cars during the first day of outage than the other four dealerships in the area. I still can't figure out how they managed to pull that off. After that, however, things started to get complicated.

Without access to our systems, they were unable to process any of the deals, check anyone's credit, or enter any tickets for service. After things started to pile up, the decision was made to purchase two Verizon EVDO cards and use VPN to get back into the network. I was called in an hour or two later to install the software for the cards, as well as get everything else set up.

Upon arriving, I was informed of the plan. They were going to install the software for the Verizon cards on six computers, and switch the cards between them depending on who needed it. I've honestly never heard of anything like this, but it sounded like it would work. After some fiddling around with the VPN software, I managed to get it to work just like they wanted. Everyone would work off of two wireless cards, swapping them out and waiting until they got their hands on another one before continuing to work. It was a brilliant, if horribly inefficient, strategy.

While many other things popped up along the way (Server crashed, licensing issues, etc.), this was pretty much the major even for the week. I'd rather not have a repeat.

I start a blog to talk about all the interesting crap that happens at work, and everything goes normal on me. I've had no real problems in the past week, which is really great and really irritating at the same time. You see, every computer tech knows that if all of the problems stop coming in for a day or so, it means that all hell is about to break loose. It's one of the laws of the universe. Computers cannot exist without problems. When these problems stop happening, it begins disrupting the normal balance of the cosmos. Things start building up, bad shit starts happening and before you know it, iTunes is destroying your hard disk and Quicktime is mass mailing evil copies of itself across the network. (Yes, I know... If Apple is already evil, than how can an evil copy of Quicktime exist? It just can.)

Today was about the only interesting day all week, as one of our wireless routers went down at Lexus. Normally, this can be ignored for a day or so since most of the shop technicians rarely use the internet while at work. However, this particular router serviced the customer lounge. As you can very well guess, this is a very bad thing.

The problem with Lexus customers is that they're often times old, spoiled, rich, or a combination of the three. In any case, this leads them to be a tad bitter when things don't go entirely their way. This is precicely what happened this afternoon. One of the customers was having his vehicle serviced and was browsing the web on his laptop when things stopped working. He, of course, got fairly aggrivated and asked the cashier to have the IT guy come out and take a look at it. So I drove from southern Maryland (Where I had been fixing minor things this morning) all the way out to Lexus

Upon arriving, it was clear that a simple reboot wouldn't do the trick. The router was handing out IP addresses, but wasn't allowing traffic. I tried re-seating the cables, power cycling everything, and refreshing the IP address on my notebook. To no avail, it wouldn't work. At this point, I decided to call the ISP and ask if things were looking bad on their end too. As it turns out, Verizon screwed up somehow and knocked out the primary and backup circuts to the building. Interestingly enough, nothing else was affected. I'm still trying to figure out how that worked. In the end, they opened a ticket for me and informed me that they'd have one of their field technicians come out to take a look at it. With that, I packed up and headed home. That five hour shift was the longest I've worked in a week. I need a vacation or something...

As I said before, there is a trick to being in multiple places at once. Unfortunately, it didn't work as well as I wanted it to. Today, I was caught in a little internal battle between three managers, all of whom wanted me to be at their dealership at the same time. With my boss in staff meetings for most of the morning, I was left to my own decisions as how best to handle the situation. In the end, I decided to visit the dealership that I hadn’t been able to get to at all last week. This, of course, led the other two managers to leave messages with my boss about my lack of integrity and such. Knowing that shit (And apparently water and soap, now) flows downhill, it was only expected that I would be lectured on the whole situation. As it turns out, I was right. While it wasn't really my fault that I was unable to be in three places at once, someone had to take the blame. My boss wasn't willing to do that, as he'd get hit harder should the president of the company hear about all of the drama. So in the end, I was asked to work a little harder (With the understanding that his lecture to me was only a formality to please the three managers.) Other than that, things went relatively well.

This past weekend was fun. vu1pes and I had toracub come up to visit. The weekend was spent relaxing and just hanging out at the house with the exception of Friday evening, when we went to see the new Harry Potter movie. To avoid giving anything away to those who have not seen it/read the book/etc., I'll just say that I was rather pleased with it. The effects are getting better, some of the combat scenes were done excellently, and they didn't leave too much out that needed to be explained. Even the choice of actors on the new characters was great. The only thing I could have wished for is for the film to have been a little darker. It felt a good deal less intense than the book, and was lacking a little during some of the later scenes. In all, however, it's a great film and a tribute to the series.

Today was a rather interesting day. I've been working at our Lexus dealership for the past three days, installing and configuring new computers to replace some of our aging ones (Read as: Older than DOS). Yesterday, I set up a new machine for one of the women in customer support and began to transfer her data from her old machine to her new one. Now, as I mentioned in my last post, this process involves a 4GB flash drive. The problem with this is that she had almost 9GB of data to be moved, and I had very little space to spare on my drive. In addition, her old machine only supported USB 1.0, which is a horribly slow and painful thing to use when in a situation like this. Why didn't I use the network, you ask? Well, my company is a tad behind in the technology race. We don't have an Active Directory set up so to speak. Nor do we have file servers and the like to use for things like this. Instead, we have a very large group of highly disorganized, mismatched, nearly stand-alone computers in a loose type of... No, actually, we don't even have that. What we have is called chaos. This, of course, is what makes things fun.

I began to transfer batches of her information on to my flash drive, moving it from one machine to the other, and back again. Each upload took about an hour or so, with each download taking about 20 more minutes. After that, it took another 20 or 30 minutes to delete the information off of the flash drive so that I could repeat the process. You can begin to see how painfully annoying this could be after an hour or so. Eventually, I was forced to quit for the day and schedule another appointment there for this morning. This is where today's story starts...

( Friday the 13th )

In an effort to become more social and to meet new people, I've motivated myself to begin writing again. While I've had problems coming up with topics to write about in the past, I think I've come up with something that should keep things interesting for a while: My job. Or rather, the kinds of things that fellow IT geeks have to deal with in their day to day lives. It may not sound that interesting, but believe me when I say that I'd rather work retail sometimes than deal with someone who can't figure out why their computer's cup holder stopped functioning. Sometimes I think the machines break themselves in a vain attempt at ending their own existence to escape such people. Whether or not it's true remains to be seen.

( Cut for length )

That's my job in a nutshell. I originally had a story to get into tonight, however I think I'll wait till it finishes unfolding tomorrow. It involves a 9GB file transfer with a USB flash drive with litte more than a gig of free space on it. For anyone that's tried this on USB 1.0 before, you realize how long it takes to transfer the data up to the flash drive, and back down again. Now, why would I be using a USB flash drive instead of transferring the files over the network, you ask? I think I'll leave that answer to tomorrow's post.