Finally Friday

Friday, September 10, 2010

I planned to spend the day cleaning up some of the still-as-yet-packed boxes in my office and the tech storage closet. "Planned" is the key word there.  Turns out, my workday had other plans.

I started the day by verifying that all the equipment needed to hang our various projectors was indeed on-hand.  Yes, yes it is!  Now, we just wait for Video-Reality to come down for installation.

Next, I set up three new computers on the network.  Two of them had already been in use, but needed to be joined to the domain, have "bloatware" removed and have our standard software installed.  I also spent a considerable amount of time troubleshooting an issue where people printing to a Toshiba eStudio35 were getting weird page prints from SEASWeb.  I eventually printed pages and graphics from other applications and determined the problem with with SEASWeb.  Frankly, that is not a surprise.  I've been dealing with SEAS since it was a stand-alone Microsoft Access application.  To say the program is difficult to work with is an understatement.  We actually tried an alternative program, but could not work out the kinks. 

While installing the computers, it occurred to me that our antivirus server was offline ever since the move.  In fact, it was standing in a corner.  This did not affect computers already protected because our computers are set up to update themselves from the internet if the local server is offline.  But, as you might have guessed, when the server is offline, new computers cannot have the software installed on them! 

I took the server out of its "time-out" position and got it connected to the network.  Once it was booted up, I looked through the computers in the list of protected devices and realized that many of those computers do not even exist anymore.  So, I deleted all the entries and set the server to scan the network for devices.  In retrospect, I should have just imported computers from Active Directory.  On Monday, I believe I will clean up Active Directory and do the import.  Mainly because it is MUCH faster.

I sent out (and answered) various emails, including those related to updating the FCC FRN's for the districts in my service area.

Hopefully, the upcoming week will have the Tech Coordinator survey ready to send out to techs, superintendents and co-op staff.  We techs will use the survey to gauge the perception of our effectiveness and then we can adjust to meet schools needs and desires.

On a lighter note, the inserts arrived for our phones.  Since we made some changes in our phone system after the move, we needed new "cards" for the phones so that staff could know which buttons do what.  I handed out cards and installed them on all the phones in the building.

Throughout the day, I also took care of minor issues that arose.