Thursday, September 30, 2010

Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Tuesday was primarily occupied with a troubleshooting video conference call between several co-ops, the Arkansas Dept of Information Systems, and the Arkansas Dept of Education.  Through the process, the screen kept "blinking" randomly in what was best described as "Vaseline."  It was a weird "smearing" on the screen that lasted only for a blink of an eye, but it was at something that was regular enough that it showed up on some of the screens and not others.  When it was all said and done, our co-op seemed to be one of the leading culprits.  We had a lot of packet loss.  According to ADE/DIS, the problem is most likely a line issue but might be a router problem (because we have been having issues with our data connectivity in addition to the video-related problems).

Then, at 1:00pm, the co-op tech coordinators met online through Adobe Connect with Debbie Coffman about several items.  We talked about our service-to-schools surveys, keeping our work logs (like the one I keep on here), and we talked about Arkansas IDEAS and MyEvents.  All certified teachers in the state are to have an Arkansas IDEAS login before the year is out.  If you happen to be a certified teacher and have not signed up for IDEAS yet, you can visit http://ideas.aetn.org/ and sign up!  I spent the rest of Tuesday helping the construction supervisor find and record various issues that still needed to be fixed.


Wednesday - Terry, Josh, and I went to the old building and rounded up all the desktops and laptops that we are selling in the auction.  We hooked them up, removed our networking information, removed any of our users' information, and set the units up for the buyers.  We also moved some furniture around for "traffic flow" during the auction.  That took up nearly the whole day.  When we did get back to the new building, I spent the rest of the day helping the construction supervisor again and I laid out the Panduit to be hung at various places around the co-op.


Thursday - I cut and hung the Panduit in one conference room (the other was occupied by a workshop), in the Distance Learning Lab, and in Terry's office.  I also replaced some of the ceiling tiles that had been removed at various times during the move-in and set-up.  Then, a group of us met with the sprinkler system guys as they had to shut down and drain the system to replace a leaking head.

I have to say, I hope I never have to mess with that ever again.  In this case, I had to call our monitoring system and let them know we were going into "test" mode.  The system was shut down and drained.  Before we could turn it back on, we realized that turning it on would mean "fireworks" - that is, lights and sirens - would start immediately.  After a phone call and some closet work, we were able to engage the refill of the sprinkler system without causing 'fireworks.'  Whew!

I called the monitoring system to let them know we were done, and the woman said, "Well, I show that someone has changed the date and time."  "Yes, ma'am, when we brought everything back up, it had the wrong date and time so I reset it," I told her.  "So, you are the one that changed the date and time?"  Maybe she didn't understand me.  "Yeeeeesss....??" I half asked, half answered.  "Okay, just a minute," she told me as I heard her click on her keyboard.  The system panel on our end cleared all messages.  "Okay," she said, "Well, you are still throwing events our way, so I can't take you off test until that stops.  Call back in ten minutes."  I waited about 20.  Everything was good to go.

The Director and Assistant Director met with several employees (including myself) regarding the Open House we are having on October 8th, the auction on the 9th and the AMTRAK meeting/presentation the next week.  I think everyone will see stress levels come down to a "normal" level once these events are over.  We are all VERY excited about showing off our new building, but there is a lot of behind-the-scenes "stuff" that has to happen in order to pull it off.

I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the computer and DL labs, and helping Josh install the televisions that still needed installing.  Around 3:20 or so, I went into the downstairs telco closet and started making the wiring closet "look pretty." That is, routing cables through the tracks and installing the cover panels.  It'll look really good when it is all said and done!

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