Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Back in the swing

My family and I took a vacation recently (visited friends and family in Pittsburgh, PA). Now, I am back to work and moving right along.

On Monday, I was still on vacation.

Tuesday, I played a LOT of catch-up. Some of the things I did: Called local college about their fire system inspection; called heating/air about replacing our current filter system; reviewed quotes for laptops and awarded purchase order; talked with Lindy as she prepares to exit for her retirement; attended a portion of a social networking workshop for administrators; caught up on a lot of email, but still have much to do; worked with bookkeeper regarding end-of-year budget and grant evaluation; began preparations for my video editing workshop on wednesday; ordered Lion in order to upgrade the computers in the lab.

Wednesday - I am teaching a video editing workshop; hope to start the Lion install after the worksop is over.

Thursday - Continue the Lion install; start installing new computers in the distance learning lab; finish director's separation as needed.

Friday - Offices closed.

I received an email about a list of iPad apps for classroom use, and I looked it over. There are some great tools in there, so I thought I would share the site:
http://www.onlinecolleges.net/2012/06/26/48-ipad-apps-that-teachers-love/

Enjoy!

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Catching my breath!

Wow!  I can certainly tell summer has arrived!  I have been running all over the place for the last week and a half, not even taking time to make notes here.  I have a few moments, so I thought I would catch everyone up.

March 28 - Memorial Day, Office Closed

March 29 - Drove to Bradley to help with moving user home folders. That was not good. For some reason, changes to the active directory are not getting rolled out to the users.  I am still trying to figure that one out.  I had to change everyone's home folder redirection back to the old server and set their home folders back in the profiles.  What's weird is that the profiles connected their home folder and mapped it. But, Windows would never update the group policy to the location for My Documents.  I thought I had conflicting policies somewhere, but everything I did checked out.  And, *NEW* users would get the redirect. I understand I may have to delete local profiles, and I am not looking forward to that at all.

March 30 - Apple Products Demo - Looked at iTunesU, iBooks, iBooks Author, MDM, Lion, and other Apple offerings.  In the afternoon, participants looked at Casper for MDM and talked about tablet rollouts, summer projects, etc.

March 31 - Began updating iMacs in lab to Snow Leopard 6.8 in preparation for Lion/Mtn Lion rollout.  Hit major bandwidth snags.  Performed other duties as well - helping out with tech in other workshops, etc.

June 1 - Office closed, but I came in to check on iMac update progress. Not good. So, I got a few started instead of doing whole lab. 

June 4 - Came back into office early, started updates again.  Also changed firewall to allow al traffic to Apple without scanning. That helped immensely and immediately.  By day's end, most Macs were well on way to updating.  Left it run over night. During the day, I helped get workshops going, found a problem with an AeroHive device and got it back up and going again.  Other tech duties kept me running all day long.

June 5 - Tuesday all Macs were updated. One had the "infinite login loop."  So, after I helped get workshops started, I concentrated on getting that Mac up and going.  None of the tips I found online worked.  I left the day trying to reinstall OS X.  I copied Windows XP from one Parallels to external drive, which I then transferred to a "spare" machine.

June 6 - Came in to find the reinstall did not fix the issue.  Evidently, it just tried to "fix" what was broken and missed.  So, I put the "spare" in its place and moved the non-working machine to another location to work on it.  In the meantime, I got workshops going then used an external hard drive to make a Time Machine backup.  When that was done, I used that backup to restore the errant iMac.  That worked perfectly (after some minor reconfiguration to prevent duplicate names, etc, on the network).  For the record, the Mac that went bad after the update was the only Mac in the lab that actually required a login. All the other Macs were set to auto login.  Also - I have *NOT* restarted the other Macs because we have APSCN training all week in that lab.  if ain't broke, I ain't fixing it until I need to!

June 7 - I will help get workshops going and then we have the retirement program for Lindy and Nell.  I will take care of other issues as needed during the day, as usual.

June 8 - Our offices are closed on Fridays in the summer.