Happenings.

OK, in the last week I’ve done stuff. Not that earth shattering or cosmologically significant maybe but stuff all the same.

Last weekend I visited Rachel, Graham and not so little Christopher down in Yately. T’was a fun weekend and included eating, drinking, walking along canal paths and firing rockets.

Since then it’s been a matter of getting the house ready for tomorrow’s BBQ plus an unusual work week.

At work this week is unusual in that the first two days were the graduate mini-conference, where the first and second year PhD/DPhil students have to give talks using powerpoint or equivalent and the second years have to also give a poster presentation. Much techno-hand-holding is involved with this, especially when half the students turn up with powerpoint files made on a newer version than the laptop in the lecture theatre is capable of running. (And, of course, lots of things break when you try to run the presentation on the older version.) Add to this the replacement laptop deciding that it was going to sulk when it saw the lecture theatre mouse and you can see the fun I had.

Wednesday was a sort of normallish day other than catching up with the stuff I didn’t do on Monday and Tuesday.

Yesterday was the IT Support Staff Conference, held just over the road in Keble College. It’s a good thing that it was just over the road too as during the morning workshop I got called out ‘cos “the network’s stopped working.”

As it turned out, after half an hour working out what was going wrong, I found that one of the professors had brought his laptop in and plugged it into the network and was blythly writing stuff in word while his pox ridden machine was spamming the network causing the 3Com switches to lock up. Once I banned his laptop everything was fine. I asked him when he last ran Windows update, the answer came back “Oh, since I got the machine? Never.” and then when asked about the virus software “Oh, I think I updated it quite recently, only a couple of months ago.” This is when we batter our users over the head with multiple e-mails and face-to-face sessions telling them to run Windows Update at least weekly and update the virus definitions preferably daily. Grrrr….. Oh, and the professor also started to complain about needing the machine when he goes on some trip to Eastern Europe over the weekend and why couldn’t we fix the machine now. Grrrrr!

Anyway, today I’m having to restore a laptop for another lecturer who’s off into the wilds this weekend who’s laptop has had the hard disk replaced. The disk’s been on the fritz for ages and I’ve told him that he needed it replaced multiple times in the last couple of months, so he calls out Dell 2 days before he leaves!

Right, I’m going to take a deep breath now and calm down.

Oh, and aboutn the BBQ.. of course, the weather forecast for tomorrow is for torential rain and gales to arrive at about midday tomorrow, possibly blowing through by 7pm. Typical, eh?

This evening is the undergrad leaving do so I’ve been volunteered to do pictures for that, so I have my cameras with me. Wish me luck.