The Screaming Viking

I haven’t had a whole lot of time to type about much other than coaching. Things have been going fairly smooth at the school. During the year it looks like most things are in maintenance mode. There have been some iPads bought for the title 1 division and pushing them out has been a bit of a challenge. I have been trying to secure them in some way…but they are just not designed for that type of thing. There are some 3rd party server apps you can buy that are suppose to do things like that, but I’m not familiar with them. Ideally I’d like to save some money if possible. I downloaded lion and the server app in hopes that it would do what I wanted it to…but no. Read the rest of this entry »

Traditionally the wife, kid and myself (along with whomever comes with) have gone up to the hills over Labor Day weekend to clean out and prepare the shack for hunting season.  Most people don’t quite understand the magnitude of this job.  This building was built by high school guys 40+ years ago for virtually nothing, it’s used 3 weeks out of the year…and we still don’t put much money in it.  There is a commercial I think about “Remington” country where this guy gets up in the morning and leaves this shack out in the woods for a hunt…it looks all rustic and hap hazard…I wish our place was that nice.  Given that it’s not put together all that well there gets to be quite a few animals into it.  If it’s only mice and squirrels…it’s not too bad.  There’s a bit of a mess to clean up, but over all not too bad.  The major clean up comes in when the raccoons (hence forth referred to as “coons”) get into the building.  Those little bastards tear everything apart…get in to everything…it’s horrible.  The year before last the place was a horrific mess, I’d never seen it that bad.  The main problem was we had food stuff the animals got in to.  Learning from this, we didn’t leave any food up there…and given the fact the old man died and I didn’t really go up…there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff for animals to get in.

The kid and I rode up there on 4-wheelers this summer.  We stopped in and it wasn’t too bad…clearly some animals had been in there but overall not too bad.  We went up there today to clean things out…the child walks in…and there is silence.  I went around back to turn on the propane tank for the lights…I asked her how bad it was and all I heard was “love you daddy”.  I knew it wouldn’t be good.  I walked into the building and it was a crazy mess.  We’d left a couple of pillows in there and they were tore completely apart with stuffing all over the place.  The steel cabinet was tipped over, the other one was opened.  It wasn’t good, but over all it was just a mess to throw in the garbage and sweep up.  There was no food that needed to be cleaned up…then I started looking around…. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t had much time to type up any blogs outside of the coaching updates from time to time.  Between work, coaching and some time at home I find that I am really quite busy lately.  There were a lot of changes implemented over the summer and that caused the shake down period to be a bit longer than in previous years.  After things have been hammered out a bit, I’m back down into regular maintenance.    For as busy as the summer was, I am satisfied with the way the majority of things are running.  There is some stuff that is going to have to be updated…but that is going to cost a bit of money that I’m sure the school is not able to spend at the moment.  I have around 80 emacs that need to be replaced.  At 1200 per, that adds up pretty fast.  We’ll just have to work with what we have.

One of the opportunities for me in moving up here is a little bit of consulting type work for some of the small businesses in the area.  Yesterday I had my first “interview” with a small business.  When I say small I am referring to the number of employees they have…I do not know what volume of business they do.  It’s possible they are bursting at the seams with clients, which is great for them and me.  I worked at a company a few years ago that was struggling (workforce) and it wasn’t a good feeling.  I also don’t think interview is the right word.  It’s more of a meeting where they can decide if my service is right for them and I can also see if their environment is going to be right for my services.  We discussed their needs/wants, I compared that to my work experience and abilities and it looks like a pretty good fit.  I left the meeting feeling pretty good that we would come to an agreement and this morning I received an email that confirmed that sentiment.  To finalize the deal we’ll need to work out the numbers and work through some transition time.  I’m not going to be posting the company name and/or what they do.  I don’t think it’s good practice to be talking about various companies on a blog site and certainly not without their permission. Read the rest of this entry »

We have been back to school for a week now and I’ve been pretty busy.  Over there summer there were a few changes that the instructors are going to need to get use to.  Generally, people struggle with changes, especially with things they don’t understand completely.  The biggest nightmare has been the printers…there is an interesting issue that is affecting virtually all the printers that I don’t quite have a handle on.  I’ve made an adjustment that should take care of the situation, but it’s going to mean that I’ll have to touch all the machines in the school…whoo hooo!

The wireless is working out well.  I’m using a certificate based authentication mechanism that, so far, is pretty smooth.  The only real issue I’ve run in to is if the time on the client is off by too much.  I’ve seen this on two machines.  I expect they ran out of juice and didn’t charge them for a day or so?  Dunno. Read the rest of this entry »