The Screaming Viking

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 »

I’ve been going through the process of deploying laptops to the instructors.  I’m glad I waited until the wireless was setup… Had I not I’d have had to deal with them not only using the crappy consumer level equipment, but also trying to get the machines back from them to configure the wireless.

Deploying these machines involves more than just plopping then on their desks and being done with it.  I use mac’s migration assistant to move their info and applications, docs…etc over.  After that I install mac’s remote desktop software (ard), give the machine a name, configure the wireless…done.  At the same time I’m doing this, I’m configuring the other machines with unique names, setting up my admin user and installing ard…it gets to be a little involved.

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I mentioned on here that waiting for the budget year to turn over so I could buy a copy of deep freeze was really holding up my progress.  Upon retrospect I could have tried to build images for all the machines and then install deep freeze, but I figured I would use the same image on the majority of the machines.  As it turns out there are minor differences between the high school and middle school setups…nothing to be too worked up about I think the only difference was the elementary machines had Ultra Key installed.  I found out after messing with things that this application isn’t even used anymore…live and learn I guess.

My initial plan was to image all the mobile lab machines, then the high school lab, high school library, middle school lab…so on and so forth.  The high school lab went just like I expected…I used 2 external usb drives and was able to image a machine an hour (so 2 drives = 2 machines an hour).  It took all this time because of the size of the thawed partition I built.  Not a huge deal, 25 machines were done fairly quickly.  I assumed the same process would be used for the hs library and the middle school lab.  Boy was I wrong… Read the rest of this entry »

After we decided to move out to the farmstead, I was concerned about the Impala handling the country roads.  If they were good gravel that was all well maintained it wouldn’t be a problem at all.  These roads though are beat to hell by the oil and gravel trucks.  I remember back when I was younger that it was very rare to find a bad spot in the road, but now even the highways around here are starting to buckle under the abuse.  It’s been a really wet spring and early summer as well.  Some of the roads are light on gravel so when they are wet you slide around quite a bit on the underlying dirt and clay.  I’d driven the impala a bit around here for a while and there was just no way the wife was going to be able to handle it when it’s wet.  It’s like driving on snot.

I had looked around a little bit trying to find one of those AWD vehicles.  I pointed out quite a few to the wife that I thought would work well…for one reason or another she didn’t like any of them.  It became clear that I was going to need to let her find one on her own.  It did get a little frustrating trying to find something for her…but once I let her handle it and told myself that she’ll either find something she likes or deal with the impala…it’s her problem, I was much more content with the process.  I did put a couple requirements on her, I wanted one where the interior space compared to the impala and the milage needed to be mid 20′s.  In the end, I did end up giving up some on the interior space…there was no way we were going to find an AWD she liked that had the same space as the impala with the milage we wanted. Read the rest of this entry »