Well, updated the start page again yesterday - added the menus back and dropped a couple less used qux.net links. I think I fixed some formatting bugs with IE too, but will have to go find a windows or macos machine to find out. The initial back-to-school rush is pretty much over, but now there's getting used to homework again. Way too much reading to do...

Well, the crunch at work has started. Gotta get a bunch of online forms up and running, as well as account signup kiosks. And get blackboard integrated into SSO (and cleanup the SSO login help stuff). Of course we'll probably discover more bugs in the system as time goes on too...

Woohoo! It's done! The domains are totally merged, and all servers are up and running. It went rather smoothly, with only 3 temporary glitches and one that required the reinstall of a machine (is it bad that's considered smooth when dealing with windows machines?). Now it's just cleanup next week, and hope everything's replicated everywhere by monday so there's fewer delays for looking up data. Next week/weekend we start weeding out people who have accounts in multiple domains - even more fun stuff. At least when we're done we won't have to deal with it near as much.

Finally an upgrade that's gone rather smooth. We successfully upgraded an NT4 domain to a domain under an existing tree. We still have the original 2 DCs in case we have to rollback, but we'll redo them one at a time tomorrow. Snag 1 - NT4 BDCs are quirky. After isolating the original controllers the new BDC (whiterice - it's someone's nickname) didn't want to see the accounts and computers right. After deciding that if the accounts were really over we could copy the login scripts manually, we took the new BDC off of both networks and promoted it to PDC. This fixed the account problems, and allowed us to get working (we'll retrieve the scripts later). Then there's the having to "cancel" the upgrade to install SP2 so it doesn't keep crashing... Finally it was all done except replication, and we discovered the NTFRS database was corrupt (apparently not too uncommon). Now members of both original sides can sse and log into both domains, so the rest of this should go rather smoothly...

Well, today started off with going to work and waiting for my computer to sort 903 new messages, so me and a coworker discussed/planned upgrading one of our NT4 domains to W2K and integrating it into the existing W2K AD tree. Because of the current setup we can get the thing 90% upgraded and still drop back to the old setup effectively instantly if something goes wrong. Hopefully we won't hit th issues we have been hitting as we're not upgrading hardware (although tomorrow is lunch at Cattle Company on our vendor for the hastle, so I'm not too bitter). Then I spent an hour and a half going through and responding to email. Luckily I only had 4 voicemails. So far the day's going pretty good for the first day back from vacation, so I look in the IncidentBase and see a simple request for account combining for a student worker at the Seminary and figure, "Oh, I can do that quick for a change of pace". Then I find out the person's second account isn't listed in her name, but rather a former student worker. Nobody has received a request to change it to her name either. I try calling the head of the department the student worker says she works for, but he's out of town for the week and his voicemail list's his assistant's number. Her phone's forwarded to VM but says nothing about being gone, so I leave a message and ask for her to call back.

After lunch I ended up talking to some Help Desk people about things different users had complained about and stuff we want changed before fall. I get back and no response. My boss had in the meantime talked to the student worker again, and she said her supervisor had called and left a message with someone, which he figured was me so he commented in it and assigned it to me. I spend the next half hour talking to everyone who her supervisor would have called trying to find out if someone did indeed call, and whether everything was confirmed. No such luck. After setting everything up so it'll take about 5 seconds to actually complete the change when I get confirmation, I still haven't heard from anyone. I finally resort to query the student employment records comparing the old person and new person for a position or supervisor. I find it and find a 3rd person is actually the supervisor as of about two years ago (which explains why we haven't gotten any updates in about two years).

Luckily he was there today and it only took a minute to confirm that the old student worker wasn't coming back and the new person was the replacement and reassign all the permissions. Turns out he left a voicemail with the HelpDesk, but I still haven't heard anything about that. I think I convinced him of the importance of telling us when students start and leave in the future. :) I somehow doubt it will be consistent though, and am still looking forward to the day when the group assignment is grouped to the employment records automatically (we're hoping for early fall, but who knows).

Hopefully tomorrow will be better...

Well, in the past hour or so I've gotten 5 voicemails on my cell phone from one of the server rooms at work. Temperature kees climbing (AC probably went out), and the noise level is too night now (not sure on that one sounds like just a lot of fan noise - maybe the AC is trying to catch up?). Hopefully someone will look at it soon. One of the best benefits of being on vacation has to be selective ignorance of things. :) Of course now I have one more thing to mark down on the list of "change the notification settings for this when going on vacation". I turned off paging, I totally forgot about things that actually make a voice call to me...

yafiygi.com is getting a bit of traffic. After messing around with text ads a bit, I found that k5 has the best CTR, and second is metafilter or google, depending on which keywords (bored is doing much better than random). Whatsbetter.com only has 12 clickthroughs, but I don't know how many times the ad has been shown. I think there's supposed to be 75,000 over the next 2 months, so whatever that comes down to per day...

Work is going well, although the last couple weekends with Avalon and Usonia2 have been interesting. I also got the IncidentBase/KnowledgeBase server back up and running with a much newer OS version. Tomorrow it's teaching some people about the Auth server and then I'm done for the week. I'm glad I'm gonna be on vacation for a week and a half. Finally get some time to do nothing...

Figured I should probably put something up here since the WSJ expired the last article link I posted. :( Nothing much new, except I think I finally got all the bugs worked out of the main Access DB at work (our incident tracking one) after moving it to a real SQL database. Seems whoever created it didn't realise #'s /'s and ''s aren't good things to have in field names. I've also got a complete web interface to it pretty much completed, so people are happy they can start ditching MS Access.