Frank

There’s no end to the creativity of my coworkers.  The boss was recently away for a couple weeks, and to give me more experience with ‘leadership’ skills at my agency, left me in charge during his absence.  I’ve had previous leadership roles, particularly in leading and managing the implementation of trade-show and conferences a number years ago.  And when the boss returned, I was able to give him a satisfactory debriefing, noting that all tasks assigned to me and my coworkers were complete or diligently in progress. However, because it was close to April Fools day, and they were in a prankish mood, I found this covering my name plate.

  So, our own Hawkeye & BJ Hunnicut had struck.

 

Sick Time

I have more important things to do with my sick leave than getting stuck at home sick.  However, last week I managed to catch Bhronchitis (or rather, it caught me).  I did try to go back on Thursday, but my boss explicitly barred me from returning until my cough was gone.

So, being home, I took the opportunity to rebuild my system, which turned out to be a rather arduous task. A few years worth of family pictures and my music library, not to mention game save files (NWN2 & BFME II), various virtual machines I make use of (at roughly 2GB each), and documentation and reading material on a sundry of topics, mostly IT.

Fortunately, I have had an old Compaq workstation that I’ve repurposed some time ago as my home server, having scrounged up a few 40GB harddrives in RAID5.  Taking a lesson from work, my server has been set up with a copy of Windows Server (from school), and have home drive for family members (mapped as H:), a shared folder for music/pics and other media (S:), and an InfoTech folder (the I:\ drive) where I keep all the drivers and applications that I use.

A recent perusal of some tech magazines while teaching, I came across Microsfts Home Server, currently in beta, that is meant for home users to “Connect their digital experiences.”  It mpresses upon me the fact that in our tech-connected world the explosion of digital media in the home and the integration of all this technology, from Multimedia PC’s, Xbox, PS2/3, media extenders, etc.  And now consumers need their own servers!  Microsoft’s not the only one in this niche…for roughly $500 you can get 1TB of Network Attached Storage at home, tied right into your broadband router, doubling as an FTP server, internal web host.  Some even integrate with active directory or other directory services - a boon for use in branch offices of some business’.

1TB should be a good place to start for storing DVR’d television programs, esp when analog TV goes away in a year, multimegapixel digital photographs, and 192 kbps ripped music.  Who knows what else we’ll be storing in the future.