Saturday, August 21, 2010

Bluetiful Is A Good Girl


This morning I rode Bluetiful to grab some coffee and breakfast. Then headed over to The Bike Barn to have them check on the handlebars; they seemed a little loose.

The tech there discovered that it wasn't the clamp, but the top nut on the head.

Rode home and parked her in her spot and ....

Fssssssssst!

The back tire went flat immediately! Now, how often does that happen? Your bike doesn't make you stop out on the road, in the heat, to change a flat, but waits until you are in the air-conditioned comfort of your great room to let you know she needs maintenance!



Looks like the old tube was just dried out. The hole in it was on the inside, next to the rim. The rim strip was in place and none of the spoke heads were sharp.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

AWOL Because of WORK


Yeah, yeah, I know. I haven't posted anything new in quite a while. Well, I got an excuse: work has dominated almost every waking moment for the last month and a half.

On July 29th, I had to take all of the equipment, and the rack, from our present Goodyear, Arizona, office ...



... and move it about a mile down the road to our new office location. And I had to do it in about two hours! With only one guy helping me! And we had to dodge raindrops the whole time!

Only when we were finished did the clouds part and I had a gorgeous sunset as I boomed back to the Phoenix office ...



We are also upgrading our Internet speeds by putting in fiber optic cable at our new Goodyear office and our Phoenix office ...



If you look closely at the rack on the right in the above picture, about a third of the way down from the top of rack you'll see two bright blue lights, one above the other. These are my new Dell KACE KBOX management and deployment systems. In between the Goodyear move and Internet upgrades, I've had my office full of spare workstations ...



... You can't see them all in the above photo; there are a total of eleven workstations in all on the bench and on my desk to the right. I've been installing, testing, reconfiguring, etc., in the remaining free time that I've had during this last month.

Today, I finished. From now on, barring any physical hardware problem, I will have to visit each of our 150 workstations only once, and that will be to set up the systems so that they will boot from the network cards in them and Wake-On-LAN; a process which takes all of about a minute.

Then, I can upgrade the machines from Windows XP to Windows 7, install our Office suite software on them, install our two CAD software systems on them, install the GIS software, and install all of our utilities and any new programs on them ... from the comfort of a workstation in my office.

From that workstation in my office, I can boot the machines, shut them down, log into them ... literally do everything I can do from the keyboard, mouse and monitor which are attached to the machines.

Oh boy! I'll have more time for playing with my granddaughter, riding the bikes ... and posting to my blog!