Tancred - Indecision 2008, don't fuck this up America!

Well today is the day, Indecision 2008. For us in the UK it will probably be decided about 04:00GMT so we get to wake up tomorrow and see the damage :(

Other issues to watch include proposition 8 in California, prop 2 in Florida and prop 102 in Arizona. (all about marriage discrimination and teh gays *sigh*). Arkansas has a proposition to allow only heterosexual married couples adopting or being foster parents.

In California Prop 5 calls for rehab and not prison for non-violent drug offenders. Prop 5 also wants on the spot fines and not arrest for small amounts of cannabis.

I found Ballotpedia rather interesting/disturbing to see just how many things Americans will be voting on.

Tancred - multitasking :)

I am home watching Romania v France while reading about the Keynote - Mac Rumours Live.
It's 20 minutes since the Keynote started and neither apple.com/uk or o2.co.uk have details of the new iphone :( Apple are too good at keeping secrets.

Tancred - Euro2008

Euro2008 starts tomorrow and I cannot wait :) I have spent the day sorting out my fantasy football team (The mighty Lokomotiv Sydney) for the IT dept league and I think they might do ok. I also got Romania in the office sweep so that's £1 I won't see again.

The best part of Euro2008? I don't have to get up at 03:00 to watch the games :)

Jaime and Shannon’s amazing powers

J&S have been and gone. The day they arrived in Scottyland was our first real spring day in weeks. While they were here the fog made 2 attempts to return but using their combined powers J&S let the sun shine. At one point it hit 22°! That's almost a heatwave. On Thursday we climbed Arthurs seat and Jaime worked up a really good sunburn. On Friday I waved goodbye to them at Waverly and within 10 minutes the rain had returned and most of the weekend was fogged in. I guess Jaime and Shannon need to spend more time in Edinburgh :)

Climbed to the Summit

Today we reached the top of Arthur's Seat. Yay us!

Evelyn, Tancred, Jaime, Shannon - Off to Glasgow

Off to see arty type stuff, cathedrally type stuff and high-tea at the Macintosh tearooms.

Tancred - Zombie Jesus weekend in Scottyland

Scottyland does not seem to do Zombie Jesus weekend so I have been working on Friday and Monday. It's odd. The Uni is open though we have no lectures on. Thus we have no Academics at work and no students. It's just the support staff, ready to support people who are not in. On the up side I run the firewall, and I have my laptop so I plan to spend the afternoon grinding motes of water for my Shadoweave epics :)

In other news spring started last week but we are still getting flurys on snow and sleet. Hey it's snowing again right now!

Xmas Holidays

My company decided to be very nice and give everyone Monday off (without charging us a days hols), and I won an ipod at the company xmas party raffle.

Tancred is sick, so have spent the last two days at home not being a particularly good nurse (can't quite get the hang of Age of Empires), watching Arrested Development, and eating too much (great roast beef, a little over-cooked roast pork but damn that was some fine crackling).

Tancred - It's far too hot today!

It was -8° when I headed off to work today. Once at work the lazy bum of a sun finally come up over the horizon and raised the temperature to an almost balmy -7°. Everywhere there is a thick 1-2cm of frost and ice along with black ice lying in wait on the footpaths. No idea where the gritters were this morning.

What has made the day truly special is that last night the server room A/C froze up and now one of the chillers has a large crack in the side. No cold air for us :( At the moment it’s 45° in the server room and the rest of the building has no heating. If only we had a window in the server room to open.

Tancred - How?

How do you get your name on the list over there -> ??

Tancred - the weekend

I was on call over the weekend. I was also rather sick. So I was paid to sit at home feeling sick and play World of Warcraft :)

The best bit was nothing went down (fnar fnar) all weekend. Actually no, the best bit was hitting 40 and being exhalted with Darnassus, Ironforge & Stormwind. Human diplomcy FTW!

Tancred - Friday wrapup

I have spent the last two days trying to master all the intricacies of MRTG and SNMP. It's going to rock when I finish setting it all up :)

800 students have moved into the halls and all their problems are now in the hands of - teh winner is me :)

The Uni is still very much a building site so students are being bussed across the city for their clasess.

Tonight Evelyn and I are off to a gallery opening - Free wine FTW!

Tancred - QoS malarkey

Yesterday I was given the job of designing and deploying Quality of Service on 45 switches so our new Voip system works as it should. This is proving far more complex than I thought it would be. So far I have worked through about 200 pages of documentation and there are several pdf's still to go :(

One of the documents starts "After reading through this document, you will quickly conclude that QoS is quite a complicated topic and there are many different technologies, standards and implementations to consider. Furthermore, there is no single QoS technology or standard that can be used across your network."

Yup really inspiring stuff.

Tancred - teh winner is me :)

Spent the day setting up and deploying Nortel switches into edge roles. The Nortel CLI is really crap, but Nortel does have an interested graphic application for switch management. You end up having to use it as it seems impossible to get detailed port information on the command line. Grrrr

I did get to shine at work today. For several hours other support people could not ping a laptop and could not work out why even though DHCP worked. I suggested the laptop must have a firewall badly configured. I was right :) and the other guy said D’oh hehe. Teh winner is me :)

Tancred - first day at a new job

Finally started my new job today - Network analyst at Queen Margaret University. It's all a bit of a mess at the moment. The University has just started to move from buildings scattered across the city to a new purpous built campus. At the moment it's a building site with a small area for the IT group to work in.Yup I have a hard hat and safety vest to walk around in.

My first task is to learn all about the BlueSocket wireless LAN solution and deploy about 100 of the access points. The cool thing is they run POE, the problem at the moment is there is noone has run any UTP to where I need to deploy them. The other "interesting feature" of the new campus is the buildings are all "green". This means all the acadamics will be working in open plan offices. I wonder how many of them know about this

Evelyn - festival

Tancred, Moondiamond and I (and local friend) discover that the free cabaret day at the festival dies a terrible death when the sound goes out and the performers are replaced by ill-prepared stand-up comics. Then FalseDan turned up and we went for beer.

Evelyn - Bike Shop Sale

After going out for a ride in the evening to be coming home in the near dark - now that summer's over the sun starts setting around eight-thirty, we finally decided it was time to pony up for some lights. Yesterday, Tancred and I headed into the Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative for the sale - yay, half-price lights.