Three days? It was Three days ago I last posted? Gosh. Doesn’t time fly?
The last few days have been sligtly busy, so posting was not possible. Firstly, on a whim, I tried BT‘s “Check your Bill” service, only to discover that my “Free” 24/7 Freeserve connection is not quite as free as all that. Mainly in that I have spent lots on calls in the last two weeks, most of which is Internet, which should have been free. /me is not happy about this, for reasons that should be obvious 🙂
Secondly, PC Gamer came though with the 10 games. Due to nasty computer type stuff (My new HDD is suffering from Crosslinked Clusters, a nasty ailment which means that my computer crashes when it tries to access some bits of the HDD like, for example, by installing games) which is going to take MSScandisk many hours to complete (I left it for two hours only to return at it being 10%) but only if my computer doesn’t crash while scandisk is scanning. Bah.
Then comes yesterday. Yesterday goes down in history as “interesting”. Yesterday, as ever, I awoke at 13:00 (I’m running my days slightly screwy at the moment, sleeping 04:00-13:00, working the rest) with a phone call from work to say that the other consulting technition was around, and would I like to come down? I said yes, threw on some clothes, and wandered in the direction of my local combination print-shop, mailing-house, and place of employment.
The aim of the exercise was to remove Lantastic from the network, install the Zip 250 drive as a backup, and stop the accountacy machine from crashing. Lantastic had to go because it was non-standard and our new digital photo-copier/printer only worked on standard networks, The only computers that were crashing were the two that were still running Lantastic after the last visit, so the logical assumption was that Lantastic was the cause of the crashes. Step one was to get to a point where we didn’t *need* lantastic. This involved copying the contents of an old server to a new one (over our network, 2 hours) Copying the accounts system (Never trust an accounts system which betrays it’s origins by the executable being called “mail.exe”) and kludgeing the network into letting that work like it wanted to (2 hours), all whilst awaiting an email from Xerox to install the copier onto the network (4 hours) and installing that on all machines without it crashing (didn’t happen, mainly becuase the instructions were wrong) and, to use a euphamism from the building trade, “Making Good” (Many Hours)
Which meant that my final departure from The Marketing Solution was midnight. Anyone need a Win95 network admin?