Hardware error – user not found …

Yesterday was the kind of day that always seems to come around when management is unhappy with my work. Now I must say (and this is not a phoney disclaimer just in case somebody from work is reading it :p), I have done nothing nor have I incited somebody else to do anything which resulted in the following set of events. I come to work in the morning and I’m told that one of the editing suites is not working and that it was imperative that we get it working since the program was supposed to go out yesterday for broadcasting and as luck would have it, the guy who normally does the hardware troubleshooting and maintenance (whom my friend Robin and I sort of co-manage) was on leave. So it was up to me to get it working since I was the only other computer hardware guy (supposedly – since I have never really been taught anything about hardware by anybody) around.

It was just some sort of voodoo since all I did was remove the Matrox card in the machine, put it in a different slot and restart and it worked! This kind of thing happens to me often and I have no idea whether I really did anything or if it really was voodoo :p A couple of hours later, the other editing suite breaks down – this time it won’t play sound. I remove the driver and reinstall it but nothing. So I open up the machine, remove the Matrox card and put it in a different slot and again it works! By this time, my stock among most of the people in the company has risen sky high since I’ve been performing miracles :p Of course, it would make no difference to my boss since he wants me out anyway but basically everybody else now have a justification as to why I should be kept around 🙂

That wasn’t all that happened yesterday though – for some reason work kept on pouring in – all sorts of weird stuff. The last one being writing a VBA script to do some data juggling in Excel. So I’m at work today getting ready to do that since that’s supposed to be "urgent" – ah well 🙂

Things have been rather hectic for me the last few days on the work front but I’ve decided to keep this journal to development related stuff and so you’ll have to read the other journal if you want the dope about why I’ve had a hectic week/New Year :p I wasn’t sure that this stuff I’m going to write should be on this journal either but since it’s about “site development” I guess it qualifies 🙂

First of all, I installed 4Image (sorry, don’t have a link handy and not even sure that’s the right name for the script set) which provides an online image gallery. If anybody’s interested, you can see a couple of shots of my ugly mug here :p I did it at first as a sort of test to see how good 4Image was but now I’m actually thinking of adding more pictures of family and perhaps even of Sri Lanka so that people can see where I live and the people around me of whom I talk all the time – or not so much :p

I’ve also been thinking of discontinuing the mirror sites and consolidating all the different areas of my web presence into one location so that I avoid some of the problems involved with multiple sites currently – such as the problems with updating and keeping multiple sites consistent. I also would like to bring all the mailing lists under my own control since the domain supports mailing lists but I don’t know how much of a support mechanism there is for mailing lists since I kinda like the archival features provided by Yahoo Groups. Existing users would not have to resubscribe since I can simply take the list from Yahoo and recreate the list here at farook.org – at least I hope so.

There are other things I want to do – new efforts I’d like to launch along the GroupHug lines to try and help people in our own little ways but I will not get into it all since I need something to write about tomorrow too – plus, I obviously will not get around to doing this all so soon :p