Entered on 2002-03-19 at 8:31 a.m..
Computer rage
Spring fever! Everyone here seems to be in a good mood, which is probably because all the MSc students are about to leave on vacation and because the mornings have been glorious.
Mornings are very early in this pre-spring-forward time period. Right now the sun rises a round 6:11 and sets by 6:12. Yep, that's right spring is just two days away!
Needless to say no one is in the mood to do any work, me included. Luckily for me the computer center is happy to oblige. The following story is peppered with techno-speak. If you do not understand all of it, do not worry, just pretend you never read it, because in the end everything turns out all right." All weekend I was having trouble accessing my files from my networked directory, where I store all of my important files because the computer center will back them up everynight. Well it turns out the reason we were having so many problems is that we are on a series system of coax cable. The kind where if you open the loop it all goes down. Well some dufus next door randomly turned off a repeater and botched us all up. We couldn't even print. To avoid this problem I switced over to our ethernet cable (newly installed) and accessed my accounts that way yesterday, but the computer center was also having trouble with its file system causing me to loose the document I have been working on for the past week -- poof. I had to call them, in a panic, and have them reinstate the file from the last back up. Thankfully this was the most recent copy.
OK, you can come back now.
Needless to say I spent most of my morning in either rage/panic sorting out computing problems. For the rest of the day I just decided to read my new book that Brian brought with hime. It is AIAA's new book on Air Transportation Systems Engineering. Pretty good.