Silly Week-Ending Update Of Sorts…

First, the sad and terrible news, simply to dispense with it and move on: My uncle Tim died the other day. Apparently he had neglected to realize that it was no longer 1972 and that he was no longer 22. If you were 22 in 1972, tell me what you were doing at the time. I’m sure it was an anti-establishment, free-love, experimentation time for you at the time. Well, he never left and spent the subsequent thirty-plus years on that bent resulting in cascading failures that left him just north of vegetative for just shy of the last three months. And no, that’s not meant to be fun or funny.

He blew it in a big way, but underneath that he was a wonderful man with a sharp wit. What a waste.

I may actually go to the funeral next week if I can get away from San Diego’s Omnipresent Charitable Organization for a little while. It certainly wouldn’t be to pay my respects to a man who blew it, but rather to those who wished for something better for him but couldn’t quite get him to share their optimism for his future. I’d like to support them, his siblings, who had hoped that my uncle could use his intellect to pull himself out of the morass that he’d embedded himself in. Of course, no amount of encouragement could make that happen for somebody as unreceptive to outside interference as he was. Which is also a waste.

Next is the job thingy. The guy at work who had helped me understand how to navigate through the policies and politics of San Diego’s Omnipresent Charitable Organization has been reassigned. I’m now in charge of all desktop support, all landline phones, virus quashing, and every Mac. By “in charge” you must be thinking that I’m the supervisor, and that’s true, but I have no charges under me, so I have to actually implement all of my edicts as well. And I’m a terrible tyrant, so I’ve been very hard on myself lately. “You’re too slow!” “You’re too lazy!” “Why are there any tickets in your queue!”

Because I’m the only one I’m bossing around?

Just a thought.

The plus side is that they really think that I’m up to the task. The downside is that it’s going to take me a few days to get up to speed (again). By the way, if anybody has a good idea about how to back up a Mac OS 9 workgroup server to an Active Directory share, I’d be thrilled to hear it. At the moment, I think I’ll synchronize the server volume to the share daily, but if there’s a better (best practices) way to do it, I’d love to read your thoughts. My second thought is to convert the server to OS X 10.3, but I’m sure that I’ll hear howls about that. I love the manageability, but the guy who is running it right now might not grok the deal.

There’s more…

– bob