For this Fourth of July weekend, Amy & Rachel decided to come visit us from Minnesota. Their plane was scheduled to arrive around 11pm tonight and we’d then spend quality family time until they left Tuesday. Earlier this week, however, Amy received word that all of the Nature Conservancy employees (of which she is one) would get Friday off. So the girls left early for the airport today and applied for standby tickets on an earlier flight to Ohio. And got it! I received a phone call around quarter to 11 saying they’d gotten their boarding tickets and would be arriving around 1pm. Woohoo!

I was, at the time, working on a computer in the business lab. My goal for the work day was to get half of the business lab computers cloned to their new specifications (they’ll be going into other classrooms this summer). However, with 2 bad CD-ROM drives and the three 3-com switches hooked together (a quicky replacement for a 16-port hub that died at the end of the school year) not playing nicely with Norton Ghost, cloning wasn’t working. When Amy called, I was fighting with a piece of elementary software that will be going on every elementary machine this summer. And then realized I hadn’t installed the updated version yet. Whoops! 🙂

So, I basically worked 2 fruitless hours today and then went home to pick up dad. Mom was working, and dad was only allowed to accompany me to pick up the girls as long as he had a miserable time (so sayeth mom). We didn’t have to wait long at the airport before they arrived, and then we headed off to Stop 8 to the Panera Bread there and had lunch. Dad made sure to have a miserable time. 🙂 Then we stopped at Krogers on the way home to pick up the groceries needed for snacks and supper. And we got home about half an hour before mom came.

I had this inspired idea last weekend that perhaps Amy and I could work together on making an Indian meal for everyone. I have this nice kitchen and all, and it’s good to have folks around who like to cook so that it gets used. (It’s one of the reasons why I love it when elsaf visits!) I worked on the tandoori chicken and Amy made the vegetable curry. Basmati rice, steamed pita bread (instead of nan), and fresh peaches rounded off the meal. For dessert, we’ll have strawberry ice cream which I made earlier this week. (Everyone was too full after supper for ice cream. So we’ll have it after the girls get done visiting one of our cousins.)

This has been a wonderful day for sisters. 🙂 (Crappy day for computers. I was having troubles with computers. The dentist’s office where dad & Granny were today was having computer troubles. AAA was having troubles when I was off getting my euros for my Italy trip. Just a bad day for computers.) Tomorrow, we’re off to Yellow Springs to shop and so Amy can show off her old stomping ground to Rachel. Yay! Cool toy store! Great shoe store! And probably some Ha Ha Pizza! Oh yeah, and that store that sells bongs. 🙂 (Yellow Springs is still stuck in the Hippie Years.)

The drive back from Wooster is, like the drive there, 3 hours (plus change). I left Wooster around 3:30 and got home at 8:50. Why so late? Well, this camp was by far the best B-WISER camp ever. But the drive home was by far the WORST drive home ever. Blech!

Construction on I-71 – of course, there’s usually construction on interstate highways. Areas of slowdown, but nothing major in the way of delays. 5 minutes max for the delay.

Sawmill Road – My usual rest stop on the way back from B-WISER is a trip to the MediaPlay just off Sawmill Road in Columbus. I take I-71 south to I-270 west and take the Sawmill Road exit. But today, EVERYONE was taking the Sawmill Road exit. And what’s worse is that there wasn’t anything at MediaPlay for me to buy! Wah! I miss my half-price computer books! (Well, I missed ’em, but my pocket book didn’t!) Still, the Sawmill Road rest was only about 10 minutes traffic and half an hour shopping or so.

After I-270 comes I-70. There was a bit of slowdown before I got to I-70, but once I was there, we all just speeded along west. And then, half an hour to home (well, just over that) we hit the BOTTLENECK FROM HELL!!!! To give you some perspective, I text messaged judiang about 10 times during my long, long wait. At one point, I hadn’t moved a jot between text messages that were about 15 minutes apart! It took one hour and 20 minutes to get out of that bottleneck – usually the same drive is less than 2 minutes. BLECH! Towards the end, it looked like it might have even been construction (my hope) but instead, it was a car accident (what I hoped it hadn’t been). A single white car, which had had the jaws of life used upon it. 🙁 I hope the people involved are OK! (Though the j-o-l is never a good sign.) I must admit that I was relieved when I saw it was a white car and not a gray van. Two of my camp co-workers go home the same route as I do and had left before me. They were in a gray van.

The whole time I was in the bottleneck, I was nursing a 24 oz Pepsi Cola. (I don’t normally drink caffeinated Pepsi, but for long drives, it’s best if I caffeine up.) So, of course, before we were out of the bottleneck, I needed to pee. Before I could get home to my kitty, I stopped at the McDonald’s in West Milton and used the restroom before getting supper for me (and Leo, it turns out). And then, finally, I was HOME! With Leo! Who was VERY happy to see me.

After refreshing Leo’s water and food bowls (nearly empty and empty respectively), I had my Big Mac & fries, and Leo stole a fry from me and happily munched on teeny pieces of burger that I pulled off for him. So we’re now happy that we’re together again! Woohoo! Oh, and as tired as I am, the hot chocolate at breakfast, Coca Cola at lunch, and the 24-oz Pepsi on the way home will make sure that I’ll not get any sleep tonight! 🙂

This year for B-WISER, the new co-directors decided to use Friday as a day for the girls to meet other women scientists and hear about their lives and ask questions. Plus, they only scheduled half a day of that, so we’ll do the mentors, have lunch, then have the final ceremony. Will probably leave here by 2pm. Woohoo! I getta see my kitty again!

With this all scheduled for Friday, that means we had only 4 teaching days. So we smooshed our two electricity days into one. We’ll do current electricity and static electricity today. I’m hoping to get the Van de Graaf working to its best potential (heh) today.

Well, last year at B-WISER, Carolyn and I discovered that the building generator is located right under our room. And the night before last, we were reminded of this when the power went out and the generator went on. Hell’s wiskers… Still, it didn’t go off until around 6:00am. I remember seeing the clock time of 6:20am, but the power was already off for the folks on the other side of the building. Oh, and we discovered that the main point of the generator is to generate noise, not electricity. I mean, when Carolyn went to take her shower, no hot water! (Heh, I had hot water for my shower.)

Another part of the joys of living in an old dorm are the bathroom experiences. Douglass is a co-ed dorm and each floor has 2 communal bathrooms. On the first floor, each bathroom has 2 showers and two toilets and 3 sinks. Last year, we had practically no water pressure for either shower, but the front one had more pressure. This year, the first shower has 0 water pressue (think running faucet, not shower) but the second shower is WONDERFUL. And I’ve always prefered the back shower anyhoo because there’s a lot more room.

In other years, we’ve had the joys of cold showers and undrinkable water. Whenever we come to camp, we just never know what we’re going to get until we come here. (At least Carolyn and I know that we’ll always have the room with the noise generator underneath us.)

We’ve received compliments from folks all over. One of the people who works on campus every summer (probably all year) said that our camp and the tennis camp have the politest students and that everyone on campus knows it. Cool. 🙂 Also, last night one of the girls said she was sad because tomorrow (that’s today now) was the last day of classes. And then camp would be over Friday. And she’d never get to see all her new friends ever again. So it looks like we’re doing a good job in the “make it friendly and fun!” department.

Wow, first day of Summer! Longest day of the year! No wonder the sun was still out after we got out of the movie theater tonight. I guess it’s all downhill from now on. 😉

B-WISER is being lots of fun this year. After the terrific start Sunday night, we’ve had two really good day of classes. Yesterday was measurement day for Dee and I. Today, we worked with power and work and force and stuff. One of the girls, after playing with film canister canons, said “My brother’s gonna be jealous!” And another girl said she was having so much phun in physics. They’ve been lovely girls, and we’ve got 2 more days to teach them stuff.

Tuesday night is traditionally the teachers’ night off. Half go off to the outlet mall near here and shop ’til they drop. But Dee, Joyce, Carolyn and I opted for toys, appetizers, and a movie. We went to the Toyriffic toy store in Smithville where I spent too much money on lots of cool toys. (Alas, they didn’t have Chrononauts, but I told the store owner about the game and she’s going to see about getting it for her store. She loves “new” game ideas. Oh, and Amy, you might be interested to know that she knew of the owner of that toystore in Yellow Springs. Hadn’t met her, but specialty toy stores are rare enough that folks know of each other.)

Our next task, after spending lots of dough, was going to Applebees for half-priced appetizers and $1 off drinks. I got an amaretto sour (no surprise) and we shared cheese sticks, coconut shrimp, spinach/artichoke dip & nachoes, riblets, and onion chips. Filled us up nicely. And we sat there talking until 15 minutes before the film.

When I read off the offerings to Carolyn the other night, the only two which interested her were Mr. & Mrs. Smith and the Star Wars movie. We decided to go see Mr. & Mrs. Smith. And we really enjoyed it. Mayhem, violence, and lots and lots of laughs. My kind of film. I think dad will like it, too. 🙂 Plus, Angelina Jolie is nice on the eyes. (And I guess some folks like Brad Pitt, too… His face is funny, however. Though I don’t think I’d kick him out of bed for eating crackers.)

Tomorrow is Flight Day – I hope it doesn’t rain on us! We really have been blessed with perfect weather these past few days. And I wouldn’t mind if it continued for the rest of the week. 🙂

Yesterday, everyone arrived for the B-WISER camp. Counselors arrived between 9am and 11am, having a tour of the campus at 11:30. Teachers arrived between 10am and noon. We had lunch after everyone arrived (at Mom’s Truck Stop, one of the on-campus food areas) and chatted away, getting caught up on our lives.

The girls started arriving around 2pm. By 4pm, most of them were here and we introduced ourselves to them. They had an initial activity to get to know each other, then showed off the posters they made and did a cheer/song/saying that they’d come up with. They were all cute & clever.

Supper was at 5:30, so we went to the cafeteria for the exceptional food. I ate too much, but it was nice to have a large selection (perogies, sweet & sour chicken on rice, pizza, salad, apples, bananas, etc).

At 7pm, the girls got a problem to work on. Build a raft using straws and masking tape that can hold as many pennies as possible. I watched the first round and took photos. The best raft held 20 pennies. However, I didn’t stay around for round two, because the stuff was there for the Build Your Own Sundae snack that we had for the girls. I became a vanilla ice cream scooper for the night. But, of course, before we could try it out on the girls, we had to test it out on us. So I made myself a chocolate ice cream with caramel & chocolate sauce, whipped cream (I can see elsaf shuddering now), nuts, and sprinkles. Yum!

The vanilla ice cream was popular and I got a hand cramp after awhile, but Susan took over from me, thankfully. They ran out of spoons before the end but no matter, we had the girls use the serving spoons for the toppings and then resorted to popsicle sticks. We’re nothing if not resourceful!

It was a great start to the camp, if you ask me. 🙂

Oh, and how’s this for geeking? Since Carolyn got tired of tripping over my Cat5 cable last year, she brought her wireless router. So we’re both connected and wireless. 🙂 Yes, yes, we are geeks.

Late last night, I was playing around with my network, trying to get my new network music player to see my music library on my new PC. I was making headway, when my curious side wondered if I could set up MAC filtering successfully on my wireless network. Word of warning, if no MAC addresses show up in the list of approved addresses, don’t click on “enable” and then “apply” hoping that this will add MAC addresses to the filter. Nooooooo, it instead blocks EVERYTHING from getting through the router. Hell…

No problemo, I thought. I’ll just reset the router and start again. One problemo, the reset router wouldn’t pull an IP address from the cable modem. I tried several times, rebooting the modem and the router etc etc. Ah well, it was bedtime anyhoo, so I went to bed, figuring a call to RoadRunner in the morning would solve my problems. (Sometimes they need to “blow through the wires” as dad says, in order for the new item to successfully see the DHCP server.

Now, when I got to bed, I realized that the night was going to be INSOMNIA MAX. I couldn’t fall asleep. During the school year, this happens once every few months or so and is a real annoyance. But I figured, hey, it’s summer, I’ll go into the living room and watch more Wonderfalls. (Having finished season one of The Bob Newhart Show on Tuesday, I was now working my way through Wonderfalls.) I ended up watching 3 episodes. And when I returned to bed, I was still not sleeping, so I watched some of Return of the King (whose DVD has been waiting for me to finish it for months and months – so many months that I spent the first 20 minutes figuring out where I left off.) By 4:30, I was truly tired enough to sleep.

Leo, Mr Alarm Clock, as usual made sure I was awake by 8am. And with a bit of a struggle, I was up and ready to tackle the Tech Support of Roadrunner. I figured maybe 10 minutes on hold and another 20 minutes or so to blow through the wires. Well, 2 and a half hours later, I finally hung up, convinced that my router just wasn’t gonna take an IP address ever again.

So, what all happened during those two and a half hours? I got a tech withing 3 minutes of calling (amazing!) and he was pretty knowledgible. Hell, we even looked at the winsock dlls! I haven’t thought about those lil f*ckers since I was using Windows 3.11! Still, he was unable to get my router to be seen by the modem, and worse, now my old PC couldn’t be seen. (There was a very good reason for this, unfortunately.) I was escalated to the top tier of tech support, and apart from a glitch where I got in touch with an operator instead of tech, I was eventually talking to the higher level tech.

Our main goal was to get the old PC to see the modem & vice versa. And this entailed uninstalling my NIC drivers. (I found the floppy discs with the drivers, but turns out, they never did work for me.) I ended up going to a previous version of the registry in order to get my NIC card functioning again. But it still couldn’t see the modem. So the tech and I decided to try getting the new XP Pro (aka Media Center Editions 2005) machine to see the modem. And it was while I was hooking it up that I discovered WHY my old PC couldn’t see the modem. The old PC wasn’t HOOKED to the modem! I had (3 and a half hours of sleep, folks) unhooked the Cat5 cable from the PC and hooked it to the modem. Um, STUPID. I decided NOT to tell the tech on the phone this. I knew it would give him a good laugh, and I didn’t feel like laughing at the time. (I find it extremely hilarious now, however. God, that was stupid!)

OK, XP machine saw the modem & vice versa without a hitch, so we tried the router again. Still no go. I decided to have a burial ceremony this weekend for it. I hooked my old PC back up to the modem and read my e-mail before going off to work. It was now 11am – I usually get there around 9am.

Once at the school, however, I found another fun tech problem that only schools get (because we have teachers and grades). And wasted my tech time fixing something that could have been prevented if people actually followed instructions. Heh, considering the stupid things I did in the last 24 hours, I figure I can give them a bit of slack. Still, I ended up only working 3 hours today before heading off to Best Buy to buy a replacement router. (Oh, over lunch, I brought home the D-Link DI-624 that we’ve been experimenting with and hooked it into my home network and was up and running in 2 minutes. Definitely dead old router.) BTW, while at Best Buy, I bought a new graphics card for my new PC. I haven’t taken it out of the box yet, I’m going to do more research on my problem and see if I can find an inexpensive fix. I’ve got 30 days to return, as long as I don’t open the package. I also stopped at a Radio Shack on the way back to get a gender changer for 1/8″ stereo plugs so my music player can hook to my powered speakers.

So, anyhoo, my last 24 hours have been filled with all sorts of stupid tech tricks. But the good news is that I’m once again sitting outside on my chaise and typing this on the laptop. And my new music player works fine too. Well, still can’t get it to see my music library, but it can get to streaming websites! Sweet!

Wow, two posts from me in one day! Haven’t done that in ages. But I have my reasons… Mainly, I wanted to see if I could use my laptop outside on the chaise lounge and be online. And, indeed, I can. So Leo is on his leash sitting underneath the lounge and I’m sitting on it, typing this on my laptop. Since the wireless router is in the den and I have a good view of the den window, I guess it’s no surprise the connection gets out here.

The weather today is gorgeous. Yeah, there’s some cloud cover and the threat of rain, but there’s also blue skies and white fluffy clouds beside the darker ones. The temperature is ideal, so Leo and I decided we’d have some outdoor time. I finished my outdoor chores (take out the trash, water the flowers), so now I can relax outside with my kitty.

We can have this weather all next week, that would be fine with me. Sleeping in unairconditioned dorms isn’t fun with 80+ degrees F temperatures.

Ah, the birdies are chirping, my kitty’s tail’s a flapping (in a “relaxed cat” mode, not in a “hunt the birdies” mode), and the breeze is blowing. Life is good. 🙂

One of the advantages to working in a school over the summer is getting to pick through the stuff kids leave behind in lockers when the janitors clean them out. But I have to admit, the kids are getting better at cleaning out their lockers. We didn’t find a single calculator this summer! Last year they had a stack of ’em. Unfortunately, most were unusable – the ones that were, we made sure the student helpers got them. But this year, my only spoils of war were a newish paperback dictionary, 7 black BIC pens (all unused, it looks like), a purple protractor, and, the coolest find of all, a huge pack of colored pencils – barely used. Crayola brand, even! So, not my best haul, but not too shabby.

Today was spent moving monitors to my science lab from the rooms whose computers will we be getting rid of this summer. I’m almost done with this (I did this last Wednesday, too). I even finished a computer today! I mean, it’s ready to go for next school year. Acrobat has been updated, Graphical Analysis for Windows has been installed. I virus checked it (more about that in a minute) and it’s virus free. Spyware free too. And then I updated Clean Slate to build 873. So it is ready to go – woot! (1 down, 299 to go!)

Yesterday, when dad was working too, I looked at the traffic coming out of our network. We installed a packet sniffer onto our network last Friday because we’ve got major slowdowns online and we wanted to see where the slowdowns were at. So when I looked at the weekend traffic, I discovered there was some traffic using the IRC protocol. Um, WTF? What would be using the IRC protocol? 3 PCs were doing it and I located their IP addresses and thus computer identities. They were three computers in the high school social studies/yearbook classroom. Upon examining the computers, it looked as though no students had signed on since May 26th. So the IRC traffic couldn’t be web based. Dad and I thought “Virus!”

We cannot afford to have virus software on every PC in the building. All of the servers, the two tech computers, and the administrative computers have eTrust antivirus, but no one else does. So when I want to check a PC for viruses, I map to its C drive (all C drives are shared – brilliant idea I came up with 2 summers ago) and check it from my computer. We checked all 6 machines from that classroom. All 5 student PCs had at least the idim/backdoor trojan horse and one had several instances of Redlof.A (a virus) too. The one with the Redlof virus had 980 instances of either the virus or the trojan! Wow! Personally, I was impressed.

Now, what’s the real hoot here is that these 5 computers had Clean Slate installed on them, just like all the others, last summer. So that means the viruses were present last summer and were there all school year! I had to laugh. And from the treasurer’s assistant, I found out the teacher had been complaining about the poor performance of his student computers. (He never told us – and the assistant might be mistaken about which computers he was speaking, too.)

But the presence of the virii convinced dad that when we set up classrooms this summer, we’re going to start from scratch. The goal is to make, for each classroom, a Ghost image and burn to DVD. And then keep the DVDs organized by room in our filing cabinet. We wanna have virus-free Ghost images. 🙂 So when I was working on that PC today, I mapped to its C drive and virus checked it. I didn’t want to rebuild from scratch if I didn’t have to. Lazy me, yeah.

I’ll be working tomorrow and Friday on getting computers ready for Ghosting. And hopefully start learning how to do Ghost to DVD stuff. (I learned Ghost over the network last summer. That’s brilliant stuff.) Gonna be a busy summer. And B-WISER is next week. But it’s way too early to panic. I think I’ll panic after I get back from my Italy trip in July. 🙂

Yeah, yeah, bad pun. I read it on a t-shirt today while at the Versailles Poultry Days Festival. And I know it’s not original to them, either. The folks and I went to the Poultry Days Festival mostly for the chicken dinner. Mmmmm, barbecue chicken the way it was meant to be (and not with those nasty red barbecue sauces). It rained while we sat in the tent and ate, and was done by the time we finished. We wandered through the vendors & craft booths, then got ice cream at the Athletic Boosters Ice Cream Parlor (in the school’s cafeteria). I got a brownie sundae that was huge.

Been spending most of my time this weekend playing with my new computer and playing City of Heroes on my old one. I got a KVM switch and have both set up on the computer desk, so I switch between them. At the moment, I’m on IRC & typing this up while I’m on my old PC, and I’m ripping my CDs into MP3s on the new PC. I like the new PC, even though the onboard video isn’t strong enough for CoH. I think I’ll supplement it with a PCI-E graphics card, but until then, I’m playing it on my old PC.

You’d think someone who’s the network administrator for her school could successfully get her two home computers talking to each other. No go yet. Bleh. Still, I’ll play around some more – I’ll figure it out eventually.

I try to upgrade my home computer every 3 years or so. And this summer was my upgrade year. For some reason, I just wasn’t in the mood to do my usual shop & build. I wanted, for once, to plug everything in and have it all work at the outset. Perhaps I won’t get the innards just as I want, but as long as the specs were OK and the price was right, I was going to go for it. And today? I went for it!

I bought a Sony Vaio home PC with Windows XP Media 2005. And a damn nice 17″ LCD to go with it. It’s a 3GHz machine with 200GB HD & 1GB RAM (though it shares that RAM with the video card). So far, I’m quite pleased with it. Of the 200GB drive, 5GB is the backup area and 24GB is the preinstalled crap stuff. First thing I did after jumping through all the sign-in hoops was download Zone Alarm, then eTrust antivirus and finally GAIM. Oh, and I’m installing City of Heroes. Heh. The monitor is as nice as it looked in the store. Though it means I’ll have to go through my Sylv pics and make 1280×1024 wallpapers of ’em. (Using one from the BBC site at the mo.)

It came with a TV tuner onboard, plus DVD burner, etc etc. I’ll have to see how these work. And it’ll be interesting working with XP on a daily basis. (I have XP Pro on my laptop, but it’s not a daily use item.)

Not gonna say how much I spent, but let’s just say that I’m glad they had 18 months same as cash available at Best Buy. Oh, and I bought a Network Music Player as well – will let you all know how that goes too.