Dave's Workshop - Workbench August 5th

Workbench

Week of August 5^th - August 11^th 2001

Sunday

Busy week last week, as you might guess by the lack of posts. Kara's sister was in town, she left this morning, so we spent most of our non-work, waking hours doing family stuff. One thing we did last weekend in St. Pete that I forgot to mention was to go to the Salvador Dali museum. They have a great collection of his work, spanning his whole life. Definitely go on the tour. You'll still need to look around on your own, but the guide added a lot of information. Fascinating stuff, make an effort to see it if you're in the area. As a bonus, also in the same area of downtown are a couple of other museums, so if Dali isn't your cup of tea or it really gets your cultural juices flowing, there are more things to see.

Among other things we did last week was to go canoeing on Saturday morning. Nothing notable about that, except our run in with the Governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, the brother of the President! We got an early start and were at the river about 8:00am. We usually rent canoes at a little place right on the river, then go upstream for a while and return. First thing we noticed that was odd was a card table set up with drinks and donuts. The lady who runs the place asked if we had called ahead. We hadn't. She said she was closed till 12:00pm because of a group, but that sense we were there she would go ahead and rent to us. We asked what was going on. She said "hu-manatee" event to show the Governor the wildlife in his own back yard. "Was the Governor coming?" we asked. "He's supposed to" she said. So we hit the water. It was nice and overcast, with a breeze in the air. We were going up the Wakalla river, so at the state park we stooped and turned around. Coming back we met two other canoes. They pasted us, but turned around after a motor boat came by and called them back. Up ahead we saw other canoes turn around. We were moving faster then those ahead so after a while we passed them. In one of the canoes, sitting in the middle, was a man with a baseball cap on. As we passed, just a paddle length away, I noticed it was Governor Bush. Back at the rental place a couple of manatees were swimming. When the group got there, they spent a good ten minutes maneuvering around to watch them. Then, back on land, the Governor had his picture taken with some people. Not terribly exiting, but different from out normal trips. And no, I didn't have my picture taken.

Monday

Well, the entrance to my neighborhood is flooded again. Another tropical storm dumped rain on Tallahassee all day and when I got home the only road was under close to two feet of water. I had to leave the car and wade in knee deep. And it may not get better for a while. Rain is predicted for most of the week.

I started Windows 2000 training today. I'm taking Course 1560,updating Support Skills from Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 to Microsoft Windows 2000. So far so good. The biggest thing we looked at today was the intro to Active Directory. Supposedly, with this course and a little hands on practice, you're supposed to be prepared for the one shot "upgrade" exam for those who have already passed the three core NT4 exams. That would be nice, as I really don't want to shell out too much more money just to maintain my MCSE. Anyway, I've spent very little time with 2000, so this is a good way to get up to speed. Who knows when we'll actually move to it at work. For the desktop, I'm inclined to wait for XP.

Speaking of Windows XP, Tom's has a preview up and surprisingly it made me pretty interested. Usually I'm not one to jump on a new OS, as illustrated by the six or so hours I'd spent with 2000 before today, but something made XP sound kind of cool. Hopefully that feeling will pass as "features" like the forced activation that monitors hardware changes really gets under my skin.

Tuesday

More Active Directory stuff in class today. It's pretty interesting stuff. And who knows, someday maybe I'll be in a position to actually do the really cool stuff. Right now it looks like I'll be a delegate in an Organizational unit, inside a Domain. In other words, not much power. Don't know what I'm talking about? Don't worry, I'm working on something to take care of that...

Wednesday

We learned about RIS, Remote Installation Services, and Group Policies today. I probably won't mess with RIS much, I've got PowerQuest's Drive Image Pro which takes care of new installs. Policy stuff, now that's cool. Sure it was there with NT, but not nearly as versatile or easy. At least it looks that way. Hopefully, after using if in the field, I'll still think it's cool. I remember spending hours playing with policies in NT, but it ended up being more hassle then it was worth (at least to make it do what I wanted, restrict what programs users could run). Looking a head, we've still got a ton of material to get through in the next two days. It should be interesting.

We picked up Bella from the vet after class. She got fixed. She's doing well though. I never had a cat before, my Dad is allergic to them, but Bella has been a joy to have around (except when she's being BellaMonster). I'm very happy Kara wanted to get a cat last January.

Thursday

More 2000 stuff... Today we covered using Group Policies to manage software (kind of cool), Terminal Services (could be useful), Remote Access (Kind of weird) and started Security (somewhat interesting). All in all an average day. What really hurt it were the labs. It's good to do some hands on, but after a while you're just going through the motions and not really learning anything.

I've stopped using StarOffice to write posts. The only reason I was using a word processor at all was spell check, so I'm using a text editor called Programmer's File Editor. I can't even remember where I heard about it. But it's free and it does what I need. I've been using it as a notepad replacement for some time. I also use it to create all the HTML for the site. So why not just use it to compose as well. Although, I still cut and past into a spellchecker. I probably should just find a text editor I like, with a spellchecker, and just use that.

Friday

After a week of Windows 2000 training I now know how to play freecell. Actually, I learned quite a bit more then that, but freecell is pretty cool too. Now I start studying for the test. Sense I passed the NT 4 core exams, I get a free, one-shot attempt to pass a special 2000 core exam. If I fail I have to take the four 2000 core tests separately. I picked up the O'Reily MCES in a Nutshell book last night. The NT4 edition served me well, so between it and the class I just took I think (hope) I'll be ok.

I ran across a new project at NCSA. It sounds very cool. The machines will be linked together at 40 gigabits per second, later upgraded to 50-80 Gbps. Wow, now that's fast. Most machines on a network are linked at 10 or 100 megabits per second. One Gbps is rare. I've seen 20 Gbps before (also at NCSA), but 40... 80! To put that in a little perspective, a really fast SCSI card might be able to reach transfer speeds of 160 MegaBYTES per second. 80 GigaBITS per second is around 10,000 MegaBYTES per second. Or, 62 times faster. One of the features of nVidia's new nForce chipset is supposed to be faster memory transfer. It will feature 4,200 MB per sec bandwidth, less then half the speed we're talking here. And the network is supposed to be slower then the internal components of a computer.

I'm off to see Rush Hour 2 tonight. The original was hilarious. Usually sequels aren't as good, but I have hope for this one.

Saturday

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Week of August 5^th - August 11^th 2001

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Week of August 5th - August 11th 2001

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Week of August 5^th - August 11^th 2001