Teknoviking

A Day in the Life of a Rural CIO

Pat — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 16:53:27 +0000

All County Phone Users,

We are experiencing occasional dropped calls at some sites due to a Packrat nesting in one of our microwave equipment racks at our Juniper Flats radio site.

Said rat has been evicted from the premises, but the equipment was severely damaged by his occupancy.

We have replacement equipment on order but due to the age of our systems, it won’t be here until sometime next week.

Until we can swap out the system, you may continue to experience dropped calls at some sites.

Both I and the rat apologize for any inconvenience.

Please contact your Help Desk at x8301 if you have any questions.

~Pat

Duct Tape

Pat — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 19:06:54 +0000

Its amazing what you can do with some duct tape, an old 12volt fan from a power supply and 30 minutes of time. Felt like I got back to the basics today when our Unity Voice Mail server died.

The internal fan in the Proliant Server that runs the County voice mail system went bad and it started into a constant reboot cycle. I was the closest one to the data center so I popped in and took a look see. Those old Compaq Proliants are built like trucks so they cobble back together pretty well. We had no spare internal fan on the shelf but did have a room full of old systems. Tearing into a power supply for a surplus IBM, I yarded out its fan, rewired it and with a little duct tape and foam got the server back and operational.

Real parts should be here Monday, but it did feel good to McGyver a solution in the heat of the moment.

Ouch!

Pat — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 22:34:25 +0000

Driving by the local post office this afternoon…

Xterra Ooops!

My GIS Crew!

Pat — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 02:00:29 +0000

This group of people is absolutely amazing. They are some of the finest professionals and the most dedicated customer service focused folks I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Check out this excellent article from American Surveyor Magazine.

My GIS Crew rocks!

A new adventure…

Pat — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 17:59:48 +0000

I am definitely a child of the TV age, distinctly remembering watching the Apollo 11 moon landing from our black and white set in the living room. I discovered my love of SciFi movies and shows in the 80s with Star Trek and Dr Who.

So, it was with some trepidation this week that I canceled our cable TV subscription. On Tuesday they will be coming to pull the plug and we will be connected via 10 meg Internet pipe only to the world of news and entertainment.

I think we will be fine. I’ve built a nice media center setup over the years around the 42″ plasma that Jess bought me while we where in Massachusetts. That combined with a couple gaming consoles, Roku Player, Netflix along with the entire Internet should provide more content than we could possibly consume.

I’ll let you know how it goes in a couple of months…

Hosting Problems

Pat — Tue, 11 May 2010 19:53:04 +0000

Well, that was exciting. Our hosting provider lost connectivity between the website and the database. All seems to be working now though! On to the rest of the week.

Lucid Lynx

Pat — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:47:05 +0000

Well, I am impressed with my upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS). I really loved Karmic but this distro seems even better. I must admit that I do miss the earth brown tones in Karmic, the purple theme is just not really me. I’ll have to see if there is a way to use the 9.10 layout.

My programs seem snappier and my WINE install of Sony’s Guild Wars still works just fine, it might actually be snappier itself.

Anyway, the in-place upgrade was painless (I let it run over night… the servers were darn busy!) and everything worked wonderfully. Now to really go exploring!

Web Design

Pat — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:20:14 +0000

I am not a web designer, but I enjoy a little coding now and then. Last year I built Jess’ website (jesshartley .com) using the open source project, Joomla. It came out very nice despite a bit of a learning curve, mostly due to Joomla’s specific nomenclature. Once I got through those concepts, it has turned out to be an excellent tool-set for this sort of thing. Its a vast improvement over WordPress which she used for years and finally just outgrew.

It’s full of stars…

Pat — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:21:16 +0000

Spent a bit of time last night out in our back yard with the telescope enjoying the crystal clear skies from this altitude. We have the most amazing night sky here. The only place I have ever been that was more impressive, was the heart of the Mojave Desert in winter.

At times the clarity is so dramatic, that you almost feel like you are falling, up into the heavens…

Tapir!

Pat — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 19:28:10 +0000

My Valkyrie loves animals. When we moved out from New England to The AZ, we spent several extra days on the trip just so we could stay over extra and see both the St Louis and the Denver Zoos.

Not only does she love animals, but she is also a very talented artist and is always drawing them in some unique and beautiful way. She just finished this illustration of a Tapir that I wanted to share.