Sunday, October 22, 2006

Hey, the grocery shopping is done, too.

I hate grocery shopping on Sunday afternoons. Very busy time at Hy-Vee. But, I got my cart full of mostly unhealthy foods (hey, the salad, apples, bananas, and granola bars got in there by accident!), and got out of there in less than 30 minutes. Behold! The power of The List!

Yes, I am boring. Make no assumptions that this site is meant to be anything other than just what I do and what is in my head. It could be a lot worse, you know. I could actually detail a day at work for you. It would be enough to make your head explode from technical details best left to geeks.

For example:

I had to make a minor, minor change on one of the cyber cafe macs. It involved the following steps (this is why I don't use driveshield in the labs. If I had to go through this to make a small change on the lab machines, I would jump off of the atrium.)

1. Boot to openfirmware and enable firewire boot.
2. Boot from firewire drive. Copy any necessary files to the cafeHD. Move the logout hook from /etc to the admin user desktop. Have to do this in order to be able to login as admin on the cafe machine (this hook invokes a script that causes the machine to reboot on logout instead of logging out. Hence, the cafe user cannot actually logout of the machine.)
3. Reboot.
4. Logout of the cafe user
5. Login as admin. Disable driveshield.
6. Reboot
7. Logout of cafe user
8. Login as admin.
9. Change user restrictions to allow the cafe user to have the ability to make the necessary changes, say in the screensaver.
10. Logout of admin
11. Login as cafe user
12. Make the change, and make sure all windows are closed, and everything looks as it is supposed to.
13. Logout of cafe user
14. Login as admin.
15. Remove the changes made to the cafe user restrictions
16. enable driveshield.
17. Reboot.
18. Hope to God that you did everything correctly, and didn't miss anything, or you will be starting over at 1.
19. repeat for each. damn. machine.

See what I mean. Boring.

1 comment:

dive said...

Say, J. we really, really need you in this office.
Our crap IT team knows bugger all about Macs, but because I'm sane (and do all the high end 3D work), I've got a bunch of G5s to play with.
The useless tards in IT, however, cannot make X.4 work with their prehistoric servers.
Would you please be so kind as to reach across the internet and slap them around the head?
(Especially Niall … What a dork)!
Thanks for letting me get this off my chest.

By the way, I find shopping on a monday night is a lot easier. There's no queues and the veg are fresher.

Have a good, headache-free week.