This is not been a good weekend.
First came the blizzard on Friday. In the morning there was not a flake in the air. It was even pleasant outside. I had half expected a pile of snow on the ground, preventing me from going to work. Then the blizzard came mid-morning. It had become clear that it was going to be impossible to drive through that in the evening, so I got leave to take a half-day vacation. I used the time to work on my taxes.
First thing Saturday morning I looked outside. Yow! The whole yard was deep in snow. I spend the better part of an hour digging myself and my car out of the snow. Then I mailed off my tax payments. They have hurt me more than the snow did.
I spent most of the remaining weekend working on my Web site. I got the projects, essays and Fairmount sections up-to-date, and even included new favicons (’favorites icons’, those little square images in a Web browser’s address bar) for the projects and Bioshock sections.
I did not learn until Saturday morning, when Madre informed me, that the folks’ next-door neighbor down Walnut Street had passed away. Jeannie was one of the most cheerful persons that I have ever met. She had always lived in that green clipboard house with the two big pines, for almost as long as I have lived in town. She married some guy named Peterson; filled the house with all kinds of books; raised a very intelligent daughter named Alice; tended the garden in back of the house until the backyard was all cleared out a few years ago when Mr. Peterson died; and was a clerk at the local grocery store until a year or so ago. Everyone, including Madre, was surprised by her passing, even though she had become an invalid forced to use a walker in past year or so. Madre, my sister the teacher and I paid our respects this afternoon. We will all miss her.
I do not know what will happen to the clapboard house. Whoever gets it may dismantle it, or layer it with vinyl siding and remodel it (like what happened to mine). I know it does not look the same as it did ten years ago when it had a comfortably cluttered garden and tall pines, which kept you from having to look at the rest of the town. Now it’s all barren, like a suburb of some cruddy city.
No, I am not happy about this at all.
I guess it was all capped with the loss of the Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl this evening. How is it, that everything seemed to be okay in the third quarter, when I last checked on the game before going to the upper room to finish my Web site work; then coming back down to discover that Saints had won 31-17? What??
I normally don’t care about spectator sports, but the Colts had a second Super Bowl in its grasp. What happened?
The weather outside is wet, but I am not complaining. It is warm … pleasant. I would walk about if it were not so rainy. This is a nice contrast to the weather during the past three or four weeks: Bitter, miserably cold, with icy roads that make you drive at 40 MPH tops if you did not want your car in a ditch.
During this weekend I decided to take out a scraper and dig into the dark, wet spot over the back door. I scaped out wet stucco and wallpaper and drywall to the wood underneath. The wood was wet — and crawling with ants! After fixing all that (detailed here), I planned to call a repairman this coming spring to see if I can get the leaks fixed once and for all.
The ultimate cause is that the house was built just after World War II, as anyone can tell by viewing the asbestos wall singles underneath the vinyl siding. The house was minimally remodeled in 2005 before it was sold to the guy who, two years later, sold it to me.
I pulled my single Bioshock 2 page to pieces and turned the pieces into separate pages. The main page is now largely a bunch of link arrows to various aspects of the game: its marketing site, the characters, the weapons, the plasmids, provisioning, et alia.
For months I have been avidly following the marketing site Something In The Sea, although I have not had the patience to do the puzzles. I do not know why I am so excited about this game, except that I love the original Bioshock — but not its DRM, which kept me from installing it on my then-new computer back in the spring of 2008 [→], [→], [→], [→]).
I do not intend to buy Bioshock 2 right away, but will wait until late February or early March. Partly I want to see how the fen react to it and its DRM, which this time has the miasma of Microsoft hanging over it. Evidently Bioshock maker 2K decided it did not want to mess with DRM customer support any more, so it gave the problem to Microsoft, which is far more difficult to deal with.
Also, I am trying to make time to study to take the ACSP Mac OS X Support Essentials 10.6 test next month, and the game will almost certainly interfere.
BTW, Jordan Thomas, the head of development for Bioshock 2, is evidently a Whovian. He admitted as much, although he seemed to be weaseling around it, during a Cult of Rapture podcast on the creation of psychiatrist Sofia Lamb, Rapture’s version of Mao Zedong and the game’s antagonist. He would have to have watched the series to have known about Fenella Woolgar, who played Agatha Cristie in the fourth-season episode The Unicorn and the Wasp
. It is Ms. Woolgar who provides the voice for Dr. Lamb.
Now that I have two years of blog entries under the Hostway version of the Dysmey Blog, I have created separate folders for each year’s group of entries, just like on the original Dysmey Post (which was not a blog, althrough it has been called one).
The folks no longer have Timmy the Duck and his chicken pal for company. Their presence was a mixed blessing. Timmy was a friendly duck and a likeable mallard. But he was most incontinent, and you had to be very careful walking the sidewalks and steps around the folks’ house.
Up until late last week the weather was bitterly, miserably cold. Normal ducks would fly south for warmer lands during the winter; but Timmy was too domesticated for that. The best he could manage was to fly to the nearby creek with its warmer water.
Anyway, my folks persuaded the next-door neighbor, who owns Timmy and his chicken pal but who was hardly at home enough to properly care for the birds, to find another home for them. So a poultry farmer got the birds. At last report, Timmy has become a chicken herder, keeping an eye on the farmers’ chickens and herding the flock like a sheepdog.
My long birthday weekend is about over.
I spent my birthday last Saturday first getting a swine flu shot, then visiting the local library, then visiting the Bracken Library, then shopping at Fry’s and Best Buy in Fishers/Noblesville, and finally driving through a thick fog.
I read about the swine flu vaccine clinic in the town hall. I let it slip out of mind because I had intended to go to Muncie very early for some blood work. But I got out of bed late. I remembered the vaccine clinic only because I was mailing a water bill and noticed what was going on.
My visit to the local library was to replace a library card that I left in the pocket of a shirt which in turn went into the washer. This time I got the card laminated. And I had to sign a form conforming that I am secretary of the library board for another year. One day the board will find someone else who is not arthritic, but until then I do my duty.
I did not do much at the Bracken Library besides typing out and publish my belated New Year 2010 entry and then taking a catnap in an out-of-the-way corner with a book on Easter Island on my lap. After that I had a birthday lunch at the Olive Garden: Chicken scampi with zuppa toscana, and torta di chocolate for dessert. It was my only other meal for the day.
I visited Fry’s and got parts to turn my Isis box into a functional system, as well as Resident Evil: Degeneration on DVD. I could find a decent monitor at Fry’s (shame on them), so I went to Best Buy to buy an LG Flatron W2361VG for my main box. The Isis system, which I assembled in my bedroom, gets the Viewtronic I got from my folks.
I also got a Linksys Wireless-G USB dongle for the Isis box, so that I can link it to my local net. That meant going back on my sworn oath not to use wireless, which was the reason for the conduit project last summer. But there is no possible means to wire the bedroom, so I had to reactivate and secure the wireless part of my router. In the end the Isis system works as intended.
Finally I drove home through a fog so thick I could not see beyond two meters from the front of my car. I had to drive at forty miles per hour until I approached the intersection of state road 37 and Madison County road 600 N. The shadows of cars and a tanker truck silhouetted in the fog-dispersed light of stopped cars in the other direction showed me that something bad had happened. In the fog the scene was so freaky, but evidently someone went off the road into a deep ditch. I waited for about fifteen minutes. When it became clear that the traffic was going nowhere and that the police had the scene in hand, I drove into 600 N and drove slowly to state road 9.
I got my birthday lunch on Sunday: Pork roast with fennel, mashed spud, beans (both green and baked), and German chocolate cake with cocoanut icing. Among my gifts is an AARP magazine to remind me how old I am now. I spent Sunday doing more work on the Isis box.
Today I washed off my car as much as I could in this cold weather; and I installed a new magnetic strip to my shower stall to keep its door from popping open.
Let me wish all of you a belated happy new year.
The first two weeks of the year were very bitterly cold. Not until yesterday was it warm enough to melt the snows of the past fortnight. I had to take the interstate to work most mornings because Wheeling Pike was too dangerous for travel. That in turn ate into my travel time (Wheeling is the shortest route) and gas. And yet, my new car is holding up very well so far.
The XMas tree is back in the closet, and the humidifier is back out of it. The constant cold has made the air so dry that I decided to use it for the first time in a couple of years. That means buying distilled water for the thing, because the tap water in my house is mineral-rich and would trash the humidifier in no time flat.
I have no big projects planned for 2010. I intend to have the furnace cleaned out. I want to have the back roof inspected. And maybe I want some gravel put on the driveway and along the street, since it is starting to look like the weeds are winning over them. And the deck will need to be worked on, since the winter weather is really hitting it hard.
The first thing I did on my three-day weekend, now that I am paid up on my andywest.org Web site for another year (and on andy.west.name for another two years), was to set up a new primary e-mail address. One of my subscriptions, TechBites, got its address list cracked a month ago. Now the spam is pouring in, mostly prescription scams. Now that my e-mail address is ruined, it is time to abandon it. The new address is already changed on the sites I visit the most; the others I may as well let drop.
While I was doing this I discovered that my sister the editor had created a profile of the local library for LibraryThing. It was evident that the profile was written before the move to the new building, so I had to bring it up to date. [Fairmount Public Library] Come to think of it, I should update this as well; now that over a year has gone by, it is not all that new anymore.
My XMas vacation is over.
It has been a grey and cold week. The snow came in force the day after XMas. In fact, it was such a mild day on Christmas morning that the previous snow melted away!
My folks got a fake XMas tree this year: One that has colored lights already on it. All it needs is the ornaments. I don’t blame them. It is an annoyance trying to fit a real tree in a base, then string lights on it, then keep the tree watered.
That is why I myself got a fake tree last year. And the house is too small for a real tree, given its ceilings are only half a foot higher than I am. The ornaments on my tree are secured with twisty ties to keep Thyme from knocking them off. And I put the two XMas Coke bottles with plastic poinsettas in the other windows. That is the extent of my XMas holiday decorations.
I got Madre a new Virgin Mary plant holder to replace one that got smashed a couple of months ago. I got my sister the editor a one-terabyte external drive to store all her voluminous files. Everyone else got gift cards.
I also got Moleskin books for the annual meeting of the Friends of the Bracken Library, where I get to be president for a third year, so that all offices will be open next year. I also won a drawing for a XMas basket that included a conical cocoa cup. And I got a two-gigabyte thumb drive that was to be a swap gift at the Whoosier Network XMas party; but I did not go due to inclement weather in Muncie.
I pretty much got what I wanted for XMas: New work pants and a new toaster oven, among other things. That got me thinking that, now that I have new Dockers (the work pants), I might just as well get new jeans, too.
So, the next day, I went to the Big R store in Marion and bought three parts of jeans in the same size as the Dockers. Big R was the only place that sold the size I wear. I figured as much because the store caters to local farmers, who are often a lot bigger than I am.
I stayed home on my vacation for all but one day during XMas week. Mostly I did stuff on my computer, working on my Web site. I also installed a couple of gigabytes of core memory on the folks’ computer. That computer is a professional-model Gateway. Gateway sold its professional computer division to some company that went belly-up within a year. (Incidentally, that is way we use Lenovos at work.) This meant that the only way I can find out what memory it took was to open it up, to record the make and model of motherboard, and look that up.
I did go to the library on last Tuesday to do some work at a workstation. There I met one of my favorite co-workers … for the last time. She was fired just minutes before. Yow!! I never learned the reason. She has a husband and two kids, and now she was stuck celebrating XMas with just them, since she had no money to spend it on anyone else in her extended family. Let’s hope she had a happy XMas, all the same.
I read the letter from my employer on the impedient cuts it will have to make because the governor of my State wants to cut more money from the State budget. It looks like, as an economy, my ex-co-worker’s position will likely not be refilled. Everyone there will have to work harder with what they have.
I had wanted to retake my ASCP examination on Tuesday. But last week I got a call from Ivy Tech Marion, where I was to take the exam. I was told that their connection problems with Prometric, which gives the exams, have gotten worse. They suggested taking the test in Muncie. I did not want to navigate the labyrinth that is Muncie’s street system. I decided to cancel the test, and reapply next month. I want to get this test passed and over with before my evaluation in March.
It is dull, cold and drizzly outside. It is not a good day to end a four-day Thanksgiving weekend. But the Thanksgiving meal itself was good this year: Turkey, dressing with gravy, mashed potatoes with butter, and corn.
The day after that I put up my XMas tree. It is a plastic pine tree, only a meter tall, but it fits on a table in front of my living room window. I draped it with a rope of silver tensil, some silver ornament balls, and a silver star — all plastic. No, the plastic tree is not a real one; but I have nowhere to put a real XMas tree, and my cat (any cat, for that matter) would climb a real tree and knock ornaments off. Anyway, I am impressed with my humble XMas tree.
My XMas gift shopping is complete, much to the distress of whoever hears me say this. Really, though, I started early this month. The gifts (except for one relative, whose gift is on its way from Amazon) are now wrapped and labeled. I even got a gift for exchange at the annual meeting of the Fairmount Library Friends this coming Saturday.
As if in irony to all this, this Sunday’s Cathy comic strip expresses this very event. Cathy is all ready — for the XMas shopping craze, while her hubby is already — done! Cathy did not take that well: The next moment, he’s in a shipping box, she is calling to have him shipped to a different ZIP code for the rest of the year.
My rummaging for ideas on who to give whom compelled me on this past Saturday to do something that I ought to have done for some time. That needed task was to clean up the upper room, which has books, optical disks, and papers all about. In the end I did clean out my file cabinet by shredding all my pre-2009 bills, as well as clean off a table, which I then set up as a writing desk. But the room itself needs a lot more work. I have papers, momentos and assorted junk of the past 40+ years that I need to sort through.
Where did the compulsion come from? I was looking for the May 2009 issue of Consumer Reports because it had ratings on food processors. I could not find it in the end. The local library, where I went to have a document laminated, did not have it, either. In the end I dropped the idea on being told that the intended recipient is up to his nose in food processors.
I have mentioned the hen and duck in my last entry. Back in the end of July my sister the editor wrote about the hen. While the bird belonged to my folks’ next-door neighbors, but it likedthe bush under the folks’ family room window a lot better than its own coop. What my sister did not mention, because nobody knew at the time, was that the hen was using a hidden niche under that same window to lay her eggs.
How the discovery came about:
Next-door neighbor was informed of hen’s productivity and given the eggs. Their hen, their eggs. Of course, given that it was summer, the eggs were no good.
Since then, the hen had vanished in the choas of the village festival, Museum Days. The folks’ neighbors have replaced her with another hen — much larger, darker colored, and not as friendly.
The hen came with a mallard duck, whom everyone calls Timmy. Like the hens Timmy walks about the neighborhood, hides in bushes, digs for bugs and seeds with its bill, and takes juicy white dumps on the sidewalks.
The duck seems to like me a great deal, probably because I provide it with clean water for it to drink and to clean its bill. It even lets me pet its feathers sometimes.
Yes, I have petted a duck.
And yet, I have to be careful when I walk in the folks’ yard, so that I do not step on the duck. The duck has a habit of waddling in front of me, pecking at my shoes and pants legs, and even sitting on my foot.
I am a little concerned about their fate, especially the duck’s. Mallards are supposed to migrate south for the winter; but Timmy is too domesticated to know to do that. I do not know whether either can survive the winter.
I have had to work during the past three Saturdays this month. The work almost totally involved the Macs.
First, students could not print without logging on again. Then, a missetting on the iMacs’ workstation manager slipped past me, locking up the iMacs on Sundays. Finally, I found the right mix of scripts and apps to make the computer availability system (a service to let students know which computers are available) work on the Macs. For each of these I spent a Saturday morning working on the iMacs in the Reference section, because these are too busy on weekdays to work on them. I used some of my off-time to visit the dentist.
Veterans Day is also Madre’s birthday. With her birthday card I got her a foldout card of native wildlife, so that she can better identify what wanders about in her back yard. The folks’ house is only a block from the business district, and yet all sorts of animal life walk about the yards and streets of the town. I have seen possums, raccoons, squirrels, rabbits, and hawks. Their latest visitors have been a mallard duck named Tiny Tim and a chicken who follows him around. Well, two chickens in succession. The fowl belong to the folks’ neighbors, a couple of arts-and-crafts types who have decorated their house and yard with antiques and antique-like kitsch. The neighbors do not seem to know how, or seem to expend enough time, to raise the fowl, so little critters end up escaping their coop and frolicking in my folks’ yard. From time to time I replenish the water the folks leave for the fowl. The duck seems to like me, or at least have this thing for pecking at my shoes.
The folks’ neighbors seem to be locus from which disseminate barnstars. I do not know what those rusty metal stars have anything to do with the native culture where I live. I have never seen them on any house or barn until sometime after 2000. Then they started appearing on houses all over the place. That is so dumb. The nearest Amish community, who would supposedly hang them on their barns, is fifty miles away in Adams County. The barnstars are a home-and-garden fad like those concrete goose ‘gnomes’ that were very popular a decade ago and which I still find in some yards, all dressed up depending on the holiday or season.
I typed this entry on one of the library’s workstations. I do not like to use them. There are all sorts of programs loaded on them, requested by the university’s varied departments. Having to load the configurations of all those programs makes a workstation very, very slow to launch after you log on. Worse, none of those programs are of any use to me. I have to use a licensed version of TextPad 3 because it works from a thumb drive. I have to visit the Microsoft site to download and activate ClearType, so that the Microsoft “new” fonts like Consolas are legible. I also have to download and install Paint.NET. In short, Microsoft’s default utility programs are such trash that others have write improved programs (TextPad, Paint.NET, and AZZ Cardfile for the old Win3x utility) to replace them.
I raked the back yard once more. It was about eight in the evening, and already dark, when I finished the last batch of leaves from the maple trees. They are quite bare now. And their leaves, which I piled up along the street, have been vacuumed by the town street department. Later I gave the lawn one last mowing before the warm November days come to an end.
Speaking of my sister’s cats, I lend her my cat carrier, so that she could take one of her cats to the vet. The cat, whom I call Chitlin, is her oldest cat now. I knew him when he was a very active kitten back in the mid-1990’s. Anyway, the cat turned out to have a mouth cancer, which hindered his ability to eat. I do not know whether the tumor was removed, but my sister has to feed the cat via syringe for awhile. I visited the ‘patient’ last Saturday. It was one freaky looking cat, with one side of his face all swollen; but Vickie is giving him pills that should reduce the swelling. Otherwise, Chitlin is his happy, purring self.
I got my teeth scraped and fluorinated for the next six months. It was more hectic than usual at the dentist’s because he had to break his schedule to treat a little girl, who ran into a metal pole and busted her three front teeth. The strange thing is that the girl did not cry when she was examined, shedding only a single tear when the dentist tested a tooth to see if its root was still firm. I myself, at the girl’s age, would have cried. That is some brave girl!
I realized that I was running out of those Levenger notepads with the annotation columns and the headers, so I bought two more packs of them. I used to be able to buy five pads per pack. Now the packs have three for the same price. Levenger is falling on hard times, evidently, when it cannot even provide cartridges for the pens it used to sell. I had to go to another pen-and-ink site for more cartridges for my Lamy fountain pen.
My folks switched over from Comcast to Frontier this week. The switchover includes satellite television, with a dish antenna that was placed on the southwest corner of the garage, near the door. During my one visit since the install, Madre was thrilled with the choices she now has on the three-month trial, including a view of the Earth from the satellite itself. I myself am impressed by the greater variety of channels they now have for the price they have been paying Comcast.
This leaves only my sister the teacher with cable television. My sister the editor dumped it years ago, and I gave it up early this year. Indeed, it seems that a lot of people in town are giving up on Comcast, either getting satellite television or having antennae erected.
A cat may look upon a king.
As if the king has a choice: Cats, being what they are, may look wherever they want to look. Indeed, they can just as easily look up your skirt! That is such a stupid quote.
I am looking at the Gnomologia, a collection of sayings collected by one Thomas Fuller in 1752 and said to be the source of the sayings in Ben Franklin’s Poor Richards Almanac. It is the source of most of the clichés in our own speech. I have noticed that the gnomological formula A φ may ψ
is better translated today as Even a φ can ψ
; so that the phrase above comes out today as Even a cat can look at a king
. But it is still nonsensical.
This saying makes more sense: All cats alike are gray in the night
. Unless they are black to begin with, then they are invisible but for their eyes. Anyway, in a different language and form, it is the motto of my sister the editor’s blog: la nuit, tous les chats sont gris.
The installation of the new iMacs in the Reference area two weeks ago did not go as smoothly as they seemed. But I fixed the problems that cropped up, and the iMacs now work as intended.
There are only two major differences in the new imaging of the iMacs.
Any other changes are upgrades to existing software.
The result of all these changes seems to be the disappearance of the Active Directory fix. Last Friday, two weeks after I have ran the dsconfigad -passinterval 0 (extending the Active Directory password indefinitely) on the reference iMacs, users reported being unable to log on them. In the end I rebound the iMacs in the traditional way, but I am not looking forward to having to do this every two weeks. Something changed in the way Active Directory is handled on the campus servers, as I have found nothing in the Apple updates to indicate a change in Active Directory.
A couple of Wednesdays mornings ago I took, and flunked, the Apple Certified Support Professional test. I went to the test center inside the Ivy Tech Marion campus. After a few preliminaries, like showing two photo ID cards and signing my name a few times, I got on with the test. I wore ear plugs and headphones at first; but I had to remove firs the plugs and then the headphones, as the room was getting too hot and the background noise was more bearable than the noises in my head.
To make a two-hour test short, I can’t reveal the details under the terms of the test, but I did fail — getting a 62, below the pass threshold of 73.
I did badly in install/config, user accounts, network config and peripherals. I know I was getting stuck with FileVault, Keychains, account recovery, network configurations and Print Utility. I have never had to deal with any of them. I do not work with Mac staff workstations, where these sort of things mattered. I work on public Macs, where students are not supposed to monopolize the workstations, and any problems disappear with a reboot thanks to Deep Freeze.
I plan to retake the test in December, and will read up on my deficiencies to get a passing score, now that I know where I am ignorant.
The singing talent of Sakai Noriko graced such animé as Gunbuster and Video Girl Ai, especially the latter, whose manga author was a big fan of hers. And it is easy to understand why: Ms. Sakai is pretty, engaging and talented enough to branch off into acting later in her career. Alas, that was in the 1990’s.
I have found it hard to believe when I saw the BBC feed headline Japan pop star trial draws crowd
, and followed the link to discover the pop star in question is — wha? you’re kidding! No, you are NOT kidding! Ahh, why her?
Yes, that pop star was Ms. Sakai, now on trail on the charge of drug possession. The State wants to plug her into a cell for eighteen months; Ms. Sakai, if she ever makes it out of the courtroom, wants to give up acting altogether and start a new career in hospice care.
Perhaps it is just as well. Ms. Sakai is pushing forty. While she is still lovely, her features are not as smooth as they once were. Neither, evidently, is her stamina as in her youth, hence the need for the uppers she was caught with.
What has surprised me is that all this has come about for the past several months — it was during August when Ms. Sakai fled, causing a media sensation in East Asia, only to surrender herself to Tokyo police — yet I had discovered this only a couple of weeks ago.
The autumn is only a month old, and both my maple tree and the one only just over the fench in my neighbor’s yard have lost most of their golden yellow leaves in a big rain last Thursday and Friday. I have just finished raking them to the side of the street for the town street department to vacuum up.
The mountain range of leaves had attracted J.T., my neighbors’ cat. This is the cat that, early this past summer, was found as a sickly kitten abandonned along a country road by one of my high-school classmates. After the kitten was vetted and nursed by a mother cat for some months, J.T. is now a healthy teenaged
cat with a penchant for rolling around in the middle of the street, compelling me to either pick him up or chase him off. He also likes the grass bush and tree in the front yard.
I think I am getting the hang of my new deep fryer. The trick is to add the stuff being fried into the basket over the sink, and not when the baskey hangs over the deep fryer. The ice and crumbs in the bag, when they fall into the boiling oil, cause an alarming convaporation
. The fries came out decent this time around.
I got another month’s worth of test strips at the new CVS store that has opened at the intersection of Washington Street and State Road 9 on Marion’s south side. The store was designed with a diagonal main aisle that takes you straight to the pharamcy. That is an excellent advantage from the store’s point of view: The customer gets a view of each section of the store and its wares, which they would not have if they just walked through single aisles to the pharamcy like in regular stores. But this will not be good for the CVS in Gas City, the successor
to the defunct Fairmount Pharmacy. The new South Marion CVS, while further away, is easier to reach: 26 to 9, then straight north to just past 37.
I have finished deploying the eight new iMacs at work. They have bigger screens and more disk storage. Otherwise they are just like the iMacs they replaced. Half of those will go into a windowed alcove on the third floor near my unit’s office. I cannot add more in there without running out of licenses for the software that lets Mac users print to our public printers or to access their online storage.
It has taken the four years or so of installing public Macs at work to learn what works and what does not. Every academic year there seems to be something wrong with the Macs that I work to fix.
I list all this because I have scheduled an examination to become an Apple Certified Support Professional for this coming Wednesday. It is high time I took this, given the years I spent working on the Macs. I just need to make myself familiar with Mac OS X features that a public Mac would not use, like keychains, Exposé, Spaces, Time Machine and Front Row.