The weather is more or less back to normal. The big wind from the day before last has come and gone. I have yet to look over my house, because by the time I return home it is too dark to see the house clearly. But I do not expect anything serious.
The warmer weather has almost completely melted away the big snow of last month. It has lost me a vacation day; but I suppose that is one of the reasons why vacation days are there. That snow, and the rains that came with the big wind, turned my yard into a pond for a day or two.
My cat has more or less her normal self again. Well, she is normal for a cat who has a large patch of fur on her back shaved off. It’s kind of freaky, but it will grow back in time.
On the unbound Macs, I really did not expect my co-workers to have been able to rebind the Macs at work to the University Active Directory server in my absence. I really must stop doubting their skills and abilities. I had to finish rebinding of the boxes, but the rest work okay.
An experiment is coming which, if it works okay, will bring real touchscreen print-job release stations to the library. Something will be coming, anyway, because the current one-piece stations are beyond obsolete. Even the company that made the stations no longer exists (it is being liquidated as I type), so support for them is no longer forthcoming.
Friday the 13th is supposed to be an unlucky day. (And there will be two more unlucky days this year.) I have had no cause to complain until the afternoon. Then someone sent me an insulting message to my e-mail account at work. It never occurred to the foolish fellow that the headers on an e-mail, even one written on a Yahoo! Webmail form, would include the sender’s IP address. And, while I could not use standard Internet utilities at work, I could at home. And with those I was able to trace the message back to at least its network of origin. That was enough for me to identify this fellow.
In the nearly five years that I have worked for the University, I have been patient and tolerant of other people, so that I may work well with them. But this underhanded attack is the sort of thing I will not tolerate. I do not know what his problem is. It does not matter to me now. It will matter to him, because I intend to give him as little support for his projects as I can get away with for as long as he continues to work at the University.
This morning I took my cat Isis to an veterinary hospital in Anderson to have her back worked on.
The first thing they did was do some X-rays, which were recorded digitally. They were interesting pictures of my cat as a skeleton, but the veterinarian could find nothing wrong based on them.
The next step was to do a myelogram, where under anesthesia a die is injected into the spinal fluid and images are taken of the resulting flow. Now, something was found in the vertebra that is causing Isis trouble; so the vet gave her a steroid shot and let her rest off the anesthesia.
I took the bottle of meds that Isis is taking to show the hospital folks. I did not realize that the bottle was not leak-proof until I looked in the bag it was in and found most of the meds in the bag and not in the bottle! I had to go to the local vet later for a refill.
While Isis was in hospital, I vacuumed the carpeted rooms. I tried to wash the other floors, but the mop chose today to fall apart. But the cat now had a clean and neat place to come home to. I had my weekly hot-cheese burger and fries from the local grill.
Later that afternoon, I went to Muncie for my eye examination. The eye doctors moved to a new building outside the city, near the Petsmart store. The place looks more spacious, and I was told that people are not running into each other now, as they were at the old office near the Ball State campus. But the exam rooms are normal-sized rather than elongated, which is not a good thing, because proper eye measurement requires distance. So they have to use a series of mirrors to simulate distance.
Anyway, my eyes are okay this year, and my glasses needed only readjustment of the frames. The last test, for diabetic damage, required dilating my pupils. I ended up driving home, to the local vet’s, and to the hospital in Anderson in a fog of glittering lights, which makes driving a bit of a freakout. But I had to return to the hospital, pick up Isis, pay the bill (which I will not discuss), and bring her home.
It was a lovely day to do all this. The sun was out most of the time. The temperature was daring to break 60°F (15°C). And the wind was brisk but pleasant. It will not stay that way: The rest of the week promises rain, more rain, and a wind that will probably blow most of the loose branches out of the maple tree. Let’s hope that wind does just that and leave the shingles on my roof alone.
It is typical that, while I am gone from work, something happens that requires my attention. This time it is some of the iMacs, which have lost their connection to the network, without which students cannot log on. This is what happens when you try to run Macs on a Microsoft network. The Active Directory (AD) server that holds the workstation lists recycles its accounts every so often. When that happens, the PCs adjust automatically; the Macs cannot, because their AD utility is not totally compatible with AD. So I have to go to each Mac, one at a time, and rebind them to AD. What other solutions are out there involve using the root account, which is never a good idea on a public workstation.
After a week of bitter cold, the coming of warm winds made the weather more bearable. I could walk about today with only my favorite navy blue jacket. The winds also started to melt the thick blanket from last month’s Wednesday of Heavy Snowfall, and the ice that has made the county roads a ditch-filling vehicle threat. Now I can actually make it to work at a decent time.
I got a summons to jury duty for the ninth. But I called the county courthouse on Friday, only to hear the recorded message that the trial for which I would have been called to serve in its jury has been canceled.
Now that the problem with Isis’ back has been referred to that animal hospital in Anderson, I will have to call them Monday to set up an appointment. I have been reading good things about the hospital on the Web; too bad I cannot read the hospital’s Web site itself, at least with Firefox. I don’t know whom the hospital commissioned to design its Web site, but the designer is an a◊◊hat.
The General Assembly (the legislature of my state) is making threatening noises about library consolidation with Senate Bill 348. It is possible that it, along with other local-government-globbing bills that the governor loves so much, might not make it past the Democrats in the lower chamber. The Democrats do not see the need for such consolidation since they had already capped property taxes.
I bought two more of those beechwood book shelves. One is serving as a bedside table, since I do read a lot before going to sleep. The other gets a pile of books off the floor in the upper room. When I learned that the bookshelves were delivered one night, I could not find them at first. The usual places the UPS guy puts packages had nothing there. The snow was thick, so he could not put the two boxes of bookshelves anywhere else, I though. But then I circled the house (hard enough with the thick snow) and found the boxes in a corner where the foyer meets the house, out of view of the intersection and in the shadows where even I had trouble noticing them.