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Wiki Wild… Wiki Wild Wild Documentation

With a good start on wireless hotspots yesterday, I thought I’d start this morning finishing their setup. I got a little frustrated and a little more sidetracked as I had to refer to the hidden and overdocumented instructions. Between at least three network shares with countless folders, email, Google Shared Drives, and individually shared Google documents, sometimes finding what you really want can be an absolute nightmare. I’ve been talking about wanting to start a Wiki for a long time for its ability to interlink other articles, and today was the day to break ground.

Zach, Gary, Allen, and I went to Wendy’s for lunch, and then Gary showed me how to start up a virtual machine on our servers. It was pretty straightforward, but fun to finally dig into. Next will be setting up a web server with PHP and a SQL database. Right now I’m just saying words, but hopefully soon I’ll have a better understanding as I find my way to documentation Valhalla.

I spent the rest of the afternoon digging into more Avaya stuff, and testing how my new IVR behaves. In retrospect I could have done some more testing before, but now that I’ve been able to collect the recording and create the call map, I can dig into the nuances of how all the pieces connect together. My next big sell will probably be a complete tear-down and reconstruction of the entire district’s worth of phone extensions, and I’m giddy just thinking about it.

When I got home, I took care of some housekeeping before running to Walmart for cat food. Then it was off to Summer’s to hear about her day at headquarters in Little Rock.

Turn on by holding the power button and go through the tutorial, (push buttons for next until the dashboard shows the signal strength, battery level, and icons).

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Cellulations

I approached today quite a bit more casually, but still managed to get quite a bit done. It’s likely that I’m not prioritizing properly, but at least I got things closed. I need to hunker down and churn through some 1:1 laptops soon though, because they’re going to stack up on me pretty quickly.

Summer invited us all to the shop for hot dogs during Paint the Town Green & Gold, but nobody else showed up. I mostly stood out in the sun with Ben and just watched cars go by. I was hoping Summer would have a chance to step away and just eat with me, but no such luck. I headed back a bit early since it was so hot, and I had some things to take care of at our office before going back to work. The afternoon went by pretty quickly as I wrapped up the day swapping devices on our Verizon wireless account. I couldn’t tell any particular rhyme or reason for the replacement devices we received, but overall it was pretty painless.

When I got home, I started some laundry before heading out to get the girls from karate. Then we met Summer at Cici’s for dinner before heading back home. Once laundry was stowed away, it was off for an early bedtime.

I like me better when I’m with you.

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The Fastest Day Ever

I slept pretty well last night and was able to jump right into the day. The morning absolutely flew by. I got enough done that I felt really accomplished, and even spent some time remoting in to assist Heather with a deployment. That was two labs worth of testing software resolved. It felt like I had only been there for half an hour before lunch time. I lucked out and caught Summer on a slow day so she could meet me at Arby’s for lunch. The poor old lady at the register seemed new, but was kind. The tiny girl that came to help her a couple times as she struggled seemed like she was super frustrated by it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but thinking back she looked a lot like the daughter of one of the big wigs from back when I worked at Domino’s. Surely it wasn’t.

After lunch, I had to babysit the interns for a period while the girls in the library were out. I took them downstairs to help move a lab worth of computers from under the desks to behind the monitors. I originally intended to leave them to do it alone, but as we got going, I just stayed and helped complete the job. I was surprised we were able to get it all done in one day. I worked on some other stuff for a bit until Ben came by to look at the fire panel at vo-tech. I met him there and tried to learn anything, but oldschool telephone stuff still just confuses the hell out of me.

Eaddie came to the high school today, but she just had to chill out while I was with Ben. Then a bit after quitting time I had to take off to pick up Autumn from her practice. We were a bit later than I wanted to be, but I didn’t want to just leave Ben either. Once I had everyone, we headed straight to their house so they could take care of whatever it is they had to do. Autumn first claimed homework, then reported near-immediate completion when she wanted to sit down and play Minecraft. I played with them for a bit, and then switched to my phone to kill time until Summer got home.

I hadn’t been home, and it was too late for dinner by the time Summer got there, so I left and spent the rest of the evening taking care of the shrimp before bed.

We’ve got an escape artist!

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Painted Town Projections

Summer left this morning for the gym and then went to the shop to decorate for the Tech pride event. It took me a while to get around, but eventually I made it out to meet her, bringing one of her big Bluetooth speakers from her house for some tunes. Disappointingly, Alex was the only one that showed up to help, so there was a lot more time and work involved than any of us really wanted to put into it. I was immediately hot and cranky, but I contributed a little by getting a proper projector so they didn’t have to keep cutting shapes out for their overhead projector.

By the time we finally left, I felt completely sapped and sleepy from the prolonged heat. I just sat down at home and couldn’t do much of anything. I hated that I couldn’t be more excited to help her, but that kind of stuff just isn’t me. I felt guilty for feeling like I just burned the whole day, but normally when we sacrifice getting the important things done, we’re at least doing something fun instead. Maybe karma earned me the huge scratch across my glasses from tossing my blankets around to sort the bed.

Some days I just pray to the god of sex and drums and rock ‘n’ roll

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Sleeping In at Home

Summer had to work today, which meant I got to sleep in at home for the first time in a long while. I started the morning with the shrimp and just kind of lounged around all morning and early afternoon. When I finally got around, I tinkered with the computer some and got to play with PRTG, which is something I installed but then sort of abandoned last year. I even had a little fun adding some custom device icons.

Eventually I got around to bathing, then waited a bit until Summer got here from the gym and a shower. We went to my parents’ house for duck soup for dinner, and then came home for a few tense episodes of Battlestar Galactica.

No, no, no. It’s “frak.”

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Fax It to Me Baby

The team meeting was pretty worthless this morning, but I expected it to be with Jason’s attitude about “nobody sending him any projects” yesterday. Heather had some lines to pull at the junior high, so Ben helped her with one set while Allen and I ran another longer one. Ours was a fax line for the counselors, because it’s 1982. We worked until a late lunch, then went to Wind Taste to eat before going back to drop the cable down the wall.

Once that was finished, we went back to the shop for a while, where I spent some time chatting with Gary before heading to the high school to do some work. I wrapped up late there too, then headed home for a little while. I messed with the aquariums some until I saw Summer’s text about needing help at the shop. Evidently they had some trouble with their modem, and poor luck timed it during an outage with Suddenlink’s own provisioning service. We called and spent a while on hold, but couldn’t ever get the service switched to the new modem, so Summer left her personal modem there for tomorrow.

Having done all we could do, Summer went home to get some clothes while I picked up some Zaxby’s for dinner, then met her at my house for the evening.

I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a freelancer, but I’ll give it a shot.

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Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed.

I came in to work this morning ready to get things done. My first stop at the arena was a bust, but then I sat down in my office and just bit right into the Avaya system. I dug through manuals and samples, and got an IVR built. I even found an unused phone number that worked with a vanity number. I was super proud of it, even if it probably took me way longer to create than it should have. By the time lunch rolled around, I was super hungry. Allen and Jason were going to Arby’s, so I met them there. On the way back, I felt like it was nice enough to take the bike out, so I went home to trade.

I worked late hunting down a bunch of existing network lines, and got it mostly figured out. Then I went home to change before going to pick up the girls for karate. Summer was almost off work, so I went to my parents’ house to meet her for more leftovers. When I got home, I had to clean up the Imagitarium a bit because the screen I put over the filter to keep the shrimp from getting sucked in was too dirty to let enough water out into the sump. Then it was off to bed early again to finish the week on a good Friday.

Look at me. I am the phone guy now.

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Learning ALL THE THINGS

I tried pretty hard to get things done today, and though I closed a few little things, I felt better about learning and knowing processes and things. I wish I had time to just sit and document some of this stuff, or better yet, organize the documentation that we already have so it’s more accessible. I worked into lunch a bit, but got hungry and bothered enough to leave. I tried to go to CiCi’s with Summer, but she got stuck on the phone while I was waiting for her, and I had to run to Wendy’s really quickly instead.

After lunch, I chatted with Ben for a bit so he could help me better understand some of the things I had been working on. I was on the right track, which made me feel at least a little competent. It’s starting to feel like I’m the everything-guy though, and it’s aggravating being around people that make more for less. I also about had a fight with my phone over how stupid it was being, but then out of the blue it fixed itself as though it could sense that I was preparing to pull the trigger on a full factory reset.

I finished up the day a little late, then headed home to do some more laundry while I waited for Summer to get off work. Then we went to my parents’ house for spring rolls, and the girls brought some homework along as well. They did really well today, but they couldn’t stick around for too long. I had to head home to finish laundry and clean up after the cat too, and then it was a relatively early night to bed.

Shrimp everywhere!

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Lunch with LeRoy

Today was pretty incredibly scattered for me. I got a few things done, but I had trouble prioritizing things to actually get them off my plate. Instead, I kept starting new projects and finishing nothing. I had planned to go get a $5 garden bar with Summer for lunch, but Ben invited everyone to Taco John’s, and I couldn’t pass up seeing him again after his retirement. Ben’s order got made and delivered twice, so I took the leftover tacos to Summer so she’d at least have the same light lunch I had in case she wanted to go to Ruby Tuesday later in the afternoon.

The afternoon was more of the same scattered nonsense for me until I finally left and had to get the girls from the shop to go home to change for karate. They did a good job of hustling and I got them dropped off just in time, and then I went to my parents’ house for some leftovers. I didn’t realize how late it had gotten when Summer left work for the gym, so Autumn called when nobody came to pick them up. I ran to get them, then cooked up some chicken sandwiches for their dinner before going home to complete some laundry.

Tomorrow, I’ll have to sit down and just do a thing.

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Meet the Nerites

It was so hard to get out of the perfectly snuggly bed this morning after staying up too late. We had to get to the lobby for breakfast though, and I was excited for an omelette from the chef. I was disappointed to learn that he wasn’t there, and I’m guessing they only bring him out for conferences. The rest of the food was okay, but not great. The biscuits were a surprising win.

We went back to the room to get ready for the trip back home, and finally left right around noon. I tried calling a couple local pet stores, but everyone was closed for the holiday. Without any other plans, we headed straight home. I dropped Summer off with the kids and then headed to PetSmart to look for some snails for the Imagitarium. They actually had some ghost shrimp in stock too, and one was berried, so I picked up a couple of them to mix up the gene pool. They had one black racer nerite and a tiny horned nerite that looked fun, so I got those for the algae and headed home.

I wanted to take a nap, but spent most of the afternoon with the aquariums instead. I got some laundry going and headed to my parents’ house for some eggplant soup, then came back home to finish up laundry and headed to bed really early.

That is a horny gastropod mollusc.