Dysmey Blog Archives > 2009 > Autumn Potpourri 2009

Autumn Potpourri 2009

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.

• First the students were clamoring for the ability to print to the public printers. It took me awhile, but I found a way to do this.
• Then the Macs would crash every two or three weeks after running out of resources; I had to write a script to restart the Mac after every logout. (The workstation management program now does that automatically.)
• Then the Macs would lose the ability to log on the campus network every two weeks, forcing me to remap the Macs to the campus Active Directory (AD). I learned that an upgrade to the AD server brought this about; I learned a lot later that turning off the password interval on the AD client on the Macs was the 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.