The Last Summer Weekend 2011

I have taken my last vacation day of the fiscal year this last Friday. I spent it working on Madre's pile of yard waste. Actually, I spent a couple of afternoons because it was a year's worth of yard waste. I burnt it — as much as I could because much of it had already composted — in the trash barrel because I wanted the fire somewhere controlable. Now it is all either compost (which has to be hauled away) or ash.

The past week was the first week of school. And, like all first days of school, it was an annoyance. The students wanted to print their first lessons, syllabi and whatnot. It was a test of the new print server, and during the first couple of days, it was overstressed. The virtual server it was resting on had to be reconfigured and rebooted. That fixed the print server. But what could not be fixed were the multi-100-megabyte files: The Powerpig presentations (and Word documents) with their heavy graphics, the malformed PDF documents, the printouts straight from the course management server — all either freezing up the queues or printing page after endless page despite all attempts to stop them. In the end I had to monitor the queues to keep them running.