Well, I am currently off for the next week and will not be back to work until after the new year. Well, not quite. I need to head over to the NWC Sunday afternoon and set up printers for the director's backup machine. His laptop failed why he was away and it is off for repairs. In the meantime, his old desktop has been put back into service. I forgot that it had not been set up for the new building. So no printers are set for the new networking and in I go.

I can at least say that all my holiday shopping is now complete. Nothing left as far as I can think. But my guess is that like the printers, I am forgetting something. I am sure it will come to me late in the day. For at least the past couple of years, I have been out for a quick run to the store to get one item or another that I have forgot.

So, a break for now. I will try and post a bit of what is on the docket for spring term. Some very interesting projects for sure. So keep tuned.

mjl

Sorry that it has been so long since I have last updated. Been busy with both general semester chores as well as working out the kinks in the NWC. Now that I have had a couple of days off owing to the "bad weather" I figured I would work on an update.

As to the weather, the University has been closed the Thursday and today. So I have been enjoying the days off (sorta). I have still been monitoring systems at work (kinda) and checking e-mail. The ability to monitor systems at work is hampered by the fact that I cannot get onto the internal network of the NWC. None of the paths into the building have been established. Frustrating to say the least. This means that if any system has troubles, I am forced to drive to the NWC to take care of the problem. Not the most desirable option with driving conditions as poor as they are.

It appears that the problems with some machines not connecting to the network in the NWC 5720 (the Linux lab) have been resolved. It WAS a hardware issue with the wires (hmmmmm) and so the kludge fix that we were using has been removed. I will keep an eye on those machines over the course of next week and see where we stand.

Also, we are looking into options for setting up a new electronic map wall. We are looking at a few solutions, one of which will require that we build GEMPAK on an Intel Apple. That should be interesting. Unidata has done it for the Power PC but has not compiled a binary for the newer Intel's. I will post our status later.

mjl