A lot has been going on. I have been made co-chair of the National Weather Center Information Technologies Council (NITC). I am not all that comfortable with the formality of it all, but I will do my best. This is a committee made up of mainly techno-geeks trying to follow some form of Robert's Rules. It would make for a great week long series in Dilbert.

I got to tour the NWC classrooms today to check out the AV equipment. I am very happy at how well the classrooms are coming along. I think the students will appreciate the features, especially the smart boards. The real challenge will be to get all the faculty trained on the equipment. I am sure the first semester will be a busy one for me in that regards.

Furniture is in my office. While not quite the setup I imagined, it is a definite improvement over my old digs in the SEC. I at least now have a separate room to work on the computers. This will make for a much neater office. I wish that I could post some pictures, but I am not allowed until after the official opening of the NWC. So you all will just have to wait or stop by once we are moved in to the NWC.

Oh, by the way... the move has been delayed yet again. So June 7th is out and I have yet to receive official word as to when our new move in date will be.

mjl

Well, I have added a link to my .Mac calendar. Without it i would be lost. As you can see, the number of meetings is growing the closer we get to the move in date of the NWC. In the meantime, I am piecing together a plan for the move of the SoM and all of its computing.

Right now, our servers will remain in the SEC. I will not work on those until all the faculty, staff and students have completed their moves. Most of the main servers are being upgraded to new hardware, so most of the work will be in setting up the new machines, then transferring the data and starting up the new machine.

Another issue is that there will not be any SoM machines in public access labs which will be running MS Windows. All public access machines will be either Apple, Linux or FreeBSD. I know that this is not too popular with some of the students. However,. from both a meteorology side and a sysadmin standpoint, this setup will work well. This of course does not mean that there are no machines running MS Windows. Faculty, staff, and graduate students for their own desktop workstations can run whatever OS makes them the most productive.

I am trying to get electronic versions of the floor plans for the NWC. I am also testing the idea of a SoM NWC Computing blog to track status and post updates as to where the computing group stands relative to the work still needing to be performed as the SoM transitions into their new digs.

mjl