(no subject)

Sorry I haven't written in a while. I seem to have other things keeping me busy in the evening.

My system administration work continued. My colleagues in SF and away from the offices reported a number of problems with mail, which I think I've managed to solve now. I had to talk several of them through reconfiguration processes and network debugging. Reading out command lines over the phone is no fun! Thankfully I'm able to do quite a lot by remote administration, and I've managed to get all our servers back in sync for the first time since November.

Took a server out of service that wasn't doing much and which no-one had a password for. It turned out to be a name server for some of my colleagues, but it didn't take long to fix their network configuration. (They should have been using DHCP!)

The next administrative challenge at work: counting licences and installations. We have maybe a thousand CDs, accompanied by hundreds of manuals and other bits of paperwork, and many different programs installed on every computer. We may have installed more copies than we have licences for, which could potentially get us into legal trouble, so we're attempting an internal audit. Today I attempted a bit of automation - I wrote a script that reads through the registry on each PC to get a list of installed programs, then checks it against the licence conditions (if known) and number of licences we have. This unfortunately doesn't cover the Windows 98, Unix and MacOS machines, but there aren't many of them to check.

We went to the a.f.p meet in Cambridge at the weekend, and had a number of guests crashing at our flat. This involved lots of pubs and restaurants, walking back and forth between them, Australian Rules giant Jenga, lots of chocolate, live streaming toast, heavenly milkshakes at Old Orleans, liquid cola cubes (double Malibu, Coke and lime, I think), and other weirdness.

Those bastards at Barclays charged me £40 for going too far overdrawn! My mistake, yes, as I'd forgotten about the electricity bill payment, but it's really a bit unfair. I wonder if noises about possibly changing bank will persuade them to pay back some of that charge...

The meal plan seems to have gone to pot this week, but we have a plan for the remainder of it. We shall be cooking for my parents when they visit this weekend, so I hope we can get that right.