Weekend Plans

This weekend will prove to be one of the busiest in the history of Scott. Granted, it’s nothing that I’m actually doing, per se…but there’s going to be a lot of work done. What, you may be asking, will be happening? I’m glad you may be asking!

Starting today, I have 36 laptops that will be arriving from Dell for deployment to the attorneys and paralegals. Thirty-Six laptops…that’s a bunch! I don’t know if I can even count that high right now. Anyway, the cool deal is that I created an image for the laptops ahead of time and sent it off to Dell for pre-loading on the machines. That means, in effect, that I can un-box each laptop and put it on the desk. In doing this, I probably shaved off about 30-40 hours worth of work. That’s money, ladies and gents. Granted, you can’t deploy 36 computers to 2 cities, 3 buildings and 5 floors without there being some small issues, but I’m ready for that as well. I have a bottle of Valium all ready.

On Friday, I’m going to be working with Northrop Grumman in a project which will involve rebuilding our Citrix server. This, I hope, won’t be very “work” intensive for me as all I really have to do is find the software and provide it for them and to be “on call” just in case something bad happens (which it won’t). Once this project is completed, the Missoula office (which connects to our system via Citrix) will be MUCH more stable and will run much better. I hope, anyway.

I had some good news the other day. My supervisor left a message for me on the phone in which he stated, “Why don’t you go ahead and change your message to “Network Administrator” or “Systems Administrator” instead of “IT Support”.” Wow. I talked with him yesterday for a bit and he asked if I had done it yet, which I hadn’t. I asked why I should and he explained that he wanted me to change my title because of the work that I’ve been doing, the initiative that I’ve taken on the projects and planning and because I’m now starting to act like the system here is “MY” system rather than “THE” system. To me, the difference isn’t that much, but apparently it is to him and others. I just changed it

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about stuff. Serious stuff like religion, politics and all the other “Taboo” subjects. I’ll write about these next time.

Today I woke up at 6am and decided that I wanted to go outside and look at the stars. If there’s one thing about Montana that amazes me even more than the scenery, the weather, the people and the attitude of the place, it’s the night sky. There are more stars here than I’ve seen anywhere else short of Up-State New York. I realize, of course, that the same stars are above my head that have been above me everywhere…it’s just that the sheer number of them is much higher. For about 30 minutes, I stood outside with my eyes turned skyward…drinking it all in (Curly and Tomassa, you would be pleased to note that I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt in 28 degree weather…I was wearing shoes though). Amazing. What do you find amazing?