Work this week
Jul. 29th, 2004 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nlbarberSpent most of the week working on moving the office Web site from our local server to "NatWeb", a set-up of 3 redundant central servers that are located at Internet/intranet portals and, most importantly, that someone else maintains and keeps secure. Didn't finish, though I did get to the point of making the first sync of our pages with the new root directory. Most of the work was cleanup--getting rid of the old server name we'd like to retire, removing long-dead pages and graphics (amazing what has accumulated since we set up the site in 1997 or so), etc., etc. Next week I'll tackle the various errors that showed during the first sync and start testing the pages on the new server. Hopefully we can do the DNS changeover on Wednesday or so, and turn off the old server the following week.
In between battles with Unix scripts on the Web server, there was lots of office gossip going on. While I was out of town last week, the hot story broke: our Administrative Officer was apparently found to be embezzling, with some forgery thrown in. I missed the first descent of the Inspector General's office, but understand that they will be back next week along with people from our Regional office (some of whom were around this week, trying to sort through the AO's piles of paper), Headquarters staff, and our new (temporary) AO who will try to get the mess straightened out for end-of-the-FY closeout. I hope to remain uninvolved, though I did a few quick Web page updates of our policy memos at the pleading of the office chief's admin assistant. And I filled out my travel voucher for last week's trip very carefully...
Last fun of the week was a battle with Microsoft. I'm really generally pleased that MS Office is so cross-platform compatible...except that it just isn't quite there. I'm giving a paper...no, a talk, as I didn't write a paper...at a conference on Monday. I gave the same talk in March at a lunch meeting of the Georgia Ground-Water Association, running the Powerpoint slides from my Mac laptop. But at the conference, they will be using PCs, of course--so before I started to review the presentation, I moved the file over to my PC to make sure everything looks OK. Most things are fine--little font changes, as PowerPoint is continually trying to think for you and make the fonts bigger or smaller. But then I hit the graphs, all of which were created within PP in a single data sheet. The first few had the axes and some other linework switch from white to black, thus becoming invisible on my dark blue background. Oh, and some tick marks flipped from inside to outside, just for grins. Clicking on the graph so it opened in MS Graph was generally be enough to get the linework to switch back. But then I hit a series of graphs that wouldn't open--PP would tell me the application or file couldn't be found, and that perhaps I needed to re-install the application. That's the same application that just opened 3 slides ago, and the same datasheet... <Sound of much hair-tearing> It was 6 PM, the end of my work week, and I decided that I'll ask if I can run PP from my Mac (I'm the first presenter of the afternoon in my session) and if not, I'll live without axes on the graphs that wouldn't open. The axis labels are OK, so the audience can get some idea of the scale even without the lines and tick marks. I hope.
In between battles with Unix scripts on the Web server, there was lots of office gossip going on. While I was out of town last week, the hot story broke: our Administrative Officer was apparently found to be embezzling, with some forgery thrown in. I missed the first descent of the Inspector General's office, but understand that they will be back next week along with people from our Regional office (some of whom were around this week, trying to sort through the AO's piles of paper), Headquarters staff, and our new (temporary) AO who will try to get the mess straightened out for end-of-the-FY closeout. I hope to remain uninvolved, though I did a few quick Web page updates of our policy memos at the pleading of the office chief's admin assistant. And I filled out my travel voucher for last week's trip very carefully...
Last fun of the week was a battle with Microsoft. I'm really generally pleased that MS Office is so cross-platform compatible...except that it just isn't quite there. I'm giving a paper...no, a talk, as I didn't write a paper...at a conference on Monday. I gave the same talk in March at a lunch meeting of the Georgia Ground-Water Association, running the Powerpoint slides from my Mac laptop. But at the conference, they will be using PCs, of course--so before I started to review the presentation, I moved the file over to my PC to make sure everything looks OK. Most things are fine--little font changes, as PowerPoint is continually trying to think for you and make the fonts bigger or smaller. But then I hit the graphs, all of which were created within PP in a single data sheet. The first few had the axes and some other linework switch from white to black, thus becoming invisible on my dark blue background. Oh, and some tick marks flipped from inside to outside, just for grins. Clicking on the graph so it opened in MS Graph was generally be enough to get the linework to switch back. But then I hit a series of graphs that wouldn't open--PP would tell me the application or file couldn't be found, and that perhaps I needed to re-install the application. That's the same application that just opened 3 slides ago, and the same datasheet... <Sound of much hair-tearing> It was 6 PM, the end of my work week, and I decided that I'll ask if I can run PP from my Mac (I'm the first presenter of the afternoon in my session) and if not, I'll live without axes on the graphs that wouldn't open. The axis labels are OK, so the audience can get some idea of the scale even without the lines and tick marks. I hope.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-30 07:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-31 04:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-31 01:51 pm (UTC)At home I have a "desklamp" iMac, one of the initial 15" screen ones. And an old "Wall Street" model G3 laptop, now relegated to opening too-old MS Office files and reading floppies.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-31 03:12 pm (UTC)