Emily from a few entries back returned to the hospital two weeks ago for a two-week stay. I spent a few nights up in her room at the hospital playing softball (of course) with the plastic recorder and a Sponge Bob Squarepants ball. Once again, my muscles regretted our softball game the morning afterwards, but we both had a lot of fun. We did a few other things too - watched an R.L. Stine (Goosebumps) movie, and made fun of it the whole way. (Side note: R.L. does an appearance before each movie to give you a quick idea of the movie you're about to see, and the man is the epitome of a bad actor. He delivers his every line in a deadpan monotone that is probably meant to be "ominous", but ends up making you think "Man, cut the downers.".) The nurses thanked me again for spending time with her - they geot pestered to play constantly when there was nobody around. Anyways, we both had a lot of fun together. Good times.

And work. Work, work, work.

We can build systems to help with user stupidity, but not deliberate malice. Stupid virus writers, making my job difficult! Our Pet Virus of the Week, while being listed as only causing slight damage on Symantec's website, played hell with the hospital's scheduling software, taking almost all of the machines that it ran on, out. This generated, over the course of the week, about 50 calls. What really bothered me about this is the fact that our last virus used the same known exploit in Windows, for which two patches are available. Why we didn't just use the SUS server or (God forbid) SMS to push out something useful for once is quite beyond me.

I've also recently re-evaluated my opinions of some of my co-workers, Merlin (our lead tech) in particular. When I first arrived, Merlin was pretty much at the level of Alpha Geek. The man was (and still is) incredibly skilled, and highly knowledgeable about the systems he services. Over time however, I've come to realize, he has his faults. For instance, our disagreement today. I got a call for a computer that was having trouble accessing the internet. Where I work, there are generally three standard reasons for this:

1) They have the old proxy settings still set. These proxy servers don't exist anymore, so anyone still trying to use them will be unable to go anywhere.

2) They have their homepage set as "http:///", and they can't figure out that you have to type something to go somewhere.

3) A patch cable got unplugged, either from their computer or back at the switch.

(1) is the most common, and to help with this, a Group Policy Object was created and put into Active Directory that would remove the proxy settings whenever you logged into the domain. Sometimes, this doesn't work for whatever reason or another, and the users can't just remove the settings because the old image was locked down. When I got the call, I mentioned it to him, and as is his way, he repeats the fix back to you, He knew about this call, though, and mentioned that clearing all the proxy settings for all the users would be impossible. (Since Windows NT/2K/XP does this on a per-user-basis.) When I mentioned that I could simply use the Group Policy Editor to clear them all out at once, his immediate response was "No, you can't! Because Active Directory will just clear out the settings on the next login.". This is correct, but the settings that Active Directory pushes are exactly the same as I'd be putting in, and if Active Directory was pushing the settings down like it was supposed to, this call wouldn't have existed in the first place. (For those who think I'm smoking my socks, another tech confirmed my theory.) The technical details aside, I was miffed that he just blew me off without thinking my solution through.

Or maybe, I'm just incompetent and don't realize it. I wish someone would tell me if I was so I could stop looking like a fool and go fold origami cranes or something. I had some musicians tonight basically give me the finger and refuse to use their microphones because they really just "liked the sound of acoustic instruments" - the fact that we were standing in a huge auditorium (that will kill the sound of two flutes while they're being drowned out by the piano), and that I'm a sound technician with six years experience notwithstanding. Describing this situation to Pixel caused him to mention that it would do me well to take criticism when given.

Am I just a skill-less, gibbering, incompetent, witless fool without a shred of knowledge or wisdom, or what?

The universe can bite me.