Well, after two days of work I’ve got a working Windows 2000 image. It really was a difficult as that sounds. There are still annoying clones that refuse to accept the image, but I think that either that is a HAL problem or just plain old hardware malfunction. Its been a hell of a process, let me tell you.

See, none of our computers have CD-Rom drives so I’ve been having to remove covers and attach a slave drive to them to read or write an image. This is both good and bad. It is certainly faster than the quad speed drives we’d have in these ancient behemoths, and I certainly have the space to make whatever images I need. On the other hand, I have 12 uninterrupted gigs to fill with the sloppiest images ever. I mean seriously, when I was working at Lex2, John had a 2k image that fit on one normal CD. And it came with Office! I’m at 900 megs and all I’ve got is a telnet client and PCAnywhere. Its enough to make you cry.

That and the fact that I had to install SP4 before I started imaging! SP4! That came out while I was working at Time Warner for God’s sake! It SP4 could vote, hell it could run for president! But I digress. Tons of updates later I get to come to grips with Sysprep. Which is fun for about the first 10 minutes. Then when it JUST DOESN’T WORK then it gets mightly old. You dial back your unattend stuff and then you have a respectable image that you just have to walk up to and put the computer name into and you are good to go. I still have some editing to do (adding OEMDriverDirectory stuff) but remarkably, it works.

I might get the hang of this yet.

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This is a bit serious, a bit of a departure from my regular way of doing things. However, I think it is called for. I honestly think that we should never forget what happened today. In the grand scheme of things, it changed me fundamentally. I became aware of a world larger than my own backyard. Thinking back on time before 2001, I honestly can’t concieve of how I thought about the world. How little I knew about other people and places and how much I changed when it all happened.

But that’s not what’s really important. The important thing is that it didn’t feel real then. I remember sitting in Accounting 101 and thinking, “Well, this is war. I hope I don’t get drafted.” Remarkably selfish. People were dieing at that moment and I was thinking of nothing but myself. It didn’t feel real then and it doesn’t really feel real now even after 5 years and seeing it from every angle.

That fact, the unreality of it, the ungraspability of it, that’s what makes it something that we should never forget.

I now return you to your standard babbling about computers and video games.

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So, I’ve been tapped at work with becoming temporary IT. I’m basically tasked with updating, upgrading and re-imaging a fleet of 250 rediculously old computers. They range from HP Vectra desktops to Dell Optiplex GX250s. Sadly, I’m supporting Windows NT 4.0 on some of them! I’ll have to make a clean 2k and NT image, but after that, smooth sailing.

I apparently impressed the head honchos (in Columbia) today by cleaning and fixing 10 previously non-functional workstations. I also annoyed the head honchos (in Miami) by downloading and installing an updated Microsoft Installer that fixed what the update to our glorified telnet client broke. Ah well, you win some, you lose some.

But I’m also getting 40 hours per pay period, so I’m basically full time. Just no benefits, but then I’m healthy as a horse *knock on wood* so that should be no problem. Ah well. Over the next few hours, I’ll be updating and moving to publish a few articles, so if you see an avalanche of new posts, that what that is.

Man I’ve missed this.

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