Monday
- My Grandma’s health isn’t too great
- Working on taxes
Tuesday
Wednesday
- Hard day at work
- Co-worker makes up shit about me, other co-workers and our boss. Then jumps rank to complain about it to the director.
Thursday
- I got a free bacon upgrade with my cheese fries at Ramon’s food truck
- Started tweeting (using Twitter) to promote my podcast
- Find out my Grandma’s health isn’t as bad as we thought it was
- Made awesome pizza for supper
Friday
- Lots of people following me on Twitter
- Delicious left over pizza for lunch
- Director informs my boss that she has found funding for my job next year
“Back in the game!” - Cameron 10 Things I Hate About You
So Liz and I are going to be moving, date to be determined, this summer. This may not sound like a huge deal, except I’ve been trying to get some things in order at work. I’ll be finishing up my 9th year of working there. First four years were as a student worker, 5th year was a full-time student-employee supervisor, and the last four years have been full-time hourly. There are a lot of things I do that nobody else has ever touched. Writing out instructions, tips, and what-have-you can be a daunting task.
This weekend we’re making a 1,000 mile trek so Liz can do a campus visit, we can look at some possible places to live, network with some people, and so I can go to what I’m interpreting as a pseudo-interview. On top of all this, I’ve been trying to schedule a phone call interview for a fund raiser with some fellow Achievers who obviously aren’t millennials. Even though I’m not from that generation, I sometimes forget that some people don’t have three email accounts open all day, a cell phone in their pocket, and several chat programs at their fingertips.
So with the finalization of a two year educational technology Lilly grant, a Second Life presentation, podcasting, blogging, and life…I now have a day to make sure I’m ready for a road trip. I usually work well under pressure though so things should work out.
We got access to Second Life up and running for the presentation and it went pretty well. We had a lot of good discussion amongst the staff and faculty present. We also got some pretty awesome box lunches and I was able to bring back an extra for a snack I’m currently enjoying.
Gary and I have been working on a presentation to faculty about the educational uses and potential of Second Life. The presentation is tomorrow and as of this morning our internet filter is blocking Second Life.
Today I tuned into a DyKnow webcast in which several professors from another university talked about how they’re using laptops (without pen technology) instead of tablets. The audio was a little rough and I have to admit I didn’t learn much, but I think the audio capabilities are very promising.
If you’re not familiar with DyKnow, it’s a piece of software heavily used in education as a teaching aide. It combines various presentation technologies, presenting text and images, polling, chat, feedback, user submissions, along with monitoring software to block applications, web access, etc. It’s a pretty useful tool that has come a very long way since we first started using it.
I’d like to see how well this would work in a distance learning or online course application. It’s easy to post some notes, PowerPoint slides, and have a couple of assignments online for students to login and look at. I haven’t seen too many people using the internet for innovative ways to teach. If you didn’t catch it earlier, DyKnow has been working on the integration of audio along with its already useful software package. Now the audio wasn’t necessarily perfect in what I experienced today, but there were a lot of factors affecting that and I know it’s only going to get better in the future.
Just imagine the teaching possibilities of being able to interact with students from afar using DyKnow. Instead of posting some material and assigning some homework, teachers can now interact with their students with audio, video, text, etc. I think this is a big step in making online teaching worthwhile.
Like I said in the previous post, all you need to do to migrate your Deep Freeze Administration software is to make sure you know two things:
- The Customization Code you originally installed it with
- The IP address or name of the machine you’re installing the software to
From there it’s a piece of cake. You just install the software on your new server or machine and then tell your computers to point to the new administrator machine*. I was able to have my original console and the new console up simultaneously by remote desktop’ing into the new location. I was then able to update my machines using the old console, watch them dissapear and then re-appear on the new console.
After you’ve pointed all of your machines to the new console you just have to link to the new console yourself. Faronics (Deep Freeze) has instructions to do that. It’s not too bad. They also have great tech support if you need to call or email them.
* When changing the network settings to tell a computer where to report to, I had to make sure I checked LAN/WAN instead of just LAN. I work for a university and we have computers all over campus in different buildings on different VLANs, switches, etc. While having LAN checked, I was only able to see computers in the same building I was in.
If any of you are managing labs/computers with Deep Freeze, I’m sure you probably know it’s some pretty cool software. Currently the Enterprise administration console resides on my personal PC and we’re going to be moving that to a server just so it’s easier to access, always running, etc.
To do this you just need to have your customization code and send out an update to change the network settings before you install the admin software somewhere else. Well, I thought I’d try pushing out a configuration update file on one computer to test things out. So I entered the network settings on a new file, saved it as a configuration file and pushed it.
I then found out that all fields need to be filled in, like the password for example. I didn’t quite know what to do because my PC couldn’t communicate with this machine anymore and I couldn’t login locally on the machine to turn Deep Freeze off. Luckily, the calvary arrived in the form of a One-Time-Password.
To use the One-Time-Password feature you have to first get the token from the login window on the machine you need to create a password for. Use that token to create a password in your configuration administrator and you’re good to go. I was then able to login, change the network settings and unfreeze the computer. Now I could talk to the rogue machine again with the admin console on my PC.
So, if you’re going to make a configuration file, I would first open the executable you used to originally install Deep Freeze on that machine or lab, make your changes and then save it as a configuration file. This way you’ll be sure to have all the settings you need.
I keep getting these pop-ups today about severe weather. When I see that I’m thinking hail, tornado, blizzard, etc. Well today it happens to be strong winds gusting up to 45mph. Well, I’ve been walking around campus between buildings here at work today and I keep thinking of the movie Miller’s Crossing when the main character keeps having these dreams of his hat blowing away. I haven’t seen anybody chasing after a hat yet, but it’s a definite possibility.
I’ve pretty much always hated the free software that comes with HP Scanners. It never seems to work very well, very often has errors, and rarely works properly unless you’re a full-fledged admin. Since I manage labs at work with this stuff installed, 99.9% of the users have no admin rights whatsoever.
Today I was creating a new image for a particular lab and after installing the scanner software I realized I couldn’t access HP Director. I eventually found out IE7 won’t let it work anymore. There is a quick fix though. Just go to the download section for software and drivers on HP’s website. After you navigate to your “make” and “model”, just scroll down towards the bottom and you’ll find the patch under Updates. It’s called Critical update to resolve an issue with HP Director after installing Internet Explorer 7. After you install that you should be good to go.
Day 2 is over for the 5th annual Technology for Teaching conference. My first class was a bit of a bust with network and server problems. I was teaching a class about using webcams. The cameras weren’t working, Skype wasn’t working, etc, etc. I totally had a Dr. Toll moment cause it worked in my office!
The podcasting session went a bit better. Afterwards Quinn noticed that it was all business people instead of profs. That was ok though. We both got to highlight our pet projects a big and talk about our experiences. I think it went pretty well.
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