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February 19, 2004

Been one of them thar weeks

I know everyone has a bad day, or even a bad week at work. It seems that this week would be that week for me. I feel spread thin, and this is even with having Kyle picking up my slack at work. Poor guy, I'm sure he gets irritated at all the crap I keep throwing his way.

Let's break out what's happened this week and run down exactly why these particular items have made it bad:

1. There are three PCs in the newsroom that are being damn flaky.

Okay, this actually started happening on Friday, which was also a bad day, which in effect brought the bad into this week. Seems that two machines in news decides to start crashing and doing weird things. Kyle and I try everything in our power to get these machines to behave properly. We try a different power source (thanks Mark for running that cable for us), we try replacing the entire news network infrastructure in a 20 minute period (if you've ever had to do this, you know how big of a headache this is), we try putting a PC on a UPS, we put voltage testers in line, and so on and so forth. Needless to say that nothing we tried worked. Then, the other day, Kyle and I hit on an idea... what if the voltage on the RF cable to the TV card was sending some kind of power surge to the PC? Well, we've unplugged the RF cable and haven't experienced any real issues since. I was told today, however, that when you turn on monitor on, it affects the other one (making it look like its degaussing). This could really be two problems at once.

2. I'm elbow deep in capital purchases for February.

Most of the capital purchases that I'm doing for the month have worked our great. I ordered desktops, laptops, memory, and software. The one thing that is the most important on this project list, our newsroom printers, has been the biggest fucking headache I've experienced to date while working at the station. Back a year ago, I recieved a quote from a printer vendor for roughly $13000 for a redundant printing solution. I put the numbers together and got a budget approved. I got a call on Tuesday that there was a problem. Apparently one of the items I was purchasing went from $2000 to $5000, and as a result, I was off by capital request for about $3000 (not including tax, mind you). As of this afternoon, I have about 97% of the issue resolved, however, and I should be finishing up the purchase tomorrow if things go well.

3. We had a computer install that I knew was coming, but didn't know when it was going to be.

I was notified on Monday that a vendor rep was going to be here this week to install some new equipment, and that it was going to happen on Tuesday. I needed to be part of the installation process. So, an engineer was assigned to the project with me and we got the first of two machines in place with little issue. As a matter of fact, we were able to clean up some really ugly cable runs in the process. The second machine, on the other hand, was a completely different issue altogether. It was buggy and worked differently than the original machine that we were upgrading from. Worse of all, even though we were given a checklist by the vendor to make sure we had specific things in place, more equipment arrived than expected ... requiring more work to be done on my part. This is time that I just don't have, people. I'm busy doing so many other things that I don't know where I'm going most of the time.

4. I'm trying to keep up with everyone elses projects in addition to my own.

The problem when you're managing a department of 1 and 1/2 people (Kyle's part time and I count myself) is that you tend to find yourself going in several directions at once. So, while I'm trying to do my capital projects, I'm also working on a control room renovation in addition to a rack room renovation. I'm placing orders for equipment and prepping for cable runs that I feel that I'm just not ready for. In addition, it takes time out of my day while I'm trying to do some rather important things to stop and look to find the best ways to make cable runs and such. Thankfully, I've had some great help from some of the Engineers and Facilities guys. I wonder if they really know how much I appreciate their help in times like these.

I made a judgement call yesterday, and asked Neal if I can have Kyle in for the entire day one day next week just so he and I can concentrate on makeing cable pulls. In all, we have quite a few cables that need to be pulled:

1) 25-pair from phone switch to new control room
2) 4-pair cat 6 from server room to new control room
3) 4-pair cat 6 from server room to weather office
4) 4-pair cat 6 from weather office to master control
5) Ten 4-pairs from new control to new audio
6) 4-pair cat 6 from new control to new audio

In addition to all of these runs, we also get to put in new phones and network drops in the new control room and audio room. This also includes moving a phone system that I really know nothing about, but hope to high hell that I can get figured out before we move it. This project is supposed to be completed by March 3rd.

There's only one thing that I can say to how this week has gone:

B - L - E - H

And you can quote me on that one.

Posted by ed at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)