1. 3 week update

    Apparently I forgot to blog last week…

    After two four day weeks this one has felt incredibly long I can tell you! But good stuff has happened. Antony Stone, previously an associate with Sirius has come on full time as our services manager (as of last week) so this was his first full week in the role. He’s got a lot of good visions, especially with regards to the wiki which as you know is something dear to my heart ;)

    Been fairly quiet on the support front with a few small issues and a couple of big ones. I’ve come to realise that while I love *my* mac, I do not love other people’s especially when they need to be connected to network printers.

    On my last two project days I have spent time creating a virtual host and setting up a Drupal installation on it so that Mark Taylor can play around with Drupal 7 before we upgrade. It’s been really interesting actually as I’ve never had to do this before. While I have quite a bit of Drupal experience I’ve only ever set it up on configured web servers and I installed it by copying everything over to the server by ftp (FYI, if you’re feeling lazy a great ftp tool is FireFTP, it’s a plugin for Firefox and it works really well).

    I’ll write a fuller blog post on that later this week but suffice to say it was a good learning experience fraught with learning and muppetry (on my part). It’s all set up now so come next Monday Mark will be able to have a play and hopefully on Tuesday we’ll look into what modules are currently being used and what we can use in our new site. It’s prompted me to realise that I really ought to upgrade my own install of Drupal. Even if I don’t use the project management system any more it won’t do for it to be sitting around all broken and stuff. Maybe I shall force some of my final year and second year friends to use it for their dissertations or group projects. A task for another day.

    In other news we have a workshop this coming Monday so most of the NOC staff are coming down. Kelly and Antony went to Gradwell last week to ask leading questions and have a workshop on how to diagnose problems. This is what will be covered in the workshop. I made my infamous brownies for the Gradwell people and have been requested to visit but give sufficient notice so they can brainstorm what cake they want me to bring… Not sure if I should feel happy they liked my baking so much or hurt that that’s why they want me to visit! I’ll go with the former, I have a happy nature - it’ll be easier :D

    We’re also going to have an early celebratory barbecue/lunch because Sirius turns 13 on the 19th of September! Cue the loud music and band posters as Sirius becomes a teenager… This could get messy folks ;)

    Going to my first Surrey LUG meeting this weekend as it is being held here - so two four day weeks then a six day week. Hopefully it’ll be nice weather though. I’ll let you know how it goes.

    Willow xx