NerdBlog

Being a computery nerd means I'm greatly in demand at work when items of an IT nature cause havoc. So much so that my entire job role has been changed to reflect the fact that without me this would just be an office of lady teachers yelling at apparently useless plastic objects. (I'm pushing for it to be phrased that way in the job description, but so far no luck.) So my efforts at rescuing people from difficulties with PC's is now how I earn my living! Wow, Superman had to take a seperate job! Yes, I boldly compare myself to Superman. He rescues people from crime, disasters and alien invasions. I rescue them from IT problems. Superman operates with a secret persona, taking no reward for his efforts and working a mundane job under a mundane disguise! The idiot! He should just get paid for being Superman and then live an exciting life all the time! I have combined my superheroing with the mundane job!
Anyway, I digress, not that I really have a point to this post, I'm just ruminating on some of my technical tasks today. I had to put up an interactive whiteboard. These things are immensely cool, because you can electrnically draw on them, and control the mouse by touching the board! It's like a giant touchscreen PC! That you can't really stand in front of because you block the projected picture. So it's really something that the novelty wears off from after you can't see what your touching for the 8th time you've blocked it with your own shadow. Plus they're a bitch to keep calibrated, so your cursor always ends up 3 feet to the left of your finger.
My most frustrating task has been a laptop returned to us by a closed nursery. They'd not made a lot of use of it, as they'd not peeled off the protective film you get over the screen and parts of the computer. Though they'd used it once at least. And not turned it off. And closed the laptop up. So that it got very hot. And the plastic film melted, trashing the screen and then melting through the buttons, into the motherboard and solidfying around and over that. Waste of a decent spec laptop sadly. There were attempts to save it, by carefully melting the residue off the screen and power button, but eventually had to concede the machine was a lost cause.
My favourtie one today has been the blackberry that's refusing data connections. I fixed that one by taking the battery out, putting it back and turning the machine back on! Classic IT.
Finally I'm testing one of the broadband dongles. It's marvellously simple to use, if a tad on the slow side, but it's currently only picking up a GPRS connection. I'll be interested to see it perform with a 3G signal. I wonder if I can get one to work in Linux?