The group I work with produces websites for the academic departments of a small liberal arts college. One of the faculty members of a certain department often displays behavior best described as…erratic. They’re somewhat aged so we’ve joked that perhaps this individual is pre-alzheimers. Today this person contacted the project lead for a project we’ve worked on them for the past several years and asked if they could have a copy of their project on CD ROM. Since it’s a server-based application this is not trivial to provide and the project lead wanted to know why. It turns out this faculty member was concerned that our servers might get infected with anthrax, thus destroying the project. (!!!) “Not that I’m not worried about you folks (ie us, the staff) but I really want to be sure not to lose all this work.’

Granted, a significant portion of the older generations are a little unclear on how computers work, but mistaking them for biological organisms? We all had a laugh at this poor person’s expense.

What a drag. I got a new Radeon 8500 last week, installed it in my machine as a replacement for the Voodoo 5 I’ve been using for the last 10 months or so. At first I was loving it even though I had some minor graphics driver issues. But this morning I woke up and booted the pc and it failed to boot. A reboot later and I was in 640×480 8 bit color, which is windows for ‘Houston, we got a problem.’ Couple of hours of investigation later and it seems the card is dead as a doornail. Major drag. The only positive has been that Newegg, my new favorite online parts vendor, approved an RMA on the card in like 10 minutes so if all goes well I should have a new card in about a week.

Hmm. All kinds of wierdness to puzzle out with this. I’m having a lot of minor irksome troubles.

I’ve been working on a bunch of things for the site, one of which is switching over to a better blogging system. No offense at all to greymatter, it’s great free software, but Moveable Type is awesome and will allow me to plug in to weblogs.com among other things. Plus it’s actively maintained.

At least that’s my hope anyway. We’ll see how it goes.