Adam's blog

Pretty much nothing happened. Kids didn't wake up until 10am for some reason, and then they calmly and cheerfully cleaned their rooms, brushed their teeth, made breakfast for me, vacuumed the flat and cleaned the toilets. I let Taran use the computer for a while, which he seemed pretty excited about, but every time I checked on him it looked like he was just browsing on Amazon. I took all the rubbish out and the flat smelled a bit like smoke when I got back, but the kids said they just burned some toast. Didn't we use to have two sofas? It was so nice outside we walked through Stockbridge, and I took Kenna to a couple charity shops while Taran picked up a couple things at Waitrose. There seemed to be a lot of activity around the front door when we met him there, and he smelled terrible, but he said they had a problem with the refrigerators and some of the meat had gone bad. He and Kenna spent a ton of time looking at the designs in the window of the one tattoo parlor in Stockbridge, so I figured it was fine to run into the wine shop for a minute. We just threw together pasta and stuff for dinner, and the only weird thing was that both kids said they wanted to stand up while they ate. Whatever. At least they were way better behaved than yesterday. This parenting thing isn't so hard after all. Where ARE those sirens coming from? I swear it's like they've been following us around all day. Hold on, there's someone knocking at the door.

kenna's blog

Today was absolutely crazy!

After breakfast Daddy told us to hit ourselves on the head until lunch time!

After lunch Daddy was varry silly.He (by himself) put a glass of water

on his head!

taran's blog

todays morning was terrific!! i got £200 & bought a 3ds & a plasma t.v. . daddy said not to but i found mommy's credit card number(really! its 2736110048637384).and no matter what the police said,i told them i had nothing to do with the fire. after lunch we went to watrose and there was a special deal that involved a pick at the lottery and i won.of corse, at the worst possible moment i was registered of being 17 instead of 18(i wonder why they didn't know that i am 9).it is so unfair that i am not allowed to the store again and besides, i didn't drink all of the wisky. and i only threw up on three aisles, not four. what made things worse was that i got into the Guiness world record of running fast to the toilet after a massive outburst from my bum.i like when mommy goes on vacation. and daddy says it will all blow over as long as mommy doesn't find out where the tattoo is. 

Lynn goes on vacation - Day 1

Kenna's blog

It's fun with Daddy but without Mommy it's not vary fun.

But Daddy is mean. I am going to tell you some thing's Daddy is mean about him.

1.Tickle me until I pee!

2.Made me eat snail's for breakfast \ worm's for diner!

Taran's blog

no devices running.

scavenging for food.

don't know how mom is able.

no water.

barley surviving.

sleeping all in same room.

WE NEED MOMMY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Adam's blog

The children are like rabid wild animals. How does Lynn put up with them while I'm gone? Taran ate his food off the floor. Kenna refused all the nice food I offered her and chewed on the table. I can't figure out how the washer/dryer works-- we'll have to survive without clean clothes. The phones are running out of charge and we can't find the charger. Had to sponge bathe the children with hot water from the tea kettle because we can't figure out how to get the boiler to turn on. Likely to be very cold, we'll all have to sleep huddled up in the same bed. Rained incessantly, couldn't get out for more food. Not even sure where the money is to buy food anyway. Probably shouldn't have let the kids sword fight with real swords. Who knew children had so much blood in them? Took hours to get the stains out, and that was even with the kids' help. Injuries don't look that permanent. I'm sure they'll be fine, right?

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful... dahling

The challenges of IS insfrastructure

Almost 20 years ago, I spent a year as the IS manager for the strategy consulting firm I worked for. We had 4 North American offices, as well as a virtual Bay Area office. Two of our offices were on PCs, two offices ran Apples, and we had to have duplicate networks (Ether/Appletalk), duplicate printers, and so on. Just to make things interesting, we were also a Beta site for Lotus Notes, and we had to be able to connect to our European and Asian offices, which we did via dial-up modem at midnight, transferring emails in batches. Needless to say, it was a significant learning experience for someone with nor formal training in IS/IT. I'm not saying it didn't have it's moments, but on the whole, it wasn't exactly fun.

So I feel like I do have some sense of the challenges associated with small, much less large-scale IT infrastructure management. And it is not my intent to criticize the University's IT/IS staff, especially at the Business School, who have been responsive and helpful since the day I arrived. Paul, Matt, Clarke, and Martin, in particular, have handled all sorts of issues technically not covered by their day-job expectations (like the time I effectively crashed the School's network with DropBox).

But the University expects/requires me to utilize certain tools as part of my teaching process. These primarily include WebCT and Euclid. While these systems have their strengths, personally I have not found them easy to use or consistently reliable. Euclid, for example, has been down the entire weekend, which prevents me from accessing any information about student enrollment in my courses.

While WebCT has been available this weekend, I cannot run it either on my home computer (iMac) or my desktop PC at work without a consistent stream of messages from my web browser (Chrome/Firefox) explaining that components of the site are not secure, or are presenting expired signatures, and similar sorts of warnings. Given the amount of malware on the internet, it's not exactly confidence-inspiring.

Children, or the master of evil...

Lynn and I just watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. And, at the very end, as we see Harry, Hermione and Ron on Platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross, as their children depart on the Hogwarts Express, Lynn says: "Gosh, they all look so tired." And I said, "That's because they have children. Fighting the master of evil is one thing, but at least you get to sleep at night."