[massive time passes. jeff experiences guilt and remorse over the slipping state of his diary. seasons change. continents drift.]
a couple tips for the uninitiated:
first, installing windows nt is not the simple task that one might believe from reading microsoft banner ads. in fact, it is not the simple task that one might believe from reading “My thirty days of WinNT Hell” and similarly titled documents.
which is to say, it’s worse than they say.
after spending two hours getting lost on the way to skokie, i arrived at summit systems and the PC was set up in short order. for the next three hours, while david and tim did damage control at fox photography, Mike and I atempted to format the PC hard drive for winNT. we were unsuccessful. abandoning our idea of creaing dual-boot partitions, we simply blasted WinNT onto the C drive and called it a success – hooray!
from there on, it was a mess of DNS kludges, server configuration, server twiddling, and random cursing at the machine. david and i had envisioned a sterile white-room training session, learning at the feet of a windowsNT guru as our server came online step by step. it was more like watching a harried sysadmin beat a recalcitrant machine back in line.
which, in fact, it was.
dave and I took a breather around four or so. after hours of watching mike zip through DNS records and popping from server to server, we were glazed over.
all in all, a frustrating day – and here i was looking forward to it! it could be worse, though.
i’ve been terribly lax with my diary. but strangely, i’ve been keeping audio notes to myself while in the car. it’s working pretty well, actually – though i miss the wordplay. rambling to one’s self on cassette never has the same quality.