it's been awhile

wow, so much to talk about. let's begin...

first of all, second interview. i think it went pretty well. i haven't heard anything yet, but hopefully soon. and i had a good time in west lafayette including seeing my possible future townhouse. lunch at triple xxx and supper at scotty's. halo2 for a few hours and oblivion all night long. i slept for an hour and a half and then drove an hour and a half back to urbana and went to work to this:

a pretty normal day, work-wise. the weather was getting frightful. during my lunch (2-230), i heard the tornado sirens going off but didn't think much of it. i got back to work to a brown out and tons of people crowded in our basement. some of our computers were off; some were not. all of the lights were off. our single test-taker's computer had shut down so katrina was trying to figure out how to restore power so he could finish. that's about the time the fire alarms went off and we all had to go outside (to the impending tornado). there was about 100 people in the building and we split up among the nearby buildings. oh yeah, the fire alarm went off because there was smoke coming from a dungeon room in the basement, like where the trolls scoop coal to keep the building going. turns out a motor had burnt up (because of the brown out or causing the brown out, i'm not sure which). well, we waited for about 45 minutes until the firemen gave an all clear but by then the whole building's power had been shut down and we were only allowed inside to get our stuff and then we were told to just go home. so we figured out how our test-taker could reschedule and sent him off and then katrina stayed to document the problem and i went home with an extra hour and a half off work early. i made it till 730pm when i crashed till about 600am and got up to:

i went in to work early today to make sure everything would work when we rebooted it all. they had restored power 1100pm the night previously. everything worked fine. we even had 14 total people today. although i made a mistake when i accidentally pulled the power on the file server, thus stopping everyone's test (7 at the time). we rebooted all computers and restarted the tests and they were all able to pick up where they left off (oops!). then i set out to fix station #1 which has been "broken" for months and we're trying to figure out what's wrong with it and get it fixed so we can return the loaner. we called prometric a few weeks ago and they tried to troubleshoot it and then told us the network card was bad. we found that it was under warranty so we called hp. they tried to troubleshoot it today and then told us that nothing was wrong with the machine, but it was a server permissions problem. conflicting stories. i believe hp and tomorrow, i get to call prometric back tomorrow and tell them they were wrong. should be pretty fun. oh and our new guy came in today. his name is brian and he's a senior in poly sci. i'm not sure what "senior" means in the summer. poor guy was in for 4 hours and he read procedure manuals the entire time. it's our own brand of hazing. heh. so i finally came home to:

my new computer! i received it last thursday and put it together myself. no problems except my $45 heatsink does not fit on my motherboard (it says it does...). and then i couldn't figure out why my ide channels weren't showing up on my bios. turns out i needed to install raid drivers for channels 2 and 3 to work. got it working on friday and got winxp installed but still was having problems. i gave up at 400am saturday morning and slept 4 hours. jay and i helped sue move which took about 5 hours while neal fixed my computer and reinstalled winxp. then off to kaitlyn's house where i pretty much crashed. next day was church, family supper, traci's grad party, megan's and a "haunted" house. but all of this is on the side panel.

anyhoo, this is freakishly long so i'll cut 'er off. please pray for me to seek God's will with this job!

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