08/15/2012:
2:00: I finally doze off.
10:30: I wake up.
10:45: I receive an emergency phone call from a client. Their computer network seems to be dropping and they do not have internet access.
10:55: I jump in the shower.
11:10: I am out of the shower.
11:15: I grab a snack to eat and drink something as well.
11:25: I let Buster outside real quick before leaving.
11:35: I put Buster back in the room with my wife, grab my keys, wallet, and phone, and head on out.
11:50: I arrive at the location. The computers in the second building are not getting internet and cannot renew their IP address. I got to the main building, I couldn’t renew an IP their either. I unplugged the wire going to the second building and rebooted the router. I was then able to get an IP address. I plugged the second building back in and was still able to get an IP address. I went back to the second building and those computers were all back online. I made sure that they could receive credit card payments as well since they went through the internet system and they could, problem resolved.
12:35: I leave the location and go over to the SprintPCS store to drop off my Dad’s phone. It has been dieing and freezing up on him ever since we got it. I brought it to them once before and they did a factor reset. My dad couldn’t get his phone on this morning before he left for work. Trying to do a hard reset pressing the three magic buttons didn’t restart the phone, it is completely frozen. The only way to reset it is to take off the cover and pull the battery, which is what I did. They need to look at it again.
12:45: I get to the store, and I am seen right away by a rep. He tells me that they will see if they can get the defect to happen, they will also possibly do a factor reset on the phone. If they need to give me a new phone, they will for $35, if they can’t find anything wrong with it, then they will send me back home with the phone, and then when it happens again bring it again for a possible new phone at that time.
1:00: I leave the Sprint store and now headed back to the office.
1:05: I stop at McDonalds, horrible service as usual, but cheap food.
1:15: I leave McDonalds, heading back to my office.
1:25: I get back to my office. I sit at my computer and start some research and some programming here and there.
3:25: I call Sprint to check on the phone, it is ready. Supposedly it was an app that was incompatible.
3:40: I arrive at Sprint and picked up the phone and showed a tech that the app was also on my phone so it wasn’t the app, but if it acts up again I will be sure to bring it right back!
3:55: I get back to my office.
4:00: I am backing up everything off of my Dad’s phone, and I transfer all of his contacts from the phone phonebook to Google’s Contact List, so it is synced with Google. This way all contacts that are added are kept online with Google and if I do have to get the phone replaced, I can just get the phone contact list downloaded from google.
4:35: Back to some real office work…
4:45: I call up a client who had called earlier with a problem sending email. When I called him back, his power was out, so I could not check on his issue directly, but I emailed him the email address he was trying to send to so that he could check it himself.
5:24: Dr. Scott calls me up with an big emergency issue. Lightning struck near his office and the entire computer system is down. We do some brief troubleshooting on the phone, but we do not get anywhere.
5:45: I gather some equipment from my office to bring down in case I need to change out equipment.
6:00: I get home, because my dad is going to drive me uptown.
6:15: We leave the house.
6:30: We get there. I start examining the issue. The issue is bigger than I originally thought. The cable modem is fried, the network switch is fried, the network port on 5 computers is fried including the server, 3 computers are fried, 2 monitors are fried, the network port on the printer is fried, their phone system is fried, the thermostats settings for the A/C’s have been wiped out, and a circuit breaker in the building is tripped, all as a result of a lightning strike that either hit really close by, or hit the building itself. I need to get parts to fix this chaos. We go to Office Depot. They tell us that they stopped carrying network cards. We go to Best Buy, they too tell us that they stopped carrying network cards. I pick up a cablem modem that I see while I am there, but this is the reason I order everything from dealers, but I don’t have the time to wait and overnight at this time is 2 days. I go home and pick up 6 network cards that I have stored away. I then go to the office and pick up 2 monitors that I happen to have in stock. I then go back to the doctor’s office. I try to put a network card in the server, and the server does not take PCI network cards, just PCIE, by this time it is too late to go anywhere because it is almost 9:00. I call up my business partner. He has a usb to ethernet port that he has, but no pcie cards, so I tell him to bring it, and we’ll try it. In the mean time I go around to all the computers in the office checking their network activity an adding cards into the computers that have fried network ports to get all the computers back talking on the network, but without the server, none of them can get an IP, talk to the server, surf the web, or do anything at all. Jamie arrives, we put the USB port in, it wants drivers, we download drivers burn a CD, but the drivers won’t work on Server 2008. Jamie leaves and goes to another office to check to see if he can find any in all of the parts there. I do some calling around, but no one has the network cards in stock because it is not a big item anymore with all the on board network cards. I finally call up my buddies who I have been friends with forever who also do computer work, and it just so happens that he has 2 in stock. He shouldn’t have them, but he has them. I call Jamie up and tell him to head over to their office. He gets there and I missed the text message that its in the mailbox, we call him back up, waking him up again like fools because I missed the text message. The Chemo Brain is starting to come in, lol. Anyways Jamie is heading back to the office 🙂 Jamie gets back to the office, we put the card in the server, boot it up, and the network lights come on. Great. We now just have to wait for a script to time out. And now its midnight, so this will continue on the next days events 😛
