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Friday, May 30th, 2008
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8:58p - A quiet day at the library...
It was amazing. A whole day, a Friday no less, with a door count of under 350 and no temper tantrums or complaints? How did that happen? Several things came together. First, it's nearly the end of the school year. The hordes of elementary school classes that have been coming to the library on Fridays to get books to read for book reports or accelerated reading tests are done until fall. Second, the weather was iffy. It never rained hard but kept threatening to do so. Most significantly, though, a power outage in the early hours of the morning, before we were open, apparently trashed the hard disk on one server: the multiuser internet machine. Everything else in the building came through fine, but that one was down and out. Nothing seemed able to revive it. Enough things were scrambled that it just couldn't boot.
So, there was no public internet. People came to the door, read the sign, and turned away. ;D Only people who wanted to actually read, or at worst, check out videos, came into the library.
The hardware problem was resolved, of course, but not until just before closing. Since that machine is maintained by an outside agency under a contract (YAY!) I had to wait for instructions. They concluded, as I had, that the hard disk was scrambled and I should reinstall the software. I did that from a CD, and then reactivated the custom configurations I had on the machine by pointing to them on an external website and telling the new installation to use them. Then the vendor went on to apply software patches remotely. It should be up and running by opening time tomorrow. The whole setup is extremely slick, and doesn't even require me to make any backups of anything. The cost is far less than what we did before, which involved maintaining half a dozen Windows-based machines with layer upon layer of malware protection and security lockdowns. Best of all, I don't have to do it, meaning I have time to be a librarian instead of a computer technician.
The weather was freakish. At the farm we had heavy thunder and lightning between about 3 and 4:30 am this morning. That was about the time that the power went up and down repeatedly in Harvard. Gary was in Chicago, and the dogs climbed into bed with me to "hide" from the thunder. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep after 3 am. There wasn't a lot of rain, just fireworks. It was still splattering, not what I'd call real rain, when I went in to work. Late in the morning Gary called me to ask how we had weathered the wind. "What wind?" He couldn't believe me, but it was true. In Harvard, 15 miles north of the farm, there was little more than a breeze and a lot of clouds.
Turns out that the southern part of the county had about an hour of high wind, with gusts up to 60 mph. Near hurricane force winds. He had to wrestle with that 20 foot steel sliding door (the same one that froze shut last winter, remember?) when the bottom edge came loose from its track and started flapping in greater than gale force winds. He managed to get one end back onto the track and the other edge secured to the doorpost with a chain, but only after closing all the other doors in the building to stop the wind from going through. After the sun came out in late afternoon, he also discovered that two more large trees had fallen. One split down the middle, half falling onto our pasture fence, and the other half onto the Brit neighbors' pasture fence, totally blocking the six foot aisle between them. The other was uprooted but its top is so entangled with two other nearby trees still standing that it couldn't fall over. Fortunately it's not a huge, heavy monster, but just a 25 foot aspen with a trunk about half a foot thick. Aspen wood is light, especiall after it dries out, and I think we can safely let it go until it breaks loose of its own volition and falls to the ground. It's outside the pasture fence, in a strip that buffers us from the new subdivisions to the north.
We'll have to get the other one partly cut up right away, before it does permanent damage to the fence. There goes the weekend.
current mood:  surprised (comment on this)
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