Feeling Better

I feel better today, which is awesome. I still woke up this morning super tired, super sick, and super irritated at the fact that my ceiling began leaking during the night, which cut my sleep short tremendously. I haven’t been able to catch up on sleep yet, but I will once I write this entry. I did some good work at my job today, I think, and I’m excited to continue this project I’m working on there tomorrow. To be technical, it involves creating group policies for folder redirection and roaming profiles that affects all the students. Since I’ve been at this job, I noticed a few “hacks” the previous tech guys set up, and for a while, they worked, but I was consistently running into their limited capabilities.

Folder redirection and roaming profiles helps me centralize everything on our one network attached storage drive. Whenever a user logs onto a computer, Windows creates all the necessary folders and registry settings in the C:\Users folder. This includes the Documents folder, the AppData folder, the Desktop, etc. The problem with this is that students don’t use the same computer all the time. Every time they grab a new netbook or laptop or when they logon onto a desktop, Windows creates all these folders and settings again, and nothing is synchronized between any of these computers. So if a student writes a paper or something on one computer, saves it onto the desktop, logs out and logs into some other computer, that document won’t be available. The “hack” the previous tech guy implemented was mapping a student folder to each individual student, and here the student’s documents followed them around everywhere.

The problem with this is that this only works for documents. Windows still has to create all those folders and settings for each computer the student logs onto. I’ve found folders from students from the last two graduating classes. That’s just wasted space being used for no purpose. So by redirecting all the folders to the NAS, everything is synced up — all the folders are synced, all their settings are synced, and Windows doesn’t create these folders on each individual computer because it accesses them all from the NAS. So a student can save a document on the desktop on one computer, log onto another computer, and that same document will be there on the desktop for them to continue editing. They can put music in the My Music folder on one computer and have that sync up across other computers. It’s really cool, really convenient, and really annoying to set up. I’ve been running into sharing permission issues that is boggling my mind right now. I blame my sickness.

I wrote so much about this because that was most of my day. I came home, popped some popcorn and ate it while watching some TV, made dinner and watched more TV, read a bit, wrote a bit more, and now I’m here, writing this. I felt like working out, but I didn’t want to risk anything, especially since today could just be a fluke, and I’ll be right back to feeling awful tomorrow. I was serious about taking the week off, even if I feel 100% tomorrow or the next day. By the time Monday comes around, I know I’ll push myself really hard to make up for this “lost” week.

Besides, tomorrow I have to drop off my car at the dealer to get it looked at, and they’re letting me borrow a van so I can take it to work. I’m going to need all the positive thoughts I can get to ensure my car isn’t in that bad of shape. God I hope so.