There have been an uncanny amount of printer and printing support requests this week — a disturbing number have found their way to me. Regular readers might find this interesting, because I know almost jack squat about printing, and tend to think IT support for printers is one of the most hellish things. It’s right up there with networking, email, and file restores — of which I’m only batting .667.

Anyway, it’s always “a network printer” or printing from “the wireless network,” which is dropping the support on my lap. I’ll say it once, here, for everyone - and then individually to anyone who asks. It’s not the network’s fault. We have 4000 machines happy on the network right now, and if it was really as broken as all of these assumptions are making, you wouldn’t be able to find me. I’d either be swamped with requests, be fixing something, or be out of the country. The last one sounds inviting.

Most of the problems are turing out to be printing from different IP subnets, and either SP2 or bad network configurations. (The netmask on the printer was 255.255.0.0 — no wonder it can’t route anywhere.) And when you connect to the print server, and you’re not in the AD, you need to login as UIUC\netid.

No, we don’t filter ports to your printer. No, it’s not listening on port 161 because SNMP is not enabled. No, it doesn’t need to be enabled. No, we’re still not filtering the printer port.

I wish this was another long weekend.

I know I haven’t posted much, but I haven’t felt inspired. I’ve had experiences I thought would fit here, but I haven’t written them up, or tried and wasn’t impressed enough to push submit. I guess it’s a slump, but I don’t know. I will tell you what I do know. (I will not make this a long drawn out rant, I will not make this a long… too late.)

The last blog entry was dead on. I’ve already had at least three support issues with file sharing in SP2 that was broken across subnets. They usually come in the form “wireless is broken,” or “my printer doesn’t work,” but my blog nailed it. I knew it would. It’s refreshing to have called it like that, but I wish people would have a little more faith that it’s not the network, and it might actually be the way they configured their systems. The network isn’t broken all the time (at least not anymore.)

Happy birthday, EJ. Welcome to the quarter century club, and the land of cheaper auto insurance. Mine just dropped again, and I don’t know if it’s me getting older, my car getting older, or the fact I just bought homeowners insurance through USAA too.

Illini football is good, and I’m pumped about Illinois basketball (whose season ticket order form just came in the mail.) I didn’t get the final four tickets I blogged about back in March, but I’m still going to stick with my Illini all the way through. But, back to football, one down, 6 to go.

The Olympics came and went, and I drank them up like water and couldn’t get enough. The networks satiated me by putting Olympics on broadcast, MSNBC, Bravo, USA — all the NBC networks. But the key thing that made the Olympics even better. TiVOlympics. The games were 8 hours ahead of when they were broadcast, and I was watching them at least 6-8 hours behind. I would TiVo the nightly events, and then watch the previous days events on the TiVo. But it worked out great because I could watch ‘fast swimming’, or ‘fast volleyball’ Steeple chase never looked so cool. In fast forward I could catch way more of the Olympics than I ever could otherwise, and in many cases I could ignore NBC’s overdubbed analysis, which ranged from dramatically excellent (men’s gymnastic all-around,) to frustratingly depressing (diving.) I figure the way everything is coming out on DVD these days, we’ll see the Athens 2004 DVD set by summer 2005. Remember, you heard it here first.

If you want to buy a TiVo, I highly, highly recommend it. With rebates, they’ve dropped their entry level box down to just $99. I get so much enjoyment out of mine, I can’t imagine how people lived without it. If you do purchase a TiVo, when it asks for a referral, tell the mussulma@uiuc.edu sent you. That gives me points I can cash in for a newer TiVo, and other goodies. (They call it their TiVo Rewards program, and call the participants TiVotees. I love this company.)

In somewhat related news, TiVo announces plans to team up with Netflix to, presumably, let you download your DVDs to the TiVo over broadband instead of waiting for them to come in the mail. I think that’s a great idea, and I’m proud to be a part of that someday.

In other referral news, will you Vote or Not? The Hot or Not folks are putting up $200,000 in prize money just for pledging that you will vote. Sign up, register to vote if you haven’t, vote, and maybe win $100k. Be sure to use http://dm2747.voteornot.org when you sign up so I get the referral. See, much easier than that Win a Free iPod MLM trick.

I bought a pedometer this week, and today I’ve only done 7135 steps. According to the booklet that came with it, I should be doing 10000 a day. I guess I need to step things up a bit if I’m going to do 70k steps a week.