This is the first year since we’ve been married that Jonna and I are both in IT. This week marks the first available time that we’ve had to take vacation this year. Unfortunately, she had to work.

I figured I might as well catch up on some of my “Home IT” duties that I’ve been neglecting for a while, so after sleeping late and missing giving the kids a hard time for having to go to school while we sat around being lazy on vacation all day, I started taking care of the ol’ network here at the Labs.

Here’s the list of what I have done so far:

• Andy has been dependent on Jonna’s laptop to pull music on his Creative Zen Sleek MP3 player for a number of months. He had some troubles getting the software installed on the kids machine. This, of course, involved installing five bajillion XP patches and Media Player 10 before I could even get to the point of installing the drivers for the player. While I was at it, I figured I might as well install IE7 as well. I finally got both the MP3 player and Napster working. I know this because I verified it by loading a few Steve Vai songs on it for him. Lets see how long it takes him to notice. 😉
• Performed a complete virus scan of the kids computer. Thankfully, its clean
• Running, I think for the first time, a defrag on the kids computer. Its run 3 hours so far and is only 1/3 done
• Began rsync backups of the Linux server to the Western Digital WDG1U2500 My Book 250 GB Hard Drive I bought over a month ago for just this purpose.
• Cleaned out my Google Mail inbox of all junk mail (as long as I could handle that tedium, anyway)
• Actually cleaned off my desk (well, the working area anyway). There’s still a lot of work to do here, but I can at least say I started. That’s got to be worth a few “husband points”

On the list for later:

• Buy another 512K for the kids machine, bringing them up to 1G. Just doing routine maintenance on their machine annoyed me. 512K just isn’t enough to run Windows anymore.
• Create recovery disks for the Gateway Windows XP machine and back up the data to DVD so that I can rebuild it and get the boot time down a tad from the 10 minutes it takes now. I want to start using it for things I don’t want to use the Mac for (like running The Gimp).
• Swap an 80G hard drive out of a machine just retired here at the Labs into the Linux server
• Set the kids machine up to print to the network printer (would have done this earlier, but the machine was unhooked so that Jonna could plug her two laptops into the network)
• Buy a tarp to cover the the furniture on the patio

Sure, it may not sound too relaxing, but its stuff that has needed to get done for a long time. I think the pay off will be not having all of this hanging over my head the rest of the week.