Busy

No new news on my mother, but I haven’t called my grandmother yet today and asked.

I need to be at the big client’s this morning to commune with their trainer and/or their tech people further, see if we want some of the add-ins they have for programs like Word, and complete the workstation installs.

Yesterday was… interesting.  My counterpart from the IT firm that’s doing much of their work now filled out a form to tell the company that makes the case management software about our environment.  On it, clear as day, it says we have SQL Server 2005.

At 1:00 yesterday I attempted to work with them on the install.  It took until almost 3:00 before they got back to me to let me know that SQL Server 2005 isn’t supported.  Doh!

We had the choice of going ahead with a Sybase demo database, which would allow the training to proceed, and dealing with a rollback to 2000 or a secondary install of 2000 before it goes live.  That eliminated the ability of the office manager and bookkeeper to setup actual stuff during the training, rather than training and then setting things up later.  We had already been through confusion about the conversion of existing data and documents, which they were expecting to have done for training, but which would then have had to be redone before going live in three weeks.  We’re waiting until it’s time to go live to do the conversion in one pass.

The other firm sent over my counterpart with a SQL Server 2005 CD.  He was eager to show off the “but they knew!” evidence, which I appreciated, and we had a useful discussion of the state of things there and some stuff that would need to be done when the dust clears (like backing up all the old documents to a hard drive to take off-site).  Rolling back would have been bad, and he confirmed via one of Microsoft’s team blogs that a side-by-side could be done and work fine.

As he was rolling with that, it was pushing 5:00 and I had to leave.  Deb and the kids were there with me, as we went from the ultrasound (shoot, I need to post pics) to the office to the bank to the 99 Restaurant to the office.  While I was on the phone with the case management people at 1:00, she went to get the kids about 1:30 and then came back with them to hang out briefly until I was done.  They had a blast, but were starting to be cranky.  There was some confusion, as I thought since he was there anyway that he would get back to the other people to walk through their setup, and he thought he was done once SQL was installed.

So it was almost time for American Idol when I was on the phone with the guy at the vendor, who was home as well.  He connected remotely and went to town installing and attaching the database and doing the terminal server client setups.  I was expecting his call back about 8:45, but it took until almost 10:30 as he ran into a little trouble.  Instead of walking me through and showing me some details as planned, we left off until this morning.

Between us, we pulled of the miracle of an abrupt and drastic change that allows things to proceed exactly as the office manager had in mind.  It was fun in that I ended up doing what I actually do best; coordinating activity and the efforts of other people.

This morning it continues.  I’ll want to meet the trainer, talk to the vendor people again, get the workstations taken care of and any other details squared away.

I’ll try to post ultrasound pictures later.

1. I talked to Mom. She should be home on friday from what she was telling me.  She did indeed have a heart attack. They showed her an ultra sound of her heart where she could see one side working harder then the otherside.  I think she said she had 2 stints installed. Besides being Tired and sore from all the work done on her she sounded normal.

   Posted by wayne  on  04/25  at  10:47 AM  from  ohio
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