Note: There are no pictures this week.
This has been quite a week. For a long time, I felt I would like to have something to do on a part time or voluntary basis. All of a sudden, the dam broke. Monday I visited my doctor for a physical. I did OK, but left with recommendations for physical therapy (for my left shoulder), audiology, and neurology (for a memory check). It’s hard to keep healthy when all the ancillary systems are falling apart.
Tuesday I finished Michner’s book Alaska. I was disappointed. I learned a lot about the Aleutian Islands but only a little about the rest of Alaska.
Wednesday I went to work. I had been talking to Habitat for Humanity to volunteer. Chesapeake Habitat is an affiliate of the international Habitat for Humanity organization. It covers Baltimore County, Baltimore City, Anne Arundel County, and Howard County; and is one of the largest affiliates in the world. Chesapeake Habitat has two parts. The “Affiliate” is the office that coordinates building or rehabbing houses to create decent affordable housing for the poor. The “ReStores”, act as a kind of a Good Will for building supplies (kitchen cabinets, doors, windows, etc.), furniture, and tools. Chesapeake Habitat has three ReStores — in Halethorpe (southern Baltimore, adjacent to the affiliate offices), Pasadena (Anne Arundel County), and Dundalk. They will open a ReStore in Columbia soon, and have plans for two more after that.
I had a quick tour of the networks Wednesday.From an IT perspective, Habitat has a fairly standard server and computer setup for the Affiliate. They have VOIP phones (phones that run on the computer network). Each ReStore has a small network with a couple of computers and VOIP phones. Somehow, all of the phones work together, but the computer networks do not. They have no IT staff. They have done all this with a hodgepodge of vendors and consultants. Every employee and volunteer has their own idea of what’s best. They have pretty much built a digital tower of babble.I need to go back for a closer look. So far, I haven’t found the router in two locations, so I know for sure I’m missing some big pieces of the puzzle.
About the same time I got into Habitat, I got an opportunity with CASA of Baltimore. This is a short-term opportunity ending on June 30. CASA is an organization that recruits and trains advocates. When social services wants to remove a child from their home, an advocate may be used to help represent a child’s interest. Advocates are also mentors for the children. I don’t know a lot about the CASA organization, but I know there is a state office and that several counties in Maryland have local offices. Each office seems to run as an independent business unit. CASA Baltimore has a dozen very old computers and a network of sorts. They are set up more like somebody’s home than a business network. They have allocated too little money to IT for too long. They have a basic idea of the important IT concepts (like backing up data), but in many ways each person in the office is their own IT manager.
I work at CASA two 4-hour days a week. This week it was Thursday and Friday. CASA is downtown and they have a small budget, so parking is an issue. Street parking is limited to 2 hours. I thought the garages charged $14 a day. I was wrong. They charge a lot more. But they have much lower rates for those who arrive before 9 (Early Bird Special). CASA has $5 discount vouchers if I park in the right garage. Thursday I arrived at 10:00 and parked on one of the wrong garages. Friday I arrived before 9:00 and parked in the correct garage. My parking Friday was $20 less than it was Thursday.
Normally, I could handle CASA and Habitat at the same time, but our club house has gone nuts. I wrote earlier about how we got a new floor in the office, and how as a result none of their computers worked. Nobody could figure out how to put Humpty together again. In fixing things, I found we have two internet providers. One is a personal DSL service from Verizon. The other is a Xfinity (Comcast) cable service set up by WPM (the property management company). In discussing how we want to organize IT for our office, WPM decided they wanted to pull their network out, which they did. I met their IT guy just as he got started working. He asked me to leave him alone until he was done, so he could focus on his task and get it done right. When he left, one office worker had lost her Internet access and also many of her files. A printer/scanner printed but no longer scanned. The video security cameras worked, but weren’t available from the network. When I tried to start hooking things up, I found out that Xfinity uses brain-dead routers that don’t let us configure a stable office network. I recommended a small business router. It arrived Friday. I spent a good amount of time Saturday learning how to configure services I never had to worry about before. We’ll see how much I learned tomorrow, when I go over to hook it up.
At the same time, my community decided the electronic gate reader doesn’t work and needs to be replaced with a new one. The new one must be twice as good, because it offers two credentials for access, neither of which is anything at all like the credentials used by the old one. There are new databases, old databases, modified databases, and of course a whole pile of data entry. There is the issuance of new credentials which involves envelopes, letters, and maybe signatures. It’s not hard work, but it takes time and it’s the other thing I spent most of my Saturday figuring out.
If all this had to happen at once, this was a good week for it. It’s been too cold for bike riding. I rode indoors one day, but it’s not fun and my heart’s not in it.
This was also a busy week socially. We usually eat dinner out Thursdays. This Thursday one of the women Danita works with invited us to her house. It turns out her husband Don has become interested in riding a bike to Maine. He knows somebody who lives close to Bangor. He wants to get together for a follow-up, but I put him off for a while. Our neighborhood had a Bingo Friday evening. Danita went to that by herself. Saturday we met the Chaprnkas for dinner at an Italian restaurant near Reisterstown. The restaurant has upscale ambitions, offering excellent food and mediocre service. Today we’re going to a World Wide Marriage Day Mass at the cathedral downtown, followed by dinner with our Circle friends.
That was a lot of words for one week. I hope nobody got eye strain and that this finds everybody doing well.