Stupid Computers

I am still in Hayward. Ugh! Nothing against Hayward, mind you, but I'm supposed to be in Brule which is about 40 miles north of here. Yesterday went smoothly excepting one PC which could not be joined to the domain. I wasted lots of time with a guy in Madison who was trying to get it joined before getting one of the network guys involved. A good hour plus was wasted because they wouldn't just grant me the rights to do the job locally. (Normally it is done remotely.) All he had to do was make the call and grant me the rights and it would have taken a minute to figure out that the PCDuo client was not the issue. But no. Instead all kinds of calls were made and blah blah blah and I spent over an hour on the horn with security, my manager, and the network guy all for naught. After we decided to pick up again this morning, I moved the PC to another desk so it would be connected to a different port on the hub. Same thing happened. I wanted to try a different NIC but all the PCs have onboard NICs so I can't swap anything out. I am getting ready to go to fucking Wal-Mart, if need be, to buy a cheap piece of crap NIC and pop it in. It's like the network doesn't like its MAC address. The PC has connectivity - I can get onto the Internet and ping everywhere. The DHCP server welcomes it, the box gets DNS resolution, and everything. But we keep getting "network path cannot be found" errors when trying to join it to the domain or browse a server share. The NetBIOS over IP service is running. It is being assigned the correct WINS servers. The PC has been reimaged. (For some reason, Dan thought that the fact that I had finished the reimage process with my CD instead of his had caused an issue. Thusly 45 minutes was wasted by a 2nd reimage.)

All I'm hoping for today is either a quick resolution or for someone to make the call and get the guy a new PC so I'm not stuck here all day and forced to drive to Brule in a blizzard in the dark. Our hotel is actually in Iron River. I don't plan on driving home from Brule tomorrow if I can't get on the road by noon. If we're stuck here until Friday morning, so be it. Besides, it would afford me the opportunity to go check out the White Winter Winery which looks to be very close to our hotel. I could get me some mead. I've wanted to do some touristy stuff while here but just haven't had a chance. The Norske Nook was near close when I was ready for dinner last night and I have not had a chance during the day to go to Tremblay's Sweet Shop for some fudge. However, last night I went and had dinner at the Angry Minnow, a brewpub. I had their stout and it was quite tasty as was the pork loin. It is housed in an old building which used to be the headquarters for a lumber company.

Well, time to get all pretty...