Author: Dan Dickinson

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How Would The Lone Ranger Handle This?

There’s something about October in New York City that seems to make it particularly likely there’s an event you want to go to. Last year, we hit Paul Van Dyk, Neal Stephenson, John Lithgow, and Jamie Oliver.

As a reminder: tomorrow continues the juggernaut of October 2004, as Ricky Gervais invades the holiest of museums, the Museum Of Television And Radio. There’ll be a screening of The Office (Christmas) Special, and then a “conversation” with Ricky directly thereafter. While I doubt the entire event is going to be quite on the insanity level of the Anchorman premiere, it should be a fantastic time.
Making it potentially even more fantastic is something that I may get to meet a blogger I admire very much right beforehand; I’ll save that for another post, though.

As usual with MTR functions, I’ve posted event details on upcoming.org, just in case you’re in NYC and interested and I haven’t talked your ear off about this already and you missed the last post about it. Expect a long-winded starstruck post tomorrow night!

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Meeting Alton Brown



Dan, Alton Brown, Katie, originally uploaded by Dan Dickinson.

Yesterday, Alton Brown was doing a conversation and signing of his new baking book, “I’m Just Here For More Food”.

He struck me immediately as a quick witted smartass – which is fantastic in my eyes, since I try my damnedest to be the same way.

Up close and personal, though, he was really nice and generous, talking to everyone who was getting a book signed for a fair amount of time.

And the book is fantastic, by the way – truly a cookbook for geeks. High recommendations from me.

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I Own ARD, And ARD Owns You

One of the goodies given out at WWDC this year was a full unlimited-client copy of Apple Remote Desktop 2.0. After returning to NYC and proceeding at work with the major rollout of 135 new G5s for the Education Center, a number of us rapidly agreed that using ARD to help manage these machines is a natural choice.
Part of these 135 machines includes the podium machines in each of the auditoriums. Due to a need to remove the technical aspects from giving lectures, the podiums are almost always logged in and sitting at the desktop.
We also have four cameras in the main auditorium, since we are capturing the lectures to send to the school in Qatar. The monitoring station for these is located in a room behind the front wall of the auditorium, and there’s mild entertainment to be had watching the students falling asleep during the lectures.
So today, after I’m done doing a run down with a staff member, I’m walking by the monitors and our capture technician when I notice that there are a handful of students in the auditorium, including one standing at the podium. I can see quite clearly that he’s playing a Flash version of SFCave in IE, and the other students are watching intently and giving encouragement.
This is one of those times I started to channel the BOFH.
I quickly remote-accessed my workstation, fired up ARD2, found the podium on the machine list, and selected what is by far my favorite tool: The “Lock Workstation” tool, which not only displays a giant picture of a padlock, but lets you send a message to display as well.
I quickly typed: DO NOT PLAY GAMES ON THE PODIUM MACHINE. In hindsight, I should’ve added a “KTHXBYE”. Regardless, I sent the command.
There’s nothing more gratifying at 10 in the morning than filling a group of medical students with the Fear Of Administrator and causing them to laugh while running away from a computer.