The office manager (who sits in the cube next to me) recieved a call from the lobby. It was a truck driver saying he had a shipment that required a loading dock. It seems that our keyboard trays had shown up. And as they weighed nearly 500 pounds in total, I guess it is of no surprise that it was shipped as freight.
Tangent: To find these keyboard trays, I orderedfivedifferentkeyboardtrays (A few more options if you wish to see what else I looked at; 123). Four of those were returned. All that effort was to avoid paying $400/tray for the Herman Miller keyboard trays that match our cube system. It was worth it. We found a keyboard that was better than the Herman Miller one for almost a quarter of the cost.
So the lesson learned here is that when ordering 500lbs of stuff, make sure it is shipped via a method that does not require a loading dock if you don't have one.
Ever wonder what a Windows Genuine Advantage failure looks like? I can't say that I had. Too bad I was presented the opportunity to see first hand what it was like.
We first got the warning that our "copy of Windows is not genuine" about two months ago (long story as to why we didn't deal with it sooner). We were not concerned about the machine not recieving updates from Microsoft as the machine segregated from the rest of our network. With our Volume license Key in hand (we couldn't find the original license for the system), and a use of that key marked on our spreadsheet tracking such things, I aproached the machine.
(click any of the images for full screenshots) Where I am greeted immediately by a reminder that I "may be a victim of software counterfeiting".
In case I missed the warning on the login screen, Microsoft turns Windows nagware .
And just in case I missed the two previous messages, Microsoft thoughtfully provides another warning. Clicking this one takes you to Microsoft's site for further explanation.
That page provided me a link to "Find out if you can update your product key without purchasing a new copy of windows". I could also have given Microsoft $149 to "Get Genuine Now".
I am told to download and run the Key Update Tool. It downloads quickly and once run presents a wizard to change your product key.
Unfortunately it didn't work.
Thankfully I knew of a tool to change the key (or registration information) for Windows XP. This tool simply provides a nice gui to change the product, as Microsoft helpfully documents.
A reboot, a manual validation, and a successful trip to Windows Update for updates leaves me confident that the process was a success.
The office manager brings me this card today. The cleaning crew reported to her that it wasn't working.
A swipe past a card reader shows that the card is indeed not functioning. If you look carefully at the hole in the picture above, you can see a few copper wires sticking out. I guessed that they cut through the wire loop that makes the contactless part of the keycard work. I setup a new card for cleaning crew and went about pulling the back off the card.
Well will ya look at that. The spindler hit pretty much the key spot not to on the card; the link between the wire loop and the circuit that has the unique identifier in it.
