Woohoo! Promotion day! No longer will I mire away in the blue-collar nomenclature of Network Technician. Nay! For today I rise up as the university’s first Wireless Network Engineer. Ta-da! Not much in the day-to-day will change, but my email sig is already teh upgraded. Plus, the salaried nature of new position vs. the wage rate of old means no more time-sheet bubbles ever! Woohoo!!!

Ooh, ooh. Bonus! Not only did my voicemail get played first on episode 792 of CNet’s Buzz Out Loud, but they named the episode after my extempore exclamation, Odin’s Beard!

Move-In Day for new freshmen at MSU is over. Locals may now exit their homes and resume normal activities.

With the rollout of a new system for ResNet registration and use, it was decided that IS staff should be on-hand Saturday during move-in to assist any folks who were having problems registering and remediating their machines. The new system requires a scan of your PC or Mac every 4 weeks to verify that you have legitimate AntiVirus and AntiSpyware software installed on your machine and that the definitions for those apps are up-to-date. Registering is not a huge deal, and we provide high-end McAfee AV/AS software to students free of charge if they don’t already have a legitimate suite installed. But any time you take 3500+ college students with numerous flavors of Operating System, manufacturer, hardware, etc., all in various states of disrepair and meltdown, you’re going to have some problems. Some machines wouldn’t fully run the scan application, many were still using the 1-year subscription of AV that came with their machine intially years after it had expired and stopped updating, several balked at the “Big Brother”-style mandate of requiring AV/AS software. But by and large, it went well. Of course, I’m certain most students hadn’t actually sat down and plugged in their PCs by 5 o’clock last evening, when we broke for the day, and I fully expect full-blown riots in the streets come Monday morning when thousands of students have been unable to triage their own setup and have been without internet access for an entire day.

And of course, by internet access I mean the one and only website they cared about getting to on Saturday. Webmail? No. Blackboard? No. Google? Are you kidding? — Facebook. — 3500 students back on campus for the first time in 3 months, many for the first time ever, and what do they want to do? Sit in their rooms and Facebook.

Ruddy kids. Get a frisbee.

I’ve been working on an iPhone- & iPod Touch-compatible version of the MSU Wi-Fi Locations map. It’s still a work in progress, but you can CLICK HERE to view the list on your iPhone.

Click on over to the MSU Wi-Fi Locations page and check out the Google Map I’m putting together to list all of the buildings on campus with wireless internet coverage. It’s part of a larger overall project involving Wi-Fi locationing similar to GPS, but for now it will help new students and guests find places with Wi-Fi access on MSU’s campus. From there you can link to the full version on Google Maps. Take a peek, let me know what you think.

So yesterday while in class I was robbed. Someone stole my brand new Columbia winter jacket from the table right next to me. I’d gotten hot and taken it off, placing it within arm’s reach. I mean, like a foot and a half away. When I got up to leave, my jacket was gone. Some stole my jacket… 3 feet away… during math class!
[insert first round of mental expletives]
So that sucked. Then I remembered my iPod touch was in the breast pocket of said jacket.
[insert second round of mental expletives, many of these audible to nearby civilians]
This was rapidly turning out to be a bad day. Then I walked back to my office in the freezing rain in my short-sleeved polo shirt.
[insert third round of out-loud, pseudo-intelligible random expletives, cursing the very nature of such a dirty rotten scoundrel to any available passersby]
So now I’m cold, wet, hungry, and sans $300 mp3 player! I swear a Klingon blood oath of vengeance upon his soul, and get to work.

Here’s where had this been an action movie the next 30 minutes of work would be pieced together into a 60-second montage, complete with Nine Inch Nails soundtrack in the background. I’ll give you the short version:

The iPod touch is more than just a simple mp3 player. It’s got a wifi connection and a browser built-in. [This being, to me, its main utility.] Any time you turn on the device, it automatically tries to find a wireless network and join it. If you’ve ever joined the network before, it won’t even notify you it’s doing so. [he he he]

Notice to criminals: If you’re going to steal a wireless capable device, don’t steal it from the manager of the wireless network.

To make a long story short I used the campus wireless network to track down the exact location of my jacket and iPod. I had it send SMS messages to my cell phone, updating me on its current position. Police officers made an arrest last night and first thing this AM I got my cheese back. Don’t mess with a network ninja. That, my friends, is weak sauce. Weak sauce!

This morning I get a call from the Detective involved with the case. “We just received a report of a laptop stolen on campus. Think you could do that again?”

[fade in theme music]

Addendum: A co-worker came up with the perfect analogy for this occurrence. “Hey, how about I steal this huge homing beacon and take it back with me to my secret lair? What’s that beeping sound?”

Network ninja out.