Sigh. So many great tablet topics to discuss, yet so little time. It's the middle of August, and the last month has been a run up to our academic year starting at work. So apart from tons of other system upgrades, I'm preparing about 130 desktops for our labs. It hasn't been easy. In fact, just about anything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong.

• Our hardware restore solution (you know, one of those "reboot and you're back to a working image" deals) doesn't work with the SATA drives on the latest batch of desktops.
• The new software equivalent has a somewhat buggy console that has already messed up a remote deployment to about 36 workstations.
• A clean Windows XP install didn't properly set up the system partition on two of the three master images we're using, so we had to spend quite a bit of time troubleshooting and repairing.
• One of our two spare workgroup laser printers died.
• What appears to be recent (SP2) changes in the way Windows XP behaves after copying a Sysprep configured image have led to some annoying glitches.
• My work desktop is slowly disintegrating. Outlook had to be reinstalled several times, IE is shaky, and the whole thing is super slow. No, it's not spyware - it's just approaching that one year mark of entropy.
• We have new laser printers for two of the labs, and we're still a little unsure about their stability and reliability.
• We've had a bunch of equipment stolen from a storage room, so now we're physically short a few PCs for the labs. Sadly enough, it was an inside job by somebody outside our department that had a legitimate key.
• My CD duplicator - which I use for large amounts of those handout guide book discs - is being moody, and at a time when I have to press hundreds of CDs for the season.
• My annual review is coming up, and I still have to send in my own bit for that. However, that particular task has been pushed back to "next week" about a month ago, along with many other things, just so that all the imminent problems - the ones with deadlines this week - can be dealt with.

Of course, when it rains, it pours, and you just hold out your pitcher and make lemonade out of the mess. However, at this point, the best I can do is to drag myself home at the end of each mind-blown day, stare at the Olympics on the telly, and poke at my newest (and first) tablet-enabled application (* hint, hint, I'm not a developer by trade, now learning a new language, a new platform, the app is cute, so please please at least feign interest *). Even my gaming is suffering! Anyway, once this week is over, hopefully things will become a tad (you know, just a little tiny bit) less hectic, and I'll be able to dive into my stash of earmarked topics and stories. Stay tuned!