We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties. Please Stand By.

@scribbingramma had a wonderful 3D printer success story to share thanks to my library, but this past week has been fraught with technical difficulties behind the scenes.

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This week, we finally upgraded to decent internet speeds. Our library now has fiber! But that meant a lot of disruption while new network equipment was connected. On one hand, this has dramatically improved our upload and download speeds, and we have a much better link to the district catalog server from our remote library. On the other hand, it means teething problems with new equipment.

Something messed up our local print server network.

When people can't print documents, they get upset. And it doesn't even make sense that the new stuff would have interfered with that part of our operation. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it seems to be an ongoing problem.

We also discovered that Facebook was unhappy with the shared account our former PR administrator had set up for everyone to use when managing the various library Facebook pages. There was a sudden need to change who had permission to post from personal accounts while those dummy accounts were deactivated. Our new PR admin is getting a trial by fire as she works with our team to sort everything out. And since I was one of the more active Facebook admins, I seem to be getting roped in as an unofficial PR team member. Whee.

I jest, mostly. I'm pretty good for an amateur social media person, in my humble opinion, and I don't mind most of the work. I just need more hours if more libraries are added to my list of responsibilities.

And lastly, there's the 3D printer. Specifically, on that print job that made Scribblingramma's day. Our Dremel Digilab is pretty reliable, but stuff can go wrong, and it went very wrong on the first attempt. I had no problems changing to black PLA filament to match her original handles, but when I sent the job to actually print, there were problems. The print head clogged. Nothing came through the extruder. I set aside the project for the following day, since it was getting late.

The next day, I began troubleshooting. The manual that came with the printer was not very thorough in describing how to fix problems, but a search on the Dremel website turned up a much more in-depth guide. I was able to properly feed the unclogging tool (a bit of wire) through the mechanism and get things going again. After an initial nasty blob of melted filament, things ran smoothly, and the handles printed perfectly on the second go.

We'll see how things go next week.