Month: April 2003

It might be summer, & an anniversary of sorts!

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Today is the first day this year that I left my house without a coat. It feels like summer. It is like 65 degree’s now going up to 80. I am happy the way it is right now. It is perfect. The AC in our office is not working yet. I think there is a problem. If I had this blog last summer I would have written about all the great problems we had with AC in our office. But I didn’t so use your imagination. It was hot. This year is not shaping up very good either right now. On a plus note the AC in my office works, but it dies under the strain of keeping air cool everywhere. even with the door closed it will get hot on the first 90+ day. we shall see what happens.

OK, due to me taking a late train yesterday night I actually had 3 blog entries yesterday. that will not happen that often. I really should have had 2, but I broke up one into personal stuff, & work stuff.

I am working on figuring out how feasible it is to move my entire photo web site over to my apache server. I want to get it to work, but I don’t want to have to do allot of work. there are tons of pages, and about a gig of images. it will be a big job if I can’t automate it or get frontpage extensions to work on apache. Hopefully I will have time this weekend to look at it some more.

I am taking Dan to bestbuy today to purchase wireless gear for his new apartment. Dan is the director of operations at the company I work for. He is really cool, and we get along great. That said, I don’t normally do computer work for people outside of work. I can’t stand it. Dan understands that so we are going to buy the stuff only. I like buying things! Actually some people I don’t mind helping, but others who have no business asking for help or other people who just expect it, I don’t like doing stuff for. He is in neither category so it will be fun to setup some wireless stuff. Wireless is good.

It dawned on me this morning that yesterday was an anniversary of sorts for me. I started at MFS network technologies (a division of worldcom at the time) 6 years ago on tax day. That was 1997 if people can’t do math. That really marks my beginning of my technology career. My first official help-desk job didn’t come till AuGust 1997, but I did plenty of technical and help-desk work at worldcom so I consider that my start. I figure when you are upgrading file servers, building new computers for people and auditing software you are in the technology field. That was just a bit of history about my tech roots.

Today’s work agenda, tech meeting, then tech management meeting, then trip to bestbuy, then kingston move meeting. Just full of fun meetings today! I also need to call and harass some vendor’s (see yesterdays posts).

Tonight’s the hockey game. I can’t wait. I broke out my Islanders jersey and it is in my bag for later. I am at a point where I cannot wear jersey’s of any kind to work. it sucks but I will deal. At least I can still wear tee shirts. I think it is funny to sit in a meeting with vendors in a tee shirt and khakis while they are in suits. it is very amusing.

Well I feel us descending into the train tunnel so I will stop here. Details on the game and other stuff tomorrow.

Tuesday With vendors, and web problems.

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Well I am starting to write this on the east bound train home tuesday. Not sure when this post will be finished but I am stuck leaving work at 7:30PM tonight. It is daylight out so I don’t even realize that it is late anymore. There is still work to do and it is light out, you forget it is 7pm.

We had some problems some web sites today. It was not fun. We think it is related to a bunch of different problems ranging from running out of disk space on one web server to huge amount of searching on a database server. It probably will take days to sift through the data.

I ended up meeting with our telecom vendor today. It was a meeting that was planned when I was out on friday so I was sort of surprised. I think it went well. We told them point blank that we were not happy with them, and we need problems fixed now or we wont use them on in our new office. they seemed eager to do what we want (of course who wouldn’t when you dangle money to someone). We are on sales guy number 4. This guy seems to have a clue so we will see how things go from there. it is tough. I like what these guys say, but I have heard speeches before and then get no results. if our new sales guy can do what he claims I will be happy. the question is will he do what he claims? I am betting allot on that answer.

In other news, Keith is officially a dumb-ass. His problem with the RAID array I spoke about before was that the card came loose and he didn’t check it while he tried to fix it for 2 1/2 hours yesterday. At least he figured it out on his own. FYI, I use the term dumb-ass lovingly:) If I really don’t like them I would just call them an asshole.

Hockey Playoff’s Vs. Passover

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OK, so I am really stupid sometimes. I found out Friday that I am going to a NY Islanders playoff game Wednesday. I also knew that Wednesday I am going to my brother-in law’s mothers house for the first night of passover. I didn’t put 2 + 2 together until Monday that both these things are this Wednesday. I took for granted that my friend rich who got the tickets would keep these things in mind. He didn’t. His family is only getting together for passover on the second night.

Now I had a delema. Do I goto hockey playoff’s or passover dinner. So being the good jew that I am, I decided I am going to see the islanders play hockey. Hey, I am not religious. The only reason I was going to go to passover was to not get the guilt from my mom. My dad and sister were both like “cool, did you get good seats?” So instead of sitting down for an hour of BS at a dinner that I won’t eat or won’t like with people I hardly know, I am going to a hockey game to hang out with one of my best friends and his girlfriend who is also very cool. I think I made the correct choice.

Now not being up on the whole religious think I am not sure about this, but I think that us jewish people don’t believe in hell, so I am lucky, since to some this might be a bad choice. I will believe in my own way. I will also conform on thursday night for the second night of passover!

Sales guys suck, & other Tuesday news

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Have I mentioned that sales guys (people, gotta be politically correct) suck? They do. I am trying to sift through all the quotes and crap I am getting while preparing to build this new office, and people don’t have a clue. I have one phone provider call me last week going they can’t provide local phone server in the area we are moving to. I was like, ok sorry. I guess we can’t use you then since I want one company to do everything for me. Then monday I get a call from that guys boss going, well we kinda can do local service in that area. I was like make it simple and make it a good price and I will look at you. Until then these guys are talking BS. I cannot wait to get the bidding out of the way and just build the thing.

Our weekly management meeting was canceled yesterday. I think there was a board meeting or something. It will happen today instead.

So I got my new low end compaq rack mounted server. I mean low end when I say it. This thing is an IDE drive machine with RAID in it. it is so cheap that it didn’t even come with a CD-ROM & Floppy drive. Normally I assume a computer will ship with at least 1 input device such as a floppy drive. got a call out to those people to get something so I can load the OS onto it. Like I said sales people are moron’s.

The only other things of note on monday were we had some patches of problems with one of our database servers. Our engineers are looking at it. That means I need to get my crazy 8 ball out and help them with the diagnosis. Also Keith is having problems with an IDE RAID system. I will look at it with him today.

Work again, Monday Meetings & hardware purchases

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It is monday again. The most hated day of the week. I used to not like monday’s just because it was the first day back from the weekend. My new issue with monday is it is the day of meetings. Actually it used to be the day of meetings, now it just feels like it. Monday is the day that all the managers in my company get together to let everyone know what is going on. That means writing up agenda’s, and other fun meeting stuff.

Monday is also the day in most companies where new hire’s start. We are no different. Thankfully we don’t have any today. I actually have someone new starting tuesday, but we probibly will have like 5 new people on next monday. Not sure yet. No one tells me till the last minute normally.

This week I need to finish setting up the temporary firewall I will use to test the new network for our kingston office. For setup purposes I am creating a new isolated network for all the gear we are getting for that office. I am using an old firewall we stopped using in february. Once that is done I will need to begin getting quotes for servers. The next step in the design would be file servers and a domain to put all the computers in. We currently use a mix of compaq and dell servers. Most of our machines are dell, with some database machines being compaq’s. Alot of our older equipment is VA Linux machines. I personally don’t like the VA Linux equipment. The company stopped making hardware, and the machines are not hot swapable anything in them. Granted their track record is ok. I have only had problems with 3 of them that I can remember, and we have over a dozen of them. For this new office I have not yet figured out if we will go compaq, or dell. It will depend on price most likely. I also have an IBM guy wanting to sell us stuff. They say that they can meet the other guy’s prices, but I haven’t seen that happen yet. Sales guys, are sales guys.

Another cool project we have going on is upgrading our data center to a gigabit backbone. We have the design down, and now we need to buy and deploy the hardware. I probibly will purchase that stuff this week. that will be cool to deploy.

Obviously since I am talking about work stuff I need to be vauge enough so I can write it here, but also descriptive enough since I want this blog so I can write about what I am doing and thinking. That will be a fine line I walk when doing this.

Pocket PC wins over Palm (for me, for now)

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I didn’t listen to myself. I went out and ordered the Dell Axim pocket pc. it had all the features I wanted except that it is kind of big. Other than that it cheap for a pocket pc, it has the bluetooth add on capability, and it has memory upgrade slots. I chose that over the slim HP model that does not have bluetooth. if you don’t know what bluetooth is, it is a wireless way to connect devices. I have had allot of success with bluetooth connecting my palm, cell phone and powerbook. the problem is you need devices that support it. that is a key factor in my technology buying now. so if one device does not do everything I need it to, can it connect via bluetooth to something else that can do the job? the down side is that dell takes a while to ship anything. I have a weird way of thinking about paying for stuff. Once I get the pocket pc I will of course sell my current palm on Ebay. I probably will make as much or more money back from the palm sale to pay for the pocket pc. Crazy justification for buying a new one, but it allows for almost spending more on something while getting a new device earlier than I would normally have.

On another note I totally forgot that my friend rich got us islander play off tickets for Wednesday. I am not sure the kind of seats we got, but I look forward to going. I love hockey. it is the one sport I can get into. I played a little roller hockey in college, and when I worked at summer camp when I was younger I played and coached a bit. so I am into the sport. Every season I say I will follow it more or goto more games, but never seem to find time to go. I have gone to play off games the past 2 years. this will make 3 for me. I am a toronto maple leafs fan as well as a NY islanders fan. always difficult when both teams I like are in the same division, but I normally root for toronto when both teams meet. My thinking is if either team win’s I am happy. I will break out the islander’s jersey Wednesday for the game. it should be fun.

Not that I care a huge amount about who reads this (it is primarily for me to have as a journal), but I want to figure out how to get this out so I may get some visitors. some of the writing is kind of private, but I always wonder if I am any good at writing so this is a good chance to see if people can actually make sense of what I write. So I think the next step for this blog is to get it “out there” and see what happens.

Another thing I need to do is create a sort of cast of characters of my life! I mention people in this thing, and if you are a stranger reading this you have no idea who in the world I am talking about. I did something funny with my friends a while ago with funny bios, but I think I may actually do a real one for some people I talk about. This all depends on if I have time on the train to write it. this entire blog rely’ on the fact that I have time to write. today I have time to do 2 full entries, but other days I can’t do any. we shall see. also my hands have to not hurt. I have been having problems with hand stress again. it comes and goes for the past few years. that is the curse of working with computer all the time. also not do ergromatic things when working on computers also does bad things to you.

OK, it is late. I am off to bed. I hope to get back on a normal sleep schedule tonight from the past 4 days of crazy sleeping habits.

Computers, do they suck up or free up time?

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From the title you may think I am pondering the usefulness of computers. Not true. I think they are great. So much so that I made a career out of working with computer networks. But, sometimes I think they can cause tons of wasted time. I think that today because I needed to spend hours yesterday and today rebuilding my computer. Last Wednesday I blew my desktop away and re-installed windows xp. tuesday night I put the machine in a new case and during the move I physically destroyed a hard drive. Out of the 4 drives that I had I lost the one with the important data on it. The good news was that I made a backup of it that morning. The bad news was I didn’t get everything. I left off some less important stuff. you don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have it. But ok, there I was with a bad drive and a backup. I was feeling dam proud of myself for making a backup. Well try importing the data back off the dvd backup I had was a pain. At first I didn’t think it would work. I kept getting major bad errors when copying. I ended up throwing the dvd in my mac and restore it from there. At this point I may just leave the “personal data” like word doc’s, pdf’s and images on the mac. I didn’t want to do that, but it is turning out to be ok. Yeah, I am just grumbling. Everything seems to have turned out ok, but it took a day and a half working on and off to get things restored. That does not count all the programs I still need to reinstall on that XP machine. I will be doing that for weeks. So this week, computers have been a drain on my time, not a savings. next week hopefully will be different.

On the flip side, I am sitting here with my handy offline blog editing tool writing this blog as my trusty powerbook is taking my photo album I had backed up and sucking it into iphoto. It places them in nice categories. I have very few complaints about the program. I was also able to hack together a non-frontpage enabled version of my website on the apache server. the photo album site of 1gig of my images will take allot longer. Also not up is what I used to call the edata site. it contained data out of an access database. apache can’t read ASP files so I need to figure out PHP & Mysql to do the same thing on apache. that will take some time also. I honestly am not sure if I will take that plunge. I would have to export a bunch of data into mysql and I don’t know it that well yet to be the sole location for that data. I am so crazed about screwing up my apache server and the content that every change I make I am backing up the directory to my windows 2000 server. I just need to get comfy with everything.

Today was another lazy day. I got up late (11:30) and just bummed around all day. worked on the website and cleaning up my desktop computer. Tons of fun stuff:) I also made a ghost image backup of the desktop OS just in case. Also got the TV watching down. Trying to catch up on things I missed this week on tivo. I also watched harry potter II last night on DVD. it was ok, but they leave so much out of the book. I totally understand they cant put everything in the movie, but it is just a let down. that is probably why I didn’t see it in the theater.

My parents probably will call and want to do the traditional sunday dinner. Not sure if I am going to opt in tonight. I had pizza for lunch and that is what they do every sunday.

I am also shopping around for a new handheld PDA. everyone who knows me knows that I go through stuff like that and cell phones relatively quickly. I do a pda about once a year. This year I went through them like every 6 months. The reason I do that is because I have not yet found the perfect device for me. If I did I would stick with it, but alas I cannot find it. also my requirements change as my needs change. what I need now is totally different than what I needed when I was traveling all the time. I am thinking of a pocket pc. the palm I have is nice, and does almost all I want it to, but it does not do everything. the problem is if I switch to a pocket pc I will probably have to give up something. Either weight, wireless ability, allot of $$$ from my wallet, or a combination of the 3. I probably will go to bestbuy tomorrow during work to take a look.

Def Leppard still rocks!

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As I have discussed before I have not written in a few days because two friends came down to visit from albany. One of my good friends from college steve and a friend of his tom came to visit. I know tom through steve, but he is really cool. They both came down to goto some def leppard concerts. We went to the thursday & friday night concerts. They actually made great time thursday and showed up early. I went up to meet them at a brew put right by the beacon theater where the concert was. I still am queasy about drinking after last week so I didn’t drink. I had some “healthy” cheese sticks and hung out and caught up with steve. The concert was awesome. we sat in the next to last row on the upper level, but I didn’t care. Tom had a floor seat since they didn’t get 3 tickets together for the first night. they played over half the songs from the hysteria album. I was very pleased. got to hear my favorite song live twice, it was nice. If anyone needs to know my favorite song is Animal by def leppard. I have others songs that I like allot but I still consider that my all time favorite!

So it turns out that tom had problems with his seat. he and another guy had the same ticket, so for the first few songs they thought that someone was running a scam. he was pissed since he went to ticket-master for the tickets. He ended up having to stand at the side of the stage the rest of the concert because they gave the other guy the seat. it was funny, but really stupid. Steve & my seats were fine.

We went back to my place afterward and just hung out till like 2-am before going to bed.

I actually got through most of friday without dealing with work. it was nice. I just had to call Keith about 1 problem with a backup. Other than that and him calling to try to mess with my head once work was non-existent.

Friday, Steve, Tom, & I went into the city at like 1:30 after eating lunch at the omega diner. To save on parking we took the rail road in and bought the unlimited ride fun pass’s for the day. We went to the trade center site since neither of them saw it before. I swore I wouldn’t go again with them, but we had nothing going on. I got a chance to goto J&R computer world, so I wasn’t complaining. then we went up to time square area and walked around for a while. We needed up spending like 2 hours in the virgin megastore just looking at the dvd’s. the guys from albany were amazed at the selection. I was pretty impressed myself. we ended up eating (and having happy hour) at planet hollywood. I was fighting a migraine all day so I didn’t drink. I ended up having to take a bextra at lunch, another at dinner, and then 2 furiset’s (aka butabital). I COULD not get a migraine during this concert. I called my dad and he said I could mix the bextra and furiset. I was worried. I didn’t eat because my head hurt too much. I am thankful to say that the drugs finally kicked in and I was fine for the concert. I also got ear plugs so that helped. I liked the first concert better, probably because of the drugs and headache, and the ear plugs drowning down the music. Steve and Tom liked the second one better. Def leppard played an extra song in the encore, and it turned out to be one they have only played once before since 1996. I never heard it so I didn’t really care. Either way I had an awesome time both nights. it was also good to see steve. I am thankful for tom putting up with our “old college stories”. he also gave me some steve hight school stories so I had a good laugh.

Steve and tom took off early today (9-am). I woke up long enough to say by, and hear them leave. I went back to bed till like noon. I was zoned out till like 3pm and then started working on my new linux box (see previous post). Not sure what is in store for tomorrow. more later!

Apache, Moveable type lives! IIS, Frontpage are on life support!!!

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Ok, after less trouble than I though (but with some problems) I am now hosting my own blog on a linux server running moveabletype and apache. My boss was awesome in giving up time to help me configure this. I had alot done by myself, but it still didn’t work right. So I called the man who knows linux. this is the same person forcing me to learn it, but I needed the swift kick in the ass to do that. Thanks, enough but kissing since I know he reads this!

The nity gritty of it all is I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old dell desktop I have. Pumped 380+ megs of ram into it first of course. and then downloaded movabletype. that program kicks ass. I just finished importing all my old blogger.com entries into the new system. All I have to do is figure out how to properly back this thing up. I also got the offline posting app on my powerbook to work. I am writing on it right now. It is Kung-Log. I also downloaded w.bloggar to do the same thing on my XP box if I need to.

The next major step is to port my website over from IIS & frontpage to apache. that may be time consuming. I did have a copy of my site running on a win32 install of apache a few weeks ago as a test. seemed to display the current pages fine. I will just have problems with the indexing and other frontpage centric features.

As much as it was painful I actually enjoyed tinkering with red hat. I have ton’s to learn, but I learned it is not impossible to do.

Now that the technical stuff about this setup is written I can write about the past few days in the next post!