Month: May 2003

The weekend is almost here

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I have survived (almost) another week at work. Now I can have either a stress free or stress filled weekend with my cousins! Probibly stress free but you never know. The down side of going over to their place right after work is that the commute sucks. I don’t know how wayne did it for a few years. NJ Transit sucks, and the trip is really long.

The up side is I really love my cousins that I am going to see. They are like the only family I like that I see in any normal interval. I wanted to go roller blading with my cousin arriell, but ran into some problems last night when I was packing them up. About 2 years ago I went out and bought brand new top of the line roller blades to replace my aging roller blade macroblade equip’s I bought back in 1994 when I was working at Timber Lake Sleep away camp. They were top of the line then but they got beat up so I decided to get new ones. Well I don’t work out as much as I used to so the new blades ended up sitting in a closet for 2 years, or maybe more. I can’t remember. I got them out last night and realized one of the wheel bearings on a back wheel was busted and was not spinning well. I couldn’t fix it in thime so I didn’t bring them. I am pissed because I wanted to go out and do that with arriell, but I wasn’t going to bring them if they were broken. I was not sure if I could fix them. It is alot of extra stuff to bring when I am taking the train.

I will think of something else to do with her, I hope!

Interviewing may be harder than going on interviews, or maybe not.

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Today I have 2 phone interviews with Gus for our Helpdesk Manager position for our Kingston office. Not that anyone who is interviewing will read this, but I have lots to say about the first guy we talked to, but I can’t discuss here. Trust me lots to say, most not good. Not sure if giving an interview is worse than having an interview. Both are not fun.

I am slowly trying to setup moveabletype on a red hat box at work. Gus wants to use it for project based blogs. I think it is a great idea. The problem is I can’t get people to follow simple security procedures let alone use a blog to document a project. We will build it anyway, and hope for use I guess.

I think Gus is having buyers remource with the VOIP solution we just purchased. He knows it is good, but he still worries. Keith is all excited about the new toys to play with. For some crazy reason I think I am the level headed one in this situation. I think it will work, but we cannot play up the “new toy” part of this because it is not a toy. It is the bet we made with alot riding on it.

Yesterday we had an interesting converstation with a bunch of our DB guys. Our QA guy rajive came asking if we can get a faster staging DB server. Staging is a place you put stuff right when you are ready to actually open it up on the internet. It is a staging area, or a place to make last minute testing of code. Well our staging database server was running something really slow, so people wanted to put the process on a production machine and run it from their. I was like no way. You don’t mix “live stuff” with “staging stuff”. I did feel bad because not allowing that screws up rajive’s testing, but I couldn’t do what they asked. So no one liked that answer and Gus gathered us all around to discuss the problem. We started with Keith and me saying this is a bad idea to everyone agreeing it was a bad idea in like 30 minutes. I don’t understand what happened. Boris one of our DBA’s made a complete 180 on the decision. Don’t get me wrong I am happy, but it was weird.

I did feel bad about rajive. he is like one of the most level headed and coolest people I work with. But he needs to rely on other people for him to get his work done. I mean it is his job to test everything, so if stuff is bad it makes his life harder. If people ask him to test 5 things at once, his life sucks.

No life, or so it seems some time

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It feels sometimes that I have no life outside of work. I know I am not the only person who feels this way sometimes. For the past several weeks I have felt that way. I have been so busy with stuff going on at work, I have not done anything after work on weekdays. I didn’t get home till after 8 on yesterday and tuesday. Tonight I need to go home and pack. Hopefully I will have a life this weekend when I visit my cousins. Hopefully!

Still not sure what we have planned to do. I probibly will call my friend lefty and try to hang with him sometime while I am there. We don’t hang out much since he lives in jersey.

Stuff breaks

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Yesterday was very interesting. That is technobable for really really stressful. As I was getting into the subway yesterday morning I got a page staying one of our e-commerce sites was having issues. Justin our helpdesk guy onsite at the time said he could not place orders on the site. After much debate with our cracker jack development leader (sorry mark, it was broken) it was determined that we did have a problem. One of our developers figured out the issue and fixed it, but not for like 45 minutes. The problem was a stupid mistake. I won’t go into details.

The long distance provider we selected for our Kingston office put tons of crap into their 50 page contract. We are seriously thinking about someone else. Gus is not to happy since he was the one who has been pushing for us to use these guys for the past year. I am happy with their data services though. Go figure. I have someone from verizon scrambleing to get us a contract hopefully today.

Our local Voice T-1 was ordered. When it will be installed is anyone’s guess.

This morning I woke up to another problem. Looks like one of our web servers is not happy. We are not down, but we only have 3 left.

Yesterday was also tons of stress since Keith left early. He was complaining of a cold. He needs to toughen up a bit.

People actually goto this blog!

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It turns out that I do have visitors to this blog. I am not tracking anything just yet, but according to someone at work people in the office are looking it over. Does that means I cannot say bad things about those moron’s anymore? No, they are not moron’s. I was just kidding. I will however continue to speak my mind, good or bad. This blog was originally for my own use. People reading it is just a plus.

I have been told that I ramble on in these entries. Yeah, that is my writting style. I just write what I am thinking about. Also that every other sentance has a sarcastic undertone. My responce to that is “Realy” I hadn’t noticed.

Work yesterday was ok. I finally got the Internet T-1’s ordered for our new office. Still waiting to sign our voice T-1’s. I have a guy selling Internet access at the facility that we are going to. it is cheap and high speed. The problem is one guy runs the company. Also his install and labor costs make the savings on the T-1 be very low. I had serious issues with going through a reseller who we would rely on their equipment, and only one person worked there. Spoke with Gus about everything and he was like make a decision. So I am going to pass on this guy. He was eager to be agressive on the install cost, but he had some fixed costs he could not come down on. Also the support issues scream for attention. I know I am making the safe decision, and will find cost savings elsewhere.

I had a really bad experience with a sales guy trying to save me tons of money on my phone bill tuesday also. He was a real pain. He was like can you sign agreements? And 5 or 6 times asked to speak with someone who had more purchasing authority. This is even after Gus was like speak to Scott. Do people think they will get anywhere when they act like that? And then this guy is telling me things that I know are incorrect but thinks I am wrong. In a nutshell, smells like a big scam. Dan agreed with me. This guy should have been happy that I didn’t have Gus sit in on the meeting. I kept quiet. My boss would have killed the guy. Now that would have been fun.

What is on the agenda for today you may be asking? Tech staff meeting for one. Then a tech management meeting, and a Call Center project meeting. Don’t you just love going to tons of meetings all day? I also need to meet with people to sign the verizon local T-1 contract for our new Call Center. That should happen first thing this morning.