Month: June 2003

Yet more moving!!!

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I didn’t want help moving because I hate moving for other people. I don’t mind favors but moving sucks. My last move my cousin wayne came and helped. I helped him move when he went from one house to another, but he just came because he is a nice guy. My friend Joe flew up from Baton Rouge to help. he is the last person I owe a moving favor too!

I figured since it was going from one building to another I could handle it. It turns out I was correct. Go figure. It took me some time but I was able to move everything except the really big stuff (thanks mover guys) myself.

I did some final moving stuff today. I still have some glasses and other breakable stuff at the old place, but I have almost all my stuff at the new place already. I threw out allot of old books that I didn’t think I would ever read again. I also got rid of other crap. You never realize how much crap you have until you need to move it. I think this is the last move that I can do myself or with friends. The next one I will have so much stuff that I will need professionals.

More Moving!!!

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Today was the day to do the bulk of my moving. I got allot done before 2pm. That is when Time Warner Cable was supposed to come and do my cable and cable modem. They give you a time frame of like 4 hours. Well when 5:50 roles around and they said they would be there before 6pm I got pissed and called. Turns out they claim they attempted to visit at 5:08PM. My dad was at the new apartment waiting for them. I had my phone with me and they claimed they called. No voice mail or missed calls. Now I don’t know who screwed up time warner or the security guys at my building. I am going to assume both did and scream at both. The security people at my apartment complex suck. Everyone else is great, but they suck. Time Warner was no help either. They said the next appointment was Wednesday. I got pissed and yelled at them some more. The best they could due was tuesday afternoon. Turns out they don’t do service on sunday or Monday’s. That would be nice if someone had an outage during those days.

Because of the cable guy’s I have to take Tuesday off after all. It was shaping up that I wouldn’t have to take off, but now I will.

On the plus side the movers came and did all my stuff that they said they would take and more. They were great. They were just a bunch of maintenance guys who work in my building. I asked them about taking my parents living room set and moving it to my place for me. they said it should be no problem. I am going to have them look at the set next week and we can setup a time to do it. that will make my new apartment complete as far as furniture goes.

Moving stuff

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I just took pictures from my visit to my new apartment. I need to figure out where everything will go. I may need to put a bunch of stuff on wireless. It will be cool, but will cost more, and will be slower.

I have not started to pack at all yet for this move. I am hopeful that I can just throw stuff in the moving carts that my building has and just move everything. only a small part of the stuff I have needs to be considered fragile. My sword set and Hard Rock glass’s.

One thing I noticed last night when I was at my new place was that I heard allot of background noise. I think it is from the Clearview Expressway. I am not sure, but it worries me. I am not that close to that road, and I will be 19 floors up. What was weird was that I only heard these noices from my bedroom and not the living room. Maybe the noise is coming from a vent or something? I am not sure. I will investigate further.

The new paint and carpet look awsome. I still need to pull up the crappy carpet in the bathroom but that should not be a problem. The bedroom already has wires for cable TV. All I need to do is wire for my computer stuff. I will most likely put my router near my TV so I can have less wires. Also the wall unit where the TV will go is in a more central point of the apartment. That way I will get better wireless coverage.

Work, softball, and head ache’s

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Today we have another company softball game. It is supposed to be 97 degrees today. I think that I will pass on going to this game. I don’t need to kill myself in the heat when we have not one a game yet. Well, we did win 2 games by forfeit when the other team didn’t show up, but that does not count in my book.

Also today is tons of interviews. I never know what to ask people. This lot looks good though. We will see what happens after today and tomorrow.

I woke up with a small head ache, but it seems ok right now. I forgot to take my Nadolol. I am supposed to take it daily to prevent migraines. Missing it one day here and there doesn’t usually cause a problem, but I don’t like forgetting to take it.

hectic day!

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Work was crazy today. I have a ton of people coming in tomorrow for interviews. On top of that I was working like crazy to set in stone our hardware config’s for the new office. Keith got the 2 Cisco Pix 515 firewalls we will use in Kingston so he is going to start configuring that. I finally ordered a replacement web server, and a disk storage array. I had approval for this stuff for over a month but I didn’t have the time in the schedule to deploy it. Now we need to get it done.

T-1 install dates still haunt me. 1 circuit was supposed to go in today and I have no word on its status. I still don’t have dates for my 3 long distance circuits. I hate having no power to do anything with these moron’s at the phone companies.

Computer equipment swapping

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Gus and I went down to the Apple store again yesterday. He needed a case for his new ipod, and I needed a scanner. I had a great scanner that did slides and everything but it did not work with my Powerbook in OS X. Thanks HP! So I got a Cannon USB scanner that is supposed to work with OS X. I am not sure if it does yet. I have not tried it out. The guy at the store was trying to sell me a more expensive one going the expensive one will definitly work with OS X. Dam sales guys.

My sister now gets my old scanner and a new hard drive I just ordered for her. She is taking so many pictures of the baby that the 8 gig hard drive they currently have is getting maxed out

Reading and Harry Potter

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So I finished the new Harry Potter book # 5 tuesday night. It was good, if not sort of predictable. Maybe I am getting old, or to critical but I think rowing is getting to stereotypical in her characters. I do get that the kids associate better that way so I am not critical of her. I still think she writes a great story. I am upset that I read the book in 3 days and now I probably have to wait 3 years for a new one. Besides my one criticism of the portrayal of some charicters I would say it was a good book. I will wait for the next one.

Wednsday again

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The middle of the week is almost as bad as Monday’s. Today is the day my division has its weekly staff meeting. We all get together to discuss the important events and status of projects. After that meeting we have a technology management meeting where we go over the same basically the same stuff and a different level of focus. It keeps everyone up to date on what is going on, but both of these meetings end up taking away the morning. That is what happens when you have such complex stuff going on, the update meetings take a long time because things get complex.

Daniel our new linux admin just finished a prototype build for Red Hat 9.0 for us. It looked good so far. He put MRTG on it and is now customizing it for us. We need the network stats from our LAN again. It is a hugely helpful tool. Their is so much to do with Linux. Hopefully we can do all we want to.

On the flip side I am waiting for the chance to do a Windows 2003 server. The latest servers I have built have been application servers that run multiple applications on them. Not all of these app’s would work with Windows 2003, or their status was questionable. So I am waiting.

Buying and selling

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So I am selling some old (and not so old) stuff on ebay. I sold 2 of the 3 items already. I have some more to sell later this week. I sold an external DVD player for a laptop that I don’t need anymore now that I have DVD built into my Powerbook. I haven’t used it in a while so it is time to go. I also sold an older enterprise class 802.11b access point.

Still on auction is my Palm T (can’t spell it out) running OS 5. And now that the new HP iPaq’s just came out I will probably sell my current one and get one with bluetooth. I am pissed about that decision, but see my previous posts on my handheld’s.

I also just got my sister a new 80 gig hard drive. I need to go over and install that for her sometime soon. I am also giving her my scanner. She will scan all our baby pictures on slides for my dad. It works out ok since my scanner rocks, but does not work with OS 10 on my mac. It gives me a reason to go out and get a Mac compatible scanner. I only wanted the slide scanner attachment to do the baby slides anyway. If she will do them she can have the scanner.

Interviewing

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Recently I thought interviewing was the worst thing in the world (besides speaking to phone companies) and then I started thinking. I came to the conclusion that yes interviewing sucks. We did find a nice group of perspective candidates for a support job we have had open for a while. I will see if anyone is good enough when we bring them in. That is all I can say on the internet on that subject. Lets just say that this topic preoccupies me allot recently. I have been on the phone with people for allot of the past 2 days.

Working in a support role means your day is never done. Case in point tonight as I sat down to do a blog I got a page about a website of my companies not performing well enough. I check it out and it looks fine. I then get a page telling me everything is back to normal. What happened, no one can tell. All I know it sucked time out of my night. I am actually not complaining, because I really like what I do, but work is never done.

I am still in the process of narrowing down our hardware selection for servers and desktops in our new office. Bargain hunting takes time.

Our new sysadmin is doing all sorts of cool stuff. I am just hounding him to document everything so us less linux inclined can figure out what he did. Turns out his documentation so far has been awesome.