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.
Day: 25 June 2003
Wednsday again
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
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
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.