Month: June 2003

Fathers day

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Went with my family to my brother-in-laws family today. Well sort of family. It was a family friends house that they have been friends with forever. They are like family. If you know me, it is like the Stein’s for my family. They had an an awesome house with a nice in-ground pool on like 4 acres in Stamford CT. Nice place, but too far from the city for me. I had a good time. Mike pissed my sister off by dunking the baby in the pool. In my opinion the only thing wrong he did, was dunking her right in front of my sister and then not giving morgan to her when she started crying. Some things you don’t do in front of mom.

Not sure if we will do that trip again next year. The traffic sucked and my dad has a bad back. Sitting in the car is bad for him, or that is the excuse he uses. I guess this BBQ is an annual think, so we will see if we go next year.

I am spending most of my evening changing address’s on everything I can think of in planning my upcoming move. I got most of the magazines, the post office, the credit cards, and one cell phone company done. I still need to change my drivers license and some more stuff. Address changing is an art form if you have stuff auto billed to your credit card. If you change your credit card address you need to immediately go and change the auto billed account or else they will stop sending your or providing you whatever service you are paying for. I found that out when Amex changed my address on all my cards when I just wanted a corporate card changed. My Metro card was turned off. If you don’t live in NYC, a metro card is the credit card that you use to get onto the Subway. Mine also is linked to my Long Island Rail Road account, so having that get turned off was a bad thing.

Cleaning Up

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I finally got a fathers day card for my dad. I also got one for my brother-inlaw. He is a dad now too. The day before a holiday like fathers day is a zoo at the local card store. I also had a bunch of errands to run, so I took out my dad’s new Honda Accord. For honda that thing has some power. I always like driving something with tons of horse power. I will stop talking about it now because I am getting teary eyed thinking about my last fast car. I miss my mustang.

1999 My Mustang - 006

I also did the super fun task of balancing my check book. Or rather download stuff into quicken and make sure I actually bought the stuff it says I did. Turns out I actually found a $500 plus error. Gotta call and find out what is up with that. I am now up to date on all my bills and statements and other misc. mail, I think! My desk is sort of clean now.

I also started the grueling process of calling everyone and telling them I am moving. I always forget a bank or magazine, and then spend months figuring my mistake. I am doing allot of change requests on line, but it still takes forever.

Bluetooth Woes

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I may have mentioned my problems with bluetooth and my IBM thinkpad T30 running Windows XP. I have a Xircom Realport 2 Bluetooth card. I cannot get it to dial out using the bluetooth modem on my Sony Ericsson T68i. I can do it with my powerbook. Turns out that my problem may be the Xircom card. Howard (aka super smart guy that is an investor in my company) got it to work on his Thinkpad T40 with a built in bluetooth card and the same type of phone. that sucks because now I need to get a different bluetooth card. The Xircom one does not seem to work with XP. I hate wasting money on tech that doesn’t do what it was designed for. I am off to search ebay.

Vonage is out

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OK, so Vonage is everything they say it is, and probibly more. I used the service and the phone calls are nice and clear. The call routing is great. The service is just awesome. Just one little show stopper problem that I have. They won’t let you choose a vanity phone number. I got a really crappie number and would pay anything to get a nice easy to remember number from them. The problem is they automated the system and claim that they cannot in any way let you know the number you are getting before you pay the $10 fee to change it. With Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile I talked nice to the rep and was able to select the number that I want. AT&T even stayed on the phone for like 30 minutes with me till we came up with something good. They rock. Vonage is saying no, sorry. I wanted this service for incoming calls, so a crappy number is no good to me. I would rather change cell numbers and let everyone know about it often than keep a shitty number. I am looking into returning my router and getting a refund.

It is a great idea, but doesn’t seem to fit what I want if they are inflexible. I would still recomend them to others.

Flirting is ok, but not all the time

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Have you ever had a girl flirt with you and try to entice you into doing something you don’t want to do by flaunting her body? A girl I know was doing that to me today. Or at least I thought she was. Actually I am pretty sure she was or she has a serious back problem. She is nice and all, but if I know the flirting is going nowhere you can shake your chest at me all you want I am not going to help you do something I don’t want to do. Do women think guys are that shallow? I guess some are, but guys will do things if they think they have a chance. Being a flirt isn’t always a good thing.

(The contents of this blog are left some what vague for reasons of protecting me from getting people I know pissed off if they knew I was actually talking about them. Especially in this situation!)

never say its been a good day

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I believe that if you say the day is going well, or if it is “quiet” that fate will screw with you. I think that happened today. I said lots of good things about yesterday and it came back to haunt me today. First one of my helpdesk guy’s called in sick, when the other one was already taking a day off. then we had our site perform slow for a few hours during the afternoon. And to top it all off I get a call that Verizon is putting in a T-1 at our new office today. That would be a good thing, if it wasn’t the first time I was hearing about the install. I had no one onsite to greet them.

As you can guess it was hectic. I was able to get “back into the swing of things” but by doing that I found a bunch of problems that some people created while I was away on vacation. They say ignorance is bliss. I may believe them now.

I am looking forward to just resting this weekend.

Busy but good day, and good food Too.

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I was so packed with meetings today, and I still missed 2 because it was so busy.

Gus invited me to lunch with Howard Morgan. Howard is an investor in our company and one of the smartest people I have ever met. Besides being super smart, he reads almost everything and knows tons of people in the technology field. It was cool that he invited me to lunch with them. Never get enough of talking to Dr. Morgan. We ended up going out with his assistant Tori, and our CEO Glenn. We ended up at a Greek restaurant near our office. Gus wanted to take Howard to a authentic Greek place. Turns out it wasn’t authentic enough for Gus, but the food was awesome! I had some octopus, shrimp, steak, and this really good tasting cheese thing. We all just tried different entries. it was fun. I found it interesting to watch two really smart tech guys (howard and Gus) explain what a blog was to Glenn. Now glenn is not a tech guy but he does keep up on some aspects of the technology field. Internet culture such as blogging was not one of those fields!

I also got 2 tentative dates for some of my T-1 installs. That made me happy also. Still one more date to go. I also interviewed a guy to do some linux admin work for us. More on that later.

I am hoping I don’t get sick. everyone at the office is coming down with or recovering from something. I was glad I was away last week! The AC not working in the office very well can’t help either.

Dinner was good too. I defrosted a steak last night so I george forman’ed it up tonight. That is an kick ass little device. I need to order more steaks and stuff from freshdirect. They are a great food delivery service in NYC. The fresh meats and stuff are freaking great.

OK, time for bed. More tomorrow when my hands don’t hurt anymore (i hope).

New and awesome things I can do with my Mac!!!

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I keep finding new and cool things I can do on my powerbook that I cannot do at all on my windows machine(s) or it takes 10 times longer to do compared to my mac. I recently downloaded iSync 1.1. Now I can sync my cell phone with the mac using a USB cable and almost any mainstream cell phone. Worked great on my old Motorola V60i.

If that wasn’t enough I found a site that showed me how to use the same cable and phone to dial onto the internet using Verizon Wireless’s network. It is circuit switched at 14.4kbs but it works and does not cost extra per month to do, just uses your air time minutes.

And even better than dialing out using a USB cable is the ability to use my T68i as a GPRS modem (aka 56k speeds) with AT&T wireless. The dam software AT&T provides for windows doesn’t even work correctly with bluetooth, but the mac does without any special software! And why don’t more people use the mac again???

And have I mentioned how awsome itunes is? Or iPhoto? Winamp was good. I used it for years, but itunes blows it away!!!

Technology Treadmill

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So you buy some new device, and you are happy. Then a month later a new one comes out that is way better. What to do? That is the problem I encounter. If I sell the original device and throw in a few extra dollars I can have the new device, so what is the harm in that? It can add up.

I am pissed off because I just got a HP Ipaq 1910. It is a great little PDA. I love it, except for one limitation. It doesn’t have bluetooth. I am an early adopter of bluetooth, I think it can be a great protocol. I got the ipaq beacause it did everything else I needed, and gave up on the bluetooth option. It was a tradeoff, size vs bluetooth. Size won. The problem now is that I hear HP is coming out with a new version of the 1910 and it will include bluetooth.

Back into the routine

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Yesterday gave me the opportunity to get back into the work routine. I got a reasonable amount of work done. When I say that I mean I got some work done off my list of tasks. The downside of my job is the ever present list of daily requests by people that need to be done right away. that slows down any planned projects.

I ordered a new Wireless 3G PCMCIA card yesterday. It is a data card that fits into your laptop that allows you to browse the internet wherever Verizon Wireless provides Data services. It is a great concept, but in practice I have not seen any solution that works well. We need one for a demonstration next week.

I also got a list of quotes for our new desktop computer standard we are designing for our new call center. Once selected all new computers will be exactly the same type of machine. This makes management easy, but the problem is selecting the dam unit.

I have a ton of meetings today. I meet with our CEO about my budget for the new office project. I also have a conference call about desktop computer management options with an HP rep. I think I am sitting in on an interview for our Development team, and I also need to update Gus on all the things going on. Oh, I almost forgot I speak with AT&T about our Long Distance T-1 install dates also today.