Month: July 2003

Sitting around in the “good chair”

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So I was extremely lazy today. I did very little. I am still recovering from my all nighter. I always had trouble with those things. This one was actually not so bad, but I remain tired afterward. I am sitting up now watching a little tv, typing away on my new IBM Thinkpad T40 in my comfy Pier One Papasan Chair .

I have the chair in my living room until I get my couch. My mom called this week and actually wants me to take it soon, because they are doing work on the apartment and want to clear space out. I need to go and get it. Until I do I have the chair. I really do like writing in this thing. The funny thing is this chair is probably so bad for my back. Oh well.

The T40 is totally awesome. Looking at the T30 and T40 side by side, they look almost identical. The thing is the little bit of thickness that they took off really makes the difference. So far the battery life is good, but I have not completely tested it. I have spent my free time over the last 3 days installing everything on this new machine. I have allot done, but getting it customized the way I like it will take a while.

I did get some stuff done today. I updated my photo web site. I also made some changes on the blog. I have gotten the blog to work properly while pointing all my web traffic to my IIS web server and redirecting certain sites and directories to my apache box. I had issues with it before but figured out the security problems I was having. The blog’s new address is http://blog.Scott.ac/ The old address will continue to work, and redirect to the new address.

Other good news regarding the new T40 is that I was able to get installed and working. For some reason that offline blogging software never would work on my T30. Now I can write my blog while not on the internet using my windows laptop. As much as I like my Powerbook, I am going to try and commute more with the thinkpad.

the little things

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I am sitting here on my laptop typing and I can’t help smiling at my new background image. I have a new picture of my niece morgan from our trip to barbados. Every time I see a picture of her I just want to give her a big hug. She is so cute. I am not just saying that, but judge for yourself. This is the photo I currently use as my windows background. Funny how the little things like a picture of someone you love will make you stop and think for a second. The funnier thing is after a while, you don’t over look it. Morgan is 4+ months old and I still stop every time I see a picture of her and wonder what we will do the next time I see her.

late night

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So here we are at work at 9 Pm. We are waiting until midnight to run our network upgrade. I am fed and waiting for the work to begin. We are trying to watch a movie soon. I am not sure if we will get to it.

So we never got to watch that movie. I ended up not being able to write a blog entry, and I am finally sitting down and able to do so two days later. Depending on how you look at our schedule we could say things were successful, or not. We got most of what we wanted to do completed. one big peace was not done, but I think we were a bit agressive with what we thought we could do in one night, so I am happy with our results. We had some problems allong the way, but we were able to pull through and get the project complete.

The whole thing took almost 6 hours. We (keith and i) started at midnight and didn’t leave our Data Center until almost 6-am. The rest of the team was at our office.

I was able to go home around 8AM. We waited until our call center opened and things were working normally.

The crazy thing was I didn’t go right home to sleep. I had 2 dunkin donuts on the train and went to get a hair cut. I grabbed a quick shower and then fell asleep till like 5:30PM. I was too tired after that to do anything. Hopefully my sleep cycle is not totally screwed up. Time will tell.

Busy at work

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I am tired and don’t want to write allot, but I have allot to talk about. So I will be brief.

Went to kingston today. Got there late, and didn’t leave till late. Was very productive with Dan & Joe. We got 2 POTS lines installed and our local Verizon voice T-1 installed.

AT&T had a massive outage out west that caused us all sorts of havoc while I was out. We had issues reaching sites on the west coast. Still no RFO (reason for outage). I am waiting on that.

Also I was just told that we hired 2 more developers that start on monday. I need to order computers and stuff for them. That will be fun since we are doing a late night (overnight) tomorrow.

And lastly the above mentioned overnight tomorrow. I need more sleep and we are doing an overnight install. that will be interesting. Because of the overnight I may not be doing any blog entries for a few days. if I do they may not post right away. It depends on how tired I am thursday and friday. More later…

The DMV

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So I just moved on July 1, 2003. if you read this blog you already know that. Well I sent away for a new drivers license with my new address on it. Since the old one was going to expire on my birthday early next year I figured I would renew it at the same time (to save money and avoid an eye doctor visit). As luck would have it I went to the eye doctor in June and he gave me an eye test so I didn’t need to goto the DMV for one. Just filled out the form and attached it to the renewal form and mailed it in with my $45 check for a license. The internet is awesome since I got all the information I needed off the DMV website for NY state. So I get the license in the mail today and it doesn’t expire till my birthday in 2012. Currently the picture on it is from like 10 years ago, and now I don’t need to renew it for another 9 years. That will be almost 2 decades of no new picture. I hope I look as young as I do in the picture in 9 years, but chances are I wont. How weird will that be handing that license to someone then. Will they even think it is valid? Who knows. At least I don’t need to pay another fee for 9 years unless I move again.

Work as Usual

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Monday was work as usual. We had our new Kingston Help-desk guy start. Gave him the really brief overview of stuff we do. After lunch he sat in on a training class for Call Center people. I bet he wasn’t happy about that.

We got our 2 file servers for kingston. They are nice. I am building Windows 2003 Server on them right now. Not 100% sure if we will use 2003 though.

We are planning a huge system upgrade at our data center that I mentioned last week. We hashed out issues still outstanding regarding that move. So far we have no show stopper issues. I gave it a go and await getting final approval for the work to proceed. We will meet again tomorrow to make sure no new issues creep up.

Keith is not happy because he thinks we gave away too much in the design changes to our development team. Or rather to accommodate issues they had. I think this is Phase 1 in a multi stage project. Once we complete this, we work for Phase 2 changes that may require reworking some site code. The work we are going to deploy represents a major step for us though. Sorry I cannot go into too much detail, but certain aspects of work are better left off the open internet!

Golf Outing

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So I went golfing yesterday. it was fun. I am not good at all, but from what people say they think I would be decent if I took some lessons and practiced. So Dan, Alyssa, Gus, Ravi, Nelson, John, Miguel, and I ended up going. It was fun. My foursome was Dan and me, and alyssa and Gus. Dan is the only good golfer among us. I learned a bunch, but still need to get allot of help. We had fun, so that is all that matters. I only lost 1 ball the entire day. I guess that is what happens when you cannot hit the ball very far!

Nelson was took some pictures of everyone. They are located on my photo site.

Dan had his best game ever, and I was his witness. I told him he needed to be nice or I would say that he lied about the score:)

Dan, John, Nelson & I ended up back by dan’s place in manhattan and ate dinner at some Russian diner. It was nice. The view (aka women walking by our window) was nice.

I didn’t get home till after 10pm due to limited LIRR train’s during the weekend.

Unfortunately I ended up taking 2 bextra’s due to the heat. I was getting a head ache that could have turned into a Migraine so I took the pill’s twice. The alternative was not to be thought about.

New blog look, or a small blog change

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If you read this blog, and lets be honest not many people do, you will notice that the title has changed. Also the URL or website address for you non computer people has changed slightly. I am always playing around with the name to see what sounds better to me.

I have moved the photo site completely off my Red Hat box onto a Windows 2003 server. I find it easier to manage the 750 megs + files within windows than within linux at this point. I am still running my blog on the Red Hat server until I can figure out how to move it to a Red Hat Server running under VMWare. Still working on that one.

Dinner with morgan, (and her parents)

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I went over to my sisters last night to install a new hard drive for them. That is my job in the family, to fix computer crap. Thankfully it was relitivly painless to do the install on their old Dell Dimension XPS500. The only problem I had was the ton of dirt in it. Once that was done we all went to dinner at Santa Fe. It is a steak place near Austin Street in forest hills. The food is always good. The big excitement of the night was when I was holding Morgan and she almost got out of my hands. Man that baby can move. In the end no harm was done, but I freaked, and my sister was very calm about it. I think she secretly wanted to kill me, but I don’t want to know.

Mike and I had some drinks at the bar, and then he drove me home so I can drop off a lamp and an end table they were giving me for my new apartment.

They tried to bribe me to do the computer work with paying for dinner, but I didn’t want to have them do that. I don’t mind doing stuff for them, and if it is something crazy big project I wouldn’t mind some free steak, but this only took me a half an hour and I wanted to see them anyway. It was nice that they thought to take me out though!

Dinner turned bad when we were walking back to their apartment and I got pages about errors my companies website. Turns out some stored procedure need re-compiling, or something. I have not yet read the incident report on the matter. I should get that on monday.

Amanda emailed me late, saying she was trying to IM me about going to Rye play-land friday night. I am glad I didn’t get the message till late because I would have felt bad that I was going to my sisters already. I like amusement parks.

Friday was busy, my old boss jeff from my days at Y&R wanted to do drinks also. I need to catch up with him soon.

Time for a lazy Saturday!!!