Month: September 2003

I Don’t Feel So Well

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I woke up early this morning not feeling very well. I have a cold and feel like crap. My noise has been running all day. My ears hurt, and my throat feels like crap. The bad part is that I know it will only get worse before it gets better. I am heading home to Nyquil or Tylonol PM. Hopefully I can sleep using that stuff because I didn’t sleep well at all last night. Hopefully the drugs will kick this thing, or make me not feel anything while my body deals with the problem.

I left Kingston early since I don’t feel to hot. I left right when our CEO was showing up. Perfect timing on my part.

UPDATE, my jaw now hurts from the sinus pressure. I am on the train and the elevation changes are hurting like hell. I need some coco and a nap:)

My Treo Is Dead, Say Hello To Treo # 4

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My Treo 270 died from unknown causes friday night. It just wouldn’t get a network signal every again. I called T-Mobile and after 90 minutes speaking to 7 different people I finally got a new on shipping to me. I love those Treo’s, but this problem reminds me that my original one worked for not even 2 days before it died on me. I got a replacement after a week that time. This time it should take 2 – 3 days. So counting me selling my second one, I will be on my 4th Treo when the new one arrives. It should last about 1 – 2 months and then I will get the new Treo 600’s when they come out.

Also DOA this week is my blackberry pager. It finally stopped working completely. It went from bad lcd screen, to rebooting when sending messages, to rebooting every 5 minutes. Skytel claims that they can fix the reboot problem, but not the lcd issue. if I cannot read the email, I have no reason for the pager. The problem is that blackberry or RIM the makers of blackberry’s just stopped selling the 850’s, the little pager size units everyone has. they are focusing on the bigger PDA style devices. I am not happy because I want a pager like device. My hardware rep has a lead on something for me, if not I am hitting ebay for a used skytel blackberry.

2 Days At Kingston

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I did my 2 days in Kingston this week. I am on the train (Amtrak) heading home. Got allot done, and still more to do. We just brought up 10 computers from our NYC call center and are setting them up in Kingston. We now have over 32 stations setup with 10 more for training. We are well on our way to 48, the target for phase 1 of our build out. Then we move up to 85 stations soon after that.

I also just got a new help-desk person in Kingston. Kai started monday for us. He was originally hired as a call center supervisor but he had IT background and we liked him so we transfered him over. Sorry dave. the call center’s loss is our gain.

I will be in NYC the rest of the week, and Keith will be in Kingston Wed, & Thursday. I want all the building out to be done so we don’t have to spend so much time up there. It takes time to transfer the knowledge we have to the new people at the same time as we are deploying so much gear.

We just got 30 new phones. We need to program them. We also had 8 new people start Monday. It is busy, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Of course a break now and then would be nice!

So Much To Write About

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I have so much to write about I don’t know where to start. I just got back from the second night of the Jewish new year’s celebration. I was at my family’s best friends house. We do almost all the major holidays with them. This being the first holiday of the season was weird. Their were so many new babies and little kids. My sister hasn’t been the only one having kids. Bruce and Richard (my dentists) both have new kids. Scott brought griffin (1 1/2), his new son. Cari (another Cari, not my sister) brought her 3 kids (6, 3 1/2, and 18 months). Then their was like 5 others that I can’t remember. Lots of kids.

Dinner was ok. I am not big on holiday food spreads. Desert was fantastic though. Had some awesome chocolate cake. My dad had a little on my recommendation. he is diabetic, so he waits for me to have chocolate to give my opinion on if it is worth the sugar for him. 5 months & 6 days until I can introduce chocolate to Morgan. Morgan’s mommy may not be too happy, but I will try anyway!

I tried to rest today. It didn’t work. I didn’t feel well during the day. I didn’t get to bed till after 1:30AM since I got home late last night from the first night of the new year dinner. I took a furiset to prevent the migraine. it worked, but I was really tired. I couldn’t sleep though. When I lied down, I kept getting woken up by the phone. Now I will try to sleep and probably won’t be able to.

“Family” get together’s are always interesting, and annoying. I get the curious questions about what I am doing and how things are. That is normal from people you don’t see that much. Then I get the inevitable tech questions. Some of them are cool, and I don’t have problems answering. Case in point, Scott’s question tonight on what laptop to buy. He used to have a Mac and I talking to him about my Powerbook. He may get one, but also is looking at a decent dell. Told him he can’t go wrong with either. But then their are questions like anything from Wammy (not his real name but everyone calls him that. Don’t know why). Ever time I see him he picks my brain about all sorts of tech crap. Some stuff is interesting, but other times it is downright annoying. Now I like talking about technology. you can tell that by reading this blog, but I like talking about it with others who know what is going on. Family gatherings are not the place to discuss stuff.

I also tried to get data off my Dad’s old Palm 505. He just got a Treo 300, and I need to get the data onto it. Can’t get it off using the equipment he has at home. it only sync’s with his work computer, so I have to have him sync it and then backup the file and email it to me. I tried 2 cradles and neither worked.

Been Busy

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I was away in Kingston till Wednesday night. I was busy and tired at night so I didn’t blog. Tons to talk about but I just am not in the mode to write that much. As I said Kingston was buys. Tons of issues remain outstanding. NYC is also a hotbed of problems right now. I hope to have things straightened out by next week.

Tomorrow I go with my family to my mom’s friends house for the Jewish holiday’s. I am not a big “holiday” fan, but I do what the family asks in situation’s like this. Why piss off my mom when I don’t have to! I will play next time.

I didn’t go to Gus’ for poker like I thought I would tonight. I had too much to do, and I was really tired. I didn’t really want to be out late tonight while I had problems to work on.

The Phone Traffic Transfer

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Last night I successfully completed tranfering almost 50% of our call traffic to our new Call Center. At about 8:45PM Sunday AT&T redirected the traffic and it immediatly came up at the new center. It was actually very painless. Knock on wood nothing goes wrong.

Today I got to work at 7:30AM to reboot the call center software server, and from 8AM on the office was busy. We maxed out all the computers we had setup by 1PM. We even had 3 users logged in from our NYC office using the VPN tunnel. As of 10PM tonight it was still busy and they needed to get people back on the cisco phones because the queue was backed up alot.

Surprisingly (or not) we didn’t have that many major issues after the transfer. We had some computer that had some apps not working. We also had 5 machines that didn’t have Windows XP activation completed. The new computers ran out of the 30 days for activation and some of them coudln’t startup. To make matters worse the microsoft activation servers were not working ok. After some work, we got them online but it was a pain in the ass.

Never-mind What I Said About Poker

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OK, so I canceled going to poker. It was going to be a late night, and I am not ready to goto Kingston tomorrow. I needed to get some last minute work, and house stuff done today. I will go with my dad as planned tomorrow morning and then head up to Kingston.

I got my Mom’s EZpass so hopefully the trip won’t be so bad. Tried a new (or new for me) italian restaurant by my house. The food was ok, but the service was really slow.

I also got a bunch of clothing shopping done. I finally got a Fall/Spring coat. Also tried some new khakis and polo’s. I am buying polo’s again:( Dam company dress code.

I need to pack now, and finish folding my laundry. I also have to remember to export all the hold messages from my companies NYC office to bring to Kingston.

Poker Again

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I just got the call that we are trying again for poker tonight. Even though I am in pain from the last huge loss, I am down. I need to build my confidence and my bank account back up:) I am planning on crashing at dan’s tonight and then head home in the AM to shop with my dad. Then it is off to kingston in the afternoon.

I need to go shower and do my laundry now.

Snapper Mail

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Just found a great new program for my Treo. It is called Snapper Mail. it is a wireless email client that does everything that Treo mail does, for less money and it has more options. I think it is a bit faster at downloading also. I am using the 30 day trial now. When it is up I will see the status of the new Treo 600’s and will decide if I will buy the software. So far, all signs point to yes.

The Power Of Multiple People

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Yesterday was the first day in a while that I was the only one around in my department. Keith went off to California, and Justin was in Kingston. I was busy getting the office ready so we can have some people (3-5) be able to take calls using our cisco system in Kingston. I setup the phones and configured the computers to work. Thursday night we tested it with 1 rep. She loved it.

Daniel had to build a new Red Hat 9.0 box because our old secondary name server died. We rushed a new one in its place. We were never down, but I like having backups. He also mounted and brought on line the new ftp server. Now all we need is the second ftp box and we can cut over to the new system.

Otherwise it was a very busy and stressful day. We ran a disaster drill. It worked out ok, but the thursday drill didn’t. We also had a problem with a server running out of disk space, but their was no log entry of the problem.

I didn’t leave work till after 7PM. I get a day of rest and then it is off to Kingston on Sunday.