Day: 3 September 2003

What’s On TV

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I used to watch TV all the time. It was my way of relaxing when I got home from work. Tivo has changed my life, or my TV watching life. It records the crap I want. I don’t channel surf anymore. I also find myself watching less TV. I even fast forward allot of what I Tivo, or just decide to delete it after I capture it. It is rare to find good television, especially during the summer.

My new favorite thing on TV currently is Mi-5, on A&E of all places. I mentioned it before in another post. It is a well done BBC show that A&E picked up. Their are only 16 of them over 2 seasons. I just saw the entire season 1 over the past week or two. A&E had a marathon monday and I captured all the ones I had not seen. I like spy novels and shows, but this is just good. This is my spy fix since The Agency was canceled. I just ordered Mi-5 Season 1 on DVD. Gotta love that amazon.co.uk. You can find tons of stuff you can’t get in the US.

On the down side in 9 more weeks the second season will be over and I will have to wait till june 2004 or later to get more installments of Mi-5 (or spooks as it is called in the UK). I guess I will have to wait till September or October and see what crap US television puts on the air. Of course who will be watching TV when the Simpson’s Season 3 comes out on DVD!!!

The Cool Side Of Network Administration

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Today I played with, I mean setup some cool new tools for our network. Joe finally got up our Avocent Switchview IP. It allows us to securely view the console of remote machines hooked up to our KVM. It was cool and very helpful to look at the bios screen on a server as we rebooted it 150 miles away.

Another cool tool we are looking at deploying is Microsofts Operations Manger, or MOM. I don’t like the name. Any software called mom gets me worried. It also makes me think about Microsoft Bob. MOM is actually interesting. It is not as nice a network monitor as Whatsup Gold, but it is a good windows tool to keep tabs on the health of a windows server. Whatsup and Mom are complementary in what they do. I can even have MOM send SNMP traps to a system like Whatsup. Of course doing that is easier said than done.

Next up is an automated Symantec Ghost deployment scheme. To be able to click on a button and update a desktop computer image would be fantastic. I thought we should have a system like that when we reached 50 desktop users. We are well beyond that and we have nothing in place yet. Windows 2003 Server also has other options you can use to do remote deployment and software package updates. I have never tried anything with 2000 Server, but I hear that the 2003 implementation is much better. Now I just need to find the time to do a test.

Back To Work

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My sister went back to work today for the first time in over 6 months. She dragged it on as long as she could but she needed to get back since her maternity leave was over. She will only work 4 days a week and only 3 of them at the office. Morgan is great, but I don’t know if I would stop working that much to be at home. I guess it is a maternal thing.

My mom also went back to work today. School start’s so she is back. She was not to happy about no vacation. I had no sympathy. After a hellish summer of working, I don’t loose sleep over them having to go back. My mom is weird, she has been talking of retiring for like 2 years, now she is saying she will retire in 2 more years.