Month: September 2003

On The Way Home!

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I am done with my 2 days in our Kingston office. Things are very busy up there, but everything is shaping up. I got a lot of issues cleaned up yesterday and today. We still have some things to finish, but we are moving along at what I think is a satisfactory pace.

Justin takes my place up in Kingston tomorrow for the remainder of the week. We are starting to ramp up that office and need people up there to make sure things are done at a quick pace. Justin will also accompany me up in Kingston next week, when we move a large amount of traffic to the new facility.

Joe is doing a good job of keeping things updated. Their is just allot of stuff to do, so I am happy we got a second person for the next two weeks. I hope to have some one up there permanently soon. I am working on that also.

I went back to the hotel last night and went to check my mail on the Treo. I ended up falling asleep till almost 9PM. I woke up and decided to just “officially” goto bed. I did nothing but sleep at that hotel yesterday. I felt a bit better today because of it. Travel takes allot out of you. Even if it is short distance travel. If I am in a hotel it is considered travel for me!

Shopping Called Off

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My shopping plans with my dad got called off today. My parents had plans that started earlier than they originally planned. My dad didn’t even know about the change. He isn’t up on my family’s social calendar. He just goes where he is told. He was not too happy. He wants a new PDA. Also I was going to order him his new computer today. It worked out ok since I unexpected work stuff come up also.

Sort of funny good/bad new today my sister called. She said that morgan got scared from a game of peekaboo gone wrong with her dad, and the only thing that would calm her down was Blume the big pink elephant I got her when she was born. Got to love the plush toys!

Off On The Road Again Tomorrow

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Tomorrow I am off to Kingston again for 2 days of working up there. It is not that I don’t like the office or the people up there. I just like being near home. Sitting here tonight writing this, I think I have kicked the work travel bug out of my system. Of course I won’t turn down working in barbados or something if the office said they needed to send me there!!!

I am catching the early train up. Hopefully I only have to be there for 2 days. I want to be back for poker Wednesday.

I have grown used to packing extra clothes just in case I end up staying longer than I planned.

Their is just so much to do in both locations, I sometimes wonder if it will all get done? Someone else from work is now reading this blog. Whenever I hear that I get worried, then I realize that I A) don’t care if they read this, and B) would say pretty much all this stuff to people anyway so why should I care if they read it. It is posted on the internet.

Tired

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Granted I went to bed really late last night (2AM today), but I woke up at noon and was still exhausted. I went back to bed till 2 and I still tired. Not sure what is up? Saturday is my day to lie around anyway, but I am getting nothing done today. I may go back for a nap later.

The weirdest thing is when I sleep flat on my back. I usually sleep to one side or another, but sometimes I fall asleep on my back. Sometimes when I do, I think I dream that I am awake but anytime I try to move I cannot, until I force myself to wake up. It is weird. Only happens when I am on my back. Very hard to describe. Sometimes it freaks me out, and other times it is very relaxing feeling.

Meetings On The Road…

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Friday I went with about 12 others from my company to our President’s house to talk about stuff on our minds. We meet every week, but this week the powers that be decided to take us out of the office. it was a nice change of pace. We talked for a few hours then hung out and had a BBQ. I lost at pool, won at air hockey, and installed a Wifi card on a PC.

We got to play with night vision goggles also. Dean (our president’s) friend who is a next door neighbor is an FBI agent and had a pair of night vision goggles. they were really cool. Gun conversations are also interesting, I don’t talk about them much since I left Baton Rouge.

All in all a good day. I am also vindicated in my opinion of Dan’s driving. Thankfully the return trip I went with Glenn who drives normally.

Two Late Nights In A Row

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I just found out that I need to be around tonight at 1AM for a software release. This will be really fun because I will be up till the same time Wednesday for a hardware release. Needless to say I am not happy about the situation. I hope I am awake tomorrow. I have a meeting filled day from like 10AM through 2PM. Meetings are never fun.

Unfortunately Keith cannot do this hardware swap by himself tomorrow. I don’t think he can mount the gear with one person. if he could I would seriously thinking about letting him.

The Long Reach Of Voice Over IP

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Today was a momentous day. We finally received power supplies for 2 Cisco VOIP phones. With 1 entry into our DHCP scope we turned the phone on and it saw the Cisco Call Manager. Call Manager is like a PBX or phone switch. Within 2 minutes we were making calls to my cell phone to test. It worked great. The only minor issues we have are making calls to different extensions on the same phone system. Small routing issue that we are working through.

The next step is to be able to use our call center software in NYC connecting to the servers in Kingston. We are having some minor issues with that, but we are slowly working through them. If that works we will be able to take calls in two facilities using one phone system. This is big if we have capacity issues in our new space down the road.

I now have a cisco phone at my desk in NYC. I hope to fix all the problems this week. I am very excited about getting this working.

Bring Your Powerbook To Work Day

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I didn’t take my thinkpad home last night due to the dinner. So I decided to commute in to work today with my Powerbook. It is the 2nd time in a week that I am doing it. For some reason I just feel comforatable typing on it, but not on the Thinkpad. I miss the blog entries on the train like today’s entries. Of course because I have 30 minutes to type I tend to ramble on about useless stuff. That is just what a blog is supposed to be. I will see if I will want to commute with both. I doubt it though. We shall see…

Training For A Call Center

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Yesterday a new class of trainee’s started at our Kingston Call Center. We have 24 customer service reps who will “hopefully” start taking calls full time on 9/22. The class was so big that we had to put the working reps in the training room and the people to be trained sat in the call center. Joe our Tech guy in Kingston is overloaded right now. Justin went up for 2 days to give him a hand. Justin was eager to go up, so it worked out ok. I need to get up there one day next week. I will also need to be there on the 22nd.

Besides the ongoing call center build out I have hardware swap out’s to deal with in our Data Center Thursday morning. Tomorrow will be interesting since it will be a long day.

I just received my first Penguin Computing Server. These guys make cheap linux servers. The joy of it is, I can put Windows OS’s on it without a problem. The Super Micro servers I have been buying for windows will not handle Linux. I have some issues with the hardware, but for the price we will deal with it. A decent server can be had for around $1600. I can get a really cheap one for under a grand. We are actually looking to get some cheap windows box’s and may actually use these guys.

I am still awaiting a heat sync for a Super Micro test server we are testing. I got a trial of a serial ATA server. Actually we had the financial ok to buy it but instead of buying a regular server we got this to test. If we like it, we will keep it. If we don’t like it, we will send it back and get a normal IDE server. Serial ATA looks good, and this machine can do hot swappable drives, where IDE RAID cannot.

I need to also start working on our Exchange 2003 test server. Gus and I want to get one working for the Information Systems team and see if it is easy to admin and troubleshoot. If it is we may want to make a larger scale deployment. The difference this time will be we don’t outsource it and we do it ourselves. In December of 2002 we outsourced our mail and put it on Exchange 2000. It was a horrible failure. Too much latency with accessing exchange over the WAN. We abandoned that option and returned to our original mail provider with just POP/SMTP mail. We have been happy since.

Steaks

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After much delay our telecom integration company, Gus, and I finally got together for steaks. We went to Keens chophouse in Manhattan. It was really good. The team we got finally has a clue and it was actually enjoyable to sit back and eat with these guys. I don’t think I have ever been that full after a meal. I had a hard time walking the 4 blocks to Penn Station. My paints feel tighter today!

We still have allot to do so the get together was also productive. We are looking at a bunch of other solutions they can provide assistance for.