Took the day and went up to kingston to work. I got allot done. I also learned allot about what goes on day to day up there, and what the employee’s need from a support perspective. The weather was on my side and I was able to be home by 7:30PM.
Month: January 2004
The Furniture Move
I got my new furniture friday as planned. It looks as good or better than I anticipated. Most of my stuff is put away now. I only have 1 issue with were to put all my home entertainment components. My Tivo & DVD player don’t fit where I wanted them to go. I need to cut a hole in the back of the wall unit in order to move them somewhere else. Other than that things look good. I need to hang my large map now that I know where my couch is. I have a massive map of the US with marks on every city I have been to. It was fun doing and is nice to have around. I will probably move my DVD collection to the new wall unit also. It will make room in my front closet where they are now.
I need to have my old wall unit removed. it is in pieces in the corner of my living room while I figure out what to do with it.
The really big foot rest in my bed room is making it hard to walk around, but it goes with my new comfy chair so I am torn with what to do with it. I pushed it against the wall and am hoping it is out of the way. You really need someplace to put your feet up on when you sit in a comfy chair. My Pier 1 chair had a small foot rest. That chair is now on my patio. it will be for warmer weather use outside.
This entry was written while listening to Farmhouse by Phish
First Blog From A Fresh Clean iMac
This is my first post from my newly formatted iMac. I had problems with it crahsing allot so I decided to reformat the drive and start over. I thought it was a software issue. It is begining to look like I either setup the software in the same way, or I am having a hardware issue since my problem is still happening. I have most of my settings recovered but it won’t be perfect for some time. I am just pissed that it is still crashing…
This entry was written while listening to Washin an Wonderin from the album “Nasty Little Thoughts” by Stroke 9
Visiting Friends
Spoke to my friend Jayson today. he is planing on coming into NYC for a week in february. He is going to take a Cisco Voice Over IP class. I think he is a punk for needing to take a class in it, but he owns his own buisness. In order to get clients he needs to not just prove he knows the stuff, he needs certification in it.
He may stay by me while he is up here. I don’t see him much so I think it would be fun. I need to get down to New Orleans and hang with him, joe and gretchen soon also.
I told him he should come to work with me and see a Cisco Call Manager in action. He was at the our "parent" company office when Jeff & Dave where there, but hasn’t ever made it to our current office.
Hopefully that will be a fun visit. I look forward to it.
Lazy About Packing
Well not really packing, but I am lazy today. I know I need to break down my old wall unit so I can get my new stuff friday, but I just am not in the mood to do allot of manual labour. I will wait till tomorrow. Hopefully then I will be up for it. I need to carefully take apart all my electronics and store them for a day. I also need to make sure my cable modem stays on while I do this or else I won’t be able to get on the internet. And that would be bad.
Snow, Snow, And Some Cold Weather
It is freezing in New York City today. It is also currently snowing. I hope it doesn’t snow that much since I actually want to goto work tomorrow. I am working from home friday so I really could get stuff done tomorrow at the office. As of now it is a crap shoot. Who ever knows how much it will snow. The weather people have no clue and I have stopped listening to them years ago.
All I do know is it is freezing. And on that note I just got a new Pea Coat. My old one had buttons falling off and my new LL Bean one just showed up tonight. I am just worried it is not as heavy as the current one I have. For the amount I paid that thing better be warm. I have a real navy surplus Pea Coat I got from my dad. Unfortunately it is too tight on me now. That was an awesome coat. He got it from a Navy base in the 50’s. It was used in WWII and has the guys name still embroidered on the inside of the coat. You could seriously throw a bucket of water on someone when they are wearing that coat and they would still stay warm.
VOIP Rocks
I tested our VOIP link between offices today. I was able to get 12 or so people on the phones in our NYC office connecting through a VPN tunnel to our call manager in our Kingston office. I only had 1 complaint about quality. I need to do a test like that a few more times, but the results look promising.
Keith was out sick today, so I was busy with helpdesk issues. I also have to continue to evaluate our monitoring system to make sure we get notified of any server problem. I think we do a decent job of it now, but whenever anything falls through the cracks it is really bad. Also there is always room for improvement.
I had to spend allot of time reconfiguring VOIP phones today to get our test to work. We are compressing calls, so I needed to associate the phones with the compression scheme we are using. I also had to setup the phone extensions for when our customer service rep’s start using them.
Plenty of other things going on, but my head is not focused right now to remember them all. I will write more later this week.
All in all things are good, and that is all that counts!!!
Migraine Streak Continues
For some unknown reason I am still getting head aches. I was stuck in bed all day sunday with a migraine. I attempted to not take drugs since I was at home, but I ended up taking a bextra and sleeping all day.
Today I also took 2 fureset (butabital). I am hacking the spelling of these drugs! I felt better after taking the drugs today, but if I didn’t I would have a big problem. Butabital is a powerful pain medication. Thankfully I was able to make it through the rest of the day. Hopefully tomorrow I will feel better. I will try to goto bed early tonight.
Work Update
Here is what has been going on at the time sucking void I call work. Kidding. It may be a time sucking void but I wouldn’t be doing anything else…
Fixing our monitoring system. It seems like I am always doing this, but I am spending time tweaking our monitoring system that listens to all our computer systems and pages us when something is wrong.
Keith just finished setting up the VPN link to our Kingston office. Now we have a dedicated link between our offices for just VOIP traffic. We can use an entire T-1 for voice calls. We hope to get 15-20 calls over it. We will test it this week.
We are busy building and configuring new servers. it feels like we are doing this daily. We deployed 2 new box’s this week. Something to QA stuff on, and a new data-warehouse machine.
My mail migration goes slowly since I am busy doing other things. This is not a problem except we are paying for pop accounts on our current provider still when I would like to offload these users to our own hosted mail system. That is the end result. Hopefully when done I will save a few hundred bucks a month on mail hosting.
Gus has been away on vacation and now CES. He returns Wednesday. The rest of our upper management return Monday. No joke it has been quieter without them in the office. it is not them, it is just there is like 10 less people in the office. Back to normal on monday.
Bad Blogger
I have become a bad blogger. I have not posted in a week. And it feels like to me I don’t post as often as I used to. It is not from lack of things to talk about. Just lack of time or inclination to sit down after I get home and write. I don’t write on the train anymore. I am going to try and fix that.
UPDATE FOR THE WEEK:
Wednesday, Thursday, & Friday I had a headache each day. I took some bextra and furiset to stop the Migraine. Wednesday it didn’t really work, but the other days I was at least able to make it through the day. Today I don’t feel 100% but I am still planning on going out tonight.
I finally got a date to get my furniture. My mom actually setup the move. She wanted the stuff out of her place so she setup the move. She knows I am busy so all I have to do is write a check. My dad and I will supervise the move next week. I need to destroy my old living room wall unit to make room for my new one. half of me wants to keep what I have, but it is not in good shape and the new one is so much nicer.