Month: May 2004

Construction Delays

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Since I am out on Jury duty Dan has postponed the cube redesign scheduled for this thursday. As of now it seems I will be out all week. The newly scheduled date is next thursday.

Also on the construction front is the preparation for new cubes in Kingston. We have one cable quote, and we are waiting for a new one. Once that is done we begin plan’s on Phase III of our call center build out. I guess Phase II would be the adding the remaining cubes. Phase III would be the plan to double the call center size with new space. That plan is underway now. We meet architects on Thursday to discuss the designs.

It looks like Kai and Brian will loose their office when we do the construction. The kitchen won’t be big enough for all the people we plan on holding. The IS office can be moved and a wall can be broken down and the kitchen can expand into the IS office. Because of the size of the office when the construction is done we will need a second telecom room to accommodate the new cable runs we will need.

With all this construction I at least know what my summer will be like.

Jury Duty Update

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The powers that be have smiled on me today. Turns out that my case settled out of court. We were just told the good news. I am now waiting to be officially released from jury duty. The cop running the show has not decided to do that yet. I am not sure if we have to wait till 5PM or if we will get out soon. Either way I am out by the end of today. I am happy now.

All I have to do is get my cell phone back!

Jury Duty Sucks

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I am on day two of Jury Duty. Yesterday was going ok until I got put on a Jury. I was in the new courthouse. The AC was on, I had cell reception. I figured I can ride this out. No problem. Then I get put in a room for 4 hours and at the last minute I get selected as an alternate on a jury. I did my best to not be wanted, but they selected me anyway.

My dad picked me up from the courthouse yesterday and we went to dinner. THe commute wasn’t so bad. today will not be so nice. I got a car service to the court house again. That went over well, except for its cost. Going home is more difficult. I don’t know when I will be let go, so I cannot arrange for a car. Taking the rail road will take longer than it would from the city since I would have to go from Jamaica to wood-side back to my train station.

Other problems abound today. My GPRS service was not working on my phone so I could not check email. I figured it would start working eventually today. I will never know since the court house confiscated my phone because it has a camera on it. I can get it back later, but I am now without a phone all day. I had to call the office before and I used our 800# to get a hold of kai. If it wasn’t happening to me, I would think it was funny.

I am now waiting for my trial to be called. They say it can happen anytime between 10AM and 5PM. It feels like I am waiting for the cable company.

The only plus side is that the AC is going in the courthouse and it is comfy. Work will probably be hot and nasty this week without AC.

I am sitting here blogging in the central jury room waiting for my case to be called. I cannot find any outlets to power the laptop so I am keeping it powered down as much as possible. I have the screen brightness down all the way to conserve power. I don’t know how long I will be here. I also don’t know if or when I can charge the laptop up again today.

I have been using my Treo for email. That way I am trying to phase out my blackberry. Since I cannot have the camera phone in the courthouse I am having Jayson fedex me my pager for tomorrow morning. Hopefully I will get it before I leave for the courthouse. With my blackberry I can at least get email when I am out of the office. The Treo was fine yesterday, but they confiscated it today:(

This blog entry was written while listening to Black Balloon from the album “Dizzy Up The Girl” by Goo Goo Dolls

Palm Apps

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I may have mentioned this before but the only software I am buying recently is software for my Treo 600. I am finding so many useful things to get, I going out and buying the full versions when the trials are over.

I just bought Verichat. it allows you to chat over GPRS. You can use AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ. If you are not actively in the program, but logged onto their proxy server and someone sends you an IM, you get a SMS message with the IM. You then can sms back or enter the program and chat. Regular chatting does not use up SMS messages. it rocks.

I also got Call Shield Lite for the Treo 600. It allows me to identify anyone or any group with distinctive rings. It also allows me to hang-up, send to voice mail or answer any call by a number of parameters. you do this by group, person, or phone number. I have someone who keeps calling with a wrong number. I programed the software automatically hang up on them before the phone rings. It is so crazy, how cool this software is.

I am going to buy jabber software so I can use work’s jabber system on the Treo. I haven’t tried that out yet, but it looks good.

Saturday

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Alison and I met Jayson, Gretchen, Dave, and two of jayson’s friends from New Orleans. We meet at their hotel across from Penn Station. We ate a nearby Pizza place. The out of towners wanted some pizza. We only had a short amount of time before our reservations so we did quick and easy. it was surprisingly good.

I made reservations at the Gotham Comedy Club. it was right around the corner from Best Buy and Outback near my office. It was rated very highly from Zagats. We had a blast. it was really funny.

We sat righ tby the stage but in the corner by stage left. Gretchen got made fun of in the beginning when they were asking where people were from. She was slow to answer so they were making fun of Southerner’s being slow!

We even saw some comedian’s who I recognized from TV. One guy I don’t recall where I remember him from, and another guy I saw on Tough Crowd. All in all we had a blast. We ended up in the hotel bar after the show to hang out for a while. Alison and I took off early since we both had trains to catch. this would be a perfect night to have an apartment in the city. I could have stayed out late and not had to worry. Oh well. The search goes on for a place.

iPod And Storage Space

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Jury Duty makes me remember I want another iPod. I am waiting to see if something new is coming out from Apple. Macrumors say that the iPod is in mid product cycle and won’t have a new one coming out for a few months. I am still holding out. I think the 20gig units are too small for what I want to do, and the 40 gig ones are too expensive. I am hoping that the middle of the road unit has 25-30 gigs when the refresh their product cycle in a few months.

For now I am going to wait. I may invest in a 512 meg SD card. I have been thinking about it, and the prices are coming down. It is that or a USB flash drive.

Friday Tasks

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Jayson and I went to our data center today to bring up a server we just built. Man a 2U server is more than twice the weight than a 1U. Even though it is only double the size.

I hurt my wrist on a disk array we were mounting. It got stuck under the array as I was (trying to) holding it up. I didn’t realize it hurt until I tried to lift some metal rails later back at our office.

i was successful at creating a phone for the first time on our Avaya switch. I did it by myself. It was not so bad. Lets hope the next time I can figure it out again.

I also began to map out all of our phone ports. Looks like keith never bothered to do that, so I am going and mapping physical office location to the port on the phone switch that that location is hard wired to. I am slowly building a nice DB of everything.

Jayson left early today so he could hang out with his wife gretchen and friends that flew up this weekend to see him. I am catching up with them tomorrow for dinner.

Quick Bits

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Kingston was interesting. I got stuff done, so that was good. I even slept a bit on the train going home. I never do that so you know I was tired. I think I got an hour or more sleep.

I left a key for the real estate person to show my apartment. Maybe I will get luck and they will rent it right away? I doubt it but you never know. I think they may show it today.

I figured out how I can have 1 ftp user account and have 2 sub directories in the users home folder. Each of those sub directories actually redirects the user to different virtual paths. That way I can have two directory trees, one for inbound, and one for outbound. To the user everything looks normal. Next up on the new FTP setup schedule is getting an SSL certificate for the FTP server.

After 2 months of waiting we finally got a hold of a the server we will be sending to our production environment. This will replace an aging server that needs more disk space. I had to lend it out to the dev staff for a while so they could do something with it. After 2 months I got it back and I can move it to our data center. I hope to move that today if possible.

Also today I have to make sure we have a computer and a phone for a new user that starts monday, setup SQL mail for a database machine, and probably 5 other things that I haven’t thought of.

AC Update

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The final word on the office AC has came down. Turns out our master plan cannot be enacted in time for it to get hot. It will be 77 degrees today. The problem we had in the past was the water tower we use to cool our water cooled AC’s put out really dirty and warm water. 80 degrees in NYC, but the water cooling the AC in kingston is coming into the system at 50 degrees. See the difference?

The other problem was the units we have are very old, and we had a full office. We have allot less people in the office now. The plan is to plug back in our old systems since we cannot install air cooled units in time for summer. The building we are in will take over control of the water tower and fix it up. This is a departure from the past when they wanted nothing to do with the tower. We are hoping that once the tower is in good working order we will actually get cool air in the office. I am crossing my fingers and toes.

I cannot go through another hot summer like the past 2, without good AC. If the AC sucks, I will be summering in the computer room. You will see me in October or so…

Jury Duty Calls

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Tonight I have to start calling to see if I need to show up for jury duty. I can suck it up and do it, but the problem is we have something major going on at work next week. Wednesday and Thursday we are reconfiguring our NYC office. I am one of the 2 people that knows what we want to do. The other guy is not as technical so I am pretty much it. If I have to show up at the court house one of those days we have problems. I have not yet figured out what I am going to do about that.

I start calling today at 5PM…