Month: June 2004

Friday Still Sick

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Friday night I stayed in. I was still feeling sick. I took some more Tylenol PM and tried to goto bed early. Work was a normal kind of busy. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

I am scheduled to visit some apartments Monday afternoon. I hope that I find something. Miguel’s sister is a real estate broker also and I will be calling her if I cannot find something by early next week. I am still optimistic.

This blog entry was written while listening to I Alone from the album “Throwing Copper” by Live

CallShield Saga Is Over

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I finally got the Pro version of CallShield working on my Treo 600. Mantragroup makes this cool software call CallShield. I have mentioned it before. I can have distinctive rings on my Treo based off of groups in my address book. I can filter by number, area code, etc. I can also tell the software to go right to voice mail or hang up on someone based off of criteria like #, group, area code, etc. it is really cool.

My problem was that the lite version had a bug that would prevent me from using the distinctive ringer on my Treo 600. It kept rebooting when the ringer would go off. I went through 2 trials of their pro version of the software that worked before I was stuck. The support group was cool. they sent me a key to use the software for an extra week. Then a week goes by and the fix wasn’t in for the lite version. So I email them. Several days go by and they say, hey you have been cool send us your information and proof of purchase and we will upgrade you. I figure great, that was nice of them. I send them the information they require and another week goes by before I hear back from them. In total I bought the product on April 30, and I am finally getting it working without any demo’s today June 2. Not so good.

I do give them high marks for the software being really good. Also they didn’t give me a hard time about the upgrade. it just took a while to get responses back from them.

My bad experiences asside, Call Shield is my new killer app for the Treo 600 along side my Snappermail, & Verichat. This is why I have a smart phone.

Office 2004 For The Mac

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So my initial review of Office 2004 for the Mac is this. It is great. it is just as great as the previous version Office v.x for the Mac. That is the problem. I went out and bought this thing (and I am not regretting upgrading) and it doesn’t have that much new stuff. It is not a quantum leap of enhancements in any way. It is what everyone has been saying about Microsoft office upgrades. It is minor changes, that if you have 2 or 3 versions older product you will appreciate the upgrade. But if you are going from one realize behind to the new release you wont find much difference. That was my problem.

Entourage is nicer than it was in the previous version. Other than that, I don’t see much difference. I still like the product, but for what I do it is very similar to the older version. I will see after a few months if I change my opinion.

Friend Of A Friend

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Everyone has them. You have a friend and that friend introduces you to his or her friends. You either get along or you don’t. If you do and you hang out thats great, or not. That is how you meet people. Friends of friends are common. Some of my current friends I have were introduced to me by friends I don’t even see anymore. That is just the way it is. Other people you meet that are “friend of a friend” you only see or talk to when the initial friend is around.

That being said, a friend of a friend of mine called me last night. He never calls me. he is in the later group of only seeing him when I am with the mutual friend. I answer the phone and ask whats up. I get along with this guy so I am nice. He is looking for our mutual friend. I immediately am now pissed. You call me looking for someone else because they aren’t calling you back. How rude is that. Of course he does not even see what he did wrong, so I don’t mention it. I just file it away for future reference.

Am I wrong to think that was rude? I don’t speak to this guy very often and then he calls looking for someone else because he cannot get that person on the phone? And he wanted to talk to my other friend about some stupid thing. it wasn’t even an emergency. of course this guy thought it was an emergency, but what I am I to do? I may be over reacting. I am on cold meds this week. That may be it, yeah…

Hazy Day

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I am fighting what is currently a moderate cold since Monday. Last night I got Tylenol PM and slept ok. Most of today I was in the hazy after affects of the drug. I was able to work normally, but when I stopped to take a breath I could tell that I had taken sleeping aid’s the night before.

My throat still hurts, and my noise is still a bit stuffed, but I am getting by. John and Jayson want to go drinking tomorrow night. I want to go, but I want to get better. I am TBD for that as of now. The worst part of this cold is that my ears itch. I can’t do anything about that right now. I have learned no more beach on windy not so hot days.

Documentation

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I try to keep good documentation on what goes on in the office. Gus says it is good. I always think it can be better. The problem with documentation is that it gets stale quick if you are in a very dynamic environment like I work in.

We have a document we aptly call what runs where? It is a list of all tasks and jobs that run in our production environment. The problem I keep having is that no one updates the dam thing. We tell everyone, update the file. No one does. Today will be a day to bust heads and get the doc updated. I hope it will work. I need certain information out of this document to be complete so I can work on a new notification project I am planning.

After that I really should update our network visio map’s. Then our standards documents, and disaster recovery, etc. You get the picture. All these documents are really detailed, but after a few weeks the details tend to change. And if you haven’t ever done documentation before, it is really boring. Except Visio. I find working in Visio to be therapeutic. Not sure why, but I do. Call me crazy…

DFS On Windows 2000

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I am wondering if anyone out on the internet has had issues with Microsoft’s Distributed File System (DFS) and Windows 2000 Servers as the client for DFS? We have several developers who use Windows 2000 Server as their desktop so they can develop our website. We moved to a new file server last week and when we moved the DFS to Windows 2003, we notice very slow response time browsing the DFS from a Windows 2000 Server. Our Windows XP Pro clients are fine. Only 2000 Servers. The DFS is now hosted on a Windows 2003 box. The old DFS we had was on a 2000 box. I wonder if that is the problem? I have to google the issue. Right now I am away from the internet so I figured I would think about the issue for a while. It is a minor problem, but when I am on the train away from everyone I try to figure out the stupid little issues that I can’t think about at work.

I will leave comments open in case someone has a thought.

Project And Other Servers

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Gus is getting me to start using project server. I got my account today, and I hope to add my quarterly project plan in a few days. it looks cool, but we need to get everyone to use it.

I got the RAID card in for the new machine we will build Subversion on. lets hope that Promise didn’t lie when they said this card supports Suse 9.0. I need to build that with Danny sometime in the next week or so. I then need a new box for Nagios. Danny (who is now our resident Linux expert besides Gus) is saying that Subversion and Nagios may be too CPU intensive to put on the same low end box. We will evaluate the situation and make a decision. We are using a Penguin Computing 1U server we picked up last September. They make decent low end box’s for linux. We are modifying the one of the 2 we have for use with this app.

Missing Sync Is Out

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OK, I am not going to bash Mark / Space or their product the Missing Sync. I actually like the product. I bought it for the Palm and Pocket PC. I am just having issues with limitations the mac has on PIM software. What I mean is that I like outlook. I really do. I use the catigories in the address book, tasks, and calender allot. The problem with that is the Mac equivelant software Address book, and ical does not do cagitories or does not do them in a way they are compatible with what I do in Outlook.

I use outlook at work. I go home to my mac and would like the work to carry over. Instead I get all my categories I do at work getting erased when I go home and sync with my mac. I had to spend 2 hours redoing all the categories on all my address book contacts on Saturday because of this.

For this reason I am on hold with using my mac as a PIM again. I still use the Missing Sync to update Avantogo on my iPaq, but that is it for now. Hopefully Markspace and apple inprove their products to allow me to do this. I don’t think it is a limitation on Mark Space’s side, but on the Apple PIM side. Either way I am not able to do what I want.

To me this is one of the last hurdles for me to get rid of my PC at home for all day to day tasks. The other things I need the PC for are all work related. Come on Apple, make a better PIM, that is compatible with it’s PC cousin’s!!!

Tuesday At Old Town

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Tuesday night Jayson, Cari, and I went to old town tavern for dinner. Jay and I of course cut out early to go home. That is a classic case of me needing to have an apartment in the city. I really think that if I did, I would be able to stay out later. No rushing to catch a railroad train home every night.

My luck no one will want to go out anymore when I am in manhattan:)

It was a fun night. No drinking for me since I have a cold, but still fun.