Month: July 2004

T-Minus 2 Days, Plus Tivo Withdrawal

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My Tivo is packed for my move. Last night I wanted to finish as much as I could today so it is away now. I wont have it on until thursday the earliest. that is the longest I have gone without my tivo recording stuff form me since I got it in September 2001. I don’t want to imagine all the things it is not watching for me:)

It is another rainy day in NYC. It will be muggy in the office with poor AC. Today is filled with no less than 4 meetings for me. Spaced just far enough apart that I won’t get anything meaningful done between them:( I need to get stuff done today, since I want to leave early tomorrow to finish any loose ends up with my move.

Late last night I was able to install the Entourage palm connector for Office 2004 on my laptop. I got my Treo to sync up with my Powerbook. Now I can try to use the powerbook as my PIM instead of my Thinkpad. Not sure if outlook will go away completely, but I want to use Entourage a bit more to see if I like it. For now the syncing with my palm, pc laptop and two mac’s is actually working. No corrupt data yet. That will happen when I try to edit entries in more than one place at the same time.

After work today I need to get more box’s from staples. Then I have to bring over a bunch of stuff to my parents place. They want an air mattress. I have bedding for them. I have some of my dad’s tools. I also need to give my dad some loose change (about 5 pounds of it) to sift through. He likes to look through change for anything out of the ordinary.

I also have more stuff to throw out. I am trying to get rid of as much as possible that I don’t need.

It Just Works

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Whoever said that is correct. Mac’s just work. To make a long story short, I have an Eye TV that I have plugged into my iMac. I am moving, so I unplugged it. I packed my TV, DVD, VCR, Tivo and all other gear away. I still wanted to watch tv. I went to elgato’s website and downloaded the latest software for Eye TV and dropped it in the applications folder of my Powerbook and plugged in the EyeTV. I was watching TV in 3 minutes.

I never had that kind of luck with my ATI all in wonder capture card on my PC. The idea of setting the Eye TV up on my laptop is now when my cable company shows up at my new place I don’t need my tv to be unpacked. I just need the Eye TV and my powerbook and I can verify that cable works. Both items are small so they can go in my laptop bag.

I am very happy I didn’t have to spend hours figuring out how to get the dam thing to work. I don’t even want to watch tv now that I know I can when I want for the next few days.

Tivo withdrawal is another story, and another post…

T-Minus 3 Days

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The move happens in 3 days. I am starting to freak a bit. Everything needs to go off perfectly or I will have problems. My doubts about if the movers can move everything from one apartment to another between 8AM and 4PM is really starting to worry me. getting from my old place to my new apartment after the movers finish at my old place but before the cable guys show up at 2PM is also in question.

I have most, but no all my stuff packed. I still have the computers, some clothing, some kitchen ware, and stereo to pack. not sure if I have enough box’s. Of course I was never sure. I may go buy more today.

I went to Ikea with Jayson and Gretchen yesterday. I didn’t see anything that would get me to throw out my current living room wall unit, so I am stuck with it for this move. It will be the single biggest problem to move. I just hope that it doesn’t slow down the movers too much to cause an issue I haven’t been to Ikea in ages. Some of the stuff was nice, the rest was obviously cheap.

Another reason I haven’t been to that store in a while is traffic. We sat in construction traffic going out there, and accident traffic coming back. Another reason why I am moving into manhattan.

I went to Amy’s surprise 30th birthday party yesterday. It was nice, but I don’t speak to many of the people I saw outside of holidays. Because of that it is always awkward. Family events like that are weird. They aren’t really family, but my family is so close and we have known each other so long we are closer than my real family. So it had the look and feel of a family event. Baby Rily was very cute. Unfortunately baby Morgan was unavailable. She had another birthday party to goto. I hopefully get to see her when I get my sisters jeep on Wednesday night. I will do dinner with them if I am done packing by then. I just hope that I am done packing by then.

It is funny, I was all worried that I would have extra tickets to the van that takes me to the train. It turns out I will be 1 day short on them. that works out perfectly for me. I just bought 2 round trip tickets for today and tomorrow for the rail road. I will play Wednesday by ear and decide then if I want full fare or off peak. It turns out that a weekly LIRR ticket is cost effective if you goto manhattan 3 or more times in a week. For me it was a toss up since I was not sure if I would be coming home from work on Wednesday regular time or early. It was better to pay a few extra bucks and not be locket into a ticket in the long run.

Palm And Entourage

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I installed the Palm conduit for Microsoft Entourage 2004 over the weekend. After using it for a few days I have no idea why I haven’t been using it for longer. I want outlook like functionality on my Mac. I want free / busy data that works with outlook. Turns out I am a dumbass and have had that all along with Entourage. It makes sense, Entourage is Microsoft’s answer to outlook for the Mac.

I removed the Missing Sync from my Mac and ran the Entourage conduit. it worked great so far. I will put the missing sync back on when the new version 4.0 comes out with support for Entourage. No more iCal & Address book for me. Almost everything sync’ between the palm and Entourage. The only thing that doesn’t is calendar categories. I think that is because the palm doesn’t transfer them, because Entourage has the ability to handle them, and so does outlook.

I am going to try to sync my Treo 600 with my Powerbook today at work, and use the powerbook for my PIM instead of my windows box and outlook. I will see how it turns out. Now all I need is for my Treo to do Bluetooth and I would be a happy camper!!!

My iPaq

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I have been thinking of selling my iPaq. Well I have been thinking of selling allot of devices I have just to clean house and get some cash, but I digress. I don’t need the iPaq, but I like the screen. it is easy to read off of.

I may just keep it because of that easy reading feature. I like ebooks and I cannot read them off my Treo as much as I would like to. I got the iPaq for free so it isn’t costing me anything to get rid of it. I should just keep it. No more rambling from me!

I don’t want this blog to be a rambling of tech stuff. Oh, too late.

Pix Configuration Problems

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I am having a problem with the new Pix. I think it is a minor issue, but I just cant figure it out. I am trying to make a second static VPN tunnel, and the pix keeps telling me the crypto map is not complete. I am doing nothing different from the first tunnel I created but it still wont work. I am going to call Cisco and try to figure out what the deal is.

Man I Have Been Lazy

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I have been so lazy the past 3 days. I wrote a bunch of blog entries and I have not updated any of them to the site. I will do that when I get home tonight, I hope.

Another website note, my site is currently down. The blog and mob are up, but my regular site is down. I unplugged it when I took down my wireless point / router. I will bring it back up when I move. It is not worth redoing that now when I am moving in a few days anyway. I may end up moving my site off to my friend Miguel’s server he hosts.

T-Minus 6 Days

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No major news to report in my move preparation. Jayson, Gretchen, and I are trying to goto Ikea sunday. I want to look for a new wall unit so I don’t have to bring my old one with me when I move. Jay and Gretchen want new couches. Hopefully we get out there. The problem is Ikea is out on long island so they would have to take the train to me and then we would have to drive. The problem is (major reason I am moving) that no subway goes near my place now. You have to take the rail road. And that is expensive and a pain in the ass due to the schedule. Only 6 more days to worry about that!!!

T-Minus 7 Days

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Just as the subject says. Seven days until my move. My apartment is full of box’s, bubble wrap, and tape. I have spent a decent amount on box’s. I have tons of them at work but I don’t want to travel to the office to get box’s so I went to staples and bought even more box’s yesterday.

I have allot of the packing done. I need to pack up my computers, TV gear and clothing and then I am mainly done. I have a few misc items that still need packing, but I got allot done this week.

I cannot wait to get this move over with. More news as it develops.

Mini Pix

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After some consideration I went out and bought a Cisco Pix 501e. You may be wondering why in the world a person needs one of those. Need may not be the word, but I do have uses for it. In the past 24 hours I have learned more about IKE tunnels than I had in the past 12 months. Allot of what I want it for is work related, but I doubt they will pay for it so I got one.

I want to prove (i know it can be done, but me doing it and having someone say it can be done are two different things) that I can setup a static VPN tunnel securely and allow a VOIP phone to connect to our office. I want to be able to lock down the connection so only the voice traffic we want can go over the VPN. It will work since to my office pix, it is just connecting to another office with a pix. The 501 is exactly the same as the larger 515 but you can only do less. The config and the PDM is all the same.

It is very cool. The only problem I am having is that I cannot initiate a VPN client connection through my pix to another pix somewhere else. We have this problem at work, and I have not been able to find a fix for it. I need to call Cisco about it. It is a pain, but not a show stopper.

I showed jayson what we can do with the personal Pix and he wants one, but he just got a big screen tv so he is not spending anything for a while.