Month: October 2004

Birthday Party Brouhaha

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I went to my cousin Arielle’s birthday party today. Well it wasn’t a birthday party really. She had her friends over for a sleep over party last week. This week was the family getting together. Now that is always an interesting thing. I took an early afternoon train out to New Jersey. I got picked up by my cousin Synde and her mom, my aunt Marian. We did some shopping for the party and headed to Synde’s house. I got there early. I didn’t mind. it gave me time to catch up with Synde, Wayne and the kids. Cerina (cannot spell any of their kids names correctly) is getting so big. She is such a barrel of laughs. Arielle is grown up also. She is 9 as of this week. I remember holding her in my arms as a baby when Synde and Wayne moved into their house. I feel old. Merric is getting big, but I am used to that now, so it is not as crazy for me.

Synde had 2 of her sisters over and their family’s for the party. Shelly and Samia. Shelly caused a huge problem by bringing Arielle a rabbit for her birthday. Now that side of my family can be flaky at times, but who brings pets to a kids party without asking the parents first? Wayne was like we can’t keep it. He was right, but Arielle was upset for the rest of the day, and Synde and Wayne were pissed at Shelly for the incident for the day.

Besides the people over I mentioned, Wayne had his “other” cousin Scott and family over. Shelly & Gill’s kids were over, along with Samia’s kids. Conspicuously absent where my parents and Samia’s husband. I am not sure what is up with my parents. They used to almost live at Synde & Wayne’s house, and now they have (in my opinion) bad excuses not to show up. It is very noticeable, to everyone but that is the way it is. My parents both have trouble with long car trips, but I really don’t think they make an effort anymore. There I said it. I have been holding that one back for a while. if my mom ever figures out the internet enough to read this site, I think she knows my opinion already.

Besides the rabbit incident I had a great time. I like seeing my cousin’s but I don’t like large or even small family gatherings. So I am usually low key at these things, but I do enjoy seeing my family. This is the group of people I have the oldest memories of.

I don’t get to see the family as much as I like. I need to get out to see Synde and the kids more. Our schedules are always crazy, and I am lazy. I am going to make an effort to get out sometimes before the holiday.

Right now I am on NJ Transit on my way back to NY Penn Station. Wayne gave me a lift to the train. Once I get to Penn I hope to get a cab home and get some sleep. I am tired, and I have about an hour till I get home.

I would also be remiss if I did not mention that Arielle got mad at me after she played with my Treo. Turns out I should have had her name in my contact list even though she doesn’t have a phone. She was not too happy that her brother had an entry and she did not. She corrected the problem and promptly returned the phone after she took some pictures. Man that kid makes me laugh!

Tonight is daylight savings time change. I need to remember to change my watch before I goto bed. At least I gain an hour of sleep tonight…

Friday Night Crazyness

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Friday night I ended up going out with Jayson, Gretchen, Jennifer, Cari, Nelson and others. We had a good time even though Nelson cannot shut up. We ordered pizza from a bar on 3rd and 23rd. We drank, ate, some people played darts. I did not. I have no aim without drinking, so I decided not to throw pointy things after a few drinks.

I have confirmed my previous suspicion that nelson can control what he does and says just as much as I can control fire. He just says what is on his mind. In principle I respect that, but he has some vulgar and not really funny things on his mind allot. he tries to be funny. Sometimes it is funny, but it is also just mean or insensitive.

All of us ended up at Dan’s to play scrabble and poker for a while. I showed Danny, Jayson, Anthony and Nelson how to play Texas Hold-um. We didn’t play for money. Jayson surprisingly did well. I did good, but not the best.

After Dan, and others finished their game of scrabble Dan wanted to play Hold-um for “real”. Not many of us were in for it, but Cari, Dan, Jennifer, and I ended up playing. I ended up being the big winner, but pissed everyone off by leaving at 11:30 before everyone was done playing. They couldn’t win back any losses. Jenn was like, “i will make everyone remember that you left early”. My response was, “ok. I will remind everyone that you lost big time”.

It was in general a fun night. Nelson is still an ass, but I get along with him anyway. he is in he means well, and doesn’t mean to be a dick, he just is sometimes.

I Do Not Like Politics

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I really do not like politics. For that matter I cannot stand the news. I haven’t watched a news show for years. That is funny to me since my mom always said I used to watch the news when I was little. Now it is so easy to see whatever angle the news is trying to take. I cannot stand it. I read news from Reuters or AP, and that is about it. Even that is sometimes one-sided.

Everyone seems so passionate about this election. I have friends who are volunteers for the Kerry campaign. Other friends and coworkers have their own opinions. From observing people I know I have got 2 questions. One, why then is there such a large percentage of people who are still undecided? Come on, how many months do you need to decide who to vote for? Second what is going on with our political system? I am neither a democrat nor a republican. At times I have agreed with both sides, and disagreed with both. Why then is both sides moving more to the right or left (in my opinion)?

I wont vote for Bush, but not for any of the reasons most people sight. But I am not really compelled to vote for Kerry either. He will get my vote because he has one thing going for him, he is not Bush. Normally I don’t write about politics, and I think that is a good idea. Politics, religion and operating systems are way to polarizing topics to discuss. As a tech guy I will talk about OS’s, but that is the russian roulette I will play! What scares me more than anything is not that Bush is president, or will be re-elected, but that if he does win 50+% of the public actually voted for him. That will get me wondering.

If you want to understand my opinion of world politics today, you should watch the Daily Show with John Stewart. Yes a comedy show actually portrays the situation in our country better than any news show. I get more realistic news from John than from anyone else. His time on crossfire last week was priceless. All I can say is thanks to the internet, I was able to download and watch it. To watch real political pundits or whatever they are called attaching him for being soft in interviews was crazy. Stewart is correct in saying shows like that suck. I may be paraphrasing there, but you get my drift.

Ok, like I said I don’t like to talk about politics’ but this post was written out of frustration with the universe today. I will now resume my normal ranting about some cool gadget, or the Simpsons. Hey the Simpsons new season starts in 2 weeks!!! Was that a good segway?

Pimped Out Desktop

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Between meetings, cleaning my office, and real work I tricked out an old desktop today. Jayson and I seem to accumulate computers at work. He has 1 for normal use, it is a tricked out P4 so he can run multiple VMWares. He then has a laptop, and I think a desktop is collecting dust under his desk as a Novel 6.x server for testing.

My computers in the office are my laptop, a desktop that is nicely configured for VMWare workstation and burning, etc. I also have an older box setup to run Suse 9.1. I had another machine that I customized for testing, but it finally pissed me off enough today that I needed to replace it. The hard drive is going on it. So I replaced it. then the IDE controller got all flaky on me, so I gave up on it. I took an older (almost 3 years) P-4 1.5 GHZ that for some reason had a gig of ram in it and but a newer burner in it. Cleaned it up, and now it is a Windows 2003 server I am going to use as a test box. We hate that we have desktops proliferating in our office, so I threw on a test copy of VMWare GSX server on this new “super desktop” I built. I am proving that this server software is worth the money to go buy and put on a nice dual processor machine.

Right now I have several tests of software I need to run. First up is Ipswitch’s Collaboration Suite of software. It looks like their Imail mail server on group ware steroids. My company wants exchange like functionality, but they don’t like the cost in software, hardware, and manpower needed to get exchange. This product looks like it will do what most people want to do, and that is share calendars, contact lists, etc right in outlook.

Immediately we need to test and then deploy Intuit’s Track It. We are planning on using it as our support and helpdesk ticketing system. The software arrives tomorrow, and we need it deployed (if we decide to go with it) by January 1, 2005 in order to support some changes we are planning in our support structure for the new year.

Another focus I had today was getting the specs needed to setup another VPN tunnel to a partner of ours in India. That was a fun conference call.

Then I had a bunch of meetings about some data migrations we are planning, and a failover drill that is 4 months in the making.

Gus and I also went over a power point I am making for a big presentation next week. He had some changes and I created a few new slides. Have I mentioned I don’t like power point? The funny thing is when I first started out on the helpdesk all those years ago, I actually was very good at power points. I just haven’t done them in a while.

All around a very busy day. I didn’t leave work until 7:30PM tonight. I need to make dinner now. I just felt like writing when I got home. Some days (most days) I don’t feel like writing right away after I sat at a computer all day, but today I did. Go figure?

The MOB, or Lack of!

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I know recently I have been lacking on the photo blog entries. I know I have the phone in my pocket all the time. I don’t know why I just take it out and snap photos more often. When I remember I am usually waiting on the subway platform. Yes that is why you see so many pics of the subway. One answer could be because the camera on my Treo sucks so bad. Hopefully the new one will be better. I will attempt to take more pictures. One thing that is a problem is I haven’t been doing super exciting things that people may find interesting in pictures.

Going To The Movies

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A bunch of us from work are getting together later to see the new movie from the guys who made South Park. I honestly don’t remember the name. I just remember everyone says it is very vulgar and not politically correct. That makes me want to see it. I am lazying around my apartment until we are meeting up.

I woke up with a head ache today so I took a furiset. I am feeling better now but I will need to take another one near the start of the movie if the drugs wear off and I still have a head ache. These are the type of days where I DO get migraines. It is cool outside, but not cold. It is stifling in the apartment, and I am inside right now. This is the exact change of weather situation that gets me sick. I hate it. It is my demon I need to keep in check. I don’t want to have to cancel so I am medicating early. When I am home on a weekend I tend not to take any drugs. It usually leads to bad consequences, but I take the medications enough during the week that keeps me working and a normal functioning person in society. That is why on weekends (my time) I try not to medicate if needed. Unfortunately I end up canceling on plans allot since I refuse to medicate sometimes. My dad says I am crazy, but I get scared sometimes about getting a “habit” to some of these medications. Some of the stuff I take is pure pain medication. I could see how easy it is to get used to taking them.

Welcome to world! Just spoke to Cari, and Jayson. They are both in for the movies. Danny is even coming in from Staten Island. I am off to Jays in a little bit to hang out before the movie…

Lazy Saturday

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I am lazy. I admit that all the time. I blame genetics, dam that lazy dad of mine! Of course my mom is always busy and active, so wouldn’t that cancel the genetics of my lazy dad out? Ok, I am getting off topic. I am lazy, get over it. I am especially lazy on the weekends. I like to sleep in. Do nothing, catch up on my TV watching (thank you Tivo). Today is no different. I got a hair cut. The guy I am using chopped off way too much hair. I love it. I need to find the goop he uses to keep it down when he combs it for me. I am messing around now with the blog. Some people have hobbies I have blog writing. It beats doing nothing! Actually I like writing so I do enjoy this blog thing.

I am now procrastinating the work I have to do. I need to do some power points and update some documents for work. I also need to do some shopping for clothing, but since I find that one of the most boring things in the universe I am not going to do it right now. Part of me is nagging me to put up on eBay some of the old gear that I want to sell (get out of my closet). The rumor is the new Treo is being announced tomorrow so I should build up my bank account to pay for the upgrade that I know I will go and get. I also need to do some house cleaning again, but I don’t like that either so I will procrastinate about that also.

Weblog Design Time

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I once again tweaked the design of this site. I hated that the body of my posts were so narrow an area. I have a 20″ flat screen at home and when I look at the site it was always so narrow. The border was huge. I found a way to make it “fluid” so it scales right on the resolution a person uses. I love the Typepad templates regarding site design. I also changed the name of the site. See a future post as to why. I am trying to be more creative with the name. Probably not working, but at least I made an effort.

After Work Scrabble

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After work Cari convinced me to goto Dan’s and hang out. They were playing Scrabble. I was invited earlier by Dan and Jenn but I passed. Cari talked me into it since I had a terrible busy day. I ended up playing a round of Scrabble. Now first I have to mention if you don’t know me that I cannot spell. I mean I really CANNOT spell. I am not stupid (or I don’t think I am), but ever since I was little I had issues with spelling. it is partly due to a learning disability, but that is off topic. The point is for someone who considers themselves a terrible speller, how did I end up in a room with 8 people playing scrabble? And how did I actually have a decent score for half the game? Granted I ended up in last place out of the 2 others I played, but for a while I was actually giving them a run for their money. Come on people, I suck at spelling how can I do ok at Scrabble?

A Single Minded Day

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Some days I cannot remember what it was that I did at work. Today I only did one thing almost the entire day. I cannot forget what I did if I tried. I worked on fixing our Call Manager all day. Call Manager is the Voice Over IP version of the PBX. It is basically the computers that control our phone system. Last night Kai and Jayson upgraded our Cisco Call Manager’s to version 3.3.3 from 3.3.2. When you read the version number change you (I) think it is a minor fix. Well the latest version (it is the latest version we are using, but there is a 3.3.4, and a 4.0 now) does some things differently. Kai and Jay got the upgrade done, and tested all the phones in our call center. Everything seemed to work. What they couldn’t test was our remote phones. The phones in our NYC office didn’t work. We didn’t know this until hours after they went off to sleep. They left word that we may need to upgrade the firmware on the phones, but that was it. Turns out the firmware upgrades automatically when you reboot the phone and their is a newer version of the firmware.

The problem was the phones could make outbound calls, but could not receive calls. when you called the phones in a remote office the phone would ring but if you picked it up the Call Manager didn’t recognize that the call started. this is not good if we want to our reps to take calls. So off to call Cisco I went. This all happened before or as I got to the office. What a way to start the day that I knew I was going to be short handed anyway. Kai and Jay were both off to sleep because of their overnight. So after a long and drawn out troubleshooting session with Cisco we figured out our problem. I actually spoke to 2 guys over there. the first guy gave me the right answer but could not explain why we had to do what he asked. Since it required me to change firewall rules and we upgraded a phone system not the firewall I was skeptical. So the second Cisco guy came into the picture. He walked me through the same troubleshooting process (a bit quicker than the first guy). he then made some phone calls and got back to me. Turns out the first cisco support guy was right we needed to change some rules on our Cisco Pix’s. Why? Well in the new version of our CCM (Cisco Call Manager) they changed how some protocol’s operate. So what worked in older versions of CCM didn’t work in the newer version. We had to remove to fix-up protocol lines on all of our Pix’s that are involved in the VPN that makes up our WAN. Sure enough Kai was right. Kai as in Kai the cisco rep I spoke to, not Kai the guy I work with. I made the two firewall rules and the phones started working. Elapsed time on the whole saga, 8 hours. I got the phones working exactly at 5PM.

During this adventure I had other fun things to think about. Sean and danny dealt with problems with an index on a database somewhere that was causing one of our websites to be slow. Word of advise to people I work with. When I am fiddling with one phone, on another phone and talking to someone on a nextel and you know a system is down, don’t come and tell me about another problem that you need me to work on. I can only do 4-5 things at once. Thankfully Sean was able to get a handle on the index problem and fix it with little to no help from me.

Danny was helpful in my network trouble shooting saga today. Everyone else was surprisingly not bothersome. usually when I have a major problem people come out of the woodwork to bug me about minor issues, or that is how it feels.

I was crazed today. Am I glad it is over? Of course I am, but there is something to be said about days like this. First, it goes by so quick. Second, it is the type of day that you earn your salary. You get a few of the each year, and when you live it you hate it, but after you live through those days you are a better person for surviving them. On a personal note I am glad I got through the issue mostly by myself. Danny did give me great assistance in the network trapping, but allot of it was second opinion from what we got from Cisco. It is good having someone else around who you can sound off ideas to. I think Danny and I work great in that respect. On a whole I had to tackle most of this issue by myself. In the past that is not a big deal. Recently I have been delegating allot of the day to day technical responsibilities. It is something that I have to do, but I feel like I get rusty by not doing hands on work all the time. Days like today keep me sharp and lets me prove to myself that I am still in the game and can get dirty with the best of them, or so I think.