Month: March 2005

TV and Not Much More

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I did some work, watched TV, etc. today. I went to the bank to deposit my Tivo rebate that I finally got. I hit Best-buy. I got Angel Season 5 while I was there. I liked that show and never got to see the second half of that season so I am eager to watch it.

Right after I got home jayson called and needed my help because he hurt his back helping danny move. I met him by Petco. We ended up grabbing food at burger heaven. Well I ate and he drank. I also brought him Alien Vs. Preditor. I still have not watched that dvd, but I saw the movie already so I am not in any rush.

I felt bad that I couldn’t help danny today. I was originally going to have electrical work done in the office, but then I got sick. So lifting would be bad for me today.

I also got a card for Morgan. Her birthday gift is already on the way. I still wanted something for her on her party day but I will settle for her just getting the package.

Spoke to Sean today. He is happy (as a father of a 4 day old can be). Little Scott is doing well also. Kelly is resting. Sean had some website questions. I think his idea of a baby site is cool. that is what I did for morgan.

Walk Don’t Run Down Memory Lane

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I started going through some old “journal” entries I wrote years ago. Yes before this blog (and any blog) I wrote a journal online. I kept them in password protected word files. I still have them 10 years later. I decided to take each individual word document and put it in a blog format. It is time consuming but once I am done I will have all my journal entries updated into a blog. Since most of that stuff was not originally written for the internet I will put it on a password protected site. Going over what I wrote it is all PG, but I will leave it on a different site than this one just because of how old it is.

I have already gone through 1995. That seemed like the first year I digitized everything I did. Before that I only kept 2 other journals. One was a high school project and another one was just a scratch pad I wrote on when I went cross country. When I was younger I only thought journals or diary’s were for girls. Going back over what I wrote 10 years ago is weird and interesting. Some stuff I was like wow, I remember that but I hadn’t thought about it in ages.

It will take me a while to update everything into the blog, but I have wanted to do it for a while. It will eventually get done.

Still Lingering

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I had lingering feelings of sickness this week. I left work early Thursday because I felt like crap. I ended up working from home most of the day on Friday. And unlike many of the people I know “working from home” actually means doing some work for me. I ended up going into the office anyway in the late afternoon. I had 2 meetings I needed to keep.

Friday night I took Gretchen & Jayson out for dinner at the Outback. I felt like thanking them for making sure I was not dead last week when I was sick. It is nice to have good friends, who aren’t afraid of being contaminated by you! The Onion is still good, but man it seems like the Outback has raised the prices at their restaurants like 2 times since I moved last year.

I am feeling allot better now. I will take it easy today so I can be all good for Morgan’s birthday party tomorrow.

Free Palm SD Card

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I tried to fill out the form for the free 128 Meg SD card from Palm today. Since I have less than perfect vision and Palmone decided (like everyone else I know) to make the serial number microscopic I was unable to pull the info I needed for the free card. Lets face it, I don’t need the card. I already have a 512 meg SD card. Dam, I gave away a 128 meg card to Jayson already. It is the principle of the matter that I want Palmone to pay (even if it is a little bit) for putting only 32megs on their top of the line phone and got burned for doing it.

Great Product Just Got Better

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I use (sometimes) The Missing Sync 4.x from Mark/Space.  It is a palm sync utility for the Mac.  I say I sometimes use it because I have some minor issues with syncing my PDA data to Entourage.  The Missing Sync is actually a fantastic product.  They just released a new version that now supports its own Avantogo Conduit.  I can almost seamlessly sync between my Thinkpad and my Mac Mini.  The only issue I have now is the category data from Entourage getting into outlook and vice versa.

I may start using my Treo with Entourage as my main source for mail and contacts and drop outlook all together.  Of course I say that allot, but I haven’t cut the cord yet.  Dam outlook.  you love to hate it.  And recently I have truly hated it.

All I can say is that Mark/Space is a company that gets me buying Mac hardware.  Why?  Because I know innovative people like these will write software that lets me use most of what I use on my PC, like my Palm Treo!  And no I don’t work for these guys.  I just like software that does exactly what it is supposed to without major problems.

Can’t Get Enough Bandwith

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I just finished the paperwork on getting our office more bandwidth. We currently have 1 T-1 (and its redundant shadow twin). That amount of bandwidth is just not cutting it. We are maxing out our circuit several times a day. With the price drop on bandwidth we just ordered a 4.5 megabit link and are going to drop our redundant pair of T-1’s. Since we don’t have a call center in our office anymore we don’t need the extra redundancy, and the 4.5 meg link is actually cheaper than the 2 redundant T-1’s we currently have.

Save money and triple our bandwidth, that was worth the trade off in redundancy. Since there is such a lag in order time to delivery we won’t see this bandwidth for several weeks. I estimate it up and running by May 1. Sounds like a long time, but it is worth the wait.

VMWare Server

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We just bought our first (of many I hope) license of VMware GSX server. We also just picked up a nice Dell Poweredge 2650 off of eBay to run it on. We are plugging it into an existing SCSI disk array we had. We are bumping the ram to 4gig and with the existing dual Xeon 2.8ghz processors should make this a nice little server. VMware suggests 3-5 virtual machines per physical box depending on its configuration. I figure I can get more if I have several virtual machines that need to be always up, but are not always worked on. I already have a list of a bunch of projects that can be virtual machines, vs buying a physical server. We already built a Biztalk 2004 Server and SQL server to go along with it in GSX virtual machines using the demo copy we had. Once this new server is built we will port them over. Since it is just copying a few files it is trivial to move the VM’s to a new server.

I am also itching to try out the beta of VMware Workstation 5.0. I downloaded the beta but have not had a chance to try it yet. it looks like there is a bunch of new features. The more I use this software, the more I think it is the wave of the future for an environment such as ours. I can cut down the number of servers I have and save money doing so. Allot of my dev and QA servers are old, and will slowly need replacing. Putting them into VM’s makes sense. I see a ton of other applications for the software. This is our first foray into VM’s for server use. If successful I hope to do more with it.

Back To Work

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It was my first day back since I got sick. I ended up leaving early (3ish) since I was still very tired. The bright side is I made it through the day! I am resting now (sort of). hopefully I will be at 100% tomorrow since I have a full day planned that I cannot really bail out of if I start feeling bad.