Month: May 2005

Dinner With The Folks And Morgan

by

My parents came into the city (pigs must be flying) to have dinner with me. They have Morgan for the week while my sister is on vacation. Her and Mike needed to get some alone time. My parents are both tired from dealing with a 2 year old, but I think they are loving having her the week. Besides being cranky from napping too late, “the girl” as she refers to herself was doing great. That kid always cracks me up. We ordered in because a certain little girl would probably not make people happy at a restaurant if we went out. Sometimes you just don’t take little kids to public places.

I had a good time, but too short a night. My dad was happy that the trip into manhattan wasn’t that long. I told him no traffic does that for you! I got points for my place being cleaner than my sisters. of course I don’t have a 2 year old. But on the other hand I don’t have a nanny that cleans up after said 2 year old, so I think I come out ahead if we were keeping score! My mom was surprised that my place was neater. My dad wasn’t. I was just glad they didn’t come over on friday, since I usually clean on Saturday’s.

Everything is now cleaned up after everyone left. For a 2 year old, Morgan can make a mess. I am off to bed soon, hopefully. I need to get back onto a work sleep schedule.

I Do Listen To People, Just Not Right Away

by

One thing Gus suggested to me over a year ago was to read the book Getting Things Done. It is a personal productivity book. I am not one of those people into personal enhancement by reading, or going to a seminar, etc. The thought of improving my organization and allowing me to get stuff done at work quicker was appealing. So after much delay, I bought the audio book version of Getting Things Done. I am listening to it on my iPod.

It is too early to tell if I will get anything out of this book. My hopes are high that I can improve my personal organization. I always pride myself on being organized, but I am also always open for improvements. I am only 1/3 through the book. I already redesigned how I keep my email inbox, and have about 20 new items of “stuff” that I wrote down that need attention. More as it progresses…

Quicken Conversion Again

by

Over the past 2 years it seems like I keep ying/yanging on where I use quicken. I use the program for my personal finances (what little I have). I have used online checkbooks since like 1994. I love quicken. The problem is if I want to use Quicken on my Mac I need to export each account to a .qif file and import it into Quicken for the Mac. It is a pain in the ass. If you have certain kinds of split items or stock sales it messes up the transactions. Of course I have both, so it took me like 4 hours to clean up and move everything. I was amazed (again, I did this twice before) that I could get it to work at all.

My error last time I converted everything was that I didn’t keep both my mac and windows versions of the file up to date. This time I think I will do a monthly update of my windows version. For some reason I always need to go back to the windows version for some reason. For now I am happily running everything off of my Quicken 2005 for the Mac!

The Friday Before a Holiday

by

Twas the friday before a holiday and it seemed like no one wanted to work. A holiday weekend is upon us. The office was kind of dead. I got a bunch of work done. We have at least 3 people starting on Tuesday, and another 2 later in the week. James is keeping busy getting the computers ready. He was out the door right after I said he could go home early. Danny on the other hand seemed to not get the concept of getting out early for a holiday. I thought he felt he was going to miss something if he left.

All in all a good week at work. Busy, but good. I need to tackle some hardware design stuff next week. I didn’t want to think about it after the meeting I had on it Thursday. Just too much to digest. Next week will be interesting…

Early Friday

by

Got off work early today (due to the holiday!). Jayson and I went down to the Apple store (see later post for details), then headed back to my place. Jay is/was selling his Treo 600 that I sold to him a few months back. He liked it but thought it was too big. he sold it on Craigslist in like 15 minutes. No fees or anything. I was impressed. We ran back to my place to grab the original box and manual for it. I always try to keep that stuff. The guy buying it picked it up today. It was no fuss, no muss.

I hung out at Jays place for a while and played with Pierre. he is suck a funny dog. We hit dinner at Burger Heaven and then I went home to relax. I ended up working on Quicken (see next post) for most of the night.

MailHop Forward

by

Now that I am once again messing with my own mail server I need some sort of backup in case my server at home goes down. I used to use DynDNS’s MailHop Backup MX service. It was great. If I lost my server, they would act as my backup mail server and redirect my mail to me when my box came back online.

DynDNS now has a service that will allow me to create alias’ and direct mail from my domain to any mailbox. So my mail mail domain can redirect to any other domain and mailbox I want, or to my gmail account, etc. This is great if I have/want to change my mail setup quickly, or direct mail to different systems. The concept is probably overkill for what I need, but I wanted to give it a try. I needed some sort of mail backup anyway so it was worth the price I paid.

I have been a happy user of DynDNS’s Custom DNS service for almost 2 years. I am a huge fan, they have a good solid track record for me!

Star Wars Episode III

by

I “finally” saw the new Star Wars movie today. Rich, Amanda, & I bought tickets last night for the noon show by their house. I got up early and trekked out to Forest Hills to see it. It was worth it. The theater was not that packed, and we had stadium seating. They have stadium seating in Manhattan you may say, but it wasn’t crowded. I would have traveled to Iowa to see the movie if I knew it wasn’t going to be crowded.

I won’t bore you with details about the movie, except for the fact that Skywalker IS Darth Vader! Why didn’t anyone tell me! Seriously, it was a good movie. Most people could predict most of it, but it was still a good story.

After the movie we walked along Austin Street. They had some street fare. I had a crab cake sandwich for lunch. The thing was like the size of a hamburger. it was good, and didn’t hurt my stomach. I got some peanut butter fudge for desert. Cold stone creamery beaconed but it started to rain before I could get over there. Still not sure why there was a fair, but it was interesting. I passed on the funnel cake. No one else seemed to want it, so I didn’t want to pig out on my own. I searched but could not find a churro guy. Man street fairs are great for really bad for you (AKA very tasty) food.

NASA Operations as a Role Model

by

I have always been fascinated with space, space travel, the stars, etc. I always wanted to be a pilot, but alas my vision does not permit that. I still have a love for all things fast! Because of my love of space, I have always been interested in NASA, the space shuttle, etc. My dad is also into that stuff, so he partly drove my interest. I would never have thought of making similarities regarding the technical work I do and NASA.

A few years back Gus got me thinking about technical operations. How a data center is run. How a corporate network is run. He always made the comparison of run the network like NASA runs a space mission. Granted I will be the first person to say what I do is not NASA, but it is the process that we are trying to mimic and not space travel!

Now at first I was like how do you compare the two? The answer is it is all in the procedure. It doesn’t matter what you are doing (putting a person into space, or launching a website) it is the operational theory that ensures that things go right. Sounds far fetched? Maybe. Maybe you have to manage some sort of technical operations to understand?

The basis for this theory as I see it is the following:

1. Never assume anything

2. Have a minute by minute plan for all tasks

3. Have contingencies for everything (when possible). Also note points of no return, roll back’s etc.

4. If a mistake happens, isolate it and ensure it never happens again.

There is a ton more things to go over, but sitting here those are the biggest things that come to mind. It boils down to never leaving anything to chance.

This type of thinking got me (kicking and screaming sometimes) to put together firm policies and procedures to keep our network operating. Every time we have an issue come up it is, how do we prevent this from happening again? I am learning that Technical Operations is really a way of thinking, not just a job!

I am thinking about it more today because I am in the middle of reading “Failure is not an option” by Gene Kranz. Gus gave me the book over a year ago. I started to read it but got side tracked. For some reason I sat down to read it today and I finished half of the book. It is a fascinating read. I don’t know why I stopped reading it last summer. It makes me want to continue my efforts at “operationalizing” things at work. And everyone wonders why I am such a pain in the ass about documenting everything. I do have a method for my madness! It is all about the process. No one person can hold any bit of information. That is why the NASA guys would pretend people had accidents during simulations to ensure that if the real thing happened, everything would work normally! Like I said, a fascinating read. Back to the book for me!

iSync Perfection or One Big Mess?

by

I switched from using Entourage to iCal/Address Book for syncing my data to/from my Treo 650 on the Mac. I want the slick UI and terrific integration of Address Book & iCal, but I am concerned about some issues. Firstly I rely on Palm/outlook categories on my Treo. Primarily I use them for distinctive rings on the phone. if work calls I get a specific ring. if people I don’t want to call my cell are in a specific category they goto voice mail and don’t ring, etc. Looks like iSync does not keep the categories intact if I make changes to the categories. This sucks. If I create new contacts on my Mac I need to manually assign them categories when the contact goes onto my Palm.

It also looks like some fields don’t carry over either. I don’t see birthday’s that I entered into Outlook now that the contacts are in Address book. I think IM names are also not carried over.

Don’t get me started about my iCal invites not working in Outlook. There is some hackish fix out there but I don’t want to mess around with it.

Why then do I move/try to move to this? The integration between Address Book, iCal, iChat, Mail, etc is fantastic. That I can add a contact to address book and associate that contact to my AIM contact list in iChat is fantastic. The same goes for my jabber contacts. Linking every contact to email in Mail is also great. I can also sync everything using .Mac to my min and powerbook! Top it off with using spotlight to search everything, and I am a happy person. It makes for easy day to day use. The problem is when I want to get that information out into my Treo I run into issues. I don’t even care that I have problems when I import everything from the Treo to Outlook. I don’t want to use outlook anymore. I have had so many problems with it recently that I could live with using it just for an email archive. But at least work in the Treo!!! I am continuing my search of the internet for solutions or work around’s to my little issues. So far, no luck.

Star Wars III

by

I have been asked by over a dozen people what I was doing for the newest Star Wars movie. I have told everyone I didn’t know, but if I anyone wanted to go and had tickets so I didn’t have to wait on line I would be there. Well everyone agreed with that assessment of not wanting to wait on line, but no one had any ideas. Sometimes I think I hang out with people who have no creative ideas what so ever on what to do (at night). Of course I am the same way, but that is getting side tracked. So I have potentially like 12 people to see Star Wars with, but here I am Saturday morning and I have no firm plans yet to see the movie.

I will probably call my friends Rich and Amanda and see what they are up to. They are the biggest Star Wars fans I know, I think. I haven’t seen them in ages, and I want to get together with them anyway, so this sounds perfect. But knowing them, they may have gone already! I will know soon.