Month: May 2005

Dari’s Birthday Bowling Bash

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Went to celebrate Dari’s birthday last night at Bowlmor. It is one of those places right near where I am all day but never went to. It was cool. Yes, bowling that was cool. I guess when you light up the lanes, turn down the overhead lights, play good music, and feed us food and good alcohol anything can be fun!

I bowled horribly. I did a 50 something, and a 60 something in the 2 games I played. Heather, Alyssa, & Miguel didn’t do much better than I did. The other Miguel, and a few people I cannot remember did way better! Bowling always hurts my wrists, so I got out of the games early. Thankfully we weren’t playing teams or my team would have been killed. Not only because of me, thankfully!

It was fun. I didn’t eat since the afternoon and one drink got me really buzzed. At least I got happy on 1 drinks since the mixed drinks were like $9 a drink. I owe Cari a round since she cut out early. Some lame excuse about parents visiting. Come on Cari, come up with something better than that:)

For her birthday desert we had fondu. I am not normally a fan of the non-hygenic deserts (Dam double dipping people) such as fondu, but it was good.

Even though it was really late, the subway even agreed with me and only took 10 minutes to show up!

New Lease?

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I got a letter under my door last night. That is the popular way for my land lord (aka. some big management company) to communicate to me. It contained my lease renewal information. I am glad I finally got it, since I was wondering what the deal was. At first I thought I read the price increase wrong and was thinking of where I was moving to, but then read it again and relaxed a bit. that is what I get for an overactive imagination and bad vision. The rent is only going up like $65 per month. On top of what I am paying now, I am not happy. But it is not unmanageable for me. It would be more money for me to move than pay out the increase each month, so I will probably stay. I have said that all along. I like where I am. quick trip to work. Relatively easy to get around. Near the subway. So I am happy for now.

My New Linux Box

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I have not had good luck getting Suse Enterprise Linux 9.0 installed on my new server again. it is not me. I cannot even get to the partitioning screen using text mode. The machine just hangs. As I said before when I try using Suse 9.3 I get told that it cannot find a hard drive. The drive is there fine, but for some reason the software wont find it. instead of messing around with those distributions I am just going to use the older (but totally usable) Suse 9.1. Lets face it I am going to mess up the install and need to do it again. I don’t want a distribution that will cause me headaches to install. With Suse 9.1 I can install it in vmware on my XP desktop and mess with configurations I am thinking of trying on the physical machine. Yes this is for personal use, and yes it may be overkill ot use a test machien. This is what I do. I deploy things. This is the smart way to do it, and it saves me from having to reload the hardware each time (and I anticipate it being many times) I mess up the OS.

So far I have 9.1 on the new box, and I am waiting to configure it. Doing some other stuff right now, but I figured I would take a break to write a bit. Updates later.

Stuff

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I had to deal with fixing contracts for our cage upgrade. Bob finally signed off on them at like 5pm and I faxed them back to our provider. Now we wait for a completion date.

I also worked on moving AD (active directory) roles around on our servers. This will enable me decommission a server and move it into a virtual machine. We have an old Dell 42xx series server that is just taking up space. It barely runs as it is, so it is a good idea to make it a virtual machine and free up precious rack space. Yup, still loving VMware!

Thursday night I stayed late moving print servers, and FMSO roles around. The testing of the log-on scripts with the printer changes took longer than I hoped so I didn’t get home till like 8:30PM.

Danny was worried about disaster recovery issues with moving more gear to virtual machines. I downloaded the white papers on the subject from vmware and will read them on the train to Kingston Monday. I am off to upstate for 2 days for furniture construction.

Drinks Out

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Went with Jayson and Danny to Becky’s by Jayson’s place. We like going there. Tonight we had a really pretty (at least to me) waitress. Thank goodness for her that she was pretty since she was really slow and didn’t seem to be the brightest bulb in the bunch. We drank, ate greasy appetizers and had an all around good time. I called Gus as we got there hoping he was around for dinner. As I was in a cab on the way home I got his call back. he was ready to eat, and I was ready for bed since we already drank. Maybe next week.

I had a funny cab driver on the way home. Who would have thought I would find an old white jewish cabbie in NYC? Well I did. that guy was just too funny. I normally don’t like talking to strangers. It just feels weird most of the time. Cab drivers, car service guys, and others are probably the worst. Don’t get me wrong they are good working people, but I just don’t have anything to say to them. What if you don’t have the same interests or opinions on something they feel strongly about. Then it just gets really weird, and they are the ones driving. I tend to just agree and let them drive. The alternative is talking about the weather, or the news. Both are generic and boring topics that everyone talks about when there is nothing else you can discuss. Not sure what my point was, but that is my opinion of small talk with strangers.

Birthday Lunch

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At work when someone has a birthday, usually 10-20 or so people get together and we go out to eat. We can only goto like 3 places nearby that can accommodate that amount of people. It always turns out that no matter what you buy ($5 grilled cheese perhaps) you always end up paying at least $20. You also end up waiting like an hour to get your food since they bring everyone’s out at the same time. Don’t get me wrong we usually have fun, but it is a circus.

It was Jayson’s birthday today. He is an old 30 today. With all of the above information in mind, Jay decided he didn’t want any big lunch feast. Instead of a big group going to a mediocre restaurant, Danny, Jay and I went to Angelo & Maxi’s for the steak lunch special. Well jay and I had it, danny had a baked potato. For $20.99, you get a soup or salad, steak (i had an 8-oz fillet), and desert. I had (of course) the black and white cheese cake. it was awesome.

if you are keeping score I went no where when I had my birthday. that is what I get for being sick that week! Turns out Dan scheduled something on my birthday, and then rescheduled it for that friday. I was out both days. Opps.

We had a good time today. It was unfortunately busy at work. I didn’t get home until 20 minutes ago.

Mac Spotlight

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When google came out with Gmail I said so what. I don’t need a free email address with tons of space, I have my own domain. When people said you can use it to search for mail contents, I said I didn’t need that, and I didn’t want google “seeing” everything I got in email. When Microsoft and google both came out with desktop search tools I was skeptical. When Apple came out with spotlight I was just as skeptical.

I tried spotlight out last week when I installed 10.4 on my mini. It seemed cool, but I didn’t think of much use for it right away. The other day I configured Apples mail client to see if it was better than entourage. It has its advantages, and so does entourage. Then I realized that all mail located in my Apple mail client is indexed into spotlight. I was still skeptical until I did my first search. I was looking for a piece of mail in my inbox (1 of 500 messages currently there). I typed the first name of the person sending the mail, and a word I knew was in the subject or body of the message. Spotlight spit back 3 possible answers and sure enough 1 of them was exactly what I was looking for. No need to create folders and sort through my inbox every week or so. All I need to do now is just dump my mail into an offline folder (i use IMAP for online storage) and just run a search when I need something.

Because of the spotlight searching ability I may start using Mail over Entourage. Apparently Entourage is not indexed in spotlight, but they (Microsoft) claim there will be a plug in for the Entourage database at some point that will allow indexing. I for one eagerly await the release of that. Until then you may find me using Mail for mail, and entourage for contacts and calendar. I just wish Mark/space, Apple & Palmone would get sync’ing perfected so I can use iCal and Address book with categories on my mac and have the categories carry over to my palm and then over to my PC when I am at work on Outlook.

Travel Day Complete

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I am done with my day of travel. Amtrak sucked. The trains were older and in worse shape than normal. When I asked the conductor he said that the normal trains are in use on Acela since those trains were down for maintenance. Something about the “elite” route gets the good trains! The train was late 20 minutes going up, and 45 minutes late coming home. I should be used to it by now, but I am not. On a plus note Amtrak’s automated IVR was awesome. I understand why they won all sorts of awards for the voice responce system. Hey I deal with telecom, network and VOIP gear most of my day, so hearing a good IVR actually interests me now. Some people look at nice cars, I admire IVR’s. No one ever said I was normal.

We got 10 users downstairs. Kai had issues with the other group of 10 they wanted to move. Turns out the electrical guys didn’t plug in a conduit so a bank of stations didn’t have power. that set us back enough that we didn’t have time to finish moving users today. They should still meet the deadline of friday to have half the users downstairs.

I also dealt with issues regarding our upgrading our cage at our data center, and canceling circuits in NYC. Also design woes about upgrading our circuits in our call center. I have been busy with our telecom provider to iron out all the issues. More meetings with them tomorrow!

A New Call Center, Well Almost

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Tomorrow (if all goes well) my company will open its new floor of its call center. We are moving our reps down to our new floor (with tons of space for expansion) and corporate people (those that are in that office), escalations groups, etc. will remain upstairs. Tuesday marks the first day we bring reps down. We are taking it slow with only 1 team of 10. By the end of the week we will ramp up half the call center or more down there. Then we move some existing furniture down that is currently in use. Cable, and bring the rest of the people down. It has been a logistics challenge. Not quite a nightmare, but challenging.

I don’t “have to” go tomorrow, but I wanted to see the end result of all that work that I (and others) took part in. I will most likely be back for a few days next week as the construction people do the cubes and cable for the second half of the center. Dan will be on vacation and even though I am a “technical guy” I am the next person who is aware of the entire project.

IPCC SOW

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We met our integrator about the statement of work for our IPCC deployment. They calmed our nerves about most issues but we came up with another one. Dan and I will talk about this tomorrow.

If that is done, we can sign the papers and in 90 (work filled, super stressful, and probably extremely interesting and fun) days we will have an IPCC call center.

More news as it develops…