Month: June 2005

Bye Bye Treo, Maybe?

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I got fed up with my Treo 650 this weekend, and it may be time for it to hit ebay. I am not sure if my problem is T-Mobile or the Treo but I had problems with people not hearing me yesterday. I heard them but they could not hear me. A phone reboot solved that problem. Today I rebooted the phone for some reason (at 7PM) and I got notification that I had 6 messages from that morning. All of the messages were import work related issues that needed to be addressed quickly. Well needless to say they weren’t.

I have had issues off and on for a while. Rebooting the phone solves lots of issues, but should I have to do that? Jayson thinks I should wipe all the extra software I have (i have allot) and see if the phone works fine then. He is right, and the phone probably will work but the whole point of a palm phone is the ability to use the “SMART” features. If my distinctive ring or other apps wont work, why would I want a big phone like that?

The problem is what to do? I have a Blackberry that I need to carry for work, so I get my realtime email. I have been using my SE T610 off and on for a week. I broke down and started using it tonight full time until I can find a permanent replacement to the Treo, or until I calm down and start using it again. I already ordered a Motorola V3 Razr off of ebay. I have been eyeing it for a while and I figured now was the time to get one. I will continue to use the Treo as a palm for now. When I finally decide to dump it I will need to find a new PDA. The Razr should be able to connect to most new PDA’s via Bluetooth so I hope to keep some of my wireless internet features. I will find out when it arrives later this week.

Little Italy

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Meet up with Cari, her sister, Jayson, Gretchen, and Jay’s mom for dinner in Little Italy tonight. We went to a place we goto allot. It was good, but I can’t remember or spell the places name right. Afterward we went shopping for junk inexpensive sunglasses and accessories for Cari’s niece. It was hot and steamy from the rain, but we had a good time.

I just got home about an hour ago. I am still not tired. Even after a relitivly strong drink at Cari’s. I know I need to lie down now in order to be normal for Monday, but I am still not tired. I will try in a little while…

Yet Another New Hosting Provider

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I admit that sometimes I cannot make up my mind. Last month I got a static IP address for my cable modem at home. I figured I would host my own mail/ftp/web server like I did in years past. It was a great idea. I know more than I did back then and even then I hosted stuff. My problem is I don’t have time to deal with building and tweaking a server at home. I have tried. The machine I got to use as a server has been sitting idle wasting electricity.

Over the past week or so I have been doing research on web hosting providers again. I see all these really cheap providers but none of them have all the features that I want. That is what lead me to want to self host anyway. For whatever reason I got sidetracked on the Typepad site before I logged in one day and saw the Moveabletype hosting providers list. I checked them out to see how much it would cost for a web provider that would give me Moveabletype blog also. Turns out some of them were nice and full featured web providers. They weren’t cheap compared to a godaddy.com or hostmysite.com, but they offered me options that I wanted. IMAP mail is key for me. Also the ability to host multiple domains or sub domains without paying a ton more. Also a decent amount of storage space was needed. I ended up choosing Media Temple. For like $10/month I got 2 gigs of storage, IMAP mail, and extra domains. $6/month more gets me Moveabletype. I still have months left on my Typepad subscription but I want to try out the hosted Moveabletype. If I don’t like it I can always stick with Typepad and still use Media Temple as a hosting provider.

I am not going to say anything good or bad about the new provider for a while. I have found several providers that seemed awesome until I found the one feature that they said they had and didn’t (godaddy and IMAP) or some other issue that caused me to cancel within my 30 day free period. This is after I do my research. This provider seems to have all that I need. As I write this entry my site is uploading onto the new server. I need to read up a bit more on Moveabletype to see how I can customize it. I like the way my Typepad blog looks now, so I want to try and emulate it as much as possible.

Data Center Move Completed

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Jayson and I finished up our data center move this morning. We have allot of free space that Bob will use up right away. It is also as neat as we are going to get it. We had some interesting moments configuring up the network. We were putting in Gigabit uplinks between all the switches and ran into some problems. The ports were configured weird by Keith. Jayson didn’t understand half the crap that was setup, and neither did i. We cleaned it up and we were good to go.

We also had a problem with one of our servers Promise IDE disk array. this is like the 3rd time we have had trouble with this array, and the incalculable time we have had trouble with these IDE arrays. We spent hours trying to make it work, but it does not seem to have worked. Danny and our DBA staff was working on some alternatives I suggested today while Jay and I got some sleep.

As it stands now that server is still causing problems. Contingency plans are already in the works to replace it:(

The Hard Part

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I thought working nights all week would be the hard part. Who was I kidding? The hard part is now getting back on a normal sleep schedule. I was surprisingly easy to get into a night schedule. Granted being able to sleep from 9AM to 5PM requires some dose of medication. Be it alcohol, Tylenol PM, Nyquil or something stronger. But you do sleep!

I got home today at like 7AM. By the time I unwound a bit it was 8AM, and I called Kai to go over some stuff. I figured hey, he starts work at 8. By the time I was ready for bed it was 9AM. I woke up at like 4:45PM and it felt like 30 minutes had passed. I slept that well. Now of course it is 11PM and I am not tired. I am going to force myself to sleep by the latest 12:30AM.

While being awake and having extra energy I have kept myself busy. I decided I didn’t like how I reorganized my desk, so I reorganized again. I am happy with the new layout, but I am thinking I want to plug an external hard drive into my Powerbook so I can have my iTunes collection on it. I am using the powerbook as my primary machine now a days (and loving it), so I need my tunes with me. The problem is the entire collection takes up half of the hard drive.

I did some cable cleanup behind my desk while I was reorganizing. Man it gets messy and dirty back there. Being the clean freak that I am, I had to do my best to fix things. The cables are still a mess (but better than before) but it is clean.

Data Center Update

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After working all day Saturday, Monday night, and Tuesday night, we are about 90% done with our move to the new cage. We have 3 servers and 3 desktops (don’t ask) to move, along with a core switch and the firewalls. We will do that Thursday night. The new cage looks good. Some of the cable management could be better, but Jayson assures me that it will be cleaned up when we are done. We already started taking apart the old cage. it is/was a mess.

Since Saturday I have done nothing else but deal with this move. Once it is over I will be very happy. The good news is we think we were able to squeeze out even more space savings than we originally thought. that is good news since we are planning on expanding with a bunch of new servers soon.

Sleep

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My sleep habits are all screwed up now that I worked nights two days in a row. Tonight I don’t have to do an overnight. We got allot done yesterday so we didn’t have to go in today. I do have to go back one more time on Thursday night. I got home at 6AM this morning and slept till 2PM. Now it is midnight and I am not tired. I figured I would write a bit and then hopefully sleep would come.

My building’s maintenance crew gave me a new AC unit today. The on in my living room was not cooling. Now I am nice and cold while I sit here and write! When I called they said it would be a while for them to send someone out so I ended up going to the office for a few hours. It was that or goto Starbucks and pay for internet. At work, it is free (for me)!

I went over to Macy’s after work to try and do some shopping, but the lines were really long for the changing room. I decided to try back some other time.

I also went over to the Cingular store. I still think they are an evil company, but I bought a pre-paid SIM card to test out their service. I have been having intermittent reception issues with my T-Mobile phone. So much so that this week I have been using my work Nextel and leaving forwarding calls to that. The pre-paid SIM was cheap, so I will try it for a few days and see if I like it or not.

I also re-organized part of my living room. I had for a while 2 monitors on my desk. They took up allot of space. I had another half of the L of my desk with nothing but piles of crap on it. I cleaned it off, bought a power strip and put my 20″ Apple Cinema display on the other desk. Now I have my powerbook plugged into that and I have more room. I also moved my printer to a shelf out of the way. I still need to clean up my place, but I am lazy since I have been out of it with these weird hours. I keep telling myself I will clean this weekend.

Besides that, I tried to rest allot today. More exciting things this weekend, I hope!

Nights

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I have been working nights all week so I have not been able to write anything. I got home at 5:30AM this morning, and just woke up about an hour ago. The weird work schedule is necessary for allot of reasons, none of them I can discuss here. See the work blog for details. All good things though. I will write more when my head is clear and my living room AC is fully functional!

Birthday, Days

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Yesterday was my brother in laws birthday, and today is my Dad’s. We are going out to dinner to celebrate. Not sure when, not sure where, but we are going. Not much else planned for this lazy sunday. I am just trying to get every bit of rest in before the crazy week looks like will happen next week. I need to work nights 12-4AM for a project, so I will have my sleep habits all screwed up.

I am sitting here planning on writing, and now that I am actually taking time to write I don’t know what to write about:( I have a list of stuff I want to write about, but nothing that I seem in the mood for. Weird. Maybe something will come to me later!

Working on a Saturday

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I worked most of the day today. Busy, busy, busy. See the work Blog for details. After a late lunch at outback I was tired. I didn’t go to the beer garden for Dave’s birthday like I hoped. I ended up relaxing at home and walking to Best Buy.

I am now updating my version of Beyond TV to the latest revision, and at the same time looking through the TV guide for anything on TV that looks good to record over the next 2 weeks.

While running my software update I have been giving serious consideration to dropping the Tivo in favor of a second computer based DVR (PVR). My reading has proven that I can plug a second USB Video capture card into my desktop and use the existing Beyond TV software to record 2 shows at once, or watch one and record another. Some would say that is overkill, but even my mom who has a Time Warner DVR has asked to watch something and record something at the same time. Right now I have 2 cable box’s with one plugged into my Tivo and another one into my computer. The thing with Tivo is it costs $12.95 a month. With a video capture card going for a little over $100 depending on what I get the device pays for itself in 10 months. That is assuming I get no money for the Tivo I have.

I am still pondering what I want to do.