Month: October 2005

Retirement Party

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Today was my mom’s surprise retirement party thrown by her old co-workers. I meet up with Carrie in Penn station and we took the train together. Mike picked us up with Morgan and we drove over to the restaurant it was being held at. It wasn’t really a huge surprise to my mom, but it was a nice party. There were allot of people who turned out. Morgan was in Morgan form. She is funny to watch with so many people.

Because of the party for my mom we were not able to make it to Arielle’s birthday party in Jersey. What is so funny was I was planning on going to Arielle’s party, but when I met my parents for dinner last week they told me about my mom’s party. Like I said it wasn’t a surprise. So my plans to Jersey were canceled. I need to get out there eventually since I haven’t seen my cousins in ages.

The party was started at 1:30 so it wasn’t a late night. I don’t like being out till 10-11 on a Sunday. Work on Monday is hard enough without coming home late the night before and having to get up early the next day.

Flickr And Me

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I signed up for the Flickr photo service a few months ago. I just never used it. I thought, I have a photo album on Typepad, and I use a MOB on Textamerica. I also maintain a photo album site on my home page. Why do I need to post my photos somewhere else? Well the devil is in the details. I finally went onto the Flickr site and was looking around. You can do some cool stuff with the site. I also like the ability to batch upload files using iPhoto since someone wrote a plug in. I already uploaded the past 2 months worth of photos to the site.

I also found someone posted how to take a Flickr badge and use it in Typepad. I got it setup in 5 minutes. Not bad! Now I am going to play with the tags on some of my photos.

I can also get rid of my Typepad photo album. It was easy to use and convenient to have, but it was never that great. I can delete the photos and save space on my account, not that I need to!

Mini Work Birthday Party

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Before the Best Buy thing I went to I did stop off at for a quick drink (well 1/3 of one) at the mini birthday party the Finance people were having for several of their team. Jay and I stopped by for a bit. I ran out quick to goto my other thing, but Jay stayed for a while. There was one or two other non finance people there, but it wasn’t weird. We hang with most of them all the time!

Wednesday At Work

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Wednesday was not that eventful (other than my Best Buy excursion). I got some task work done. Updated people on what to do. Ran to the colo for 2 hours, and that is about it. Nothing major to report. It was almost quiet (ALMOST, I don’t want to have the powers that be reign down problems because I said it was quiet) with Danny upstate, Kai out, and Jayson at the data center.

Pre-Opening Day

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Today I “won” the chance to goto a pre-grand opening of the new Best Buy in NYC. Someone at work couldn’t be there, so I guess they knew the store manager and he gave her a ticket for someone else to go in her place. She gave it away to the 3rd email respondent! I was it. It was cool. There was food, and you got to check out the store before it opened to the public. I felt all special getting in by invitation only! The best part of course was the discount. They had a one day deal that anything you bought that night was at the employee discount price. On some items that was a nice deal. I have wanted to get a LCD TV or Plasma for almost 2 years now. Every time I look at price they are way too expensive for what I want. Then to settle was not worth the money.

I wanted to get a 42″ HDTV plasma. They are way to expensive. I didn’t want to get an EDTV plasma at the same price. it just wasn’t worth it. So I decided to go with a 32″ LCD TV. I saw the price online and said with a nice discount I would be willing to buy it. I went to the store, found the TV I wanted and checked on the discount. I was blown away by the deal. I was all ready to buy it. Then a bad thing happened. I looked at the bigger TV next to it. It was a 40″ LCD HDTV. Beautiful, crystal clear, and WAY out of my budget. Then someone else asked the price of it after the deal. I was shocked at how good a deal it actually was. It was still expensive, but within my budget (barely) and a deal that I would never see again. I called my dad, since he wanted a TV also. We were going to go shopping in a few weeks anyway for one. I told him the situation and the price. I also warned him that the price was only part of it. He needed to get the extended warrantee since this thing was big and pricey. You don’t want to take a chance with it breaking. Then I told him he needed to have it professionally wall mounted. He said get it. Not wanting to abuse a special deal I said only if I can get more than 1. I asked and the staff was very cool. They were like yeah you can get 2. As I was standing there waiting to place my order there where several other people doing the same thing I was (buying 2).

I got my order in, and went upstairs to pay for it. It was allot of money for a spur of the moment item, but I have wanted one for so long, and the deal was not every going to be better, no matter what I kept telling myself. Now I can’t wait for it to arrive. They had to ship it to me. Something about not selling anything at the store since they wanted stock for the real opening later this week. I didn’t care, I wasn’t going to carry 2 TV’s home anyway.

I figured if I could get a nice

A Rare Trip

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Today I made a trip with Jayson up to the data center. I don’t get up there that much. I usually let others go, but every so often I have a reason to (or just want to) get up there. Today was both. I had some specific tasks I needed to do, and I also wanted to see how the additions we have made look. Things look awesome! Jayson has done a fantastic job of making that place nice. Most everything is so neat.

I brought up some gear, and also did some inventories. We spent a few hours doing that. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon working on firewall rules, and distributed file system security permissions. I had a stupid problem with a cross domain security issue with a file share. I have yet to resolve it, but I found a work around that will be fine for the next few months.

Jay and I decided that we are going to try leaving the overhead lights off in the office. We think it is easier to read the monitors without the lights. I installed a small desk light for some background light. We shall try it out for a few days and see how it goes. I like that we decorated and make the office feel lived in. My office has more posters on the wall than my apartment does, but that is not something I should be proud of!

Word of warning to myself. Do not eat ice cream after a big lunch. I have been feeling the pain ever since I got Hagen Das. It was good, but after it was bad! More later.

Monday Recap

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I woke up with a headache. Alive kicked it, so I was happy in the afternoon. Most of the day was taken up with shepherding along other peoples projects. I did get to deal with a few items on my ever growing list of items I am working on. The thing about the Getting Things Done system I am trying is that the list always gets bigger, and each task gets more specific. The purchase of Daylite has been very helpful in keeping things organized.

Some things I did get to work on today was some network port blocking projects I have had in the works. I also got some time to update some test virtual machines for some other tests. I also pitched to my boss a new upgrade to our network. I think he liked it, so we will take it to the next level. Not much more I can go into on this site.

I got to get home at a normal hour today. I ended up cooking dinner instead of ordering out like I have been doing the past 2 weeks. I also got to touch base with Amanda over IM for a while. She is back from her honeymoon so she was able to chat.

,

HL DL 320 SATA Servers

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I have been working with a few HP Prolient DL 320 SATA servers. The price was right on them and they have decent specs. The issue I had with the last round of Supermicro SATA box’s weren’t the supermicro box’s them selves, but the SATA RAID cards that went into them. They would fail much more than their SCSI counterparts. Also the array controllers would not rebuild without crashing computers. We tried several brands. We are using 3ware for new deployments of older chassis SATA servers. They seem the best out of all I have seen. They were a crap shoot. These HP box’s seem to rebuild fine in our tests. Time will tell if they drives hold up, but so far I think HP finally got it right with a low end non SCSI RAID system.

Resting, & Cleaining

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I am so sleepy today. I woke up around 10:30, and I have been sleepy ever since. I tried to lie down and take a nape (not something I usually do) but I couldn’t fall asleep. I am done cleaning up my apartment. My parents are coming over later so I decided that my weekly weekend cleaning should be a good one. I finished most of the the work last night, but I put the finishing touches on the place this morning.

I would be watching TV now, but there is nothing good left on my Tivo or DVR. Oh I have about 100 hours of crap on them, but nothing I want to be watching now. I watched the latest episode of Spooks (aka Mi-5) last night thanks to usenet!!! All I can say is I love watching a show where no one is safe from getting killed off. Too bad US TV isn’t as good as some of the stuff coming out of the BBC.

Rich and Amanda are back from their honeymoon. They called and wanted to know if I wanted to goto a steak brunch. Now I am up for steak, but for sunday brunch? Who am I kidding? I would have said yes if it wasn’t for my parents coming over later and me being so sleepy.

At least it stopped raining in NYC!

Is The Date Too Much to Ask For?

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It is funny how you miss the little things. I have been wearing my new Omega watch for almost 5 months now. The one thing I miss off my old timex is the ability to look at my wrist for the date. I can get the date off my Omega, but I have to hit a button to get it and then cycle through the menu to get back to time. It is a pain so I never do it. Something so simple, yet so difficult. I find myself having to look at my mobile phone or the time preferences on my powerbook to get the date now a days. Bob got a good laugh at me when I commented about the new watch not giving the date, but the $40 timex does. Oh well, what are you going to do?