Month: March 2006

The Missing St. Patrick’s Day Post

by

Yesterday was a roller coaster ride of a day. I had a tons of issues to contend with at work. Jayson & Danny where off because of work done during maintenance Friday morning (for those of you that don’t understand that, when you do work on a website you need to do it on off hours. That means like 1AM EST. By the time you are done and home it is like 5AM, so you don’t get up for work normal time the next day.) Of course Jay was up at 10 not sleeping so he helped a bit remotely, then Danny shows up around 2:30 since he didn’t want to stay home.

Semi related problems to the work done Friday morning plagued us all day but where annoyances more than major catastrophes. Can’t go into more details here. Then we had other minor issues that where fun to deal with while down two people most of the day. Jayson ended up coming into the office at like 7 with gretchen so we could goto dinner. We didn’t get out of the office till like 7:30, and headed over to Heartland Brewery for dinner and hopefully drinks. We stumbled upon (well she was stumbling) Gretchen’s old boss going to another bar. She obviously got off work and had a head start with the festivities.

We had drinks, food, and then desert at the brewery. It sucked that Danny had to head home early! I got really buzzed off of 2 drinks. All I can say is that I predicted it in my birthday post. Jayson’s no alcohol vow from Gretchen’s friends wedding last week lasted a whole 5 days!

I got home late and was so tired and buzzed that I didn’t couldn’t write last night.

Technorati Tags: ,

The Big 3 2

by

Today is my birthday. I am now very much into my 30’s at 32. It was a relatively normal day. I got a ton of backlogged work done with Jayson out in the morning, and not many people dropping by for requests. A bunch of people from work took me out for lunch. I got a bit sick on some ice cream in the afternoon so I passed on dinner with Jayson and Danny.

I got the customary calls from my parents, sister, cousins etc. My favorite was the voice mail from Morgan singing me happy birthday. I missed the call but now I can keep the VM for a while. She is so cute.

My sister guilted my parents (my mom) for canceling our dinner plans for sunday so they are back on again and we will all meet in the city for dinner. Personally I didn’t care that much if they canceled, but my sister was right in saying the correct thing to do was to go to dinner and not do whatever emergency plans they had.

The birthday present I wanted didn’t happen. I was hoping my watch would be fixed by now. Saturday marks 7 weeks since it went in for repair. I will call them tomorrow to check on it. My other Speedmaster has been filling in nicely but I am still slow on the analog only watch:(

Proposals

by

Today we meet with the first possible integrator for our new phone system project in our NYC office. They presented us with their first proposal. The price they came back with was very high! We had them change the design and take out a bunch of stuff to try and slice the quote in half. We shall see what they come back with again. I also await a quote from the other integrator we are looking at.

I also meet with people regarding a pilot program for open office 2.0. we are going to roll it out to 30 people at the call center to see if it will not only replace open office 1.1 for the call center but also possibly replace Office for people who have it. We estimate it will save us allot of money. Can’t say how much but it is not a small number for us. Our CFO heard great things about it from my boss who is trying it out, and then heard the cost savings and wanted to know when we could get a test done! We are taking this one slow, but we believe the return on the investment in this open source product will be huge.

Beware the Ides of March

by

Personally I don’t (see title). But the term sounds cool, and most people don’t get it. Julius Ceasar had a bad day on this date in 44BC. Generally this is the first of a 3 day holiday (self proclaimed) for me. It begins with a normal day March 15, that happens to have a cool sounding reference that was used by Shakespeare. Only other significance for me is it is the day before my birthday! Other stuff happened on March 16th. The Wikipedia has yet to list my birth on their page related to this date. I assume it is just an oversight. That is supposed to be a happy day. That is the middle day of this holiday. And to cap off the 3 day gala event is St. Patrick’s. Recently this is the day I can drink to excess claiming it is a holiday, but really because I am a year older. Who am I kidding. I am a light weight drinker anyway!

No major social events positive or negative happened today. Work was busy. See the work blog for more info. I returned the PCI DVR card I bought last week since it was having major issues with interference so sound was terrible. I tried everything I could think of to fix it. I am back down to 1 tuner for the DVR. I am researching my other options now.

Bandwith

by

I meet with our Voice/Data provider today with our CFO to discuss renewing our contract with them. One account rep and his boss flew out from down south, and our local rep showed up also. They offered us a nice discount off of what we are currently paying since our volume is up, but our CFO thinks we can get a better deal. Let the games begin. This is the part of my job I don’t like. It is necessary but I don’t have to like it. Other topics we discussed where open issues we having as well as some new network options we have been thinking about. it was productive but long discussion.

Other issues that came up today was dealing with the ever growing space problem. We had to plan on moving 2 people to accommodate a new hire starting next week.

CIA cited as worst freedom of information agency

by

Umm, are we talking about the same CIA that I am thinking of? I would expect that CIA to I don’t know keep secrets. it is in fact a spy agency! I am not saying I agree with anything it may or may not have done now or in the past, but it is by definition a spy agency. I would expect it to be cited as the worst freedom of information agency. Not getting an award for being the most open agency for free flowing information. Get over it.

Technorati Tags:

Computer Rebuild, Again

by

Today I am wiping my Presario desktop. I am moving all my DVR hardware onto it and re-installing the OS. My little DVR machine is fine, but it does not have enough inputs (internal or external). That made it difficult to add extra drive capacity or another TV tuner. Since I am not really using my more powerful Presario desktop for anything other than remoting into it to use VMWare I figured I would combine the two. The hardware should be able to handle both tasks without any problems. It is after all an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ with 1.5gig of ram and 2 250gig SATA hard drives.

I am in the process of installing Windows XP now. hopefully the Beyond TV & Beyond Media install’s go well, and I have no problems with the video capture cards. More news later

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Move Go, Or Maybe Not Yet

by

I got word today that the office move that I am trying to plan for is almost a reality. We have verbal agreement on our lease terms, and the people that want to rent our current space have also come to verbal agreement with terms on our current space. That means I must frantically work to get a Cisco vendor selected and order a phone system.

I meet with an potential integrator today about this project. I just hope I can get quotes approved fast enough tot meet everyones time table.

Or Not To Join!

by

My tryout trip with Cingular and my HP iPaq phone didn’t go so well for Cingular and the phone. First I should say the phone didn’t even get really used on the trip. By the time I was ready for the trip I had decided that the Windows Mobile phone software was too clunky to use all the time, and that the iPaq was nice as a PDA but was too big to use as a phone. Having it reboot 3 times while I was trying to sync it with my Mac didn’t help it.

With the Windows Mobile woes I figured I might as well try out the Cingular SIM in my Treo and see if the service was better and if the “high speed” data was worth the extra money. In NYC the signal seemed fine for singular. It even worked on the tracks in Penn Station. At my companies upstate office however where I had great service with T-Mobile I had 1 bar or no service with Cingular.

The data plan worked fine with no configuration necessary. But it wasn’t noticeably faster than my T-Mobile data plan that was half the price. Wanting to test that I used my Treo as a DUN modem and connected to the internet on my Powerbook using both Cingular and T-Mobile. The Treo 650 supports Cingular’s EDGE network and should have given me performance somewhere in the 100k range. I ran the CNET speed test and got a response of 26k. I tried my T-Mobile SIM on the same phone and got performance of around 60k +. That was what I expected with T-Mobiles GPRS system. That was the final decision to get out of my Cingular trial. The bad signal at my office was almost a death kneel, but paying double for a data plan that was slower was the final straw.

I will give Cingular credit. They are true to their 30 day money back policy for the service and phone. I had no problems returning the device and canceling the service. I say that before I get the bill for usage I had, but I think everything should be ok. If they improve the data speeds and service in the area I travel to I would look at them again, but for now I am fine with T-Mobile.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Join An Evil Empire?

by

I have pondered switching mobile carriers for a while. I have always ended up staying with T-Mobile. I have had them for almost 4 years and all in all they have been ok. But besides being cheap, and offering GSM they don’t have that much going for them. Well except nice customer service. That is a plus but for the once a year I call is it worth all the other trade offs? They offer the worst phones. Their high speed data plans may be cheap but they are really slow.

I have been eying the HP iPaq 6515 Windows Mobile phone for a while. Cingular offers it. It has a nice size screen and a keyboard. It is larger than my Treo 650 but the larger screen is REALLY nice. I saw it in the store today on my day off of shopping. I was originally not going to switch but I was surprised to find they had the iPaq in stock (they didn’t several other times I went to the store trying to take a look at it). I was impressed with the screen size, and the fact that the whole unit was not much bigger than the Treo even thought it was wider.

To make a long story short I made an semi impulse buy and am on my way to switching mobile carriers to Cingular. Now I have 30 days to see if I like the phone and the service, but for now I am switching. I will pay almost double for the data plan I had, but I am also (in theory) more than doubling the speed of the wireless data. The plan I am moving to is almost identical to what I had. 900 minutes vs the 1000 that T-Mobile gave me for the same price. The advantage is that I get roll over minutes now. Some months I use allot of minutes but others I almost never use any, so now I can roll over unused minutes to the next month.

I am going on a trip tomorrow so I will give the phone and service a real trial. More news later.

Oh and as for the title of the post I think most large telecom companies are evil. I love them, and use them all the time, but when something goes wrong you are at there mercy. You are in a contract that you cannot get out of, they can be very evil. But at least it is an evil you know!

Technorati Tags: , , ,