Month: July 2008

The Pharmacy

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I am back at the pharmacy for the second time this week since my prescription wasn’t completely ready when I went on Monday. This sucks because it is the old pharmacy I went to near my old office. Well sort of, the pharmacy I used to goto closed and this is one nearby the old one. The problem is my new office is totally cross town and a pain to get to this one. Two trips in a week is one thing, but for some reason this place is always busy. There is always a 15 minute line, and every time I have been there they never have had my prescriptions ready even after calling or refilling online days before. I am stuck going here since for some reason the prescription I am refilling cannot be moved to a different pharmacy.

At least this was the most annoying thing to happen to me today. I was in meetings most of the day so it was a bit grueling but otherwise uneventful.

What I Have Been Up To?

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I was writing regularly for a while and then dropped off the radar. The only excuse I have is that by the time I wanted to sit down and write I was dead tired. The new job is a bit draining. There is allot to do and get up to speed on. The past two weeks have been tons of meetings and planning. Two days last week were almost entirely meetings. Yesterday and today was also like that. And if some of our integrators have anything to say about it, tomorrow will also be a minimum of 5-6 hours of meetings. Don’t get me wrong, we are getting allot done. It is just there is tons of other work that can’t get done if I am tied up. That and even though your body is sitting around all day, you get emotionally drained from all that work and discussions.

Sleeping Issues With a Twist

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I have had on and off (mainly on) sleeping troubles since I decided to start looking for a new job back in April. There is no question it is stress related. It had gotten better as I settled into my new job, but last week I started having problems again, but this time with a twist. I don’t know what I did but now my neck has been hurting really bad. I think it might have started by me sleeping on it wrong, but it also hurts during the day periodically. I have had neck pain before (I went to a chiropractor when i was like 11 for issues) but this hurts. I knew it was bad when my friends at the bar on Friday were wondering if I was ok because I wouldn’t turn in one direction. My dad says to give it some more time before I have it looked at, but I think that I need to do something about it really soon. I can’t sleep because it hurts when I lie certain ways, and I think it is causing minor head aches. Minor head aches are one thing, but for someone who gets migraines because of minor head aches I have to worry. Thankfully I have only had one incident today when i had to take my migraine meds. A good night sleep right about now would be really nice!

This Weekend

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I went to see The Dark Knight with Danny in Union Square Saturday night. We went for some food and a few drinks afterward. The movie was good, but not awesome. Until the last Batman movie I hadn’t been a huge fan of the franchise anyway, so the new ones are converting me over!

Today was more relaxing. I cleaned up my apartment, and did some reorganization on my computer. It took all week to move 1.4+ terabytes of data around on my newly upgraded Drobo. I like the unit, but performance is sucking big time after I put the 4th 1TB drive in. It stinks attached to my Mini or as a NAS. I don’t know what the deal is.

Other than that I relaxed. Having some down time since the weeks are hectic is nice!

Friday Out

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Last night I went out with friends for Lukes birthday. We went to Windfall and had a good time. We ended a bit earlier than I thought but fun was still had. Luke usually is out late so for his B-day i figured a late one, but he got blasted early and headed to another bar. He is always fun to hang with. My neck was killing me so I headed out by 8. Yes that is really early, but it isn’t so bad when you start at 5pm sharp!

I got to see a bunch of friends from my old job that I hadn’t seen in a few weeks. I hadn’t gone out in about 2 weeks since work was crazy and i was tired, but I couldn’t stay away for Luke’s b-day. I am hoping to get out again next week with that group.

DroboShare and Drive Storage

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Since John turned me onto the Drobo I have been a huge fan. I finally finished filling all 4 drive bays with 1TB drives a few weeks ago. Buying drives over the course of a few months defrayed the cost a bit. Last week I realized that if I want to have all 2.7TB of usable storage in one volume I will need to reformat the unit. Apparently the original firmware could only do up to 2TB volumes. Newer ones will do up to 16TB so I can add storage later and not have to worry about formatting the volume.

In order to reformat the Drobo I needed to move all the data currently on it off onto other storage while I performed the reconfiguration. The moving of the data off the Drobo took about 3 days. The reformatting of the unit took 15 minutes. While I was moving the data off the drive I realized that I would rather have that storage as NAS instead of directly connected to my Mac Mini desktop. When I was out earlier this morning I went over to J&R and picked up a DroboShare NAS attachment. The setup was just as easy as setting up the Drobo. I also like the fact that it piggy backs its power off of the Drobo.

Now that my Drobo is formatted for 8TB I can expand disks over the next few years without worrying about doing this exercise again. I am now copying all the data back onto the Drobo. It is slightly faster to do this by direct attaching the drive to my computer. Once I am done uploading the data, I will plug the drive back into the NAS head and my home network storage setup will be complete, for now. I want to see how long it takes me to use up 2.7TB?

The next big question is what to do with all my older external hard drives I have accumulated? I have many. I have about 5 250GB drives, and two 750GB external drives. It is allot, but I got the 750’s to replace some 250’s, and the 250’s never really went away. Once everything is on the Drobo I want to get rid of the 250’s and just have the two 750’s around for backups. And only a few years ago I thought it was allot to manage the data on one or two 18gb SCSI drives!

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The Near Disaster

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My Tumi book-bag ripped today. The strap ripped right off the bag as i was walking out of my office on my way home. My quick reaction caught on the bag before it fell into the street. I am not so happy about that since the bag was not so cheap and it is only a little over a year old. I need to bring it in to be repaired. According to the Tumi website the type of problem I am having is covered under warrantee.

iPhone Attempt Number Three

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I freely admit that I went out and bought an iPhone on the second day they came out last year. I also admit that I bad mouthed getting one, but got one in hopes that my assessment was wrong. It turned out that I was right. I couldn’t use the original iPhone. It was too limited in what it could do, and had too many quirks. Last year the line wasn’t so bad on the second day, and it moved quick. I think Jayson and I were done with the line in like 30-40 minutes tops.

This year was a totally different story. I wanted the new phone. On paper it had almost everything I am looking for in a phone, and the lines were huge and slow. So far my assessment has been good. The two issues I have with the phone is the touch keyboard is small, and I make key errors allot. Hopefully i will get better over time. The other issue is like all smart phones with installed software, it is buggy. I have had two apps reboot the phone already. This isn’t really Apples fault, but lets hope the iPhone doesn’t turn into the Palm OS Treo’s that require me to reboot them on at least a daily basis.

This is my 3rd iPhone. I did buy two of the originals and returned them. The second attempt was me trying to see if I was too critical of the first one I had. Turned out at the time I wasn’t too critical. I couldn’t use the original version of this hardware. Of course I had major issues with the first version of the Treo as well, and then ended up having many versions of the later models.

Now reading this you will rightfully think that I harp allot on certain technology gear like a mobile phone. My mobile is my only phone. It is with me almost all the time, and is always on. It is my link to everyone. It contains all my contacts, schedule, notes, etc. it also keeps me sane with games or reading when I have down time while out and about. This is not unlike many people. The issue is that I wont put up with sub par stuff. So when I read that on paper this new phone will be able to solve most of my issues, I want one.

iPhone 3G Unboxing - 1 iPhone 3G Unboxing - 2 iPhone 3G Unboxing - 3 iPhone 3G Unboxing - 4 iPhone 3G Unboxing - 5 iPhone 3G Unboxing - 7

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