Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
scott On a brighter note I have lined up my first interview for Thursday. The place sounds interesting. I am going to do more research on the company and see what happens. I am hoping to set up other interviews ASAP. I have some other things in the works but no formal meetings yet.
Technorati Tags: job hunting, job interview
Due to restrictions placed on my by my current employer I am unable to discuss what happened at work today, or my feelings about everything. I think you can figure it out. Lets just say I feel like I am on a runaway train and have no way of getting off. No the world is not going to end, but things are going to be interesting for a while.
All in all I had a horrible day. It was more frustrating than anything else. I wrote extensively about it on my private work blog. One day it may see the light of day, or not.
I am told there is a big NFL playoff game today. I am skeptical since my dad is on a plane going on vacation today, but we all know my mom runs their schedule so maybe he just didn’t remember there was a game on. In any case I am about to run out for some drinks at a bar with friends while we watch the Saints game. Since Gretchen is from New Orleans and is organizing the event we are going to a Saints friendly bar. I don’t care who wins either way so it will be an interesting afternoon. I am going for some food and drinks. I mean I haven’t seen every one in so long, oh wait we went out on Friday. Never-mind.
Technorati Tags: watching football, watching football at the bar
Well after a long period of procrastination I have gotten off my but and began looking for dating opportunities. Well, I guess I can say I haven’t really gotten off my but since I am trying the whole online dating thing so I am sitting down when looking, but you know what I mean. I forked over some cash to Match.com and will see what comes of the online dating search.
It is really weird. When it comes to dating I guess I am shy and find it difficult to make the first move. My friends probably are surprised by that since if I know you I am sometimes told I don’t shut up!
I spent the large part of this evening making a mess of my apartment, and working on my online profile. It is late and I am not tired. That does not bode well for my condition tomorrow when I wake up. Oh well. I think I finally have a decent online bio, but who really knows. I am trying the whole winking thing to female profiles I like. Apparently if they like what they read back, they can do the same for you and then you can email them. It is the sort of non-threatening way of making the first contact. I wonder if has the same averages to the old saying that if you walk up to a hundred women in a bar and tell each one that you want to take them back to your place for some sex that at least one (probably a few more) would actually say yes. Granted you would need a cup for the other 90% of them, but this is only a theory. I have never tried it, but I have some friends that may have attempted it.
Technorati Tags: dating, match.com, online dating
A minor gotcha we ran into with our Virtual Center cluster last week and again possibly today. Virtual Center requires a SQL Server (Microsoft I know) to collect telemetry I think. Not really sure why, but it does. It is not critical to operations of any VM, but you do need it for VMotion, creating new VM’s and other admin work. Well when we built our ESX cluster we put our virtual center DB on the one sql server we had on the LAN in that office that had any amount of stability. Well we were wrong. It turns out that the machine we picked (a dev db) runs out of space because our DBA’s don’t pay attention to their backup schedules. I am making an assumption there but it has happened twice in a week and a half. Well when the server runs out of space, there goes virtual center. Jayson has all the details of the issue, but it boiled down to we couldn’t use our virtual center manager until it was fixed. It is our own fault for putting it on a dev box but it was our only option at the time. We are now just building our own SQL server that the operations group will own and all it will do is the virtual center db.
This ESX roll out is a learning experience, but I still believe that we are far better off with our current infrastructure over past non vmware setup.
Technorati Tags: SQL Server, Virtual Center, virtual infrastructure, VMware ESX Server
I am writing this on the return leg of my “semi” mystery trip. I say that because no one at work really was supposed to know what we were doing this week. Apparently others are not good at keeping things quiet. I told who needed to know in my group but they always are privy to corporate secrets. that is just the nature of the jobs we have, but the rumor mill is running rampant it seems. I wrote a post all about exactly what we are doing, but it is on my private work blog right now. There it will remain until I am long gone from my current employer. I feel that the smart way to write about stuff from work. I want to write about it but cant publish it.
I can say we were doing some research. It was a very busy 3 days, and then we took yesterday to relax a bit. On this trip we ate very well. Man the food was good. Traveling always lets you eat well and gain weight. I also got the chance to see some really cool technology in action.
We rented an Iridium phone for the week because we were concerned about mobile coverage and the price of service even if we had good signal. It turned out that the Iridium phones are huge, and only really work outside. On the flip side my Cingular GSM phone actually worked so we simply used that. I don’t want to look at my bill this month since the price per minute was very high, but when you need to make an important cal you need to make a call.
I went the almost the entire trip without needing my migraine medication. Right before I got on the plane I felt like I needed to take something. At least I had a good run without the extra medication.
The trip out was uneventful. our short mini trip was nice. I have to say even smaller foreign air carriers have better service than american carriers. In the US you would never see a hot breakfast on an hour long flight but we had one.
On the return trip I went from having an asle seat in the very back of the plane to a decent window seat in an exit row. And I actually did someone a favor with that change. Go figure. The leg room is nice, especially since the carrier we are on was cramped on the way down. Hopefully the remainder of the trip will be uneventful.
Technorati Tags: international gsm roaming, iridium, satilite phone
As I write this I am on my way home from several days in Costa Rica, and El Salvador. 3 of us have been visiting several sites in both countries for what would be considered a black box project in my company. If this post is ever read it will be after I leave my current job, so I feel I can write about it.
We are researching outsourcing some of our call center operations. I went along to asses the technical operations of each call center site we visited. I also wanted to get an idea of how each company integrates their systems to ours. From what I saw we can send them calls via our providers voice cloud and do percentage based routing to their system. We would allow access to our applications via a citrix or terminal solution. As of now I am thinking a VDI solution that we have been toying around with for a while.
The trip was hectic, but very informative. We visited 3 sites from 2 companies in 2 countries in 3 days. I just hope that upper management listens to our recommendation to actually try and send some calls off shore. The venture would be profitable and still keep the same level of service. I was amazed that the majority of people in both countries that worked at the call centers spoke excellent english. I am in no way a fan of off shoring call centers to places like India because of constantly poor experiences I have had. Everyone we spoke to spoke very good english at each site. And it wasn’t like the discussions were staged. Just walking around and grabbing some food or hitting a bathroom and saying hi to someone they responded with excellent english. That and the technical feasibility of this project makes me want to try it out. Hopefully we will be given the chance.
Vmware released the public beta of its Fusion product since I wrote about the closed beta I had. In that time Parallels has come out with 2 more beta versions of their software. The last time I wrote I said that the Parallels beta had the leg up in features over the Fusion product. With the latest versions of each software now installed and running on my Macbook Pro I can say for now that Parallels still has the lead. I still think that VMware will eventually win the feature race, but for now Parallels is on top. Why you might ask? Coherence mode for one still rocks in my book. Also the new ability to create a shortcut on your mac that when launched will run a VM and then open the specified application. If that wasn’t enough Parallels now lets you see each application that you run in a VM its own dock icon. They also are on par with VMware now with there ability to drag and drop applications between VM and host.
VMware Fusion still works better in my opinion with USB devices. I cannot get my Treo to sync with Parallels but it worked with Fusion since day one. Unfortunately Fusion is still slow. Partly due to the mandatory debug mode they impose, but it is still slow. Hopefully the production version will be allot faster.
I will write more as I have more feedback to give.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Parallels Desktop, Treo 680, virtual machines, VMware, VMware Fusion
After a false start earlier this year with Cingular I finally made the switch and went back to GSM. I picked Cingular over T-Mobile because of higher speed data network and a better selection of phones. I still don’t like some of the business practices of Cingular but high speed data is high speed data. I went with the new Treo 680 with the Palm OS. My switch also means I decoupled my account with my companies corporate account. It worked out since we needed to give someone a data plan that didn’t have it already anyway.
I love the 680 but I have two issues. First is the fact that it is very sluggish sometimes with its input. Not all the time, but enough to be a pain. jayson said that his Treo 700p did the same thing but my 700p never did. The other issue is with poor battery life. It is not as good as the 700. I ordered a spare battery that should help, but I would like to make it a day without switching batteries.
Another good thing about GSM is that for $30 I took my locked Cingular Treo and had it unlocked. Not bad since the unlocked model costs $400, and Cingular only charges $199 (after rebate).
Technorati Tags: Cingular, Treo 680, Wireless data
I haven’t written about it, but over a month ago I decided to sell off my personal Macbook and pick up a new Core 2 Duo Macbook. It is still the black one. I am one of those people apple gets an extra $150 out of in order to get a black one. I supped it up to 2gig’s of RAM, and bought a 160gig hard drive to give me extra space. I am using it as my primary home computer. So far I am very happy with its performance. I will see what Apple has in store when they have Macworld. For now I don’t want to goto a desktop since the pro line is too expensive even for my blood. The mini is still a bit under powered, and the iMac is an all in one and I like having a KVM at my desk. I tried the iMac twice and both times I ended up getting rid of them because of the whole multiple computer need.