Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
scott I signed up for a free vox account. I am interested in the fact that I can apply security groups to posts and allow some people to see it. I am wondering if that would enable me to resume my (semi)public posting regarding work stuff? Not sure yet. I am still playing with the service. So far I am in no rush to cancel my Typepad account.
Technorati Tags: blog, blog security
Yet again I have been bad at posting. Sean emailed me looking for an update since I haven’t written in a while. I know I have been bad recently with not posting. I will provide a quick update of what happened this month. Ok, get ready here it comes:
Last week I was plagued with migraines from Wednesday till this Monday. It is the weather. I always get sick when the weather starts changing. It is something about the stagnant warm weather, not hot or cold when the AC’s stop running and it is just warm. I am not the only one I know that is affected by this but like clockwork twice a year I have an issue. I am feeling somewhat better now.
Last weekend I stayed in trying to kill the head aches. I ended up having to miss a Halloween party my friends threw because I felt like crap. I did get out a bit on Sunday to help Lauren and Andrew setup there new Macbook Pro. The twins are really cute, but a bit loud for my head aching state I was in.
The week before that I had a cold all week. Thankfully it wasn’t that bad. I took cold eze. I can’t spell it but it works. I sounded allot worse than I felt all week. The Tylenol PM also helped. The weekend of the 14th and 15th I pretty much slept away since I had a cold. Come to think of it, this month has been allot of resting when I am not working. That is a sign that things are crazy busy in the office.
One night a few weeks ago (i can’t remember when anymore) a bunch of us finally got together for poker. Brian’s girlfriend Amy was the big winner. I was the only other person that broke even. I did ok, but no where near as well as Amy. I need to schedule another get together soon.
I did the Jewish holidays at the usual places. One holiday was at my parents best friends house and the other was at my parents place. My dad decided to make the first holiday interesting by getting sick. He ended up in the hospital for a day and half with the flu or something. I am learning that even something as typically normal as the flu can put a diabetic in the hospital. He is ok but it was an interesting few days.
The other holiday was uneventful. I didn’t fast. I really can’t, or shall I say I shouldn’t. Me, medication, and not eating is a bad thing. According to my dad (who after all is a reliable religious scholar:) it is ok to skip the fasting if you need to take meds. Who am I kidding anyway. I am not religious 364 days out of the year, so why should I be that one extra day?
Other stuff went on this month, but I can’t recall all the details right now. Heck, I almost forgot about the hospital thing so I bet I missed some other important piece of info.
Work was really hectic this month. Lost of projects going on right now. I will cover them in another post if I find the time. Hopefully this wont be the last post for another month!
Technorati Tags: blog, Macbook Pro, migraine, poker
Last night after a stressful day a bunch of us went out and got a few drinks. We ended up at a dive bar on the upper west side. We hung out for a while and then ended up back at Miguel’s apartment to relax. It was a nice chance to relax from the crzy pace we have been keeping at the office recently.
While we where at the bar I came to the conclusion that I should take today off. It is the beginning of the jewish holiday. I have the time, and I needed a break. It wasn’t that I am very religious or anything, but taking the day off lets me go to my parents a bit earlier than I originally could if I went to work. I am writing this post from the rail road on my may to my parents house. My old stand by place to write, on the train.
I saw this article today and I got a little ticked off. When did the percentage of tipping go up? I try to stick to double the tax or about 15%. That varies based on the service provided to me at the restaurant. I don’t know where someone thinks a mandatory 20% is fare. So you can provide really bad service and still automatically add 20%? I don’t know what pissed me off more about this, article. The mandatory part, or the fact that the amount they want to tack on is 5% more than what I have always thought as a fair tip. If you are concerned with cost of living adjustments, the tip goes up whenever the price of the meal goes up, so the percentage doesn’t have to change.
I am not being cheap. I regularly tip 20-25% if I get good service. Especially if I am traveling by myself and get good service I have given really big tips. I just get aggravated by people expecting more and then not providing good service. I don’t care what the article says about statistics of how people tip. If I get bad service you get a bad tip, and vice versa. About half the time I go out to eat in the city I get bad service, I am not going to reward someone for that. That is not saying everyone is bad, I also get some great service, but I should be able to dictate when I tip well or not so well based on the level of service I get. That is the whole idea of a gratuity, deal with it!
Technorati Tags: manditory tipping
Rob has gotten allot done with Nagios. Hopefully by the end of the week he should have basic system monitoring (up and down) plus disk space checking on all gear at our data center. Once that is done we can roll out more locations as well as add functionality. He is doing great with it so far. I know Danny wanted to work on the project but he is busy with other issues. I also know Danny would have done a great job on the project, but when he works on stuff like this it seems like it takes him forever to complete stuff. Rob is able to churn out product allot faster. For a time sensitive project like this I am happy with the quick response.
Hopefully this program works out better than our old whatsup system. I can’t wait till the end of the week.
Technorati Tags: nagios, network monitoring, snmp
I spent part of the day Sunday messing around with a WordPress install on my personal website. Yes I am paranoid so I keep this blog semi-annonimous and I also keep a regular website. It isn’t like someone could figure out who I am easily but in order to keep the powers that be (the people that pay me) from getting concerned about a blog I don’t mention last names, where I work, co-worker stories etc.
Since I do have a separate site to mess around with I tried to play with a stock WordPress install I got from my new hosting provider, Site5. I installed a bunch of cool plug-ins for the app. Unfortunately as of now, I have hit a major stumbling block that will prevent me from using WordPress to host my blog. The software does not support exporting blog entries in the out of the box configuration. You can get a plug in that will supposedly do this, but I have yet to get the plug into work properly. This is after editing the php file a bit. I got it to almost work, but I still get an error. For now I have given up.
If I get more time another day, maybe I will mess around with it some more, but I always feel if I can’t get something working pretty quick (for software such as this that means a few hours, but store bought stuff it is under an hour) I need to stop and move on.
Technorati Tags: blog, Site5, wordpress, wordpress plug-in
I am looking for a content management system to use at work. We want something that will be easy to allow end users manage and update content on. So the goal is to get something setup by technology that we can simply hand off and not worry about the management of the site. At first we thought a wiki was good enough to setup, but media wiki required too much learning curve to use. This project is a side research project right now, but it would be nice to figure something out and get it up sometime soon. I think I am going to play with a few CMS’s on my own website and see how the functionality looks.
Technorati Tags: CMS, content management system, mediawiki
I know I said I thought I was pre-determined to not like Vista in my original post about it, but there are plenty of annoying things that just scream out at me. Some stuff looks nice also, but all that I have found that I like are all UI things. No real substance.
My first major complaint is that the control panel is different. For example all the elements you could previously get via the display control panel are now separated. So you have to go looking for the control panel option for the screen saver, screen size, desktop, etc. It is annoying. I also looked for 15 minutes and could not find where the option to NOT let Vista log me out after an extended period of time is kept. In XP and older versions it was configured in the screen saver options.
The major thing that drives me crazy is how you have to install software. Since at work everything is on a network drive I have to say ok to launching something from the network, and then I have to say it is ok to install something, since Microsoft likes to ask me if I really want to do what I am telling the OS to do. That is nice in theory, but if you get too many dialog box’s you tend to just say yes to them and not read them. I thought they (MSFT) figured that out with 2003, but apparently they didn’t learn their lesson. In fact they decided to take it a step further. Jayson says this all the time, but by turning off all the options of a browser by default does not make it more secure. Users will just say yes to the warning box when they try to run something. They will also look less at each box the more of them they get.
Now on a good note, I was surprised how quick Office 2003 applications such as word and excel opened when launched. I didn’t get a chance to use the apps since I really don’t work on a windows box anymore, but I was happy with the snappy performance. Of course the performance better be that nice on a 64bit AMD 3000+ with 2gigs of RAM.
Technorati Tags: office 2003 on vista, vista security settings, vista rc1, vista ui, windows vista
My Macbook Pro has been causing me problems for almost a month now. It sounds much louder than it should during normal operation. Every once in a while (more often than not now a days) it will start getting much louder like an engine for a while. After a while it eventually goes back to normal, but as I said normal is still way too loud. Last week I got fed up with the sound (when my office is quiet all I hear is this dam laptop and it drives me crazy) and had it taken in to a Apple service center. I got it back in the middle of this week, and early on it was apparent that the replaced fan did not do much good. Yesterday when it started sounding really loud again I knew whatever they replaced didn’t fix the issue.
I called Apple support today and spend almost an hour on the phone. At first the level 1 support guy was giving me the normal song and dance about how they need to bring it to a depot and take a look at it. He couldn’t shed any light on what was going on. Something must have clicked because after a while he put me on hold and sent me to a specialist. I actually spoke to someone who knew what he was doing. Now it is hard to explain a noise problem. The system functions without any issues, but it is just abnormally loud. I can’t localize the sound. It seems random when it gets really loud, but it is constantly emitting a low hum that it should not. I know it shouldn’t because at work we have a few Macbooks and Macbook Pro‘s. My luck that my personal computer would be messed up. The guy I spoke to supposedly made some special notes on my ticket and I am now waiting for a box to arrive to send it in. They said something about the logic board, but they will run it for a while when they get it to see if the can reproduce the issue. I hope they can, but based off of how often it happens to me I don’t think there will be a problem with them reproducing it.
Now I have to go without my work computer for probably another week. It isn’t too bad since I have my personal Macbook I will bring to the office. The downside is that I normally leave my Macbook on at home when I am at work and run a bunch of different processes. I shouldn’t complain too much since I at least have a laptop to use. I know I get a bit spoiled with the gear I have access to at work. I just hope this unit comes back and works. More news when the unit comes back!
Technorati Tags: apple, mac, Macbook, Macbook Pro, macbook pro noise
The driving force to get me to try a new web hosting provider that I mentioned in my post “Spoke Too Soon” was to get an easy to use web album management system installed. Not simply using some client side image formatting system like I had been using. Granted my most recent photo layout tool, RapidWeaver was good. It was the latest in a long line of editing tools such as Frontpage, the generic export feature of iPhoto, some php photo album generator, picasa, and more. The ability to have a true photo management system powered by mySQL running on a server sounded great. I stumbled upon Gallery by accident the other day.
Once I looked it over a bit and found a hosting provider that would script the setup in a minute I setup a new hosting account. I was uploading photo’s in 5 minutes. Now I haven’t got everything exactly the way I would like it, but I am working on it.
Now I will continue to use RapidWeaver for my general website creation, but since most of my content is photo albums Gallery will come in handy.
More updates after I get more content into the system.
Technorati Tags: Gallery, iphoto, photo album, rapidweaver, Site5