scott

To Do, Up To Date

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Today was relatively restful. I bummed around in the morning, then did work in the afternoon. I also took a break and went to the bank and Best Buy. I even got stopped at Best Buy and asked if I wanted to take part in a survey. I said no when I saw the video camera’s. It didn’t matter that they offered me a $10 gift card. I got my DVD’s and left.

I also went through my to do list. I had allot of open issues I needed to work on for the office. I am mostly caught up. I wrote a bunch of emails to people, did 1 presentation, generated a report, and other “business” like tasks that I now do in my job! I look fondly back and think work used to be tinkering with some piece of software or hardware all day! Who am I kidding that would be nice too, but I still love my job. Even with all the stress. And it feels like more stress ever day.

I also have a bad feeling I am coming down with a cold. My throat hurts really bad. That is the tell tail sigh for me that I cold is on its way. I am not so happy about that.

More Data Cleanup

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I moved all my files off of one of my firewire drives this week. This was so I can format it to work on my Mini. Dam NTFS not working on the mac. It took 36 hours to robocopy the data off of the firewire drive onto another USB drive. Even-though it was a USB 2.0 drive, I think it was running at 1.1 speeds. 36 hours was an awfully long time to copy 90 gigs of stuff. Even if it was mostly small files.

I am in the process of backing up old backup files to DVD’s. I am also just deleting tons of old crap that I don’t need anymore.

Dinner

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Stayed at work late and then went out with Jayson and his in-laws to a nice restaurant in Little Italy. It was a nice night. We even hit the good desert place after dinner. Cari was going to come with us, but she got a bad head ache and took off from work.

Other than that I had an interesting day at work, but the contents of the day can’t be posted here. I have updated my Work blog (password only) with details.

New Used Blackberry

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About 2 weeks ago I got a new Blackberry 7520. Well it is new to me. Someone else at work had it, and never used it. They finally gave it up saying give it to someone who will use it. My group was having a new guy start so we were going to give him the Blackberry. Instead of giving him a new one, I decided to “upgrade” mine and give the older hardware to the new guy. Hey he is the new guy.

Well the musical Blackberry’s don’t end there. Someone else’s Blackberry broke this week. Instead of waiting for the replacement we configured my old one up for her to use, and we can wait for the refurbed unit for the new guy.

The new Blackberry is very similar to the old one. The major enhancements are the screen, and screen brightness of the backlight. It is a night and day improvement. Also the new unit has bluetooth so I can use my wireless headset on it, if I wanted to.

I also went out and bought Pocket Mac for the Blackberry. Now I can sync the Blackberry address book with my Mac!

New Guy

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We had a new guy start at work today. Allot of my day was getting him settled in, and other meetings I had planned. Not too much else to report for today. I need to keep my thoughts together so I can actually write about interesting stuff on this thing!

New Years, Well Sort Of

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Yesterday was the start of the Jewish new years. I was planning on going to my parents for it. That was until I woke up with a headache. I normally don’t wake up with a migraine. When I wake up with a headache one of two things will happen. I take a shower and have breakfast and I am fine, or I deteriorate quickly as the day progressed. Monday was a slow deterioration of how I felt. I took some alive near lunch time. it didn’t work. I then took some Zomig. That worked a little but I still didn’t feel myself. I called my parents and told them I was not coming out to them. As much as I feel bad that I missed seeing everyone, I am glad I didn’t make the trip. It wasn’t worth the 45 minute trip to my sisters, for the 30 minute drive to my parents and then the late night repeat of the trip to get home.

One of my greatest fears is being somewhere away from home or another “safe place” and I have a migraine. A bad one where I need to lie down or else I will collapse, but I can’t since I am not near anywhere I can do that! It has happened before, and there here have been several close calls in my life. It is not something I ever wish to live through again. And the fear of it happening gets me err on the side of caution allot. I didn’t goto a baseball game in Baltimore last year because of the exact same reason. Call me chicken, but I won’t play the odds on a 5 hour (or 1 hour for that matter) drive and possibly getting sick along the way.

One Of Those AIM People

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Are you one of those people who leave themselves logged into AIM (if you don’t know what AIM is just stop reading this now)? I used barely use AIM. I have a cycle. Sometimes I won’t turn it on for days, and I get people asking me if I am logged in every. Then there is the other side where you log in once (lets say at work) and never log off. I have lots of friends who do both. I am sort of in the middle. I use iChat (that is how I get onto AIM) on my Powerbook. When I turn on the powerbook I launch AIM. Never auto-start it but almost always I start the program when I start doing anything. I then leave it logged in as long as my computer is on. That means that friday night I turn on my computer at home and usually leave it on all weekend. However that does not mean I am sitting there waiting to take anyone’s IM’s at any moment. So if it says I am idle for 16 hours, or if it says I am unavailable or away I am most likely maybe away or unavailable. Why then do people feel like they have to IM anyway?

Backup’s

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I am well above average when it comes to backing my files up on the computer. Of course there is always something you forget to backup. I have been burned more than once by loosing important information. Last month I started using rsycn a bit to backup my files. I am trying to get a bit more advanced in how I use the tool.

I also decided instead of backing up my data to a firewire drive attached to my Powerbook that I would backup the data to another firewire drive connected to my desktop. In order to do that I am moving files around on my desktop to allow me to use the firewire drive as a backup only drive.

ISO’s and virtual machines sure do take up allot of space.

Week Recap

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Meetings took up a large part of the first half of the week. They are necessary but I never like them. I guess I like doing rather than discussing, but discussing (aka planning) is critical before you can do! So I am stuck:(

On thursday a few of us moved a bunch of gear into a new rack in the office. That was interesting. I almost messed my arm up by climbing down from a rack. I was on top trying to clean up some cables and didn’t realize how far the chair actually was. I am getting to old for stuff like that, or better put there are younger people around who could do it instead of me. Thankfully I am ok, and we got all the work done. It wasn’t needed to be an overnight affair so I was happy.

Socially nothing went on thursday. I didn’t get home till after 11. After work was done we went to dinner at this nice diner near the office and then I hopped the train home. It is never fun coming home, changing and going right to bed.

Friday I spent time working on some virtual machines. I needed to get rid of some old test box’s that we had lying around, but we still needed the apps running on them. When I say old I mean like 5 year old desktops hiding under tables in our computer room. I migrated the app’s into a virtual machine running on our GSX server. I feel much better now that things are tidy!

Busy Days

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The past two days have been busy with meetings and very little tech work, or anything interesting enough to run and write about. I have been feeling like I am not getting anything done, but in fact I am being productive. When I feel like I am not getting allot done I realize I am doing office work, and not tech work! not bad, but just different.

I am trying to save money the remaining week of this month. For that reason I passed up going out with John and Jay to dinner last night, but then ended up going out tonight with other friends! I intend to safe the rest of the week! Really!

I was just finishing up going through my TO DO list and email backlog. I think now (at 10 to midnight) I finally am done. I am off to bed!