Friday was relatively light day at work. Got allot done since not many people were around. I met my friend Kristen for drinks at this swanky bar near the office. As she pointed out for a swanky bar, they had ikea furniture, and plasma TV’s. I love some places priorities. After a few rounds we hit Angelo & Maxi’s. It was an unplanned visit to one of my favorite steak places. The food was great as always. After dinner we ended up at some dive bar in the village. Kristen liked it because it had a Pac Man machine. I couldn’t recreate my steps finding this place if I tried. I had a good night and then cabbed it home. I don’t even want to attempt a subway ride from the west village home on a friday. It will take too long.
scott
The Picnic
Well I was going to write all about the company picnic that I was going to on last Sunday. It rained, so we had no picnic. So nothing to talk about. It was rainy and everyone from work that I would hang out with (now that we all had no plans) were either sick or lazy and didn’t want to do anything.
I was with them on the being lazy part, so I did almost nothing productive on Sunday. I played with Sync on my Mac and robocopy for Windows. My goal is to automate backing up of my most important stuff. I have both scripts working. Robocopy can be (and will be) made into a scheduled task to run weekly on my XP box. Rsync needs a bit more work to make it a cron job that runs on a schedule. I may not even do that since my laptop is not regularly plugged into the firewire drive I will use as backup. I may just run the script manually when I want to backup stuff.
The picnic will most likely be rescheduled for the weekend I am away for a wedding. Not a huge loss for me. I always have mixed feelings about all day recreational get togethers from work. The parties usually rock, but the picnic can get a little long. Of course the wedding may end up making me feel the same way:)
What Would You Do?
The events going on this week have me noticeably disturbed, but more importantly it has gotten me thinking. I wonder what I would do in similar situations? Would you set out to help people in your boat? Would you do it only if they paid you? It is reported to be happening. Would you loot for bottled water and food? In certain circumstances I can see that being necessary. Would you loot for a better pair of shoes if you were having trouble walking? If you said yes to that last one, then why wouldn’t you loot for shoes for 20 of your friends and family? While you are at it, would you loot for jewelry? How about a new TV or computer? I mean you can just take it and plug it in at home and watch cable? Oh wait, you don’t have power. And there is the problem that you have no house left, but you stole a TV. Good for you.
Would you goto a children’s hospital and shoot at the doctors there for no apparent reason? I guess you can answer yes to that one, if the hospital was conducting hideous medical experiments on the children. If they aren’t can anyone explain why in the world someone would shoot at a hospital?
How about shooting at the rescue helicopters. Would you shoot at them if they were going around saving people and weren’t armed? I mean doesn’t it sound like a good idea to take out your rifle and take pot shots at them? Or maybe it is a better idea to flip over an ambulance that was trying to evacuate patients from a hospital?
Or would you be the guy to lend out your generator to a friend if your house had power and they didn’t? Sounds like a good idea. How about letting friends and family use your house (that has power and water) to come over and shower, eat and sit in AC since they have nothing? That sounds humane too.
The really messed up thing is all the things I have mentioned here (good and bad) actually are happening right now. The good deeds are things friends of mine have done or are having done to them by other friends down in Louisiana right now. The other stuff is things that people (no, people wouldn’t do that, animals would do that crazy stuff) have done or are doing right now. This is a tragedy on a monumental scale. Why would something passing for a person take this opportunity to steel TV’s, or shoot at friggen rescue helicopters? I have been thinking about this for 2 days, and I cannot come up with an answer. I am just at a loss. At first I wasn’t going to write about it, but instead of thinking of this tragedy I am thinking how these people think stealing jewelry will make it all better? I am glad I don’t live down there anymore. Not because of the natural disaster (where I lived is actually relatively intact) but I don’t want to be associated in any way with the people on the news now doing these crazy deeds.
Why can’t everyone be helping everyone else get out of the city? Instead of shooting at police and steeling? Am I wishing for a utopia?
Disaster Supplies
All the natural disasters going on have gotten me thinking that I need to stock up on emergency supplies. Frozen pizza and soda will not get me through a disaster. I need to get bottled water, and batteries for my mag light to start.
On that note I need to order more fresh direct. I am running out of food. I have to see when I will be around for a delivery.
My mom’s CD ripping task is almost halfway done. I had a long talk about her taste in music but she didn’t seem to budge:) My Dad is sick with a cold this week. My mom called to say she is sick now. I told her I will be very upset if I got sick from being with her yesterday. Lets hope I avoided it.
I blinked and it is 10:30 already. I need to wind this down, so I can (once again) try to get a good night sleep. I haven’t been sleeping well all week.
Roller Coaster Day
When I didn’t think the day could get any crazier it did. I was very busy all day putting out fires at work (figuratively not really). Just as I recovered from a week delay on our AD project, I get major complications from our IPCC deployment. Dan and I had a opinionated discussion with our integrators. We also are very close to purchasing our first SAN. We are pretty sure we got the price to a number we are happy with.
Finalized plans to make changes to our voice circuits to allow for more resiliency if we have a failure. Stupid issues arose regarding mislabeling of circuits. The little details that we are not following up on are killing me, but when asked to get tons done in a certain amount of time, you have to give somewhere. I just don’t like doing it.
I have other issues going on with VPN tunnels to partners of ours. It has been very stressful. I thrive on stress, but sometimes it is allot. Hopefully tomorrow will be calmer.
AD Day
Worked on clearing out my backlog of open tasks to work on. I got through allot of my small misc. tasks in my list. That was good. I also got started on the first 3 new servers for our Active Directory project. We had to start over due to some complications. after some research we figured out we probably didn’t have to start over, but we wanted to play it save so we just swapped the drives from those machines with new ones Jayson had built. Working through some other issues with the setup, but we built a test environment to hopefully prevent issues like the ones we just had.
Busy day, but productive.
Technorati Tags: Active Directory, Windows Server, Windows 2003
The Birthday Gift
For my mom’s 60th birthday I got her an iPod. I was going to get her a mini, but with all her current music on CD’s and the music I was going to rip from my collection (still fair use I believe since I own the CD’s) she would have more than what will fit on a mini. the final straw was when I was at the Apple store and saw how small the screen on the mini was. My mom wouldn’t be able to read that thing. So I got her a nice color 20 gig iPod. Plenty of room, and easy to read for her. that was last month. The thing has been sitting locked in my desk at work. Why you may ask? I need her CD’s to make this gift worth while. I finally saw her and she remembered to bring her CD’s with her.
That is a story unto itself. My grandmother is in town so I went to dinner with her, my mom, sister and niece. They are all “interesting” to sit with at dinner. I survived so that is all I need to say. Since I got to see my mom she brought the CD’s.
I am now home beginning the task of ripping all the disks using my trusted iTunes. I setup her an account on my mini and am putting all her music on that machine. My goal is to then sync the new iPod on that account for her. I am seriously planning on giving my parents the mini to use as their computer instead of the dell they have. That is yet another story unto itself that I will go into detail (i hope) later. I figured that was the perfect place to stage all her music. She will never use the computer for listening to it, but I need to store it someplace.
The problem I am running into is that some of her CD’s are not in good shape and have scratches on them. So far 2 disks are not able to import because of this issue. I am going through the stack to see if more will have problems.
The other issue is that some of her taste in music is painful for me to import. Some songs should just not be digitized onto the computer! The joy about importing using iTunes (much different than in the old days when I ripped stuff using music match) is that you can program iTunes to begin importing music at CD insert, and then tell it to eject and make a tone when it is done. All I have to do is every few minutes I have to feed it a new disk. Apple was very smart with that program!
So a ripping I will go. More later…
Technology Certifications
I loved this post on slashdot. The poster asks why IT certifications are good. Some very interesting points of view. I am in the industry, and I have no certifications. I am not saying that is good or bad. I have just seen tons of people with no experience and a certification (or little experience) think they know everything. As I said when I did contracting, some MCSE’s wouldn’t know a domain controller if it fell on their head. And other guys I know with no certification but years of experience would be (and often are) the first people I call for help.
I guess what I read from this is a certification is nice, but nothing beats experience. Having both is really great also.
Poker Or Not
I missed a poker game last night due to my sleeping. I know it is kind of sad. What I am I going to do if I have a bad head ache? Jayson said he won big. That makes me think the people he played with were not that good, but he said they were decent. When we play with people from work, he usually doesn’t do that well.
I hope to play next time. Now I have to tell John why I didn’t show up. I tried to leave him a message, but I don’t think he got it. Cannot really help falling asleep due to exhaustion and a migraine, sorry. They did have 7 players so I don’t feel so bad.
Slept The Day Away
I didn’t sleep very well. I finally went to bed around 2AM. I was tired but sleep never came. I finally took a Tylenol PM around 4 or 5AM. I then slept a bit till 1PM. I finally am up showered, and dressed now. I just dropped 3 loads of laundry in the machines. Man I always used to tell myself having laundry done was almost as much as doing it yourself, but I was just saying that to make myself feel better for shelling out a ton of money to have it done. I was wrong, it does almost pay to have it done. 3 loads of laundry will cost me like $12 (not counting my detergent or time). When I have it done I never pay more than $20 (you pay per pound). for $8 difference, I will have it done for me.
Not sure what the rest of the day has in store for me. Laundry will take like 2 hours. Then maybe off to the bank to deposit some expense checks, then maybe Best Buy. After all it is right near the bank. Hmm, decisions, decisions…