scott

Why Don’t They Make This Stuff On The PC?

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So if you have been reading this site recently you will have noticed that I am on a “Mac is great” kick. I am becoming one of those people. Yup. There is a reason though. Some of this software that integrates on the Mac is fantastic. either there is nothing like it on the PC, or it is just easier (allot easier). For example I found a Bluetooth product called BluePhoneElite. It takes your bluetooth phone and uses your mac to do some crazy stuff. It flashes caller id on the mac screen when the phone rings, then when you answer it the software pauses any dvd’s or itunes you may have playing. Once you are done with your call it turns everything back on. How cool (and actually useful) is that? You can also dial numbers and send SMS mail from the program, see signal and battery strength, and more. It even changes your iChat status to away when you walk out of range with the phone and changes it back when you return. Why can’t I fund useful software like that for the PC that actually works? Another reason why I use my powerbook more and more each day.

I also just got Merlin. It is a MS Project like program for the Mac. It is half the price, and writes to Project files or Project XML files. I did a test and it imported and exported a 200 line project file I did in no time. The integration into the mac iCal and Address book was also very useful. I use project on my PC, but this just seemed to work better. Maybe I am just caught up in the whole coolness factor, but I felt this product was just simpler and more powerful to use than MS Project. Another program that I don’t need windows for!

Jayson and I are spending more of our spare time recently finding replacements to our old standard Windows programs. He is happy working on his thinkpad with a dual boot of Suse 9.3 and Windows XP. He almost never uses XP anymore. He is using more open source software than I. He has to since he is using Suse, and I am on my Mac. I am going to dual boot my thinkpad when I get back from my trip.

Clean Up

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I got a bunch of misc. items done today and yesterday in anticipation of my week in Vegas next week. I will be out at the Cisco Networkers conference. Unfortunately they hold it in Las Vegas:) So I will have to suffer.

I sat with Bob yesterday and discussed the project plan for our major new site redesign. It sounds super interesting. It will be just stressful for me and my team. I keep telling myself I will be bored if we were not as busy as we are. It is still hard having a queue of stuff to get to, and some of it won’t get worked on for months.

Kai and I are both out next week. he is on vacation and totally unavailable. I will be reachable, so that is good, but the team will be short handed by 2 next week.

James was off today so I ended up doing some grunt phone configuratin work. That meant besides working on the Definity I had to go under desks doing some wireing. Not fun, but I got everything that needed to be done taken care of. I have to repeat what I have said before, working on the Call Manager is so much easier and straight forward than working on the Avaya Definity or any other Avaya switch I have worked on.

Mac or Thinkpad?

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Mac or Thinkpad T-43? What do I take with me for a week away? For personal trips I would take the Mac hands down. Now I am going away for work next week. On one hand I get the Thinkpad from work, and I like it. On the other hand I have been working off the Powerbook as my primary machine since I got it. I use it as my main email, web, chat, and document editing platform. That is allot of my day, but not all of it. I still use my Thinkpad or desktop PC for terminal sessions (not a huge fan of the mac RDP client, and the MMC plug in for remote desktop still rocks), and VMWare. That is allot of my day also.

So what to do? The Thinkpad has IP Communicator on it, so I can VPN into work and then use my phone extension. My powerbook has Skype, and the Xten VOIP client for Broadvoice if I choose to setup my account for it. I can use bluetooth headsets with both machines, but the mac works better hands down. The Thinkpad has a bigger screen, and since it is work property I am less concerned about beating it up (but I know I still care so that is not such a big issue). Of course the bigger screen is also harder to see since its resolution is so small. Bad for me and my glasses:(

Thinkpad had good battery life and I have 2 batteries. Shall I go on? I am thinking if the Powerbook works fine with the new Cisco VPN client I will just take it. I have grown accustom to using it. Even though somewhere in the back of my head part of me says take the Thinkpad.

Why do I care what I take? Why should you? For me it is what will I use as my lifeline to the office while I am away for a week. Hopefully wont need it, but if I do it is a big deal. Why should others care? I don’t know. I felt like writing about what I was thinking. Also it kind of boils down to the age old question, Mac or Windows? For me the answer is both if you can, but if you have to choose I think I will edge over to the Mac side!!!

Dual Headed Monitor

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Chris demoed me a dual monitor setup a few weeks ago when I was visiting. I know dual monitors is nothing new for most tech people, myself included. I remember when my cousin Wayne showed me it once a several years ago with 2 15″ flat panels. This was back when 1 flat screen was a big deal, but 2 was just decadent.

I had played around with the dual monitor concept just once over a year ago. I setup 2 flat panels (15″ Samsung’s) side by side. It was cool, but took up desk space. my thoughts at the time was why not just have 2 computers setup? And that is exactly what I did. I had 2 monitors with 2 computer setups. one with a KVM and up to 4 computers and another one for my laptop. Yes I know I was geeking out. But this was for work, so that makes it ok.

Recently as a few weeks ago Jayson had tried the dual monitor thing, but gave it up because of desk space issues.

When seeing Chris’s setup I realized the advantage of actually using two displays. One for general work stuff, and the other for terminal sessions (in full screen) or leaving our monitoring tools up on screen all day. I found a video card I could use (already with dual monitor support built in so I had no need to find a PCI card to go along with my AGP one) and put it in my desktop box. Besides having the dual head setup looking really cool with the matrix screen saver running on both monitors, it was also practical since I left our monitoring “threat board” up on a screen all day. I did loose some desk space, but I got rid of the monitor stand I had so I think it evens things out. Not sure if I will keep this setup, but for now it is working out for me!

Site Move

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I have completed my move of my website & photo site to my new hosting provider. I have also migrated my email over. Now all I have to do is call RCN and tell them to turn off my static ip. Couldn’t come too soon I say! I had DNS problems on my cable modem today. Not sure what was up with RCN’s DNS, but when I switched over to other servers I was up and running just fine.

All is well with the new provider so far. I have had some quirkiness with my IMAP mail, but besides that I am happy with my service.

Still Recovering

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I thought I had recovered from my reverse (nights awake, days sleeping) schedule of last week. That was until I had to stay up late again monday night. My body clock is all screwed up. I can’t goto sleep, but then I can’t get up in the morning. Just cant win this week. For that reason and because I have had a crazy week at work I haven’t written much. I am just tired. I need to get ready for my trip to Vegas next week. I haven’t even seen if I have my luggage or if I lent it to my parents. I realized this weekend that my flight is early on Fathers Day. that means I don’t get to see dad. Of course that also means he doesn’t need to pay for me when he takes everyone out to dinner that night!

Bye Bye Treo, Maybe?

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I got fed up with my Treo 650 this weekend, and it may be time for it to hit ebay. I am not sure if my problem is T-Mobile or the Treo but I had problems with people not hearing me yesterday. I heard them but they could not hear me. A phone reboot solved that problem. Today I rebooted the phone for some reason (at 7PM) and I got notification that I had 6 messages from that morning. All of the messages were import work related issues that needed to be addressed quickly. Well needless to say they weren’t.

I have had issues off and on for a while. Rebooting the phone solves lots of issues, but should I have to do that? Jayson thinks I should wipe all the extra software I have (i have allot) and see if the phone works fine then. He is right, and the phone probably will work but the whole point of a palm phone is the ability to use the “SMART” features. If my distinctive ring or other apps wont work, why would I want a big phone like that?

The problem is what to do? I have a Blackberry that I need to carry for work, so I get my realtime email. I have been using my SE T610 off and on for a week. I broke down and started using it tonight full time until I can find a permanent replacement to the Treo, or until I calm down and start using it again. I already ordered a Motorola V3 Razr off of ebay. I have been eyeing it for a while and I figured now was the time to get one. I will continue to use the Treo as a palm for now. When I finally decide to dump it I will need to find a new PDA. The Razr should be able to connect to most new PDA’s via Bluetooth so I hope to keep some of my wireless internet features. I will find out when it arrives later this week.

Little Italy

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Meet up with Cari, her sister, Jayson, Gretchen, and Jay’s mom for dinner in Little Italy tonight. We went to a place we goto allot. It was good, but I can’t remember or spell the places name right. Afterward we went shopping for junk inexpensive sunglasses and accessories for Cari’s niece. It was hot and steamy from the rain, but we had a good time.

I just got home about an hour ago. I am still not tired. Even after a relitivly strong drink at Cari’s. I know I need to lie down now in order to be normal for Monday, but I am still not tired. I will try in a little while…

Yet Another New Hosting Provider

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I admit that sometimes I cannot make up my mind. Last month I got a static IP address for my cable modem at home. I figured I would host my own mail/ftp/web server like I did in years past. It was a great idea. I know more than I did back then and even then I hosted stuff. My problem is I don’t have time to deal with building and tweaking a server at home. I have tried. The machine I got to use as a server has been sitting idle wasting electricity.

Over the past week or so I have been doing research on web hosting providers again. I see all these really cheap providers but none of them have all the features that I want. That is what lead me to want to self host anyway. For whatever reason I got sidetracked on the Typepad site before I logged in one day and saw the Moveabletype hosting providers list. I checked them out to see how much it would cost for a web provider that would give me Moveabletype blog also. Turns out some of them were nice and full featured web providers. They weren’t cheap compared to a godaddy.com or hostmysite.com, but they offered me options that I wanted. IMAP mail is key for me. Also the ability to host multiple domains or sub domains without paying a ton more. Also a decent amount of storage space was needed. I ended up choosing Media Temple. For like $10/month I got 2 gigs of storage, IMAP mail, and extra domains. $6/month more gets me Moveabletype. I still have months left on my Typepad subscription but I want to try out the hosted Moveabletype. If I don’t like it I can always stick with Typepad and still use Media Temple as a hosting provider.

I am not going to say anything good or bad about the new provider for a while. I have found several providers that seemed awesome until I found the one feature that they said they had and didn’t (godaddy and IMAP) or some other issue that caused me to cancel within my 30 day free period. This is after I do my research. This provider seems to have all that I need. As I write this entry my site is uploading onto the new server. I need to read up a bit more on Moveabletype to see how I can customize it. I like the way my Typepad blog looks now, so I want to try and emulate it as much as possible.

Data Center Move Completed

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Jayson and I finished up our data center move this morning. We have allot of free space that Bob will use up right away. It is also as neat as we are going to get it. We had some interesting moments configuring up the network. We were putting in Gigabit uplinks between all the switches and ran into some problems. The ports were configured weird by Keith. Jayson didn’t understand half the crap that was setup, and neither did i. We cleaned it up and we were good to go.

We also had a problem with one of our servers Promise IDE disk array. this is like the 3rd time we have had trouble with this array, and the incalculable time we have had trouble with these IDE arrays. We spent hours trying to make it work, but it does not seem to have worked. Danny and our DBA staff was working on some alternatives I suggested today while Jay and I got some sleep.

As it stands now that server is still causing problems. Contingency plans are already in the works to replace it:(