scott

Data Center Work

by

Yesterday I got the call (email actually) that my companies new cage in our Data Center was ready for use. Jayson and I quickly got a Uhal van to move all the new gear from our office up to the new cage so we can stage everything. I ended up doing most of the lifting since Jayson had to stay with the truck. He couldn’t find parking. After dropping everything off at the cage we took the truck back.

Today we (along with Jon) will break out the gear and mount the shelves and rack kits. This will set us up for the server move later next week.

I am not used to being up this early on a weekend. Hopefully I am fully awake for the work:)

Incremental Update

by

I admit I have done it again. Last week I quietly went to the Apple store and got a new Powerbook. It has been over a year since I bought my previous one. I was going to try and not upgrade but the price was right and I was so tempted. I went from a 1ghz 12″, to a 1.5ghz 12″. Several other improvements in the Powerbook lead me to the upgrade. The old one is already sold and off to its new owner. One of the guys in my group upstate bought it. So Chris gets a near perfect condition “pre-owned” mac, and I get a new one for virtually nothing!

So far I love the new machine. I am slowly moving everything over to it and using it as my primary machine! As the title says, this is not some major upgrade, but it is a really nice incremental upgrade to an already fantastic piece of hardware!

Too Much To Talk About

by

I could go into so many things that went on this week. Had a great holiday weekend. Ended up hanging out with a bunch of friends Monday night in Little Italy.

Hung out with my friend John on Tuesday. He is finally working in Manhattan so Jay, Danny and I meet up with him for a few drinks. John, Jay & I ended up back at Dan’s for a pickup game of Texas Hold-em poker. At one point we had like 7 people playing. Not bad for 30 minutes notice on the game. I had a head ache all day Tuesday, but after dinner I felt well enough to go play. I am happy I did. I doubled my money!

Being out late every nigh has taken its tole on me. I am tired. I have been going to bed at 1AM every night for days. I need to get a good night sleep. Hopefully I will be in bed by 11PM tonight.

Today I got up early for a trip upstate for a BBQ. It was fun.

Tons more to write about, but I am going to bed!

Weekly Roundup

by

Took a little doing to get back into the routine this week. The week has since flown by. Wednesday was busy preparing for the inevitable colo cage move coming up. Hopefully our provider will be ready with the new cage tomorrow so we can stage things this weekend.

Today was a BBQ in our call center to celebrate the opening of the first floor of the office.

Tomorrow is dealing with the COLO and meeting about our bug tracking system, Bugzilla. Much more going on, but I am tired and will write more this weekend…

Dinner With The Folks And Morgan

by

My parents came into the city (pigs must be flying) to have dinner with me. They have Morgan for the week while my sister is on vacation. Her and Mike needed to get some alone time. My parents are both tired from dealing with a 2 year old, but I think they are loving having her the week. Besides being cranky from napping too late, “the girl” as she refers to herself was doing great. That kid always cracks me up. We ordered in because a certain little girl would probably not make people happy at a restaurant if we went out. Sometimes you just don’t take little kids to public places.

I had a good time, but too short a night. My dad was happy that the trip into manhattan wasn’t that long. I told him no traffic does that for you! I got points for my place being cleaner than my sisters. of course I don’t have a 2 year old. But on the other hand I don’t have a nanny that cleans up after said 2 year old, so I think I come out ahead if we were keeping score! My mom was surprised that my place was neater. My dad wasn’t. I was just glad they didn’t come over on friday, since I usually clean on Saturday’s.

Everything is now cleaned up after everyone left. For a 2 year old, Morgan can make a mess. I am off to bed soon, hopefully. I need to get back onto a work sleep schedule.

I Do Listen To People, Just Not Right Away

by

One thing Gus suggested to me over a year ago was to read the book Getting Things Done. It is a personal productivity book. I am not one of those people into personal enhancement by reading, or going to a seminar, etc. The thought of improving my organization and allowing me to get stuff done at work quicker was appealing. So after much delay, I bought the audio book version of Getting Things Done. I am listening to it on my iPod.

It is too early to tell if I will get anything out of this book. My hopes are high that I can improve my personal organization. I always pride myself on being organized, but I am also always open for improvements. I am only 1/3 through the book. I already redesigned how I keep my email inbox, and have about 20 new items of “stuff” that I wrote down that need attention. More as it progresses…

Quicken Conversion Again

by

Over the past 2 years it seems like I keep ying/yanging on where I use quicken. I use the program for my personal finances (what little I have). I have used online checkbooks since like 1994. I love quicken. The problem is if I want to use Quicken on my Mac I need to export each account to a .qif file and import it into Quicken for the Mac. It is a pain in the ass. If you have certain kinds of split items or stock sales it messes up the transactions. Of course I have both, so it took me like 4 hours to clean up and move everything. I was amazed (again, I did this twice before) that I could get it to work at all.

My error last time I converted everything was that I didn’t keep both my mac and windows versions of the file up to date. This time I think I will do a monthly update of my windows version. For some reason I always need to go back to the windows version for some reason. For now I am happily running everything off of my Quicken 2005 for the Mac!

The Friday Before a Holiday

by

Twas the friday before a holiday and it seemed like no one wanted to work. A holiday weekend is upon us. The office was kind of dead. I got a bunch of work done. We have at least 3 people starting on Tuesday, and another 2 later in the week. James is keeping busy getting the computers ready. He was out the door right after I said he could go home early. Danny on the other hand seemed to not get the concept of getting out early for a holiday. I thought he felt he was going to miss something if he left.

All in all a good week at work. Busy, but good. I need to tackle some hardware design stuff next week. I didn’t want to think about it after the meeting I had on it Thursday. Just too much to digest. Next week will be interesting…

Early Friday

by

Got off work early today (due to the holiday!). Jayson and I went down to the Apple store (see later post for details), then headed back to my place. Jay is/was selling his Treo 600 that I sold to him a few months back. He liked it but thought it was too big. he sold it on Craigslist in like 15 minutes. No fees or anything. I was impressed. We ran back to my place to grab the original box and manual for it. I always try to keep that stuff. The guy buying it picked it up today. It was no fuss, no muss.

I hung out at Jays place for a while and played with Pierre. he is suck a funny dog. We hit dinner at Burger Heaven and then I went home to relax. I ended up working on Quicken (see next post) for most of the night.

MailHop Forward

by

Now that I am once again messing with my own mail server I need some sort of backup in case my server at home goes down. I used to use DynDNS’s MailHop Backup MX service. It was great. If I lost my server, they would act as my backup mail server and redirect my mail to me when my box came back online.

DynDNS now has a service that will allow me to create alias’ and direct mail from my domain to any mailbox. So my mail mail domain can redirect to any other domain and mailbox I want, or to my gmail account, etc. This is great if I have/want to change my mail setup quickly, or direct mail to different systems. The concept is probably overkill for what I need, but I wanted to give it a try. I needed some sort of mail backup anyway so it was worth the price I paid.

I have been a happy user of DynDNS’s Custom DNS service for almost 2 years. I am a huge fan, they have a good solid track record for me!