scott

More Softphones That Are Cool!

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I got the chance to play with Cisco’s new IP Communicator software. Well it is not that new anymore, but it was new to me. I had used their older IP Softphone software. This is just a new version of their phone-less phone. IP Communicator lets you use your computer as the telephone. The concept is fantastic, and IP Communicator actually works as advertised.

The software emulates the look of a Cisco 7970 IP Phone. You can do 4 way conference calls (we cannot do that on the 7940’s we have). Answering and placing calls is as easy as having a hard phone. Searching the Corporate directory is faster now that you have a real keyboard to search. The call quality was great.

I need to try the software out from a cable modem this weekend. I have it on my Thinkpad to give it a whirl.

Softphone did allot of what I just discussed, but it was a pain to setup and configure. Communicator was simple to do. The only draw backs will be fixed when we move to CCM 3.3.4 or later. The main issue being extension mobility not working.

Travel Essentials

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As I said the other day, I don’t travel anywhere near as much as I used to. Just because I don’t go out of the office that much doesn’t mean that when I do I want to be any less connected. I did a quick overnight trip Monday-Tuesday. I (bored on the train) now write about what I relied on during the trek.

While in transit nothing says keeping in contact with the world like a Blackberry. When you can’t or don’t want to bring out a laptop it is essential. I hate it for everything else, including the stupid direct connect. I find that if I want to hold a conversation I might as well call the person than have a 20 minute conversation on DC. For email nothing beats the Blackberry, yet.

My powerbook was the laptop of choice this trip. My thinkpad is acting funky, and I don’t want to wipe it since I am getting a new one next week. So the powerbook stepped in and performed flawlessly (so far). I used it to watch some tv shows I recorded last week. Checked mail, did work, blogged, etc. All over Wifi!

Without the iPod I would not be sane. It makes train trips, and quiet hotel rooms that much more tolerable. It also is a great portable hard drive to store said TV shows that I watched on my powerbook. I say YES to plug and play!

My Treo is great (always carry it), but this trip it was used as it normally is. Still great, and a must for travel. What I used instead was Extension Mobility on Cisco Call Manager. It is the ability to log into any CCM phone and your extension moves with you. That coupled with the Cisco WIFI cordless phone make working in a different office just like I was in NYC, even when I was running around between 2 floors.

My new Omega X-33 watch was also a must this trip. I use my watch as an alarm wherever I go. I took my timex (broken band and all) along just in case the Omega didn’t do its job. It worked fine. I almost fell out of bed with the loudness of the alarm this morning. First impressions is this watch and I hopefully will have a long friendship!

Lastly I loved my Broadvoice VOIP phone, & Skype. I didn’t use broadvoice this trip, but I used its voice mail. I got all my VM emailed to me so I stayed in touch with everyone. I would never have checked my NYC VM without it. Skype is great since I can use it on my powerbook with my Sony Ericsson HBH-65 bluetooth headset from anywhere I have an internet connection. For this trip it was free calls from the hotel. I didn’t even need my cell phone for it. If I had broadvoice soft-phone I wouldn’t even need skype.

I have talked (praised) most of these items before, but when you use them all together you have a very smooth travel experience. I will most likely be using most if not all of this gear on my next extended trip. Now if only Amtrak could accommodate a nice ON TIME trip and travel would be painless.

The train is approaching Penn now. About an hour and 15 minutes late. So I will wrap this up so I can put the powerbook away. More mobile reviews when I use the stuff and have time to write about them! This post was written on Tuesday afternoon 5-17-05…

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All Consuming Project

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The move downstairs is taking up allot more of my time than I would have liked. I am on my way home now. Kai and Co. will make sure the cubes are finished and the cable work is done right.

Now that the contracts are back, our data center wants to schedule the move of our gear to our new cage. I need to call them tomorrow. Hopefully we can do everything and have ourselves up in the new cage by mid June. Then all we have to worry about is IPCC.

On other notes I am working on getting a DC into VMware, still. I got side tracked since I had to goto Kingston. I will demote one of our DC’s tomorrow and bring it online as a virtual machine.

Still waiting to run the active directory upgrade at our data center. this will enable us to have 2003 domain controllers. This will be helpful for Biztalk 2004.

Cube Work

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The furniture guys are doing there thing today and tomorrow. I feel like the 3rd wheel, but it does look good that we are keeping tabs on what is going on. Don’t you love obligations? I did get some work done today, but since it is cramped in the IS office up here I was unable to get on a windows box and do some of the work I wanted to do. I have my powerbook only on this trip. I didn’t want to mess with my thinkpad until I get a new one, so I am on my mac only this trip. I have done it before on day trips. I can do most of what I need on it, but not everything.

Tomorrow I hope they finish moving the cubes downstairs. they haven’t started yet. They (furniture guys) setup the offices first today. The cubes are tomorrow.

More later…

Tuesday Night Out?

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My friend John is taking a job in the city. This is a big change from working way out on Long Island. To mark the change of venue for him we are going out tonight. Not sure why tonight over any other night since he hasn’t started the job yet, but who am I to argue. As far as I know John, Dave, and Jayson are in. Not sure who else will be joining us.

As I write this, my own attendance is questionable, but looking better as the minutes pass. I took the early train back to the city and it was an hour late. Now it is running slow, so I have no idea what time we will get into Penn. They say 5:30PM, but I have no idea. If we make that time table I have enough time to goto the office and drop off my luggage and then head out to wherever we are going. Jayson claims that John will “go out” in manhattan more now that he works here. The jury is still out on that also, but we shall see. I don’t know if my wallet can keep up with John. He knows how to spend money, usually on good food and drink but spending none the less.

Travel Day

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I don’t have many of them any more, but today was a travel day (sort of). I used to consider a “travel day” a day where most of what I did was travel from one place to another. Now that I don’t travel as much (and am much happier for it) I don’t have as many as I used to. Dam, the last time I was on a plane was September. Most of my travel is train travel now a days.

I am at the hotel now. I got hear relatively early. Normally when I stay here (my companies other office) I am usually at work late. Today was different. I needed to be here for 2 days while work went on during normal business hours. That means I got to keep normal hours, well sort of.

I learned that getting to the hotel at 6PM means dinner at 7, 7:30. After checking mail, making calls, etc, I am bored and it is only 8:30. So I sit here on the bed with my ipod listening to toons, while I write on my powerbook. I will try to goto bed early, but I don’t know if that will happen.

I had the surf and turf at the hotel restaurant again tonight. I had it the last time I was up with Jayson. it was good, and only $3 more than the normal steak I get. I had a drink and felt nice and relaxed. I didn’t have more, since it was really early and I didn’t want to be tired and out of it the rest of the night. that was just in case I decide to be productive later.

Don’t Mess With The Guys Holding The Gun’s

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I was in Penn station today waiting for my train. Just an ordinary day. Until I hear commotion behind me. Some dude (homeless or just mental) is arguing with a cop or national guardsman at the police booth. The place where the cops hang out giving out help. There were EMT’s there so I assume someone called them about this guy. He didn’t seem to want to do what the cops wanted. The next thing I know there are several cops and military guys around this dude. He still didn’t want to do whatever the cops were asking of him. The next thing you know the guy was yelling at the cops, and what looked like he was acting erratic and crazy. The next thing you know the guy was being “detained”. That means he was put up against a wall (forcefully since he didn’t want to go) then the EMT’s were looking at him.

It was a bit of excitement for my morning. All I have to say is I don’t know how crazy, drugged or otherwise out of it to not listen to like a half a dozen guys with semi-automatic machine guns standing around me. That situation (to me) clearly states get on your knees, and put your hands behind your head while you say in as many languages you know I will do whatever you guys want.

I give the cops and troops credit. They got a bit rough with the guy, but I think it was well warranted.

The next thing I know the train I was going on got called, the line moved and I was away from the craziness. The rest of the day was much less exciting than the first hour or so.

Oh, if someone thinks they know what incident I am referring to, and in some future date they think that this guy will sue I have one thing to say. I am no use to you. I TOTALLY think the cops were in the right here, and didn’t use any unnecessary force. That and I have not so great vision and was a few feet away! I mention this story as a nice anecdote about what not to do when the police ask you to do something.

Storage

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Jayson is pushing an online disk storage system. He is thinking NAS. This will solve a problem we have with one nights tape backup taking so long is that it gets in the way with SQL server db backups for the next day. We just don’t have enough time in the day to run the amount of tape we need. if we backup to a disk array and then to tape weekly we can increase restore time, and backup times. from an engineering standpoint it is a great idea.

We toyed with it last year, but never got to budgeting for it. Now we think we really need it. I have to see if we can get the money for it. Jay is going to do some more research for me and then we will come up with options.

Construction (Still Going On)

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I am off to Kingston for 2 days of construction fun tomorrow. We are moving existing cubes downstairs, and putting in the remaining furniture. When I mean we, I mean the furniture guys are coming and I am going to “supervise”. I am going for 2 days since the furniture people think it will take that long. The cable guys are coming out the day after the furniture guys leave to finish up the cable. Once that is done we can move the remaining reps downstairs and be done with this long delayed project.

Fear not, the next 2 major projects is already underway. Turns out we are big enough and have the right people in place that I can run two major upgrades at the same time. My stress level is up there, but we can do it. I have NYC people (myself included) working on upgrades (now officially moving) of our cage to a new location in our data center. Kingston on the other hand is working on IPCC. I am still involved in that, but Kai will have to handle some of the day to day details since he will manage the product after it is deployed. Along the way the dev team has noted that they will be building an entirely new website environment to accommodate the next generation site they are building. That means in addition to what I just mentioned we need to find space for, design, quote, build and then manage new Dev, QA, & production environments. that means servers, databases, web servers, etc. All this while we maintain our existing equipment. It will be an interesting project.

Swiss Persision, & My New Omega

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My old Timex watch broke on me a few weeks ago. I have always been a cheap digital watch person. I liked the alarm, and the laziness of a digital watch. Not even the metal kind, the ones with the leather or rubber straps. My wrists are too small for a cheap metal watch. They would require cutting out of metal links. The work to do that would cost me more than the watch did, so I stayed with the cheap stuff.

Last year my dad gave me his 1969 vintage Omega Speedmaster Professional. I have worn it on and off since I got it. I have always been fearful I would damage it. My dad keeps saying that the watch has been through allot, and I shouldn’t worry. I have heard stories of it being sterilized. Been in countless peoples chests during surgery, and other interesting tidbits. My response is that most flesh wont scratch a watch, but sheet metal and a rack will destroy anything. I don’t want to destroy a great old vintage watch. That being said I have been afraid of wearing it every day. My family says I should just wear it for special occasions. Good idea, but that brings me back to my broken Timex. I got a replacement one at Walmart a few weeks ago. I hate it. It doesn’t feel right, the synthetic strap itches. I just don’t like it. What to do. The final straw was a conversation I had with Jayson on friday after he showed me the nice swiss army watch Gretchen got for his birthday. I realized my problem was I didn’t want to wear my dad’s old omega, but I wanted one I could beat up. I started smelling a spending spree coming on.

I went online and found several model’s of Omega watches that I liked. I was specifically interested in the X-33. it is the latest update to the Speedmaster Professional watch that is certified by NASA for space travel. If NASA certified something, it must be built to last. What I also liked was that the watch was both analog and digital. My main issues with the old Omega I had was that it was all analog. It takes me a few seconds to read the time since I am still not used to all analog. The digital face of the X-33 was cool. The other issue is the old one I have is heavy. it is of course stainless steel. The new X-33 is all titanium. Nice and light. I went over to Tourneau. They have a huge watch store on Madison Ave. They didn’t have any new X-33’s in stock, but the manager came out when I asked about availability of the watch. He showed me a “pre-owned” one. It had some wear on it. Nothing too noticeable, but he said it was heavily discounted since it was pre owned. When I heard the price I gave him my credit card on the spot. It was like half of what I thought it would cost, and it came with a 1 year store warrentee. I am now a happy wearer of a nice metal (yet digital) watch that I can beat up. I finally figured I would fork over some extra money for something that I keep on my wrist 16 hours a day, every day. I mean I buy a good expensive pair of eye glasses for the same reason (well that and other reasons), so why not get a good watch.

So I put my tax return money to good use. Hopefully I will have this watch around in 35 years like my dad had the one he gave me. that way grand kids can have a 70 year old watch and a 35 year old one! 🙂

Now all I need are nicer shoes, and maybe a few dress shirts and I will be presentable. On a plus note I do have the nice day to day dress paints down!

Most importantly now if NASA call’s and says I can goto the International Space Station, I have one less thing I need to buy!