scott

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!

Dari’s Birthday Bowling Bash

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Went to celebrate Dari’s birthday last night at Bowlmor. It is one of those places right near where I am all day but never went to. It was cool. Yes, bowling that was cool. I guess when you light up the lanes, turn down the overhead lights, play good music, and feed us food and good alcohol anything can be fun!

I bowled horribly. I did a 50 something, and a 60 something in the 2 games I played. Heather, Alyssa, & Miguel didn’t do much better than I did. The other Miguel, and a few people I cannot remember did way better! Bowling always hurts my wrists, so I got out of the games early. Thankfully we weren’t playing teams or my team would have been killed. Not only because of me, thankfully!

It was fun. I didn’t eat since the afternoon and one drink got me really buzzed. At least I got happy on 1 drinks since the mixed drinks were like $9 a drink. I owe Cari a round since she cut out early. Some lame excuse about parents visiting. Come on Cari, come up with something better than that:)

For her birthday desert we had fondu. I am not normally a fan of the non-hygenic deserts (Dam double dipping people) such as fondu, but it was good.

Even though it was really late, the subway even agreed with me and only took 10 minutes to show up!

New Lease?

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I got a letter under my door last night. That is the popular way for my land lord (aka. some big management company) to communicate to me. It contained my lease renewal information. I am glad I finally got it, since I was wondering what the deal was. At first I thought I read the price increase wrong and was thinking of where I was moving to, but then read it again and relaxed a bit. that is what I get for an overactive imagination and bad vision. The rent is only going up like $65 per month. On top of what I am paying now, I am not happy. But it is not unmanageable for me. It would be more money for me to move than pay out the increase each month, so I will probably stay. I have said that all along. I like where I am. quick trip to work. Relatively easy to get around. Near the subway. So I am happy for now.

My New Linux Box

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I have not had good luck getting Suse Enterprise Linux 9.0 installed on my new server again. it is not me. I cannot even get to the partitioning screen using text mode. The machine just hangs. As I said before when I try using Suse 9.3 I get told that it cannot find a hard drive. The drive is there fine, but for some reason the software wont find it. instead of messing around with those distributions I am just going to use the older (but totally usable) Suse 9.1. Lets face it I am going to mess up the install and need to do it again. I don’t want a distribution that will cause me headaches to install. With Suse 9.1 I can install it in vmware on my XP desktop and mess with configurations I am thinking of trying on the physical machine. Yes this is for personal use, and yes it may be overkill ot use a test machien. This is what I do. I deploy things. This is the smart way to do it, and it saves me from having to reload the hardware each time (and I anticipate it being many times) I mess up the OS.

So far I have 9.1 on the new box, and I am waiting to configure it. Doing some other stuff right now, but I figured I would take a break to write a bit. Updates later.

Stuff

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I had to deal with fixing contracts for our cage upgrade. Bob finally signed off on them at like 5pm and I faxed them back to our provider. Now we wait for a completion date.

I also worked on moving AD (active directory) roles around on our servers. This will enable me decommission a server and move it into a virtual machine. We have an old Dell 42xx series server that is just taking up space. It barely runs as it is, so it is a good idea to make it a virtual machine and free up precious rack space. Yup, still loving VMware!

Thursday night I stayed late moving print servers, and FMSO roles around. The testing of the log-on scripts with the printer changes took longer than I hoped so I didn’t get home till like 8:30PM.

Danny was worried about disaster recovery issues with moving more gear to virtual machines. I downloaded the white papers on the subject from vmware and will read them on the train to Kingston Monday. I am off to upstate for 2 days for furniture construction.

Drinks Out

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Went with Jayson and Danny to Becky’s by Jayson’s place. We like going there. Tonight we had a really pretty (at least to me) waitress. Thank goodness for her that she was pretty since she was really slow and didn’t seem to be the brightest bulb in the bunch. We drank, ate greasy appetizers and had an all around good time. I called Gus as we got there hoping he was around for dinner. As I was in a cab on the way home I got his call back. he was ready to eat, and I was ready for bed since we already drank. Maybe next week.

I had a funny cab driver on the way home. Who would have thought I would find an old white jewish cabbie in NYC? Well I did. that guy was just too funny. I normally don’t like talking to strangers. It just feels weird most of the time. Cab drivers, car service guys, and others are probably the worst. Don’t get me wrong they are good working people, but I just don’t have anything to say to them. What if you don’t have the same interests or opinions on something they feel strongly about. Then it just gets really weird, and they are the ones driving. I tend to just agree and let them drive. The alternative is talking about the weather, or the news. Both are generic and boring topics that everyone talks about when there is nothing else you can discuss. Not sure what my point was, but that is my opinion of small talk with strangers.

Birthday Lunch

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At work when someone has a birthday, usually 10-20 or so people get together and we go out to eat. We can only goto like 3 places nearby that can accommodate that amount of people. It always turns out that no matter what you buy ($5 grilled cheese perhaps) you always end up paying at least $20. You also end up waiting like an hour to get your food since they bring everyone’s out at the same time. Don’t get me wrong we usually have fun, but it is a circus.

It was Jayson’s birthday today. He is an old 30 today. With all of the above information in mind, Jay decided he didn’t want any big lunch feast. Instead of a big group going to a mediocre restaurant, Danny, Jay and I went to Angelo & Maxi’s for the steak lunch special. Well jay and I had it, danny had a baked potato. For $20.99, you get a soup or salad, steak (i had an 8-oz fillet), and desert. I had (of course) the black and white cheese cake. it was awesome.

if you are keeping score I went no where when I had my birthday. that is what I get for being sick that week! Turns out Dan scheduled something on my birthday, and then rescheduled it for that friday. I was out both days. Opps.

We had a good time today. It was unfortunately busy at work. I didn’t get home until 20 minutes ago.