scott

Mac Spotlight

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When google came out with Gmail I said so what. I don’t need a free email address with tons of space, I have my own domain. When people said you can use it to search for mail contents, I said I didn’t need that, and I didn’t want google “seeing” everything I got in email. When Microsoft and google both came out with desktop search tools I was skeptical. When Apple came out with spotlight I was just as skeptical.

I tried spotlight out last week when I installed 10.4 on my mini. It seemed cool, but I didn’t think of much use for it right away. The other day I configured Apples mail client to see if it was better than entourage. It has its advantages, and so does entourage. Then I realized that all mail located in my Apple mail client is indexed into spotlight. I was still skeptical until I did my first search. I was looking for a piece of mail in my inbox (1 of 500 messages currently there). I typed the first name of the person sending the mail, and a word I knew was in the subject or body of the message. Spotlight spit back 3 possible answers and sure enough 1 of them was exactly what I was looking for. No need to create folders and sort through my inbox every week or so. All I need to do now is just dump my mail into an offline folder (i use IMAP for online storage) and just run a search when I need something.

Because of the spotlight searching ability I may start using Mail over Entourage. Apparently Entourage is not indexed in spotlight, but they (Microsoft) claim there will be a plug in for the Entourage database at some point that will allow indexing. I for one eagerly await the release of that. Until then you may find me using Mail for mail, and entourage for contacts and calendar. I just wish Mark/space, Apple & Palmone would get sync’ing perfected so I can use iCal and Address book with categories on my mac and have the categories carry over to my palm and then over to my PC when I am at work on Outlook.

Travel Day Complete

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I am done with my day of travel. Amtrak sucked. The trains were older and in worse shape than normal. When I asked the conductor he said that the normal trains are in use on Acela since those trains were down for maintenance. Something about the “elite” route gets the good trains! The train was late 20 minutes going up, and 45 minutes late coming home. I should be used to it by now, but I am not. On a plus note Amtrak’s automated IVR was awesome. I understand why they won all sorts of awards for the voice responce system. Hey I deal with telecom, network and VOIP gear most of my day, so hearing a good IVR actually interests me now. Some people look at nice cars, I admire IVR’s. No one ever said I was normal.

We got 10 users downstairs. Kai had issues with the other group of 10 they wanted to move. Turns out the electrical guys didn’t plug in a conduit so a bank of stations didn’t have power. that set us back enough that we didn’t have time to finish moving users today. They should still meet the deadline of friday to have half the users downstairs.

I also dealt with issues regarding our upgrading our cage at our data center, and canceling circuits in NYC. Also design woes about upgrading our circuits in our call center. I have been busy with our telecom provider to iron out all the issues. More meetings with them tomorrow!

A New Call Center, Well Almost

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Tomorrow (if all goes well) my company will open its new floor of its call center. We are moving our reps down to our new floor (with tons of space for expansion) and corporate people (those that are in that office), escalations groups, etc. will remain upstairs. Tuesday marks the first day we bring reps down. We are taking it slow with only 1 team of 10. By the end of the week we will ramp up half the call center or more down there. Then we move some existing furniture down that is currently in use. Cable, and bring the rest of the people down. It has been a logistics challenge. Not quite a nightmare, but challenging.

I don’t “have to” go tomorrow, but I wanted to see the end result of all that work that I (and others) took part in. I will most likely be back for a few days next week as the construction people do the cubes and cable for the second half of the center. Dan will be on vacation and even though I am a “technical guy” I am the next person who is aware of the entire project.

IPCC SOW

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We met our integrator about the statement of work for our IPCC deployment. They calmed our nerves about most issues but we came up with another one. Dan and I will talk about this tomorrow.

If that is done, we can sign the papers and in 90 (work filled, super stressful, and probably extremely interesting and fun) days we will have an IPCC call center.

More news as it develops…

Solo Today, And Road Trip Tomorrow

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I was by myself in my office today. Jay had the day off. I am solo again tomorrow on a trip upstate. That is all I can say here, but will write more on my private work blog.

Mothers day was nice. Saw my mom, sister, dad, morgan, and others. Morgan is so funny. And the dangerous thing is she knows it. I think she is also a bit jealous of the new twins. My mom said it shouldn’t matter since the twins are not her grand kids so she will continue to spoil Morgan as much as she has. My dad quickly agreed.

After 2 changes of venues we ended up at mikes mom’s house for mothers day. I ended up taking metro north up and back. No rides for me this trip. it was not so bad. Metro north is even easier than the LIRR since it is on the east side.

I passed on desert in little Italy. Jayson wouldn’t commit to doing it until like 8PM when I got his call. By then I had just ate and I didn’t really want to trek out for a 30 minute train ride to have sugary (ohh, so good) desert at 9PM to not sleep the night because I am on a sugar high! Maybe next week.

Mac Dev Lessons

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I have been playing with Apache, PHP, MySQL & Surgemail on of all machines my Macmini. I was still having issues with the new linux box so I messed around with these programs on the mac. Man most of it was easier than the linux setup, but it was still hard. I found several prebuilt install packages for most of the programs I was playing with.

I learned a few valuable lessons today. First never install anything you don’t know how to uninstall. Doing technology for as long as I have, I should know that by now, but I guess not! Second, I need a setup for testing and messing around and a separate environment where I keep working things like my current website, email, etc.

Right now I actually have my website running on my mini. I don’t want to keep it there, but for now until I sort out my linux issues it will remain. Tomorrow I am going to do mothers day stuff so I probably wont have time to mess with this stuff. Hopefully I will get to some more during the week.

IPCC Deployment

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I have been quiet on the work front recently. Not because I don’t have things to talk about but because I have been busy. We went over the statement of work for our IPCC deployment yesterday. We need to go over a few details to make sure we know what we are doing! More news as that LONG project progress’s.

iChat Plus Jabber = Cool

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I never really warmed up to Apples iChat program until this week. I liked AIM. I never really used MSN. So I stuck with AIM. I like AIM (the service, NOT the program) only because I could not find a better program that will get me on AIM (the service not the program). GAIM, Trillian, etc didn’t do it for me.

On the flip side I use Jabber at work. I love it. It is another fantastic tool that Gus turned me onto years ago (wow, it has been years). Well my love of jabber and my use of my Mac had issues since there was no good jabber client for the mac. I have been using PSI for a while now. it is a good tool, but it had some serious quirks that I didn’t like. Actually they drove me crazy, but I had no other tool that came close to it on the Mac. Then came Tiger. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that iChat now supports jabber. After a few minutes of tinkering I figured out how to get my jabber server up on my iChat software. A few customizations with iChat (that I didn’t know I could do before) and now I am thinking differently about iChat.

Now I have another windows program that works as good or better on my Mac! Dare I dream to work completely off the mac without dealing with my Thinkpad crashing all the time? I have to stop myself from getting excited!

Rethinking The West Side

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I really shouldn’t be bashing the west side anymore. We went to a bar near Miguels on the upper west side for Cinco de Mayo. I used to be all worried about how to get home afterward. To take the subway would require me to go down half the dam island to go cross town and then up again to my place on the east side. I originally thought a cab ride from the west side would be crazy expensive. Well it is not. Late at night it is easy to go uptown, and then really simple to shoot through the park. I was home in less than 10 minutes. I had an easier time getting home than others living downtown since they had to go down on the train.

Another reason to like where I live!

New Server, Almost

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I took the plunge and forked overs some money to build a “decent” server to run my site on at home. I got a tiny desktop case CPU, RAM, & DVD drive for really cheap. I already had a drive for it. I built it today and I am now trying to put linux on it. I am going for Suse 9 Enterprise or Suse 9.3. Not sure what will end up on it just yet. I put Suse Enterprise 9 on before but had problems so I am trying it again.

Right now I am having media issues with both 9.0 and 9.3 so I am not happy. I am still very new to the Linux crazy so I am very frustrated.

Now that I am building this new machine I have a few decisions to make. Do I keep using Typepad, or host my own blog using Moveabletype or WordPress? I like Typepad, but I am not sure if I want to pay to host when my subscription is up when I am hosting my own server. I liked moveabletype as a program but it is a pain to setup. I proved that today with several attempts at configuring it right. I hear WordPress is good, and they “claim” to have a simple install process.

Not sure what I am going to do just yet. I just want to get Linux installed and working right now…