scott

Agenda

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People email the weirdest things when they are taking off for the day, or “working from home”. Below is my email that I should send:

I will be off Monday 2-14-2005. Since everyone seems to send out their itineraries of why they are off I decided to come up with this timeline of events in case I need to be contacted tomorrow.

9AM – Noon. Sleep

Noon – 1PM Think about getting out of bed, but just lie there.

1PM – 1:30PM Shower and get dressed

1:30PM – 1:35PM Realize I am off from work and get undressed into a tee shirt and boxers.

1:35PM – 4:30PM Sit on couch and watch episodes of 24 I have missed.

4:30 – 6PM tinker around with linux server I am building that I should have spent all day on. contenplate if not having a girlfriend is a good thing today since I don’t have to spend allot of money.

6PM – bedtime, misc. web browsing.

Dinner With Friends

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I hung out at home most of the day. I did some work remotely. Watched some TV. Generally wasted the day. I love Sunday’s (or Saturday’s for that matter).

Since Joe is in NY he and Karen came into the city. I met up with them and Jayson and Gretchen. We went down to little italy for some dinner. We stuffed our faces for $20 each. Not bad for Manhattan. Afterwards we swung by Jay & G’s place to hang out. I ate too much haggen das. The simpsons were very funny.

I felt bad that I made a stupid ass comment that normally would have been totally cool, but given Karen’s situation it was not so PC. I felt so bad. She at least appears to be handling everything ok. Either way I felt like a dumb ass. It is one of those things that really was nothing and will be forgotten on the walk back to the subway, but when I say something stupid in a bad situation I feel bad:(

I am now hanging out at home. I can stay up as late as I want since I am taking tomorrow off. I have no real plans. It will either be nice, or nice and boring.

The Wrong Suit

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Friday Jayson and I had to leave work early to goto a wake.  A friend of ours mom died.  It was very sudden and very sad.  It was scary how similar a situation it was with my Uncle Berny.  We ran home to get our respective suits for the service.  I was thankful that I had just bought a brand new suit and gotten it just a week ago.

After showering and shaving I put on the suit.  I was kind of surprised at how it fit.  When I tried it on in the store after the alterations it was tight but it fit.  When I put this on the paints would barely stay on my waist.  What the hell happened I thought for about a half a second.  The dumb-ass’ at the store gave me my Dad’s suit.  We went together, bought the same style suit and have the same last names.  They gave me his.  At that point I needed to wear something for this thing, so I put the paints on and cinched the paints as tight as I could with my belt.  The paints were fine except they were a bit longer than they should have been.  I spent most of the evening pulling them up when I walked so I wouldn’t mess up the bottoms.  The jacket fit, but was a bit longer than it normally should have been.  It was really funny.

I ended up calling my mom on the subway and asked her to have my dad try on the suit that he had.  REALLY LONG conversation later it was confirmed that a switch had been made.  Thankfully I was able to get throughout the night with the EXTRA large suit.

As my sister put it, the craziest thing about this situation wasn’t that I had the wrong suit, but that I could put my dad’s suit on and actually wear it at all.  Now I love my dad, but he has gotten to have a huge belly.  The last time I think he exercised without being forced to (he did have physical therapy a few years ago) was the 60’s.

The service was really sad.  I hate those things.  not because of reasons you would think.  I didn’t go out of obligation like I do with tons of family functions.  I went to let a friend know she wasn’t alone.  And she wasn’t.  A ton of us showed up.  But what I can’t stand is not knowing what to say.  There is nothing you can say that will make any difference.  it is just awkward.  You just have to sit there knowing there is nothing you can do to help.

Why Don’t You Name Your Kid Scott?

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I am a little depressed after checking out the Baby Name Wizard. No I am not having a kid, but this was too cool to not check out. It maps out the popularity of the most common names in the US for the past 100 years or so.

I was depressed to see that the name Scott peaked in the 60’s with a rank of 15th most popular boy name. In the 70’s it was ranked 17th. That was when my parents jumped on the band wagon and named me. After that the name started a major decline. Ranked #39 in the 80’s, 75th in the 90’s, and 208th last year. Come on people, it is a good name. Use it! Why does everyone need to go for those (as my brother in law calls them) shee shee fru fru names people use now a days?

Scott, from Old English. Meaning wanderer or from Scotland. There are other good meanings for the name that I couldn’t find in the 3 minutes I tried to do research for this entry. It is a good name, trust me.

On a positive note, I know of one new possible Scott out there. Don’t change your mind Sean!!!

Rant about nothing important is now over. Resume normal schedule!

Redundancy, Everyone Should Have Some

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I deal with disaster scenarios all the time.  I am paid to look at a system we have and figure out where it could fail.  then come up with a way to minimize that risk, either by a fully automated redundant system or some other backup plan.

So saying I was surprised when I read that the MTA had to turn off an entire train line and it won’t be back for nine months would be an understatement.  How can a major municipal corporate not have redundant systems for minor components like switch controls?  If you have a system that is worth billions of dollars, and millions of people use each day it sort of should be a given that you have backups for critical systems.  I guess the MTA can say oops.  This article explains what happened, or that the NYPD isn’t really sure yet.  They are still investigating.

Thankfully I am no affected by this issue, but because of what I do it got me to stop and think "redundancy, we really do need that"!  I am now not sure if big companies or small ones get the whole redundancy thing right?

AD is New Again

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We had problems with one of our active directory servers the other day. No big deal since we had more than 2 of them. A redundant back died. We rebuilt it, but that got us looking at our other AD servers wondering if we wanted to rebuild them. I tinkered with the new box today, and looked at our AD layout to see how we can juggle servers a bit.

This change in box’s also got me to start our project of moving our servers to a new ip block. This is mainly for tidiness. Our other office is newer and has a better internal ip layout. We are just taking our office and getting it up to standards with the call center.

Virtual Machines

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I launched my first “live” virtual machine today. it is not really live. It is actually a dev box, but users other than my team are going to use it. To me that makes this our first official VM. It has been mostly ready for a few days but I wanted to tweak it a bit before I turned it over to the users.

I am waiting on purchase approval on a more powerful box to put VMware on. For now we are fine, but if we want to put several VM’s on a server we will need more power.

Tivo To Go, Got It, Don’t Like It

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As if by weird fate I wrote my waiting for Tivo to go post a few weeks ago and never posted it. I put it up yesterday. Then I sat my lazy ass down in front of the TV and what was the first thing that Tivo showed me? It had a big message saying hey you got the latest software on me so now you can go and use that to go crap you have been bitching about. So that is what I am trying now for the first time. I am copying a 30 minute episode of the Daily Show onto my laptop.

First impressions are that this will suck and I will never use this software. I have a 100 megabit switch and it is saying it will take 50 minutes to copy a 30 minute show. What is that all about. I turned off my wireless so it should be going at 100mbit. that would mean 5-10 minutes TOPS for a show that size. But now, it is slow! More news as it develops. At this rate I will be sleeping by the time this show copies.

New Cell Phones

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We are expanding the team. That means we need more cell phones. We figure if we want people to be available all the time (on call) then we need to provide a cell phone. We like Nextel. Direct connect is addictive. We can add a phone to our account for like 10 bucks a month (plus tax). Not bad. One emergency and it pays for 6 months or more of service. That is my opinion at least.

We picked up 2 Motorola flip phones for some of the guys who don’t need Blackberry’s. Our sales department is also interested in Blackberry’s so we may get them some on our account. many of them have Blackberrys from different carriers already, but new people would get the nextel’s.

Why can’t Palm or Microsoft make a product as good or better than RIM? I have been waiting over a year for Blackberry software on my Treo. I am still waiting…

Big Brother Is Here

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Big brother is here. Yup, the large networks and cable companies are soon going to try and control when and for how long I can keep recordings of shows that we make. Check out this article. This will become a bigger problem when everything goes all digital. for now someone like me who uses an analog device to convert to a digital mpeg-2 file is safe since I don’t get any broadcast flags. Thanks Snapstream!

PVRblog noted that someone reported not being able to fast forward on a PVR during a show. No one knows if this was a bug or a taste of future “features” of DVR’s provided by cable companies.

A few years ago everyone I worked with had Tivo’s. Now I look around and I see people with DVR’s from their cable companies. I say screw the cheaper easier buy DVR from my cable company. The things they are looking to do scare me. But my parents, my sister, and several friends all have Time Warner DVR’s.