I know recently I have been lacking on the photo blog entries. I know I have the phone in my pocket all the time. I don’t know why I just take it out and snap photos more often. When I remember I am usually waiting on the subway platform. Yes that is why you see so many pics of the subway. One answer could be because the camera on my Treo sucks so bad. Hopefully the new one will be better. I will attempt to take more pictures. One thing that is a problem is I haven’t been doing super exciting things that people may find interesting in pictures.
scott
Going To The Movies
A bunch of us from work are getting together later to see the new movie from the guys who made South Park. I honestly don’t remember the name. I just remember everyone says it is very vulgar and not politically correct. That makes me want to see it. I am lazying around my apartment until we are meeting up.
I woke up with a head ache today so I took a furiset. I am feeling better now but I will need to take another one near the start of the movie if the drugs wear off and I still have a head ache. These are the type of days where I DO get migraines. It is cool outside, but not cold. It is stifling in the apartment, and I am inside right now. This is the exact change of weather situation that gets me sick. I hate it. It is my demon I need to keep in check. I don’t want to have to cancel so I am medicating early. When I am home on a weekend I tend not to take any drugs. It usually leads to bad consequences, but I take the medications enough during the week that keeps me working and a normal functioning person in society. That is why on weekends (my time) I try not to medicate if needed. Unfortunately I end up canceling on plans allot since I refuse to medicate sometimes. My dad says I am crazy, but I get scared sometimes about getting a “habit” to some of these medications. Some of the stuff I take is pure pain medication. I could see how easy it is to get used to taking them.
Welcome to world! Just spoke to Cari, and Jayson. They are both in for the movies. Danny is even coming in from Staten Island. I am off to Jays in a little bit to hang out before the movie…
Lazy Saturday
I am lazy. I admit that all the time. I blame genetics, dam that lazy dad of mine! Of course my mom is always busy and active, so wouldn’t that cancel the genetics of my lazy dad out? Ok, I am getting off topic. I am lazy, get over it. I am especially lazy on the weekends. I like to sleep in. Do nothing, catch up on my TV watching (thank you Tivo). Today is no different. I got a hair cut. The guy I am using chopped off way too much hair. I love it. I need to find the goop he uses to keep it down when he combs it for me. I am messing around now with the blog. Some people have hobbies I have blog writing. It beats doing nothing! Actually I like writing so I do enjoy this blog thing.
I am now procrastinating the work I have to do. I need to do some power points and update some documents for work. I also need to do some shopping for clothing, but since I find that one of the most boring things in the universe I am not going to do it right now. Part of me is nagging me to put up on eBay some of the old gear that I want to sell (get out of my closet). The rumor is the new Treo is being announced tomorrow so I should build up my bank account to pay for the upgrade that I know I will go and get. I also need to do some house cleaning again, but I don’t like that either so I will procrastinate about that also.
Weblog Design Time
I once again tweaked the design of this site. I hated that the body of my posts were so narrow an area. I have a 20″ flat screen at home and when I look at the site it was always so narrow. The border was huge. I found a way to make it “fluid” so it scales right on the resolution a person uses. I love the Typepad templates regarding site design. I also changed the name of the site. See a future post as to why. I am trying to be more creative with the name. Probably not working, but at least I made an effort.
After Work Scrabble
After work Cari convinced me to goto Dan’s and hang out. They were playing Scrabble. I was invited earlier by Dan and Jenn but I passed. Cari talked me into it since I had a terrible busy day. I ended up playing a round of Scrabble. Now first I have to mention if you don’t know me that I cannot spell. I mean I really CANNOT spell. I am not stupid (or I don’t think I am), but ever since I was little I had issues with spelling. it is partly due to a learning disability, but that is off topic. The point is for someone who considers themselves a terrible speller, how did I end up in a room with 8 people playing scrabble? And how did I actually have a decent score for half the game? Granted I ended up in last place out of the 2 others I played, but for a while I was actually giving them a run for their money. Come on people, I suck at spelling how can I do ok at Scrabble?
A Single Minded Day
Some days I cannot remember what it was that I did at work. Today I only did one thing almost the entire day. I cannot forget what I did if I tried. I worked on fixing our Call Manager all day. Call Manager is the Voice Over IP version of the PBX. It is basically the computers that control our phone system. Last night Kai and Jayson upgraded our Cisco Call Manager’s to version 3.3.3 from 3.3.2. When you read the version number change you (I) think it is a minor fix. Well the latest version (it is the latest version we are using, but there is a 3.3.4, and a 4.0 now) does some things differently. Kai and Jay got the upgrade done, and tested all the phones in our call center. Everything seemed to work. What they couldn’t test was our remote phones. The phones in our NYC office didn’t work. We didn’t know this until hours after they went off to sleep. They left word that we may need to upgrade the firmware on the phones, but that was it. Turns out the firmware upgrades automatically when you reboot the phone and their is a newer version of the firmware.
The problem was the phones could make outbound calls, but could not receive calls. when you called the phones in a remote office the phone would ring but if you picked it up the Call Manager didn’t recognize that the call started. this is not good if we want to our reps to take calls. So off to call Cisco I went. This all happened before or as I got to the office. What a way to start the day that I knew I was going to be short handed anyway. Kai and Jay were both off to sleep because of their overnight. So after a long and drawn out troubleshooting session with Cisco we figured out our problem. I actually spoke to 2 guys over there. the first guy gave me the right answer but could not explain why we had to do what he asked. Since it required me to change firewall rules and we upgraded a phone system not the firewall I was skeptical. So the second Cisco guy came into the picture. He walked me through the same troubleshooting process (a bit quicker than the first guy). he then made some phone calls and got back to me. Turns out the first cisco support guy was right we needed to change some rules on our Cisco Pix’s. Why? Well in the new version of our CCM (Cisco Call Manager) they changed how some protocol’s operate. So what worked in older versions of CCM didn’t work in the newer version. We had to remove to fix-up protocol lines on all of our Pix’s that are involved in the VPN that makes up our WAN. Sure enough Kai was right. Kai as in Kai the cisco rep I spoke to, not Kai the guy I work with. I made the two firewall rules and the phones started working. Elapsed time on the whole saga, 8 hours. I got the phones working exactly at 5PM.
During this adventure I had other fun things to think about. Sean and danny dealt with problems with an index on a database somewhere that was causing one of our websites to be slow. Word of advise to people I work with. When I am fiddling with one phone, on another phone and talking to someone on a nextel and you know a system is down, don’t come and tell me about another problem that you need me to work on. I can only do 4-5 things at once. Thankfully Sean was able to get a handle on the index problem and fix it with little to no help from me.
Danny was helpful in my network trouble shooting saga today. Everyone else was surprisingly not bothersome. usually when I have a major problem people come out of the woodwork to bug me about minor issues, or that is how it feels.
I was crazed today. Am I glad it is over? Of course I am, but there is something to be said about days like this. First, it goes by so quick. Second, it is the type of day that you earn your salary. You get a few of the each year, and when you live it you hate it, but after you live through those days you are a better person for surviving them. On a personal note I am glad I got through the issue mostly by myself. Danny did give me great assistance in the network trapping, but allot of it was second opinion from what we got from Cisco. It is good having someone else around who you can sound off ideas to. I think Danny and I work great in that respect. On a whole I had to tackle most of this issue by myself. In the past that is not a big deal. Recently I have been delegating allot of the day to day technical responsibilities. It is something that I have to do, but I feel like I get rusty by not doing hands on work all the time. Days like today keep me sharp and lets me prove to myself that I am still in the game and can get dirty with the best of them, or so I think.
Class Is A Bust, Well Sort Of
After some thought I have finally came to my senses. I woke up and realized I am not 18 years old again and in college. I said to myself why in the world am I spending all this time on a volunteer class? I loved being an EMT. And I like the “idea” of being an EMT again. In practice I am killing myself to get to class 3 (sometimes 4) nights a week.
I want to volunteer. But I already have a stressful and time consuming job. Half of me thinks I am copping out. That half of me says if I don’t do this again now, I will never get to do it. The other half of me says I am crazy for wasting that much time outside of work on school. I should have a life, instead of going for something that I did 10 years ago. I may be over analyzing everything, but taking or not taking the course is a big decision. I don’t care about the money for the class. If I didn’t spend it on the class I would have blown it on something. I am more concerned about the time I wasted, or time I will waste taking the rest of the course.
My dad thought I was crazy. he said he didn’t even know why I was taking it in the first place. He thought (as I do somewhat) I have a busy enough job, and I should just relax when I don’t have to work. Now my dad is lazy so maybe I shouldn’t listen to his opinion, but he echo’s what I am thinking. Jayson and Cari also seemed to think I was making the right decision. Not sure if they were just agreeing with me to make me feel better, but the decision is final. I already missed class tonight. That would make 2 I missed. I could only miss 4 before I got booted. The class is not worth that much emotional strain till January. I am used to going to college and taking a class for 2 nights a week. This is allot more. To me work is allot more important to me right now. They keep giving me paychecks. And it is not like I am bored at work. I have more than enough to do to keep me busy.
Just to note I was doing excellent in the class. I had one of the 2 highest grades in the class. That may have been part of the problem. I didn’t crack the book at all, and I was so bored from the class. Maybe when I am not so crazy I can try this again? But deep down I know that
More VOIP Updates
Several things finally came together on my VOIP odyssey this weekend. For one I solved a problem I have been having for some time. I also got off my ass and plugged in my new Linksys VPN Router. I started to setup static VPN tunnels to work. For one thing I proved I can setup a static IPSEC tunnel to a Pix with a cheap ($150 or cheaper) router. At first I still could not connect to one of our offices. I had the same problem with the Pix 501 I had. Or at first I thought it was the same problem. With the 501 I couldn’t connect to that office either. I was beginning to think it was not me but the Pix at that office. Turns out when I had my Pix 501 I had 1 issue. With the new Linksys VPN router the problem was a new one. Turns out the fail-over Pix we have at the office uses the IP address of 10.1.1.1. That is all nice and good, but that was what I used for my router at home. That didn’t work well. I had to give my router a new address and recreate the VPN tunnel. Everything started working then.
Now I have 2 tunnels (if and when I want them) to work. I don’t need VPN software. This is a good test since now I do not need VPN software on a computer in order to establish a VPN connection. What that means is I can plug in a VOIP phone and connect to my office’s call manager. I did just that. Now I have a 7940 phone connecting into our CCM (cisco call manager) system sitting on my desk at home. This is different to what I was trying to do with the 7940 and my BroadVoice connection. Now I can log into the phone at home and get my extension from work. I can prove that we can do this with remote agents if we choose to do so. We probably won’t but it is a nice technological feat to say we can. We want to go with the cheaper soft-phone option for remote agents, but having the ability to put a phone in someone’s house is nice to know you can. Have I mentioned that I have a cool job, or that VOIP is awesome???
In addition to the work phone I now have setup. I finally got my VOIP ATA adapter from the lovely folks at Broadvoice on Monday. I plugged it in after calling them and changing my account back to use that adapter. In minutes the adapter registered and I was off and running. I plugged in my new cordless phone and I had phone service. Did I mention it is only $10 a month? Now I was an early adopter of not having a home phone. I still use my cell as my main phone, but it is nice to not have to worry about the battery dying on a long call. Truth be told I want the VOIP service for the simultaneous ring option that I have. I am able to have calls ring on my home phone, my cell, blackberry, and work phone at the same time. I have a few kinks I am working out but otherwise that has been very cool.
Some problems I have to work out. I am back to using my old 802.11b wireless point. My 802.11g point was built into my old router. Now that I have a VPN router I can’t use that router. I need to buy a stand alone “g” point. I also need to break out a 5 port switch and daisy chain it off of my router. With the Wifi point, both my personal and work phones, plus my desktop and laptop, plus a tivo I have ran out of network ports on my 4 port router. Thankfully I think I have enough components to build 2 computers and extra network gear in my closet. He I don’t throw out very much stuff.
Ok, time for bed…
There Goes My Google Rankings
When I had my site hosted on my friends linux box I had some nice google rankings on some searches. I was surprised at how my site ranked sometimes. Well that is all gone now. When I changed my site address (used to start with blog. and now it is the normal www.) and I moved providers to Typepad several things happened that cost me the rankings. All of this doesn’t really matter. It is of passing interest to me. I still find it funny that anyone reads this. I am not sure what is weirder, people I know regularly reading it, or people I don’t know reading it?
Now with my new site URL and ip address I am hopeful the google searches will eventually come back.
Some People Need To Learn To Drive
Getting ready to cross the street across from my building tonight I was standing 2 feet from the curb in the cross walk. I was minding my own business when some asshole backed his car into me. Thankfully (for him and me) the dumb-ass wasn’t going very fast. This &*%$^&* in his wanna be punked out ride didn’t even see me. He got out of his car when I kicked his bumper. He is luck I didn’t put a whole in his window. Granted I got lightly shoved, but this idiot could have been moving faster. You have to look.
This is the second time I have almost gotten run over on (or near) the curb in NYC. The last time was New Years back in 95, 96. I would recount that in more detail but I was very drunk and all I remember is the guy in the car was also. The difference was he was driving and I was walking.
That was my moron story for the day. I am taking the day off tomorrow. Hopefully I will get some extra sleep, a hair cut, some shopping and general laziness done. I may even study for my class. The day off won’t be complete since I will have class later at night. This is the first real skills session. Yes I had CPR but that is different. This is the first patient assessment skills. I haven’t taken an EMT class in years and I am amazed at how much some of it comes back to me right away, and how other things have changed…