Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
scott It is always fun to be on the Rail Road (LIRR) and have the train jerk to a stop and then have the conductor say they are having “minor” break problems. Let me tell you, I don’t believe that any break problem is minor. Especially in a 10 car commuter train.
We are moving again. I hope we just make it to Penn station on time. I need to catch an Amtrak train.
Finally after months of waiting and/or plain old laziness I have gotten rid of my Verizon Wireless account. I have had 2 wireless accounts for years. I have had T-Mobile (Voicestream) and Verizon Wireless since September 2001. I have been using my T-Mobile phone exclusively since December 1. I am always concerned about good reception and didn’t want to get rid of my Verizon account without being comfortable that T-Mobile worked everywhere I needed it to. I haven’t needed to use my Verizon phone since December so it is a good sign that I can get rid of the extra expense. Since by now it was almost the same price to leave the account active and let the contract run out vs. canceling it and paying the termination fee, I just canceled the account so I don’t have the recurring payment.
What I did was port my old verizon number over to T-Mobile. I setup a family share plan so I can have my 2 numbers. I am truly a tech geek because of my reasoning for this. I want my PalmOne Treo 600 for my primary phone. I love that phone. But I want a bluetooth phone that I can use as a wireless modem for my laptop, and I also want some other bluetooth accessories such as the wireless headset. With a family plan I can share minutes between two phones. The price between this new plan and the plan I had was only like $10. To me it was worth the charge to have the flexibility to play around with the second phone.
Today is a good test of the new phone also. I am off to Kingston. it is north of NYC and phone signal isn’t always that good everywhere.
Last night was my second in a row with a really bad night sleep. I am not sure what is wrong. It may be the time change, but 1 hour is nothing. My apartment is a good temperature at night, so that is not it. The usual stress at work, nothing out of the ordinary, so that isn’t it. I just don’t know. I hate these bouts of insomnia.
Monday Passover dinner was nice. I went to my parents house. My sister and brother in law were there. Mike’s father was there also. A couple that my parents are good friends with were also there with their 2 daughters and one of there parents. My niece morgan was also present, but she was not a happy camper. She has a cold and a fever. It is not fun watching a little one when they are sick:(
As far as the “official” Passover service goes, we skipped it. That is what I like about religious gatherings run by my dad. We don’t have any!
Carrie made my favorite desert. Crackers with melted chocolate on it. Normally you take saltines and melt butter on top of them. Then you take chocolate and put it on top of the butter and bake until the chocolate is melted. You then spread it evenly around the crackers. Put nuts on it and let settle in the fridge for a while. Simple and it tastes awesome. My brother in law jokes around and calls it the white trash desert. I don’t care if it is cheap, because it tastes so awesome. For the holiday my sister made it with matza. it was not as good as it is normally but I still liked it.
I am not almost famous. Not even close. I am talking about the movie. Saturday was low key. I got up early. Probably from the drinking friday night, so I decided to go get a hair cut.
I met my dad for breakfast after that, and we went to his jeweler. I got back my new (new to me) watch. He was able to find someone who took off 2 links on the band to make it fit on my wrist. I was very happy. I wore it all day Saturday. It was allot heavier than I am used to in a watch. It will take some getting used to.
Alison went to an afternoon movie and dinner with one of her friends so we met late to hang out. She wanted to watch a tape (or DVD). Since I don’t have any old VHS tapes, I decided to bring my Thinkpad over to her place. I hoped to plug it into the S-Video connector on her TV so we could watch a DVD. She does not have a DVD player. Turns out her TV is so old it didn’t have an S-Video connection. We ended up watching the movie Almost Famous on her coffee table. She never saw it. It was a great movie.
They are correct in saying opposites attract. Only I (a big tech guy) would go out with someone who has no DVD player and a TV from 1985. At least it is a big screen from 1985.
I had a good night even though Alison and her friend went to the Outback without me:(
Work Friday was well work. The mail system upgrade thursday night went off ok, and we had no problems to clean up on Friday. That was good.
I had a meeting with our AT&T representatives. Gus suggested I take them out to lunch to show our appreciation on getting them back as an account team. We were happy to get them back so I suggested lunch. I figured Dukes or Old Town Tavern. Nothing super expensive. They are after all vendors of ours:) They had other ideas. Two of them came down. So it was Keith & I with our voice & our data reps. They weren’t going to let us pay, and then they decided to go across the streak to City Crab and get some lunch. I had never been there even though I have worked on and off in on that block for years. If they were paying, we weren’t going to stop them.
The food was fantastic. I was sort of worried about the price. Both reps were like don’t worry at all. I got the crab cakes as an entrée. So did one of our Rep’s so I didn’t feel so bad. We had calimarie for an appetizer. The food was great. I will go back there again.
I was fighting a head ache all afternoon. Not sure why. It was probably the temp. I get sick (Migraines) allot when the weather turns from Hot to Cold or vice versa. Cari wanted to go out drinking since it was her first weekend living in the city. She got an apartment across the street so her commute would be better during the week. She is our Comptroller so she is staying in the city all the time burring tax season. So she was all pumped to go drink. I went because I figured if 1 drink can’t kill the headache I will go home.
The running joke at work is that when ever cari and I go out drinking together we both get sick. This has happened 2 to 3 times since we started working together. I can safely say that Friday broke the trend. A bunch of us went to No Idea! It is our standard Friday night bar. it is right around the corner from work.
We had AJ, Aaron, Cari, John, Jenn, Matt, Myself, Rajive, & Gus come out. It was a good time. I ended up missing like 3 trains I wanted to catch. By the 4th train I was like I need to catch a train. Rajive was like you need another drink. He almost got me one when I finally convinced him I was really leaving this time. Conclusion of this night: Cari & Gus think I am a loud drunk. They are correct:)
A fun time was had by all…
My Imail server upgrade completed successfully. Besides an upgrade that gave us the ability to host more mailing lists and domains, we also go some feature updates. The web interface has been redone. I am not sure if I like it better than the old one though.
Spam filtering has been improved, or so they say. I have to look a bit further into that to see if it is actually better. LDAP is now using OpenLDAP. Not sure if that is better or not either. We have to change the search base for everyone that uses the address book. That was an unexpected feature of this update.
I got a hard time from Dave about running the update at 10PM on a thursday. Normally our corporate mail upgrades are done Sunday afternoon’s but the call center uses this mail system and they have more people working on sunday than they do at 10PM on a thursday. Thankfully he was finally ok with the time frame. It took several hours to run the update, convert the LDAP DB, and then test the system.
I am running late this morning since I didn’t get much sleep last night. I hopefully will be in the office by 10AM.
My 10 Gig iPod has been sold on eBay. I am taking it to work today to ship to its new owner. I wanted to get a new one with a bigger drive, but I didn’t realize they don’t sell the 30 gig one’s anymore. 40 Gig is more than I need, and it costs more than I want to pay. I may just hold onto the money and wait and see what comes out next.
I also sold my Treo 270. That went out at the beginning of the week. I go through cycles of selling things on eBay. Looks like I am in one now. I am going through my apartment looking for stuff I don’t use or want to upgrade. So far I am happy with most of my stuff and don’t want to part with it. Of course I really didn’t want to part with my iPod but I kept running out of space on it.
I bought an eBook yesterday. To most that would sound like a confession of a first time eBook buyer. I can safely say that I have been buying eBooks since 2000. When I traveled with Datastream I would put ebooks on my then Pocket PC (an HP Jordana) and use it to read when I was out to dinner or something. I used to travel by myself. It was boring at a hotel or restaurant eating by yourself. Instead of bringing a book with me to dinner, I would just have my Pocket PC that I was carrying anyway. It made things easy. I have read a few books on it.
I haven’t read any books, let alone eBooks in a while. A few people have recommended me to read the Da Vincii Code. Instead of buying the book I got the eBook at Palm’s ebook store. it was only $9.99. I put it on my iPack and am reading it using the Palm eBook reader. Palm was smart and made a reader for the Pocket PC, Palm, Mac, and the PC. I can read the book on my Treo 600 or my iPack. The iPack is better since it has a much nicer screen. I am on chapter 4. I will let you know how it is.
I also downloaded a few other free programs and utilities for my Treo 600 off of palm’s new software site, Palmgear.com. I found it when I was buying my eBook. It looks like it is competing with Handango. I like the way they setup the site. They have a my favorite software list so you can keep track of the latest versions of software you like or own. It also tells you how long you have left on trial software you have downloaded.
I didn’t buy anything, but I got a few freeware utilities that look cool. The latest filez program, a drink mixing program and a few others.
Yesterday we began to enact our departments 3 month project plan. All development projects for the next few months are out on the table so everyone knows what is going on.
Yesterday was another one of those days where half the day was spent in meetings. I did a lot of break fix stuff yesterday. I was not able to move along any major projects (that I can remember now).
It was busy. I didn’t even get to work on my new desktop machine. My HP Evo 330 that I use as my desktop computer at work was having hard drive issues. It keep rebooting and saying it can’t find one. I would have to play with the cables and it would start to work again. I didn’t have time to deal with that so I took a HP Evo 310 something and fixed it up. On tuesday I put a 200 gig drive in it, along with the 80 gig one that was there I now have plenty of space to put VMWare virtual machines. I also pulled out the burner from my 330 and put that in it too. The 510 is a decent machine now. I use this desktop mainly as a VMWare machine. I load it up with ton’s of virtual machines and I can switch between them when needed. I also sometimes use it as a backup box to my laptop. Mainly it is for VMWare. And you know how much I like VMWare:)