Today we are trying out a new support schedule for the Kingston Call Center. We are going to have a support guy onsite from when they open at 8AM to 8PM. Hopefully it will help in keeping things running normally. The change has been a long time coming but we finally have the people in place to do it. The next step is full coverage, but that may be a way’s off since you need more than 2 shifts to cover 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.
scott
Other Projects
Other things I am trying to work on are… I just downloaded Connectix (now Microsoft’s) Virtual PC for Windows. I want to see if it is better than VMWare. It was up on MSDN so I decided to give it a try. I also grabbed the beta for SMS 2003. Gets me wondering when they will release it since 2003 is almost up.
My exchange project is not dead yet, but I have no time to do anything on it, so it sits idle. I am also looking at the new Microsoft Chat Server. We currently use a Jabber server from Tipic. I actually like it allot and it was very cheap. I want to see how the Microsoft one measures up.
Besides projects to evaluate new software I am also working on tons of other stuff. I am scheduling an update to our email ticketing system called Mailflow. We currently use version 1.0 and are getting a free upgrade to 2.0. I am attempting to deploy it next week. It is from a company called Visnetic. They make some neat pieces of software.
To conserve bandwidth we are about to start blocking most outbound network ports from our firewall. That will make me a popular guy with the rest of the company! Also we are ordering a private line T-1 between our two offices so we can send VOIP calls between them in greater number than we can over the internet T-1’s we have.
Still Not Feeling A 100%
I still don’t feel 100% better. I got a MIGRAINE yesterday. I took 2 butabitol’s and I felt better for a while but ended up leaving a little early (5:30PM) and didn’t do much when I got home.
This morning I still don’t feel my normal self. I am tired. I am having trouble sleeping. I think it is stress and weaning off the Tylenol PM.
I am going to try and take it easy today, but that never happens when I am at work. I wanted to be in Kingston today. My company is having its quarterly board meeting up there today. I wanted to make sure everything was perfect. As luck would have it I have an important meeting today at 11AM with our phone system integrator, and the maker of the software we use. We are going to discuss the issues we are having. Thankfully we have no “show stopper” problems but certain things could be better.
I am kind of glad I didn’t have to go today. Like I said I am still not feeling a 100%.
Blogs Are A Fad, Or Not
I recently read somewhere that someone did a study of blogs. They said that most are not update often and the vast majority don’t last very long. It was an interesting read. As with anything people do, you have the eager beginning, then a slow tapering off of doing something. That is true if you don’t find the task interesting. Take exercising for instance. I started to do different routines for months. I would do it for a while and then slowly stop. I just wasn’t into it. People try blogging out and then they decide hey I don’t want to publish my thoughts for all to see. I for one used to write a journal. I think I started when I went cross country in 1989. I wanted to log what I did and where we went. Then I wrote on and off again into an online journal I made in Microsoft Word starting back in 1994 or 95. I did it some what frequently and then stopped. At the beginning of this year I started thinking about breaking out the old journal and start writing again. To me writing like this is very relaxing. I get to ponder what happened over the past several days, and type things out. I don’t think that much about writing, I just write what comes to mind. When Gus brought to light the whole blogging trend, I decided to give it a try. More than 7 months later I am still making several entries a week. For me the fad is still fresh. Some days I don’t enter anything at all. Other days I have made 5 or 6 entries.
So is the “study” correct about blogging? Probably, and probably not. You can make a study that says anything. Statistics never lie, but statistics can be analyzed in ways to totally screw up the results. Lets face it, somewhere there are studies that say smoking is good for you!!! My random thoughts for the day…
Off To Make Dinner
I finally got my appetite back from being sick. I defrosted a steak (filet of course) and am warming up the George Forman Grill. From meat to a cooked steak in 3-4 minutes, but I want it now:)
Written while listening to REM, The Great Beyond…
Old Gear & New Gear
I just got a new server in. We are building a Data Warehouse running on SQL 2000. We built one to demo and everyone liked it we have been using it for 4 months on a desktop with allot of hard drive space. The “server” finally showed its desktop limitations, so we are upgrading it to a Dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz server. We are doing IDE RAID, and threw in 2 gigs of ram. For just around 2K it is a nice little box. If you don’t need SCSI you can get server gear cheap now a days. Our dumb-ass vendor forgot to ship us a CD-ROM / Floppy Drive so I have the box open on the floor of my office with a desktop CD Drive and Floppy drive plugged in trying to get Windows 2000 installed. We have been buying Windows 2003 Server since it came out, but for most applications we are just downgrading to Windows 2000 Server. So far today I had no luck getting the OS to install. I think the USB floppy drive I used wasn’t working correctly. I need to cannibalize a floppy drive or buy one for $12 or whatever they are going for these days.
We have some older desktops that we were using as Red Hat web servers that we consolidated to one box. That means I have 2 box’s to use for testing and such. I am trying to demo Exchange 2003 on one and put Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition on the other. Terminal server will not boot off the dam CD from MSDN. The boot disks we have for it wont work either. I am continuing to work on that. I may give up on NT 4.0 and try 2000 server in application mode. I don’t need it for more than 30 days so I should have no problem with the demo mode it makes you use if you don’t have a key code.
As for Exchange 2003, we are looking to see if it is something we may want to move to. For maybe just the Technology department or for the company as a whole. Howard said good things about Outlook 2003 over HTTP. He said it was fast. I am going to look at how Idealab! did their deployment and maybe segment some users onto Exchange for a trial. Not sure yet.
I Spoke Too Soon!
I was feeling better. I tried to stay in and rest this weekend. It wasn’t that difficult. My body would not let me do much else. I caught up on some email and watched some TV yesterday. I also got to chat with my friend sean on MSN for a while. I haven’t spoken to him in a while so it was good to catch up. By the time I wanted to go out and get some dinner I could not sit up straight without getting dizzy or nauseous. I ended up going to bed like 8PM. It was that or be in lots of pain.
Because I went to bed so early I got up at 8:30AM this morning. Still felt tired, but couldn’t sleep. I got some work done before 10AM. The call center I support opens at that time on Sunday’s so it was good to get some maintenance work done.
I went over to my Dad’s to get something and to fix his palm. he couldn’t sync. I couldn’t fix it. My head wasn’t in problem solving today. I got to see Morgan. he was watching her for the afternoon. It is funny to see him on the floor playing with a 7 month old. She is still so cute. Every time I see her I can’t help but smile!!!
The walk over to my parents place took allot out of me. It isn’t even a long walk, I am still not fully recovered. That walk proved it. I went home and took an nap for 3 hours.
I just ordered in dinner since I am not trekking out anywhere today. I just hope I am up for work tomorrow. I just need to get through a full day. I don’t know how I am going to make it to Kingston tuesday. I am seriously thinking about not going or sending Keith up there. I am just tired. Monday will be the test to see if I can do it.
Treo 600
The Treo 600 is out for Sprint. My dad still say’s he is happy with his choice of the older Treo 300. I await the 600 being availible for T-Mobile. Rumor has it that will be on the 13’th or sometime next week. Not sure if that is rumor or if it is true. Either way I will get it as soon as it comes out.
I Survived My First Day Back
Well, I am tired and things were hectic for a while but I survived my first day back after being out for what felt like a long time. Keith was out sick today. Whatever I had is going around. Justin left early because he felt like crap also. I was left catching up on everything I missed since monday.
I fixed some call center issues. Did some sysadmin work that I don’t normally do. AKA tapes, and updating software versions for some applications we use. I don’t like having to do that all the time. Others are supposed to, but I do like doing it so I keep up on what is happening on my network. I learned that updating IPL’s (software we use to search for stuff) is still not hard, but you need to verify that it works before everyone can use it. I also learned that our new SDLT tape drive is still very cool, but very slow in loading and spitting out tapes.
I also configured Office 2003 Pro to autoinstall with paramiters I set. It is nice. Now if we upgrade (we can thanks to software assurance from Microsoft) I can easliy deploy it to my desktops. The real reason I was playing with the configuration was to get outlook 2003 to work with Exchange 2003 over HTTPS. Not there yet, but I am getting familure with the tools I need to do it correctly.
A bunch of people went out to No Idea for drinks after work. I went and had a coke. I was not ready to resume drinking after being so sick. I saw David P, and Jeff from my Y&R days. We were all pissed at each other since we work around the corner from one and other and I never see either of them. I really do want to see them, so I am trying to setup lunch with Jeff next week.
I am tired and going home. I caught the 7:29PM train out of Penn and hope to get lucky and catch a cab without waiting too long at the train station. It is hit or miss with the car service company, so we shall see.
My plan is to rest this weekend and be normal for next week.
Feeling Human Again
After 3 days of what felt like agony I am feeling just about human again. I have been sick since Monday night. What started off as a really bad migraine headache now most likely was the flu and a migraine. I left work early tuesday because I felt like crap. Feeling like crap for me is unable to keep my head up due to intense pain and or the feeling that I will puke at any given moment. Tuesday was both. I won’t go into graphic details of how bad it was, but use your imagination.
I made it home tuesday only to realize my cleaning lady was there vacuuming and stuff. I went down to my parents place and slept there till late Monday. By then I had enough strength to get back to my place. I figured I would sleep what I figured was just a bad migraine off and be fine in the morning. That is what normally happens. Well my body didn’t agree to those terms. I woke up Wednesday feeling just as bad as I did tuesday. The entire day was that intense discomfort I get when I have a migraine. So I took all the migraine medication I could. There are maximum amounts of these drugs you can take in any given day / week / month and I don’t want to find out what happens if I don’t follow the directions. By mid Wednesday my dad and my doctor both thought that it was more than the migraine. My inability to keep food down was one sign. Stomach issues are common in migraines, but not common for me. I get it sometimes, the really bad ones. But 2 days in a row was weird. So I switched drugs to Tylenol and some migraine stuff just in case. I was finally able to sleep sometime late Wednesday. I cannot remember when.
I felt a bit better thursday, but in the morning I was still a bit out of it so decided to stay home from work and get it out of my system. I was sitting up watching tv by the afternoon, but still felt sick. By thursday night I felt allot better, but tired. I tried to sleep and here I am friday morning going into work.
My dad didn’t want me to go in today. He felt I should rest through the weekend and be 100% for monday. I promised I would stay in this weekend and take it easy at work today. I hate being home sick. Usually I am bored, but this time I was in too much pain to care most of the time. I just don’t like being cooped up inside that long. Hopefully everything works out ok today.