scott

An Attempt At Poker

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So I still feel crappy from yesterday. I am still attempting to do poker with Dan and his friends tonight at his place. I missed the last poker session so I don’t want to be left out of this one. Missing too many may mean not being invited in the future. And I don’t want that. I will get some breakfast and see if I can turn this day around and feel a bit better.

Gus is away with Glenn in San FranCisco for 2 days. He sent a whole big email to everyone regarding attendance and then took off for work. He was not to happy about the lateness and people working from home. I cannot blame him. it is sort of out of control. People just email the group that they will be out sick. That is just not the way it is done. Changes are in the works, or so it seems.

The Holy Day

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Yesterday was the Jewish high holy day. I worked. I probably didn’t have to work, but Keith was out and Justin was in Kingston so I went to work. I never really felt guilty or cared about working on that day, but yesterday I did a little. I am not religious. I never goto temple, not even on major holidays. That does not mean I don’t believe. I have friends who just don’t believe in religion or what not. I believe, but I just don’t think I have to go somewhere every week to prove I believe.

I decided yesterday on the way home from work that I will take off next year on that day. I probably won’t goto temple. I am not deluding myself to think I will do that, but at least I will stay home and reflect.

I didn’t fast either. But I didn’t eat very much. I tried not to eat, but got hungry and had a candy bar. Now this is where I am stupid. I know when I don’t eat allot of the time I get a MIGRAINE. Well I didn’t eat much and got a migraine yesterday. It was a particularly bad one too. I took two butabital’s, and tried to rest. I after about forty minutes I was able to get up long enough to make some dinner. Going to the break fast with my family was out by then so I cooked some food. I ate, and still felt like crap. I ended up lying down around 7:30PM. I know the migraine was a bad one because the drugs didn’t really work that well. I felt the affects of them but they didn’t stop the migraine. Also I almost threw up. Not pleasant I know, but it is what happened. Puking is a sign of a rather nasty migraine for me. I ended up sleeping till 1AM and then got some water and tried to sleep again. I couldn’t and probably fell asleep again around 2:30-3AM.

If I was superstitious (which I am sometimes) I would say that this was the big guy’s way of saying “he you did bad today”, but it really was just me being stupid and not eating. According to my dad (whose only religious claim to fame is understanding this day and the such) if I need to eat for medical reasons or am sick I am allowed to do so. Who knew? Next year I will stay home and eat.

The family Technology Consultant

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So since I work with computers for a living I am the familys technology consultant. No one remembers my sister works with computers also, but I guess programing doesn’t count! I mentioned last week that I got my dad a new Treo 300 for Sprint PCS. I finally got it to sync to his computer at home. He had problems for months with his home computer and his old Palm 505. After trying 3 versions of the palm desktop, deleting the USB drivers (and killing his mouse in the process) I finally got the Treo to sync to his computer. He was very happy to get rid of his Palm 505. The screen was very dim. he also has to carry 1 PDA/Phone instead of a phone and a PDA. I tried to convince him to wait 2 weeks and get the Treo 600, but he said that it was too small. As long as he is happy, I won’t force him to buy the latest and greatest. The Treo fits into his scrubs pocket easily so he was very pleased.

While I was sick this week I spent some time taking some old videos and converting them to MPEG-1 files to be put on Video CD’s (VCD). I use Elgato systems EyeTV. It is a USB device that makes your mac into a Tivo like DVR. You can export the files to MPEG-1 format to burn onto a VCD. I also played around with exporting the files to imovie, but it was time consuming and the files were huge. I didn’t need to edit the files so I just burned the MPEG-1’s to VCD. The quality wasn’t so bad. What you would expect from a VCR. The better the source, the better the results.

Doing the video extraction made me realize that I need more hard drive space on my mac. The Powerbook I have only has 40 Gigs on the hard drive. 10 of which are taken up by my music. I need to get a Firewire external drive. I am pricing them out now.

My Hybernation Is Over

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Well I did what I always do when I get sick. I take lots of cold meds that make me tired and sleep the entire thing off. It works for me most of the time. It is the “24 hours of Nyquil” regiment that my friend sean came up with in college. Well this time I went a bit longer than 24 hours, but the theory is the same. I zoned out most of friday. I did the same yesterday, but I was up at night. All that sleeping makes you not tired. I got up at like 11-am today and feel somewhat human. My throat is still a bit soar and my noise is still a little stuffed up, but I feel much better. After a shower and a shave I am wide awake. I need to be. I am off to my parents house for the first night of the holidays.

Before I go out I am expecting a delivery from Freshdirect. They still rock so I buy food from them. There arrive is perfectly timed since I have absolutely no food left in my apartment. I have been putting off the order for a week and then I got sick.

I Don’t Feel So Well

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I woke up early this morning not feeling very well. I have a cold and feel like crap. My noise has been running all day. My ears hurt, and my throat feels like crap. The bad part is that I know it will only get worse before it gets better. I am heading home to Nyquil or Tylonol PM. Hopefully I can sleep using that stuff because I didn’t sleep well at all last night. Hopefully the drugs will kick this thing, or make me not feel anything while my body deals with the problem.

I left Kingston early since I don’t feel to hot. I left right when our CEO was showing up. Perfect timing on my part.

UPDATE, my jaw now hurts from the sinus pressure. I am on the train and the elevation changes are hurting like hell. I need some coco and a nap:)

My Treo Is Dead, Say Hello To Treo # 4

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My Treo 270 died from unknown causes friday night. It just wouldn’t get a network signal every again. I called T-Mobile and after 90 minutes speaking to 7 different people I finally got a new on shipping to me. I love those Treo’s, but this problem reminds me that my original one worked for not even 2 days before it died on me. I got a replacement after a week that time. This time it should take 2 – 3 days. So counting me selling my second one, I will be on my 4th Treo when the new one arrives. It should last about 1 – 2 months and then I will get the new Treo 600’s when they come out.

Also DOA this week is my blackberry pager. It finally stopped working completely. It went from bad lcd screen, to rebooting when sending messages, to rebooting every 5 minutes. Skytel claims that they can fix the reboot problem, but not the lcd issue. if I cannot read the email, I have no reason for the pager. The problem is that blackberry or RIM the makers of blackberry’s just stopped selling the 850’s, the little pager size units everyone has. they are focusing on the bigger PDA style devices. I am not happy because I want a pager like device. My hardware rep has a lead on something for me, if not I am hitting ebay for a used skytel blackberry.

2 Days At Kingston

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I did my 2 days in Kingston this week. I am on the train (Amtrak) heading home. Got allot done, and still more to do. We just brought up 10 computers from our NYC call center and are setting them up in Kingston. We now have over 32 stations setup with 10 more for training. We are well on our way to 48, the target for phase 1 of our build out. Then we move up to 85 stations soon after that.

I also just got a new help-desk person in Kingston. Kai started monday for us. He was originally hired as a call center supervisor but he had IT background and we liked him so we transfered him over. Sorry dave. the call center’s loss is our gain.

I will be in NYC the rest of the week, and Keith will be in Kingston Wed, & Thursday. I want all the building out to be done so we don’t have to spend so much time up there. It takes time to transfer the knowledge we have to the new people at the same time as we are deploying so much gear.

We just got 30 new phones. We need to program them. We also had 8 new people start Monday. It is busy, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Of course a break now and then would be nice!

So Much To Write About

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I have so much to write about I don’t know where to start. I just got back from the second night of the Jewish new year’s celebration. I was at my family’s best friends house. We do almost all the major holidays with them. This being the first holiday of the season was weird. Their were so many new babies and little kids. My sister hasn’t been the only one having kids. Bruce and Richard (my dentists) both have new kids. Scott brought griffin (1 1/2), his new son. Cari (another Cari, not my sister) brought her 3 kids (6, 3 1/2, and 18 months). Then their was like 5 others that I can’t remember. Lots of kids.

Dinner was ok. I am not big on holiday food spreads. Desert was fantastic though. Had some awesome chocolate cake. My dad had a little on my recommendation. he is diabetic, so he waits for me to have chocolate to give my opinion on if it is worth the sugar for him. 5 months & 6 days until I can introduce chocolate to Morgan. Morgan’s mommy may not be too happy, but I will try anyway!

I tried to rest today. It didn’t work. I didn’t feel well during the day. I didn’t get to bed till after 1:30AM since I got home late last night from the first night of the new year dinner. I took a furiset to prevent the migraine. it worked, but I was really tired. I couldn’t sleep though. When I lied down, I kept getting woken up by the phone. Now I will try to sleep and probably won’t be able to.

“Family” get together’s are always interesting, and annoying. I get the curious questions about what I am doing and how things are. That is normal from people you don’t see that much. Then I get the inevitable tech questions. Some of them are cool, and I don’t have problems answering. Case in point, Scott’s question tonight on what laptop to buy. He used to have a Mac and I talking to him about my Powerbook. He may get one, but also is looking at a decent dell. Told him he can’t go wrong with either. But then their are questions like anything from Wammy (not his real name but everyone calls him that. Don’t know why). Ever time I see him he picks my brain about all sorts of tech crap. Some stuff is interesting, but other times it is downright annoying. Now I like talking about technology. you can tell that by reading this blog, but I like talking about it with others who know what is going on. Family gatherings are not the place to discuss stuff.

I also tried to get data off my Dad’s old Palm 505. He just got a Treo 300, and I need to get the data onto it. Can’t get it off using the equipment he has at home. it only sync’s with his work computer, so I have to have him sync it and then backup the file and email it to me. I tried 2 cradles and neither worked.

Been Busy

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I was away in Kingston till Wednesday night. I was busy and tired at night so I didn’t blog. Tons to talk about but I just am not in the mode to write that much. As I said Kingston was buys. Tons of issues remain outstanding. NYC is also a hotbed of problems right now. I hope to have things straightened out by next week.

Tomorrow I go with my family to my mom’s friends house for the Jewish holiday’s. I am not a big “holiday” fan, but I do what the family asks in situation’s like this. Why piss off my mom when I don’t have to! I will play next time.

I didn’t go to Gus’ for poker like I thought I would tonight. I had too much to do, and I was really tired. I didn’t really want to be out late tonight while I had problems to work on.

The Phone Traffic Transfer

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Last night I successfully completed tranfering almost 50% of our call traffic to our new Call Center. At about 8:45PM Sunday AT&T redirected the traffic and it immediatly came up at the new center. It was actually very painless. Knock on wood nothing goes wrong.

Today I got to work at 7:30AM to reboot the call center software server, and from 8AM on the office was busy. We maxed out all the computers we had setup by 1PM. We even had 3 users logged in from our NYC office using the VPN tunnel. As of 10PM tonight it was still busy and they needed to get people back on the cisco phones because the queue was backed up alot.

Surprisingly (or not) we didn’t have that many major issues after the transfer. We had some computer that had some apps not working. We also had 5 machines that didn’t have Windows XP activation completed. The new computers ran out of the 30 days for activation and some of them coudln’t startup. To make matters worse the microsoft activation servers were not working ok. After some work, we got them online but it was a pain in the ass.