scott

Sales guys suck, & other Tuesday news

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Have I mentioned that sales guys (people, gotta be politically correct) suck? They do. I am trying to sift through all the quotes and crap I am getting while preparing to build this new office, and people don’t have a clue. I have one phone provider call me last week going they can’t provide local phone server in the area we are moving to. I was like, ok sorry. I guess we can’t use you then since I want one company to do everything for me. Then monday I get a call from that guys boss going, well we kinda can do local service in that area. I was like make it simple and make it a good price and I will look at you. Until then these guys are talking BS. I cannot wait to get the bidding out of the way and just build the thing.

Our weekly management meeting was canceled yesterday. I think there was a board meeting or something. It will happen today instead.

So I got my new low end compaq rack mounted server. I mean low end when I say it. This thing is an IDE drive machine with RAID in it. it is so cheap that it didn’t even come with a CD-ROM & Floppy drive. Normally I assume a computer will ship with at least 1 input device such as a floppy drive. got a call out to those people to get something so I can load the OS onto it. Like I said sales people are moron’s.

The only other things of note on monday were we had some patches of problems with one of our database servers. Our engineers are looking at it. That means I need to get my crazy 8 ball out and help them with the diagnosis. Also Keith is having problems with an IDE RAID system. I will look at it with him today.

Work again, Monday Meetings & hardware purchases

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It is monday again. The most hated day of the week. I used to not like monday’s just because it was the first day back from the weekend. My new issue with monday is it is the day of meetings. Actually it used to be the day of meetings, now it just feels like it. Monday is the day that all the managers in my company get together to let everyone know what is going on. That means writing up agenda’s, and other fun meeting stuff.

Monday is also the day in most companies where new hire’s start. We are no different. Thankfully we don’t have any today. I actually have someone new starting tuesday, but we probibly will have like 5 new people on next monday. Not sure yet. No one tells me till the last minute normally.

This week I need to finish setting up the temporary firewall I will use to test the new network for our kingston office. For setup purposes I am creating a new isolated network for all the gear we are getting for that office. I am using an old firewall we stopped using in february. Once that is done I will need to begin getting quotes for servers. The next step in the design would be file servers and a domain to put all the computers in. We currently use a mix of compaq and dell servers. Most of our machines are dell, with some database machines being compaq’s. Alot of our older equipment is VA Linux machines. I personally don’t like the VA Linux equipment. The company stopped making hardware, and the machines are not hot swapable anything in them. Granted their track record is ok. I have only had problems with 3 of them that I can remember, and we have over a dozen of them. For this new office I have not yet figured out if we will go compaq, or dell. It will depend on price most likely. I also have an IBM guy wanting to sell us stuff. They say that they can meet the other guy’s prices, but I haven’t seen that happen yet. Sales guys, are sales guys.

Another cool project we have going on is upgrading our data center to a gigabit backbone. We have the design down, and now we need to buy and deploy the hardware. I probibly will purchase that stuff this week. that will be cool to deploy.

Obviously since I am talking about work stuff I need to be vauge enough so I can write it here, but also descriptive enough since I want this blog so I can write about what I am doing and thinking. That will be a fine line I walk when doing this.

Pocket PC wins over Palm (for me, for now)

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I didn’t listen to myself. I went out and ordered the Dell Axim pocket pc. it had all the features I wanted except that it is kind of big. Other than that it cheap for a pocket pc, it has the bluetooth add on capability, and it has memory upgrade slots. I chose that over the slim HP model that does not have bluetooth. if you don’t know what bluetooth is, it is a wireless way to connect devices. I have had allot of success with bluetooth connecting my palm, cell phone and powerbook. the problem is you need devices that support it. that is a key factor in my technology buying now. so if one device does not do everything I need it to, can it connect via bluetooth to something else that can do the job? the down side is that dell takes a while to ship anything. I have a weird way of thinking about paying for stuff. Once I get the pocket pc I will of course sell my current palm on Ebay. I probably will make as much or more money back from the palm sale to pay for the pocket pc. Crazy justification for buying a new one, but it allows for almost spending more on something while getting a new device earlier than I would normally have.

On another note I totally forgot that my friend rich got us islander play off tickets for Wednesday. I am not sure the kind of seats we got, but I look forward to going. I love hockey. it is the one sport I can get into. I played a little roller hockey in college, and when I worked at summer camp when I was younger I played and coached a bit. so I am into the sport. Every season I say I will follow it more or goto more games, but never seem to find time to go. I have gone to play off games the past 2 years. this will make 3 for me. I am a toronto maple leafs fan as well as a NY islanders fan. always difficult when both teams I like are in the same division, but I normally root for toronto when both teams meet. My thinking is if either team win’s I am happy. I will break out the islander’s jersey Wednesday for the game. it should be fun.

Not that I care a huge amount about who reads this (it is primarily for me to have as a journal), but I want to figure out how to get this out so I may get some visitors. some of the writing is kind of private, but I always wonder if I am any good at writing so this is a good chance to see if people can actually make sense of what I write. So I think the next step for this blog is to get it “out there” and see what happens.

Another thing I need to do is create a sort of cast of characters of my life! I mention people in this thing, and if you are a stranger reading this you have no idea who in the world I am talking about. I did something funny with my friends a while ago with funny bios, but I think I may actually do a real one for some people I talk about. This all depends on if I have time on the train to write it. this entire blog rely’ on the fact that I have time to write. today I have time to do 2 full entries, but other days I can’t do any. we shall see. also my hands have to not hurt. I have been having problems with hand stress again. it comes and goes for the past few years. that is the curse of working with computer all the time. also not do ergromatic things when working on computers also does bad things to you.

OK, it is late. I am off to bed. I hope to get back on a normal sleep schedule tonight from the past 4 days of crazy sleeping habits.

Computers, do they suck up or free up time?

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From the title you may think I am pondering the usefulness of computers. Not true. I think they are great. So much so that I made a career out of working with computer networks. But, sometimes I think they can cause tons of wasted time. I think that today because I needed to spend hours yesterday and today rebuilding my computer. Last Wednesday I blew my desktop away and re-installed windows xp. tuesday night I put the machine in a new case and during the move I physically destroyed a hard drive. Out of the 4 drives that I had I lost the one with the important data on it. The good news was that I made a backup of it that morning. The bad news was I didn’t get everything. I left off some less important stuff. you don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have it. But ok, there I was with a bad drive and a backup. I was feeling dam proud of myself for making a backup. Well try importing the data back off the dvd backup I had was a pain. At first I didn’t think it would work. I kept getting major bad errors when copying. I ended up throwing the dvd in my mac and restore it from there. At this point I may just leave the “personal data” like word doc’s, pdf’s and images on the mac. I didn’t want to do that, but it is turning out to be ok. Yeah, I am just grumbling. Everything seems to have turned out ok, but it took a day and a half working on and off to get things restored. That does not count all the programs I still need to reinstall on that XP machine. I will be doing that for weeks. So this week, computers have been a drain on my time, not a savings. next week hopefully will be different.

On the flip side, I am sitting here with my handy offline blog editing tool writing this blog as my trusty powerbook is taking my photo album I had backed up and sucking it into iphoto. It places them in nice categories. I have very few complaints about the program. I was also able to hack together a non-frontpage enabled version of my website on the apache server. the photo album site of 1gig of my images will take allot longer. Also not up is what I used to call the edata site. it contained data out of an access database. apache can’t read ASP files so I need to figure out PHP & Mysql to do the same thing on apache. that will take some time also. I honestly am not sure if I will take that plunge. I would have to export a bunch of data into mysql and I don’t know it that well yet to be the sole location for that data. I am so crazed about screwing up my apache server and the content that every change I make I am backing up the directory to my windows 2000 server. I just need to get comfy with everything.

Today was another lazy day. I got up late (11:30) and just bummed around all day. worked on the website and cleaning up my desktop computer. Tons of fun stuff:) I also made a ghost image backup of the desktop OS just in case. Also got the TV watching down. Trying to catch up on things I missed this week on tivo. I also watched harry potter II last night on DVD. it was ok, but they leave so much out of the book. I totally understand they cant put everything in the movie, but it is just a let down. that is probably why I didn’t see it in the theater.

My parents probably will call and want to do the traditional sunday dinner. Not sure if I am going to opt in tonight. I had pizza for lunch and that is what they do every sunday.

I am also shopping around for a new handheld PDA. everyone who knows me knows that I go through stuff like that and cell phones relatively quickly. I do a pda about once a year. This year I went through them like every 6 months. The reason I do that is because I have not yet found the perfect device for me. If I did I would stick with it, but alas I cannot find it. also my requirements change as my needs change. what I need now is totally different than what I needed when I was traveling all the time. I am thinking of a pocket pc. the palm I have is nice, and does almost all I want it to, but it does not do everything. the problem is if I switch to a pocket pc I will probably have to give up something. Either weight, wireless ability, allot of $$$ from my wallet, or a combination of the 3. I probably will go to bestbuy tomorrow during work to take a look.

Def Leppard still rocks!

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As I have discussed before I have not written in a few days because two friends came down to visit from albany. One of my good friends from college steve and a friend of his tom came to visit. I know tom through steve, but he is really cool. They both came down to goto some def leppard concerts. We went to the thursday & friday night concerts. They actually made great time thursday and showed up early. I went up to meet them at a brew put right by the beacon theater where the concert was. I still am queasy about drinking after last week so I didn’t drink. I had some “healthy” cheese sticks and hung out and caught up with steve. The concert was awesome. we sat in the next to last row on the upper level, but I didn’t care. Tom had a floor seat since they didn’t get 3 tickets together for the first night. they played over half the songs from the hysteria album. I was very pleased. got to hear my favorite song live twice, it was nice. If anyone needs to know my favorite song is Animal by def leppard. I have others songs that I like allot but I still consider that my all time favorite!

So it turns out that tom had problems with his seat. he and another guy had the same ticket, so for the first few songs they thought that someone was running a scam. he was pissed since he went to ticket-master for the tickets. He ended up having to stand at the side of the stage the rest of the concert because they gave the other guy the seat. it was funny, but really stupid. Steve & my seats were fine.

We went back to my place afterward and just hung out till like 2-am before going to bed.

I actually got through most of friday without dealing with work. it was nice. I just had to call Keith about 1 problem with a backup. Other than that and him calling to try to mess with my head once work was non-existent.

Friday, Steve, Tom, & I went into the city at like 1:30 after eating lunch at the omega diner. To save on parking we took the rail road in and bought the unlimited ride fun pass’s for the day. We went to the trade center site since neither of them saw it before. I swore I wouldn’t go again with them, but we had nothing going on. I got a chance to goto J&R computer world, so I wasn’t complaining. then we went up to time square area and walked around for a while. We needed up spending like 2 hours in the virgin megastore just looking at the dvd’s. the guys from albany were amazed at the selection. I was pretty impressed myself. we ended up eating (and having happy hour) at planet hollywood. I was fighting a migraine all day so I didn’t drink. I ended up having to take a bextra at lunch, another at dinner, and then 2 furiset’s (aka butabital). I COULD not get a migraine during this concert. I called my dad and he said I could mix the bextra and furiset. I was worried. I didn’t eat because my head hurt too much. I am thankful to say that the drugs finally kicked in and I was fine for the concert. I also got ear plugs so that helped. I liked the first concert better, probably because of the drugs and headache, and the ear plugs drowning down the music. Steve and Tom liked the second one better. Def leppard played an extra song in the encore, and it turned out to be one they have only played once before since 1996. I never heard it so I didn’t really care. Either way I had an awesome time both nights. it was also good to see steve. I am thankful for tom putting up with our “old college stories”. he also gave me some steve hight school stories so I had a good laugh.

Steve and tom took off early today (9-am). I woke up long enough to say by, and hear them leave. I went back to bed till like noon. I was zoned out till like 3pm and then started working on my new linux box (see previous post). Not sure what is in store for tomorrow. more later!

Apache, Moveable type lives! IIS, Frontpage are on life support!!!

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Ok, after less trouble than I though (but with some problems) I am now hosting my own blog on a linux server running moveabletype and apache. My boss was awesome in giving up time to help me configure this. I had alot done by myself, but it still didn’t work right. So I called the man who knows linux. this is the same person forcing me to learn it, but I needed the swift kick in the ass to do that. Thanks, enough but kissing since I know he reads this!

The nity gritty of it all is I installed Red Hat 9.0 on an old dell desktop I have. Pumped 380+ megs of ram into it first of course. and then downloaded movabletype. that program kicks ass. I just finished importing all my old blogger.com entries into the new system. All I have to do is figure out how to properly back this thing up. I also got the offline posting app on my powerbook to work. I am writing on it right now. It is Kung-Log. I also downloaded w.bloggar to do the same thing on my XP box if I need to.

The next major step is to port my website over from IIS & frontpage to apache. that may be time consuming. I did have a copy of my site running on a win32 install of apache a few weeks ago as a test. seemed to display the current pages fine. I will just have problems with the indexing and other frontpage centric features.

As much as it was painful I actually enjoyed tinkering with red hat. I have ton’s to learn, but I learned it is not impossible to do.

Now that the technical stuff about this setup is written I can write about the past few days in the next post!

Hot n fresh OS install’s, mmmXP

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So I took the plunge. After more than a year (personal record since I started working in technology) I reformatted my home desktop?s hard drive and re-installed windows xp pro. It took me two hours to just get the OS installed, and service pack 1 with some hot fix?s on this thing. I just installed the latest and greatest Norton system works to get that clean sweep action going on. I am now contemplating doing office install?s. it takes a while and it is getting late. I came to the conclusion hours ago that this install wont be done till after the weekend. I will be finding applications that I need to install for the next few weeks. Who knows the settings I lost by doing this. I really should not complain. This is a task long over due. The final straw was the weird errors I got when I put my new 160 gig hard drive in the computer. Now I have a clean install that I hope to keep free of too much crap. At least my mac is (so far) easier to clean stuff off of.

Besides the virtual cleaning, I did a very quick once over of the apartment. My friend Steve and tom are visiting tomorrow. I wont have time tomorrow to do anything since I will be going to the concert right from work. If you haven?t read earlier posts we are all going to a def leppard concert tomorrow. Hopefully they are good.

Since I am going right to the concert I have to travel light to work. Of course that should be no problem since I can?t sync my palm tomorrow since I don?t have the software on my computer yet. That also means I won?t have my work laptop all weekend. I am taking off work Friday, and wont bring it to the concert. That means it sits on my desk all weekend. Don?t worry, it is locked down in a locked office!

Other news today, I convinced the powers that be at work (Gus) to purchase red hat 9.0. Actually it was a no problem. He was all for it. For $60.00 you get 1 license to the red hat network. If we actually start to deploy red hat servers in any number we can spend like $98 a machine for limited support patch syncing and other cool features. I SO need to learn Linux. I am trying to find things to do in it, but finding time is hard with all that is going on. On that note I want to setup my own blog (running on my server, instead of using blogger). Movabletype looks great, but I don?t have a Linux web box right now. Doing any personal blogging system on windows does not look too fun. All of the documentation is for Linux. Must get red hat 9 at home.

Other news (and then I will goto bed) is that I finally made airline reservations for my vacation in June. My family is going to Barbados to celebrate my dad?s 60th birthday. Got the tickets this afternoon, and even got good seats. My mom is renting a house and all we had to do was get tickets. It will be an interesting vacation. The jury is still out on if it will be loads of fun. I was all for going to a resort, but I lost that vote. I am looking forward to scuba diving. More on that as the vacation gets closer.

More in a few days. Not sure when I will post next since I will have company Thursday through Saturday. We shall see?

The scrub haircut guy & other misc. items

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Yesterday was a good day, I think. Got a lot done at work. We still are no where with picking a hardware vendor, but at least we getting other stuff done. Got construction requirements done for the space. I was bad and had burger king for lunch. I don?t do it so often anymore so I think it is ok. Keith was going down there, what was I to do? I also took care of my metro card problem. I never got my mail and ride ticket for April so I had to fill out an affidavit and get it notarized. It was a pain, but it is all sent out and I hopefully will get my money back and my may ticket on time.

Got my hair cut also. The guy I always goto was on vacation so his dad did my hair. He is good, but never cuts it short enough. I will probably have to go back in like 2 weeks. I like those guys. I goto an old fashioned barber. It is father and son who run it. These two Italian guys just cutting hair. they are cheap also. My friend jayson showed me this place years ago. I was paying double what I pay now for a haircut at the ?stylist? and it was not as good.

After I got my hair cut I picked up food at the omega diner and got my mom. We went over to my sisters to eat dinner. My dad was already there babysitting. Everyone is all worried because Morgan cry?s right after eating. I guess that is a bad thing for babies. Got to play with her for a while. Then I got to hold her while she slept. I love doing that. It is so peaceful. I had to go home though because it looked like we were having problems at work. Anyone at work reading this, when I get 20 pages while holding my niece I am not a happy camper!!! Besides playing with Morgan I also sent all of her baby pictures to myself via ftp. My sister is running out of hard drive space, and she does not have a cd burner. My next project is to find her one.

I got home around 9pm. I installed my new hard drive for my desktop computer. 160 gigs of stuff. I started to move stuff off my old drives. Got one of them done and found out the one that broke was the data drive with all my personal files on it. I am so happy I made a backup of most of it to DVD before I did this upgrade. It is bad, but not too bad. I gave up on moving my mp3?s since I have a more recent copy on the powerbook I am using. I will back it up later. The only thing I need to do now with my ?modified? not upgraded computer is to reinstall windows xp. I have been using the same install for over a year. That is like a record for me. I tend to reinstall operating systems every few months. Now I am busier I do it less often. Hopefully the mac will require less reinstall?s of the OS also.

Spoke to Steve. We are still on for Thursday. Him and tom are driving down around 4pm. That means they will probably be late for the 8pm concert. We shall see.

I am running late today. I just got up and could not get going. So I missed the 2 regular trains I take. I should be like 20-30 minutes late for work. Still well ahead of the rest of the department. Actually looking at my pager just now I realized I may be a little later than that. I don?t think we are doing a staff meeting today since 4 people are out of the office this week. I just paged Gus asking him what we will be doing.

Well we are now entering the famous train tunnel to NYC. It is rainy today, again. My hands also hurt and it is only 9am. I hope they get better because I type and mouse click all day! More later, maybe?

tuesday again (an original title)

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Tuesday again. I realized yesterday after I wrote this blog one reason I didn?t write in a while was I didn?t have the laptop during the train ride. Took Thursday off and saved weight on Friday and Monday by not bringing the powerbook to work. Oh well.

So I am really pissed, I was hanging out a little after work yesterday before I came home and a guy I work with dave hit me in the head with a mini basketball. It was an accedent, but it hit me right in the middle of my glasses. Since these glasses are so light weight (AKA easy to break), they are all out of bent. I can still wear them ok, but they feel like crap. I need to goto the lenscrafters near work sometime to fix it. The problem is I don?t go eat lunch anymore. We order in all the time. Also it snowed in New York yesterday so it is cold nasty and wet out today. It is april and it is still snowing. I will be honest and say that I would rather it snow than be 85 degree?s right now. My apartments air conditioners don?t come on till may 15, so it better be dam cold till then.

People actually read this blog. I am amazed. Well maybe not people, but a person read it. Of course that person happens to be the boss. Crazy, yet lovable Gus. Knowing that he may read this, I can safely say he keeps me on my toes and challenged. But he also adds to the blood pressure! Actually he was very funny Monday. He hurt his back over the weekend, and took some pain med?s Monday. He was loopy most of the day. Keith said he went over to his office to do something and Gus just staired at the keyboard for a few minutes before he remembered what he was supposed to do. Of course I won?t make fun of anyone hurting themselves working out, since I don?t and I should!!!

Trying to remember what is on my agenda for today. I am supposed to meet with some executives from a company called expanets. They support our phone switch in our call center. They are really bad so we are screaming at some executives. It may make us feel better, but I doubt that they will do anything new. I am a pessimist that way. Today is also day two of the no developers week. Or less developers than normal week. So far so good.

I want to add features to this blog to allow responces to my posts. I half want that to see if anyone is reading these. The other half of me doesn?t want it because I probably will get freaks posting stupid crap.

Looking out of the train just now it looks like it is going to snow again, or it is just dreary outside. The whole sky is all white, or white/grey. Not a beautiful site.

Well I think I have said my peace for the morning. More later, maybe!!!