scott

Frontpage site fried!

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While trying to relay traffic from my apache server to my IIS server I caused IIS to stop responding. It probably just needs a reboot. I also realized that by pulling out pages from a front-page web and putting them into an apache server causes behind the scenes problems. Even after stripping out lots of frontpage code, more html remains that tries to reference the frontpage extensions. I knew that frontpage wrote bad html, but not this bad. It is not a big problem on my main site. I am working on my photo site now. That is a bigger problem. I have tons of pages, and hundreds of megs of images. I decided to do it from scratch even though I have a backup of the site. That backup has all the frontpage code. I am now generating page templates out of iphoto. Each category is exported separately and all I need to do is tie all the pages together into a cohesive site, and I have a new photo site. Sounds easy, but it will take some time.

While I am making these changes, I took it upon myself to clean up my photo album images. While doing this I realized that I have been taking less pictures over time, not more. I thought with a digital camera I would be taking more, but I guess I have not had much travel or stuff to take shots of.

I also need to learn how to do virtual sites in apache. that way I can keep the photo site name of photo.sitename…

The traditional Passover dinner.

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Well we didn’t have the traditional dinner. Like were were going to. It was a small group this year. My sister and the baby. Her good friends lorrie and don, and their not so baby dara! My parents and myself. My brother-inlaw came for a bit but had a early rotation friday so he left.

My dad does passover the way I like it. No service, no prairs, just sitting down and eating. As predicted I had a dam good steak. I had to turn down seconds because I had a late lunch.

Morgan was not in a good mood last night but I got to hold her for a little while. Not sure if she was just tired or hungry. She did eat like 2 times in 3 hours. At least I got to play with Dara. She just runs around and is the extreme kid. She is not even 2 yet. Out of all the baby’s I have seen I hope morgan grows up to be like dara. she has personality, and is a good kid. But kids tire you out. I am sticking with playing with other peoples kids and then going home to my quiet apartment for now!

I had to bring over my luggage for my parrents. they are going on a cruise next week and needed my big set. Man I forgot how much crap I had. I don’t know what they will do when we all go on vacation together. I will be using my luggage, so I don’t know what they will do.

Not sure what else to say about the semi crazy family. I wouldn’t like normal anyway!

Bidding wars, no its not a movie

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So we have the bidding going on for services at my new office in kingston. We got people asking to provide Internet service that I never even heard of. We also have two big voice providers coming in to bid this week and next. This week is the contender. (no names just yet), next week is the guys who have our biz, but need to work to keep it.

I also got news that we have a new hire for monday. I ordered his computer last night and should have it today. I hope justin can build it in time. We are out of phone ports so that will be interesting. we also have no place to put the guy so a phone is no big deal. it is now starting to get fun with space.

I am in the subway tunnel now, so I will hopefully write more later.

Kingston project is a go!

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Even though officially our project was a go for a while, we finally sat down and ironed out time table’s, and things. Our CEO wants everything ready at the facility by June 6. June 6, by the way was the date we moved into our current office last year. That poses a problem for me since I have vacation plans for that week. I am in barbados with my family. My boss Gus says to chill and wait and see if things actually shape up next week. Realistically I don’t think we can make that date, but I am told to aim for that date, I have to do everything possible to do it. Even if doing all that won’t change the fact that we wont make that date. it is an interesting position.

I also got the cd-rom / hard drive for the new server we bought. I believe I talked on monday about the discount server we got from comaq that didn’t ship with a cd-rom or floppy drive. Well that problem is resolved. I need to build the dam thing now.

It just started raining in NYC. I wore light khakis thinking it would be nice out. They are going to get messed up by the dirt and water kicked up when I walk around now. Oh, well.

I am on my own today, well I have justin but he can’t do everything I need him to yet. Keith is off due to the holiday. Not really sure why since he is not very observant, but I think he said something about having to travel to jersey or something. Should be an interesting day. We shall see…

Islanders suck (at least they did last night) Dell sucks all the time!

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I finally remembered why I haven’t gone to a hockey game recently. It is because as much as I like the Islanders, they find new and interesting ways to prove to me how they suck. I went to the game last night. And if you asked me if I had a good time, I would say yes. Why you ask? Not because the team played well or they won. No, because I got to hang out with some friends and make fun of how bad the islanders played yesterday. They gave up 2 goals in the first 5 min (back to back goals). They never recovered from that. it was brutal. And they lost to Ottawa! Come on. I know that the senators are the best team in hockey but I have an old running joke about them since when they sucked, and I was in college. I had a teacher from there and we never let her live down that she was from Ottawa. In reality I have been there, it is a nice city, but I still like to make fun of it. Dam islanders, now they have to win 3 straight to win the round. I realistically know that they won’t do that, so the islanders will be playing golf by sunday.

I went with dan to bestbuy, and got him his gear. I think I am going to configure his router today at work. not sure if he was going to try it on his own or not. While I was there I looked at the PDA’s. The moron’s at that store were like the model I liked was discontinued or recalled by HP because of a problem. I was like I just saw it in another bestbuy, and I see great reviews with no complaints about it all over the web. I don’t like when I goto buy something, and I know more about the product than the people who are trying to sell it to me.

The reason I was looking at PDA’s in the first place was that my Dell pocket pc didn’t ship. Those guys say it will ship on one day and then do nothing about shipping it. DELL, its not a computer, you don’t need to build it. It should not take a week to put a pocket pc box in a shipping box and address it. So I called them up and they were like your order is on hold by the credit card company. I was like hey guys I have no problems with that card, so why is it on hold. they of course had no clue. then they wouldn’t cancel the order because the order was on hold. I was like if you did nothing to the order yet, just cancel it. after showing them some logic (AKA, if it remains on credit card hold it will get canceled anyway), the women on the phone canceled my order. But a billion dollar company like dell doesn’t give you a cancellation number or anything to prove you actually changed your order. That will come back to haunt me, I can feel it.

I ended up ordering the HP ipaq 1910 from one of my hardware vendors. I should have it today. I should have done this first, but the ipaq does not do bluetooth, so it doesn’t meet all my needs. I will see if I like it. But for the price I paid I can sell it on ebay later without any issue. We shall see.

FYI, I also took 2 butabital’s (furiset) in the car before the game. I didn’t want to but I had no choice. I should get to the doctor again. 🙁

It might be summer, & an anniversary of sorts!

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Today is the first day this year that I left my house without a coat. It feels like summer. It is like 65 degree’s now going up to 80. I am happy the way it is right now. It is perfect. The AC in our office is not working yet. I think there is a problem. If I had this blog last summer I would have written about all the great problems we had with AC in our office. But I didn’t so use your imagination. It was hot. This year is not shaping up very good either right now. On a plus note the AC in my office works, but it dies under the strain of keeping air cool everywhere. even with the door closed it will get hot on the first 90+ day. we shall see what happens.

OK, due to me taking a late train yesterday night I actually had 3 blog entries yesterday. that will not happen that often. I really should have had 2, but I broke up one into personal stuff, & work stuff.

I am working on figuring out how feasible it is to move my entire photo web site over to my apache server. I want to get it to work, but I don’t want to have to do allot of work. there are tons of pages, and about a gig of images. it will be a big job if I can’t automate it or get frontpage extensions to work on apache. Hopefully I will have time this weekend to look at it some more.

I am taking Dan to bestbuy today to purchase wireless gear for his new apartment. Dan is the director of operations at the company I work for. He is really cool, and we get along great. That said, I don’t normally do computer work for people outside of work. I can’t stand it. Dan understands that so we are going to buy the stuff only. I like buying things! Actually some people I don’t mind helping, but others who have no business asking for help or other people who just expect it, I don’t like doing stuff for. He is in neither category so it will be fun to setup some wireless stuff. Wireless is good.

It dawned on me this morning that yesterday was an anniversary of sorts for me. I started at MFS network technologies (a division of worldcom at the time) 6 years ago on tax day. That was 1997 if people can’t do math. That really marks my beginning of my technology career. My first official help-desk job didn’t come till AuGust 1997, but I did plenty of technical and help-desk work at worldcom so I consider that my start. I figure when you are upgrading file servers, building new computers for people and auditing software you are in the technology field. That was just a bit of history about my tech roots.

Today’s work agenda, tech meeting, then tech management meeting, then trip to bestbuy, then kingston move meeting. Just full of fun meetings today! I also need to call and harass some vendor’s (see yesterdays posts).

Tonight’s the hockey game. I can’t wait. I broke out my Islanders jersey and it is in my bag for later. I am at a point where I cannot wear jersey’s of any kind to work. it sucks but I will deal. At least I can still wear tee shirts. I think it is funny to sit in a meeting with vendors in a tee shirt and khakis while they are in suits. it is very amusing.

Well I feel us descending into the train tunnel so I will stop here. Details on the game and other stuff tomorrow.

Tuesday With vendors, and web problems.

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Well I am starting to write this on the east bound train home tuesday. Not sure when this post will be finished but I am stuck leaving work at 7:30PM tonight. It is daylight out so I don’t even realize that it is late anymore. There is still work to do and it is light out, you forget it is 7pm.

We had some problems some web sites today. It was not fun. We think it is related to a bunch of different problems ranging from running out of disk space on one web server to huge amount of searching on a database server. It probably will take days to sift through the data.

I ended up meeting with our telecom vendor today. It was a meeting that was planned when I was out on friday so I was sort of surprised. I think it went well. We told them point blank that we were not happy with them, and we need problems fixed now or we wont use them on in our new office. they seemed eager to do what we want (of course who wouldn’t when you dangle money to someone). We are on sales guy number 4. This guy seems to have a clue so we will see how things go from there. it is tough. I like what these guys say, but I have heard speeches before and then get no results. if our new sales guy can do what he claims I will be happy. the question is will he do what he claims? I am betting allot on that answer.

In other news, Keith is officially a dumb-ass. His problem with the RAID array I spoke about before was that the card came loose and he didn’t check it while he tried to fix it for 2 1/2 hours yesterday. At least he figured it out on his own. FYI, I use the term dumb-ass lovingly:) If I really don’t like them I would just call them an asshole.

Hockey Playoff’s Vs. Passover

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OK, so I am really stupid sometimes. I found out Friday that I am going to a NY Islanders playoff game Wednesday. I also knew that Wednesday I am going to my brother-in law’s mothers house for the first night of passover. I didn’t put 2 + 2 together until Monday that both these things are this Wednesday. I took for granted that my friend rich who got the tickets would keep these things in mind. He didn’t. His family is only getting together for passover on the second night.

Now I had a delema. Do I goto hockey playoff’s or passover dinner. So being the good jew that I am, I decided I am going to see the islanders play hockey. Hey, I am not religious. The only reason I was going to go to passover was to not get the guilt from my mom. My dad and sister were both like “cool, did you get good seats?” So instead of sitting down for an hour of BS at a dinner that I won’t eat or won’t like with people I hardly know, I am going to a hockey game to hang out with one of my best friends and his girlfriend who is also very cool. I think I made the correct choice.

Now not being up on the whole religious think I am not sure about this, but I think that us jewish people don’t believe in hell, so I am lucky, since to some this might be a bad choice. I will believe in my own way. I will also conform on thursday night for the second night of passover!

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.