Personal

Shopping

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Jayson and I went shopping at Macy’s after work today. We are never good shopping together. We make each other spend money. I bought 4 new pairs of paints, 3 shirts, and some socks. For me that was allot. I got so much since they were on sale 50% off. My problem is I bought a type of paints that I never had before. I was not 100% sure on the size and if I will like them. If I do like them I am going to get more… Jayson also spent some $$$ on paints.

He got me buying the dockers paints that are wrinkle resistant and stain resistant. You can pore coffee on the paints and they wont stain. They will dry fast also. Water beads right off of them. I like the fact that I can wash them in the machine and not have to iron them. That will save me $ on dry cleaning. My current khakis get nasty fast. I hope these dockers wear better.

And I said I would not spend allot this month since I want to move. Oh well:(

Birthday Lunch Special At Angelo Maxi’s

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Went with Jayson and Dan to angelo maxi’s steak house for Jayson’s birthday today. It was good food like always. We had the lunch special. For $20.99 you get soup or salad (i don’t eat it) a steak of some kind, and desert. I get the cheese cake. It is awesome for like $26 after tax and tip. It is not an everyday thing, but once in a while it is nice, and allot cheaper than their regular meal at dinner time.

Jury Duty Update

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The powers that be have smiled on me today. Turns out that my case settled out of court. We were just told the good news. I am now waiting to be officially released from jury duty. The cop running the show has not decided to do that yet. I am not sure if we have to wait till 5PM or if we will get out soon. Either way I am out by the end of today. I am happy now.

All I have to do is get my cell phone back!

Jury Duty Sucks

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I am on day two of Jury Duty. Yesterday was going ok until I got put on a Jury. I was in the new courthouse. The AC was on, I had cell reception. I figured I can ride this out. No problem. Then I get put in a room for 4 hours and at the last minute I get selected as an alternate on a jury. I did my best to not be wanted, but they selected me anyway.

My dad picked me up from the courthouse yesterday and we went to dinner. THe commute wasn’t so bad. today will not be so nice. I got a car service to the court house again. That went over well, except for its cost. Going home is more difficult. I don’t know when I will be let go, so I cannot arrange for a car. Taking the rail road will take longer than it would from the city since I would have to go from Jamaica to wood-side back to my train station.

Other problems abound today. My GPRS service was not working on my phone so I could not check email. I figured it would start working eventually today. I will never know since the court house confiscated my phone because it has a camera on it. I can get it back later, but I am now without a phone all day. I had to call the office before and I used our 800# to get a hold of kai. If it wasn’t happening to me, I would think it was funny.

I am now waiting for my trial to be called. They say it can happen anytime between 10AM and 5PM. It feels like I am waiting for the cable company.

The only plus side is that the AC is going in the courthouse and it is comfy. Work will probably be hot and nasty this week without AC.

I am sitting here blogging in the central jury room waiting for my case to be called. I cannot find any outlets to power the laptop so I am keeping it powered down as much as possible. I have the screen brightness down all the way to conserve power. I don’t know how long I will be here. I also don’t know if or when I can charge the laptop up again today.

I have been using my Treo for email. That way I am trying to phase out my blackberry. Since I cannot have the camera phone in the courthouse I am having Jayson fedex me my pager for tomorrow morning. Hopefully I will get it before I leave for the courthouse. With my blackberry I can at least get email when I am out of the office. The Treo was fine yesterday, but they confiscated it today:(

This blog entry was written while listening to Black Balloon from the album “Dizzy Up The Girl” by Goo Goo Dolls

Saturday

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Alison and I met Jayson, Gretchen, Dave, and two of jayson’s friends from New Orleans. We meet at their hotel across from Penn Station. We ate a nearby Pizza place. The out of towners wanted some pizza. We only had a short amount of time before our reservations so we did quick and easy. it was surprisingly good.

I made reservations at the Gotham Comedy Club. it was right around the corner from Best Buy and Outback near my office. It was rated very highly from Zagats. We had a blast. it was really funny.

We sat righ tby the stage but in the corner by stage left. Gretchen got made fun of in the beginning when they were asking where people were from. She was slow to answer so they were making fun of Southerner’s being slow!

We even saw some comedian’s who I recognized from TV. One guy I don’t recall where I remember him from, and another guy I saw on Tough Crowd. All in all we had a blast. We ended up in the hotel bar after the show to hang out for a while. Alison and I took off early since we both had trains to catch. this would be a perfect night to have an apartment in the city. I could have stayed out late and not had to worry. Oh well. The search goes on for a place.

Quick Bits

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Kingston was interesting. I got stuff done, so that was good. I even slept a bit on the train going home. I never do that so you know I was tired. I think I got an hour or more sleep.

I left a key for the real estate person to show my apartment. Maybe I will get luck and they will rent it right away? I doubt it but you never know. I think they may show it today.

I figured out how I can have 1 ftp user account and have 2 sub directories in the users home folder. Each of those sub directories actually redirects the user to different virtual paths. That way I can have two directory trees, one for inbound, and one for outbound. To the user everything looks normal. Next up on the new FTP setup schedule is getting an SSL certificate for the FTP server.

After 2 months of waiting we finally got a hold of a the server we will be sending to our production environment. This will replace an aging server that needs more disk space. I had to lend it out to the dev staff for a while so they could do something with it. After 2 months I got it back and I can move it to our data center. I hope to move that today if possible.

Also today I have to make sure we have a computer and a phone for a new user that starts monday, setup SQL mail for a database machine, and probably 5 other things that I haven’t thought of.

Jury Duty Calls

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Tonight I have to start calling to see if I need to show up for jury duty. I can suck it up and do it, but the problem is we have something major going on at work next week. Wednesday and Thursday we are reconfiguring our NYC office. I am one of the 2 people that knows what we want to do. The other guy is not as technical so I am pretty much it. If I have to show up at the court house one of those days we have problems. I have not yet figured out what I am going to do about that.

I start calling today at 5PM…

Apartment Hunting

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I went to see what the apartment scene looks like in Manhattan today. I looked at midtown on the east side today. Nice places, but far from the subway. 1st Ave. is far from the subway. I don’t care how nice the place is.

One thing I realized is how big my current place is. I couldn’t physically fit all my furniture in any of the places I looked at today. not that they were really small, but my current place is really big.

I am going to look at the west side next week. I am beginning to think near the subway is a must.

Apartment Choices

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For several months I have been rethinking my decision to live where I live. I live out “way out” in Queens, and commute to Manhattan every day for work. It takes me an hour during rush hour, and longer after hours. I don’t have a subway near me so I take the LIRR.

The work commute has begun to be difficult, and it is also tough to go out after work because I worry about train connections. Also showing up in the event of an emergency at the office is almost impossible.

Last week I finally decided I needed to move. I love my current place, but as they say, location, location, location.

I spoke to my landlady last night and she asked for 60 days to find someone else. Other than that she is going to let me out of my lease. I am sending her a copy of the current lease with the date revisions on it, and she will sign it and send it back to me. I would assume that should be enough proof for me if I need to prove the changes.

I will give her till AuGust 1, 2004 and then I will be gone. Hopefully I will find something and move sometime in July. July 15 is perfect, but July 1is doable.

I am off to look at some places with a broker today. Alyssa and AJ at work both used her and they loved her. She is also no fee, that is a nice change of pace from the 1 to 1 1/2 months rent I have paid as a fee in the past.

I gave her my broad requirements for a place and she said that for the price range I am looking for I should have no problem finding an apartment. I am scheduled to see her today to see some places. I am told it is kind of early to be looking for an apartment for July, but I want to see what my options will look like.

What’s Going On?

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I have taken a few days off from blogging. I have been busy. Thursday night / Friday morning Jayson and I did our rewiring of our NYC computer room. We redid an entire rack. We also fixed the KVM’s in NYC. It took us from 9PM till around 4AM to complete the work. I was so tired afterward.

I was stupid during the work. I climbed onto of 2 of our racks to free up some caught cable. Getting down I hit my elbow on a rack door. It hurt. It is nice and black and blue now. Well actually it looks better now, but was black and blue when I did it Thursday night.

I didn’t get much sleep Friday morning. I had to get back to work. I ended up getting back to the office at 12:15PM. Turns out we got everything back online except 1 server. The server was ok, but the disk array plugged into it was not responding. Thankfully Gus got it working by rebooting it. This was not before he complained that jay and I were not in the office in the morning. He forgot about a little thing called sleep.

Surprisingly I completed the day friday like normal. I still don’t think I have caught up on sleep though.

I just hung out at home Friday night. I needed a night to just relax.

Saturday was another story. Due to our domain controller problem from last Monday I have had tape backup issues all week. The tape backup system runs on the domain controller that went down. So I have been working on getting the backups working like normal since Tuesday. I had to work on the backups a bit Saturday. Still no resolution. I also had to cancel plans with alison because of the problems.

After working on the backups, I got a call from Dan about a poker game. I was in.

My dad gave me a rid to the train so I wouldn’t have to leave a car there all night. As we pulled up to the station I realized it was May 1st and I had forgotten my new may monthly ticket. I should have taken that as a sign how my luck was going to go at poker that night and just go home. Of course I didn’t.

I had to get my cousin a 40th birthday gift so I went to best buy and got a gift card. I waited for the 1 train for 20 minutes before one came. That was another sign that my luck was not going my way. At best buy I did get to cut the entire line because I was paying by credit card and no one else seemed to be. That was a piece of good luck.

At poker I ended up loosing $40.00. That is not allot. I thought I was going to loose really quick. I lost my initial 2000 in chips, and then another 1000. I sat for a while before I could buy back in for the last time. By then I figured I would be out quick. Maybe be the first of the 8 to go out. Turns out I held on pretty long. I ended up being in 4th place. Granted it was a distant 4th from the guy in 3rd, but I held out for so long. Everyone left kept trying to kill me off for like an hour. That is what you do in that situation. But I just kept getting good enough (or great) hands that kept me alive. I wish that my luck was that good during the first half of the game. That way I might have had enough money to have been a threat by the end. All in all I had a good time.

I got to bed late again Saturday. actually by the time I got into bed it was early sunday morning.