Personal

Got a new place

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So I signed the papers today for my new apartment. As much as I wanted to buy something I think in this economy I wanted to keep “liquid”. I am moving into the first apartment I spoke about last week. It is a 1 bedroom in the building complex I currently live in. I am in the other building, on the 19th floor. I have a fantastic view of the manhattan skyline, and a patio.

I get to move in July 1, 2003. Now I have to find a way out of my current lease or else I am paying double rent for 2 months.

The bad news is the furniture I am going to get is not arriving till September or so. My parents are giving me their mint condition living room set, since my mom wants something new. Granted this set is like 15 years old, but she has not let anyone sit on the couch except for company in like 10 years. It is in fantastic shape. The wall unit is huge. They want me to take the dining room set also. That did not wear as well, and I don’t know if I have room for it. I was told I get it after the jewish holiday’s in september, or whenever they fall out this year. I really don’t know. I am that religious.

I am going to wait until after I get back from vacation to take care of all the address changing things. the major deal is changing the cable to the new apartment. I will have pictures before I move in. I have some but they are not very good. I will take a bunch in June after they paint and do the bedroom carpeting.

Now all I need is a girlfriend to hang out at my new place, but that is a different story!!!

How lazy can we get?

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Ok so I tried out this fresh direct. It actually was really good. They came within a half an hour of when they said they would. And they apologized for being late! I even cooked up a steak I ordered from them. it was good. This begs to question how lazy can we (i) get? I don’t even have to goto the grocery store if I don’t want to. Is that a good or bad thing? Food shopping is ok to miss out on. But what about regular shopping? I spent about 2 hours with my dad today shopping at best buy. he wanted to look for DVD’s. Waiting on line all I could think about was how we could have just gotten DVD’s off amazon. The scary thing is that he would have probably gotten 50 times the selection off amazon also. So do we shop because we need stuff, or do we shop because it is a social thing and we need stuff? I am getting philosophical, but I took a class in college that focused on post WWII American culture. One aspect we covered was the mall culture. People actually spend the day at the mall, buying things is optional. Is the mall culture dead? Is the online buying culture alive and well? Probably not yet, but I have narrowed down the number of things I need to goto a physical store for by allot. I think there are less things I need to go out to a store for than there are that I can order and have shipped to me. Don’t get me wrong. I like to shop if it is for the write stuff. I actually liked spending time with my dad shopping. I don’t get to spend that much time with him so it was cool, but I avoid the mall now a days. I used to go just to go. Weird world we live in where I changed my entire perspective on something in less than 3 years.

I think I decided on what apartment to get. I will probably pick the first one I saw. The second one looked nicer, but I just had a not so good feeling about it. Even though the real-estate agent is expensive, it is not much more than doing it myself. The guy I would deal directly with wanted me to kick back his friend. The amount he wanted didn’t save me anything, since his rent would be higher than the other apartment.

Softball hurts

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I ended up playing softball friday. It was very cold and slightly rainy. I only hit, I didn’t feel up to fielding. I am way out of shape after all. Turns out I did ok. I had 2 hits, and got out on a pop fly. I had one run. As Gus pointed out I did better than Keith who is athletic allot more than I am!

We went to some japanese bar after the game. It was nice. I hurt really bad this morning. Not used to any sport recently. Running in doc martin shoes is not a good idea either.

Some people were going to a karaoke bar after the first bar. I ended up taking off then. I don’t need to pay a cover to hear bad singers sing to me.

Poker plans for today were canceled. Not sure why, but John said he is trying to get a game with his brother and some guys next weekend. I told him I was in if he could get a game going.

I ended up working a bit today. I also slept late. that is always nice on a weekend. I went over to my parents for dinner. My aunt gale was over. I haven’t seen her in ages, probably since my sister’s wedding. Also my sister and morgan were over. Morgan is a cranky baby. I think she is just gassy. I got to feed her. it went well. I rate not getting puked on as a passing grade. She makes the funniest faces when she is sleeping. Every time I see her napping I think of the Barenaked ladies song “when you dream”. it is about what does a baby actually think about when they sleep. It is so funny, but true. You should give it a listen.

My dad wants to goto bestbuy tomorrow. That will be a loss of money for me. I always buy something when I go to that place. he needs to return a DVD or something.

I ordered from an online food delivery service called Freshdirect. A few people told me about it. Dan at work used it and thinks it is great. I got $50 in free steaks and they will deliver on sunday night. I will let you know how it goes. Still a few things I need to get at the regular grocery store that I couldn’t get online. But this seems like a great first step to no more food shopping.

Softball anyone?

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Today is my company’s 4th softball game. They are really bad. Or the have not won a game yet, and 2 of them were called since they were loosing by so much. Of course winning is not everything, and they did have fun playing. The first 3 games I had things going on that I could not make a game. Now today I can actually go. I forgot however that we had a game until about 10 minutes ago. That means that I did not dress for a game. Not that I wanted to play, but it would be interesting. I am debating on going and seeing the game instead of playing. I am not sure what I am going to do yet.

I got up today normal time and didn’t do anything that different than any other day, but I missed my normal train. Not sure why. Maybe I was just slower today than yesterday.

A bad sign is that my hands are hurting more first thing in the morning. I have been having issues with repetitive stress due to using the mouse alot. I am a righty, but use my left hand for moving the mouse most of the time now. The pain happens when I type, like now. It comes and goes. I need to have it looked at.

Tons of people from work went to see the matrix II last night. I now need to find someone who didn’t go so I can see it. My friend rich is in a wait and see mode with that movie. He is not a fan of the first one, so he isn’t running out to see this one. I hope someone hasn’t seen it so I can go with someone. With harry potter I didn’t see it in the theatures since everyone saw it when I finally got around to wanting to go.

So I took a small step to getting the 1 bedroom apartment I spoke about in my previous blog. In theory we have an understanding for a lease. I put a $100 down for a deposit, and I go back to look at the place with my parents on monday. I need my mom to check cosmetic things, since I don’t pick up on that stuff. My dad is just around to “supervise”. If they give the seal of approval, I go do a lease that day. This will actually be the first apartment I do that with my parents. the other ones were on my own. My first apt in NY was a mess, so having mommy look before I sign anything is a good thing.

Poker finally

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So I have been waiting since december to do poker with friends at work. Still nothing going on with that. So I was surprised when my friend John IM’d me today asking if I wanted to play poker this weekend. I think I just spoke about him. He just moved back from New Orleans after only living down there since january. I haven’t played in a while, but I used to play in high school so I told him I was in.

Speaking of New Orleans friends, I spoke with jayson like 3 times last week, and then he disappears again. I left 2 voice messages for him and no response. This reminds me of most of college for me. I would go years without speaking to him and then he would show up. On the weird disappearing friend front, I don’t know what is up with Jori either. Not sure if she actually was moving or not. I need to call her. I feel bad that I missed her birthday party in april. I didn’t speak about that in the blog yet. Jori is a long story. I will talk about it at some point, but not right now.

My dentist appointment went ok I guess. he only drilled 2 teeth. He will do more in 2 weeks. My dentist also said that he won’t even fill some cavities. All of them are so small that he claims wont get much worse in 2 years. So why drill now when he doesn’t have to. I trust him so I wait. I just wished he did all 4 teeth that he wanted to work on in one procedure. Now I need to go back. I hate not feeling my face for 4 hours after he is done. The not being able to talk is also bad.

Apartment hunting more

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Well after a flurry of posts 2 weeks ago I have been a little slower on the posts recently. I have not had my laptop every day on the train, and I have not always been able to write on every trip. Oh well.

I am sort of apartment hunting (see earlier blog entries). I think I found an apartment that I like. The only problem is that it is vacent now. That means that the land lord wants it filled by july 1. My lease runs out september 1. I would have to pay overlapping rent for 2 months as a worst case. I wanted to look at living in the city (manhattan for all you non NYC people). I looked online last night and could not find a building as nice as mine for my price range. My range is the same 1 beedroom apartment but costing no more than $300 more than what I am looking for in Queens. The dollar value I came up with is about is about what I pay to get to work for a month. The Railroad is expencive. No buildings I saw that had pools, and other conviences that I have at my building were in that price range. Yes, I don’t always goto the pool but I like knowing it is there. I also have used it in the past. The 1 hour commute is not great, but at least I get to sit and do work. 30 minute subway ride I will stand in a crowded subway. That would be bad.

Ok, so those are the facts. I am writting htem out because I want to describe my delema. Also I am trying to make sure I am doing the correct thing. I think I am, but if I have to write a big check no matter how correct I think I am, I will be crazy and second guess myself. That is just the way it is.

The other bad thing is that if I get this apartment and move on July 1, it will come right around when we are building out our new office. You can’t win when planning things like this.

Apartment hunting & doctors

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One of the concierge’s in my building has been keeping an eye out for a one bedroom for me. I rent a studio now. Apartments in NYC are expensive even if you don’t live in manhattan. I want more space and my lease is up in a few months so I am shopping around. he came across a 1 bedroom in my price range. I called the lady who posted the notice. Hopefully it is what I want and I can agree on terms. I don’t want to have to deal with a broker. The guy I used for my current place was cool, but I don’t want to pay 1 1/2 months rent as a fee. That is just a waste of money.

My dad called and said he wants to shop around for a new computer. I need to get him to set a price so I can go shopping for him.

I need to make plans to see the matrix 2 this week. Hopefully Rich will be free. Rich is my movie buff friend from High School. Neither of us have been to the movies as much as we used to. Some movies like the matrix you make an exception. Of course I just remembered he hates kiano rieves. I know I can’t spell. I will call him later to check.

So I have a dentist appointment thursday. I am not sure how much this is going to cost me. I need 5 fillings. They say they are all minor, but when you drill into me it is NEVER minor. I need to see if this is going to cost allot or if Richard will be cool about the cost.

I also have an eye doctor apt for when I get back from barbados. it is make sure I am not falling apart season. If you knew me you would know I have had eye problems since I was born. I have had glasses since I was like 4, so the eye checkup is a holly thing for me. I am also hoping that my doctor will say the la-sic surgery is good enough for me to have now. Because of the shape of my eye I was not a candidate for the la-sic so far. I was told like 3 years ago to wait a bit. So it has been a bit, I will ask.

Mothers Day

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Mothers day was nice. I went over to my parents house. My sister, brother in law and his family were over. The only no show was mikes sister. We had a good brunch, and played with the baby. it is very funny to see grown ups going all crazy over a baby. Of course I am included in that group of crazy people. I can safely say I do not like it at all when Morgan cries.

We fixed some problems with our Barbados flight. They did stuff to our seats so my sister got all pissed at American Airlines. I actually had inporved seats so I wasn’t pissed.

I also did some more work with VMWare. I got red hat to install fine on my laptop. The only thing now is to install the vmtools onto the red hat partition. That requires some config changes so I am working on getting that done soon. I also need to get the network card working properly with the vmware.

I got up at 4:30am today to catch my flight. I made it. I am writting this blog at 30+ thousand feet. I meet Gus at the airport, but he was flying standby on my flight. That means I don’t know if he actually made the flight. I hope he did. I will walk around and look after the drink cart goes by.

Lots to learn about linux

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Gus is the linux master. Well, he knows allot more than me. That may not make him a master, but he knows his stuff. My red hat server has been serving up web pages really slow for weeks. I had no idea what it was. Gus got into it and found a line of code trying to find a dns server that is not in existence. Once that was fixed, it served up pages nice and fast.

No major plans set for this weekend. I am spending time with mom on sunday. I am going to wing Saturday. I am going to check and see if we are going drinking after work.

I am also going to play with Microsoft office 2003 beta. Howard got it and he says it is stable and nice. My cousin wayne also said the same thing last week. I will give it a try on my laptop. I also want to try out VMware. It looks great. The problem is it is expensive. I am going to see how long the trial is for. I probably would buy it if it works like I think it will.

OK, today is the day we sign the telecom contracts. I have said that allot over the past several weeks, but today is the day. I think we have ironed out all the problems. Now all I need is for Gus to say ok, and put pen to paper. We are starting to slip on the schedule. That is the unspeakable topic though. Of course it is May 9 and it takes 30-45 days for a T-1 to come in and we haven’t ordered 4 of them yet. You do the math. Will we be live on June 6th? The plus side is that construction is just as delayed, actually more so. It feels good not being the reason something is held back from completion.

We had a stupid outage this morning for work. I got woken up by Justin (Help-desk guy) that the call center site was not loading. Turns out that a database job failed taking everything with it. It is back up now, but I need to see what checks we have in place to prevent this. Also why they didn’t work. This is the third outage in 3 weeks related to a release of new code. I am very pissed about this. Gus says he is very disturbed by this. I want to bash people’s heads in at this point. I need to think happy thoughts.

I setup a new application server in our Corporate DMZ. A DMZ for people who don’t know is a place on a network that is isolated from the internal company computers but allow to be “open” to the internet. You make it so you can web browse to it, or ftp, or whatever you need it for. The point is to isolate it from everything else to do this. Well this new box is finally running the mail server I setup. Our QA mail system is now working fine on it. I also setup a small admin website for internal use. It is only one page for now. Also on deck is the Norton Anti-virus setup. This is big. I am also thinking if I need to move our chat server to kingston this can serve as the local chat server. I don’t want to move the chat system though. Probably will need to discuss with Gus on that point.

Keith is slowly working on our Layer 3 switch for our data center. He has the design concepts down. I laid out what I wanted to do, and he seems to be picking stuff up quick.

Left work on time. Wow!

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So I actually got out of work sort of early yesterday. I hopped on the subway and went to my sisters. My parents came over and we had dinner. The baby is still fun, but she is cranky. Not sure why. I won’t go into theories here. When she isn’t cranky she is awsome. I installed a CD Burner for them so they can make CD’s of all the pictures of morgan. Also they can try and free up hard drive space. They are always getting out of disk errors.

We took Morgan to Barnes & Nobles. My mom got a ton of baby books since she had a discount this week. Mike was working so I didn’t get to see him. His rotation for his residency has crazy hours for the first year.

Keith fixed dan’s Wireless Router. He dropped it and did some damage to it, but according to dan it was dropped after it stopped working. I need to check today and see how it worked out. He called with problems last night, but he was going to call Keith to help him out.

I spoke with my friend jayson for the first time in months on Tuesday. We used to talk like once a day. We both got busy I guess. He had questions about frontpage. I got him setup on his server. I also setup an IIS site on his server for me. Running just apache is not working for me. I don’t have enough time to move my site off of frontpage. So I either can have it run all half asked or put it on an IIS box again. He gave me admin rights and I will probibly setup the site there or in one other spot. That way I don’t need it on a server at home.

Jayson is doing volentier police work in New Orleans. He said he wanted to do it, but I didn’t know he started. It sounds pretty cool. He is one person I don’t want with a badge pulling a gun on me. He will use it if he needs to!