Personal

Gadgets good, shopping bad!

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We went drinking Friday night. A bunch of us from work went out. Rajive was back from the caman’s so he wanted to drink. Also out was Sam, Aaron, Miguel, & Vijay. All those guys are in my company’s development team. Also out was jennifer, from our call center. I had a good time. I did not drink though. I had a headache around lunch time so I took to butabital (aka furiset) and that is not the correct spelling. I am actually getting slightly concerned that I am taking this stuff like twice a week. I used to suffer and not take the drugs, but over the past 2 years I have taken some med or another whenever I get the feeling that I am getting a migrane. Going out and not drinking is always interesting since you see everyone all stupid. At least friday no one got sloppy drunk.

Miguel and sam were thinking of going to Las Vegas friday, but Miguel has to run a softball practice for the company Saturday so they are not going. They are planning on going one weekend soon. I think some other guys are going to try and go with them. I am interested in going but the weekend they are looking at right now is bad for me. I will be in chicago that monday so I cant do a redeye sunday night back to NYC.

I got my HP Ipaq thursday. It is really small. So far I like it allot. I just haven’t needed the bluetooth internet connection yet. Then I will hate it. I just went out and bought a cheap case at bestbuy on Saturday. It didn’t come with one. I am ordering a nice metal case but it does not come in until may 15. Those people at rhino skin are awsome. they make great PDA cases http://www.rhinoskin.com. I also got a 128 meg CF card. I think I could have gotten a cheaper one online but I was at the store already. I put a bunch of eBooks and documents on it. I will see if I need a bigger one.

I goto the BestBuy near the Roosevelt field mall in garden city long island. If you are from NYC you know what I am talking about. So since I was there, I decided to hit the mall. Man I cannot stand the mall anymore. I used to love to goto the mall. My friend Jayson and I would hang out there a least once a week. This wasn’t in college or high school. We were already out of school and just liked to go. Now it is so crowded and people have no manners. I was in J Crew and I saw some shirts I liked and I actually stopped and thought, hey I should get this online. The funny thing was I actually didn’t get the shirts. The line was really long and I figured “i could get it online” and not wait on line.

So now I have to go online and do some shopping for clothes since I didn’t buy any at the mall. Actually I am on hold with the online shopping. The union that represents the doormen in my building are thinking of going on strike Tuesday. if they do I won’t be able to receive any packages, since fedex and ups wont deliver. I guess they wont cross someone else’s picket line to deliver stuff. I don’t get it, but I am screwed by it. I am waiting and seeing until Tuesday.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!!!