Personal

Missed writing yesterday, so I

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Missed writing yesterday, so I will write about what went on now. I thought Monday was busy at work. Wow, yesterday was worse. One issue after another just keep coming. Now don?t get me wrong. I like stress, or should I say I like to keep busy. If I don?t have much to do I get bored. But sometimes things get crazy. I was very bad. I had a roll for breakfast and totally skipped lunch. Well I had lunch if you are willing to count 2 snickers bars as lunch. I didn?t eat a meal until like 8:30PM. Note to self don?t do that again. I also started getting a migrane first thing in the morning. It started to get bad around 11, so I had to take some meds. Never a fan of taking the medication, but when it works I have no choice.

We ran a disaster drill at work. (not sure what that means see below I will discuss what I do a bit) We basically simulate a falure of something and see how long it takes to get the backup systems working. Well it didn?t go over as well as we planned. I was totally not happy, Gus my boss was totally not happy and after we discussed the problems with the group I think we made them totally not happy. We are going to be doing a lot more of those in the coming weeks.

Besides our test we had like two other legitimate problems also at work.

I never covered what it is that I do. I work for a company that basically sells replacement parts for consumer electronic, computer, & appliance?s. But what we really do is develop software that makes it possible to search all those types of parts. It is really interesting stuff, but difficult to explain to someone in a conversation. It is probably impossible to explain it in a paragraph in this blog. I am responsible for keeping the network and systems operational. It is very cool work. I like to say I play with toys for a living (I do), and other people pay for them. Of course since I have to make sure stuff works, when it doesn?t I gotta answer why it didn?t. That can sometimes be very stressful, especially if you need to rely on other people to explain and fix your problems.

I live in NYC. So this blog is looking like it is a product of the 30 minute LIRR (Long Island Rail Road) commute I need to take to Penn station every day. It is a relitivly quiet time that I can write.

While I am on the subject of background info, I might as well explain a bit about the name of the blog POWERZ. If you know me you mostly likely know why it is named like that. If not, here goes. My first name is in fact Scott. Of courseJ I use POWERZ because I got it from an episode of the simpsons. Probibly the best show ever made on TV. Actually I got the name (alter-ego) power from the simpson?s but added the Z. Homer simpson could very likely say ?everything sounds better with a Z in it?. Actually I did it so I could be very sure I got screen names online that no one is using, and keep the same one over multiple sites without adding numbers.

Yes, I like the simpsons, and yes I like computers. No I do not go home and play online gaming every waking hour. No I don?t have computer equipment all over my house. I have a decent amount of it, but I try to keep it small and in a confined space. I may be into technology, but I am so against the ?computer guy? stereotype. Actually it is kind of sad that I currently don?t have any computer games on my computer. I only just started working on my website again. I consider it like a hobby. My dad builds model rockets, my cousin builds remote control car?s, I work on a web site. Probibly cheaper than collecting stamps or coins. Actually my dad does the coin thing too!

I could rant for hours about the computer guy image thing. My friends and I like making fun of it too.

Well the train is in the tunnel again. I want to keep writing but time does not allow for it. Hopefully on the ride home or later tonight I can update what went on today?

Had a real bad night

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Had a real bad night sleeping last night. Went to bed fine, but for some reason I was unable to stay asleep. So of course by morning I was so tired I slept right through the first 2 alarms. So I over slept for like 40 minutes, but I made up time. Hopefully I shouldn?t be too late to work. This gives me an opportunity to try out writing on the train. The joy?s of having a really light laptop that has a nice keyboard! The train ride to work is about 20-30 minutes depending on if it is express or not. Since I am so late I am on a local and have plenty of time to sit here and write. It is actually kind of nice. Sort of relaxing, but not really.

Today hopefully will be better than yesterday. I am going to show Gus DFS on windows 2000 server. Also have to work on a bunch of other hardware quotes. The big thing this week isn?t even that much more work. It is to convince the entire company to start using jabber, now that we have a jabber server setup. One department wants it really bad, the others are like ?can we still use AIM?. I will see how this shapes up. That jabber is really cool though. I still would like a better client software, but what we have is good enough. After months of goofing around with jabber we found a windows 2000 server based version of it. http://www.tipic.com/ I know open source is great and all, but by purchasing that windows package we saved money in the long run since we didn?t need anyone to come in and setup Linux or spend hours trying to do it ourselves. It took me a few hours on a test box one day, and like 3 hours or less on the production box to get it setup. The only time consuming part was setting up all the users. Once someone takes care of that, we are in business.

I just only hope someone comes out with a better jabber client for the mac. I still don?t understand why I had to start liking an OS that isn?t supported as much as windows. WHY??? For years I used NT 4, with no consumer hardware that worked good on it. So I always had to look for the scsi scanner, the video card that was NT compliant, etc. Then 2000 & XP come out and I am able to buy and use all the ?normal? stuff made for consumers. XP is nice, I like it, but I cant understand why then I tried out this Mac OS X? I think I did it just to check it out, and now I went from a low end ibook to a ultra portable powerbook. Dam Apple. I guess ignorance can be bliss, because I was happy with the windows stuff lying around. But now I am using both, mac and windows. I take my powerbook and leave it on my desk at work now. They keyboard is really nice, so I just use it for chatting, and other stuff during the day. Also gotta say that office for the mac is better than for windows. Not sure why Microsoft did this, but it is. I am using word right now to do this blog, and update it later. Let me tell you that it kicks ass over XP. Of course that still does not make up for half the software I like not working on the mac. Thankfully most of the hardware I want works with it. Gotta thank someone for network printing?

OK, that was enough of my ramblings on mac vs. windows. As you can tell I don?t have an answer to that age old question. I am stuck between both of them. I rely on my powerbook more than every, but I also find myself switching over to my windows box several times a day just because I cant do something on the mac.

The train just entered the tunnel, so that is my queue to finish this up. Maybe I will write more later tonight? Not sure. This blog thing is still new so I am actually making entries. I hope I keep it up. More later?

Post party madness!!!

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The award party was fun on Sunday. Turkey was later than expected. Turns out cooking turkey is harder than you think. That is what my friend Amanda found out. In the end the food was great, but took a bit longer to make. We did what I guess a lot of people do, gamble on who will win the Oscar. I was amazed that out of 8 people I came in 3rd place. I can safely say I had no idea about almost all the films I was voting on. I like movies, but I didn?t get to many last year. I also tend to not see may films that are Oscar worthy! Go figure. I was aiming for not being in last place, so I did ok.

Today was very busy. Crazy things going on at work. Have you ever had a day where nothing ever goes exactly the way you plan? It wasn?t a bad day, but just things didn?t go they way anticipated. First all I can say is discount hardware is not always worth it. Also IDE raid, cheap and nice, but it has some work left to be done before I am very happy.

Didn?t get home tonight till 8pm. Cooking dinner now, and catching up on what is stored on tivo. I was going to log onto work, but I am just tired. Probably do something later before bed.

Nothing else going on of value today to note. I got a replacement stuffed animal for my niece Morgan. The first one was all messed up so I called and got a new one sent to me. Got to bring it over to her later this week. Not that a 3 week old will notice or care, but hey!!!

Getting ready for the party

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So there is no confusion, when I mean I got dressed for the part, I just put a tee shirt and khakis on. Hope no one expected a suit or tux. I havent even seen half these movies up for awards. Still will be interesting..
posted by Scott at 3/23/2003 05:23:48 PM

So I cleaned my apartment today. So far that was the highlight of the day. I think I am going to break this blog up with personal and work stuff. Lots going on at work that I think would be cool to document how things progress, but I don?t want to keep switching back and forth. So the bottom half of the posts will be ?tech? stuff, the beginning will be other stuff.

Just got dressed for the academy award party I am going to. Getting picked up by my friend rich in a bit. Apparently we will be drinking a lot so I don?t want to drive over. Looks like it will be fun.

So I found my cell phone last night. I thought I lost it Friday. I called and Verizon said that no one was making calls on it. I back tracked what I did Thursday and it turned up deep in a coat pocket. Glad I have 2 of those dam things, or I would be in trouble. That is one thing about a home (landline) phone, they never can get lost.

Got an IM from my friend Steve. He and another friend tom are coming down in April for a Def Leppard concert. I like 80?s music, and Def Leppard is my favorite. I just hope they don?t play all new stuff that sucks. Some bands should just give up on new music and play what people liked. So Steve & tom are coming down from Albany and due to some weird fluke that I didn?t want to get into they got tickets for Thursday & Friday night concerts. I like this band, but I hope I can handle 2 concerts of them in a row!

So I finally got Gus (the boss) his phish mp3?s. Very cool that they allow free distribution of their live concerts. I got like 800 megs of stuff and encoded them to mp3. Speaking of music and Def Leppard, I may have to go back and buy another copy of hysteria. It is like one of my all time favorite album?s and the copy I have is scratched. So the mp3 encoding of it sounds really bad with skippingL I wonder how legal it is to download those tracks from the internet if I already own the cd. Who am I kidding, that file trading software puts so much spy crap on your computer I won?t ever install it again.

Work

Yes I actually worked on Sunday. Remote access is awesome. Well it sucks that you work on Sunday, but at least I can do it from the floor of my apartment watching tv. I moved a bunch of network shares around. So everyone at work will think we are screwing with them, but the real reason is to get all the mapped drives onto 1 file server. We have been doing this piece by piece for 2 weeks and it probably will be another 1-2 weeks before we are done. Something always comes up to slow us down or distract us.

I am also playing with some cool features that probably no one uses in Windows 2000 AD (active directory). Just put up a DFS (distributed file system) share. It is cool. Next I want to look at 2000?s built in package distribution. We don?t want to spend $$$ on a separate package so we will play with this. Looks cool, but that does not mean anything.

More tomorrow!