Technology

Mac or Thinkpad?

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Mac or Thinkpad T-43? What do I take with me for a week away? For personal trips I would take the Mac hands down. Now I am going away for work next week. On one hand I get the Thinkpad from work, and I like it. On the other hand I have been working off the Powerbook as my primary machine since I got it. I use it as my main email, web, chat, and document editing platform. That is allot of my day, but not all of it. I still use my Thinkpad or desktop PC for terminal sessions (not a huge fan of the mac RDP client, and the MMC plug in for remote desktop still rocks), and VMWare. That is allot of my day also.

So what to do? The Thinkpad has IP Communicator on it, so I can VPN into work and then use my phone extension. My powerbook has Skype, and the Xten VOIP client for Broadvoice if I choose to setup my account for it. I can use bluetooth headsets with both machines, but the mac works better hands down. The Thinkpad has a bigger screen, and since it is work property I am less concerned about beating it up (but I know I still care so that is not such a big issue). Of course the bigger screen is also harder to see since its resolution is so small. Bad for me and my glasses:(

Thinkpad had good battery life and I have 2 batteries. Shall I go on? I am thinking if the Powerbook works fine with the new Cisco VPN client I will just take it. I have grown accustom to using it. Even though somewhere in the back of my head part of me says take the Thinkpad.

Why do I care what I take? Why should you? For me it is what will I use as my lifeline to the office while I am away for a week. Hopefully wont need it, but if I do it is a big deal. Why should others care? I don’t know. I felt like writing about what I was thinking. Also it kind of boils down to the age old question, Mac or Windows? For me the answer is both if you can, but if you have to choose I think I will edge over to the Mac side!!!

Dual Headed Monitor

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Chris demoed me a dual monitor setup a few weeks ago when I was visiting. I know dual monitors is nothing new for most tech people, myself included. I remember when my cousin Wayne showed me it once a several years ago with 2 15″ flat panels. This was back when 1 flat screen was a big deal, but 2 was just decadent.

I had played around with the dual monitor concept just once over a year ago. I setup 2 flat panels (15″ Samsung’s) side by side. It was cool, but took up desk space. my thoughts at the time was why not just have 2 computers setup? And that is exactly what I did. I had 2 monitors with 2 computer setups. one with a KVM and up to 4 computers and another one for my laptop. Yes I know I was geeking out. But this was for work, so that makes it ok.

Recently as a few weeks ago Jayson had tried the dual monitor thing, but gave it up because of desk space issues.

When seeing Chris’s setup I realized the advantage of actually using two displays. One for general work stuff, and the other for terminal sessions (in full screen) or leaving our monitoring tools up on screen all day. I found a video card I could use (already with dual monitor support built in so I had no need to find a PCI card to go along with my AGP one) and put it in my desktop box. Besides having the dual head setup looking really cool with the matrix screen saver running on both monitors, it was also practical since I left our monitoring “threat board” up on a screen all day. I did loose some desk space, but I got rid of the monitor stand I had so I think it evens things out. Not sure if I will keep this setup, but for now it is working out for me!

Bye Bye Treo, Maybe?

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I got fed up with my Treo 650 this weekend, and it may be time for it to hit ebay. I am not sure if my problem is T-Mobile or the Treo but I had problems with people not hearing me yesterday. I heard them but they could not hear me. A phone reboot solved that problem. Today I rebooted the phone for some reason (at 7PM) and I got notification that I had 6 messages from that morning. All of the messages were import work related issues that needed to be addressed quickly. Well needless to say they weren’t.

I have had issues off and on for a while. Rebooting the phone solves lots of issues, but should I have to do that? Jayson thinks I should wipe all the extra software I have (i have allot) and see if the phone works fine then. He is right, and the phone probably will work but the whole point of a palm phone is the ability to use the “SMART” features. If my distinctive ring or other apps wont work, why would I want a big phone like that?

The problem is what to do? I have a Blackberry that I need to carry for work, so I get my realtime email. I have been using my SE T610 off and on for a week. I broke down and started using it tonight full time until I can find a permanent replacement to the Treo, or until I calm down and start using it again. I already ordered a Motorola V3 Razr off of ebay. I have been eyeing it for a while and I figured now was the time to get one. I will continue to use the Treo as a palm for now. When I finally decide to dump it I will need to find a new PDA. The Razr should be able to connect to most new PDA’s via Bluetooth so I hope to keep some of my wireless internet features. I will find out when it arrives later this week.

Data Center Move Completed

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Jayson and I finished up our data center move this morning. We have allot of free space that Bob will use up right away. It is also as neat as we are going to get it. We had some interesting moments configuring up the network. We were putting in Gigabit uplinks between all the switches and ran into some problems. The ports were configured weird by Keith. Jayson didn’t understand half the crap that was setup, and neither did i. We cleaned it up and we were good to go.

We also had a problem with one of our servers Promise IDE disk array. this is like the 3rd time we have had trouble with this array, and the incalculable time we have had trouble with these IDE arrays. We spent hours trying to make it work, but it does not seem to have worked. Danny and our DBA staff was working on some alternatives I suggested today while Jay and I got some sleep.

As it stands now that server is still causing problems. Contingency plans are already in the works to replace it:(

Data Center Update

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After working all day Saturday, Monday night, and Tuesday night, we are about 90% done with our move to the new cage. We have 3 servers and 3 desktops (don’t ask) to move, along with a core switch and the firewalls. We will do that Thursday night. The new cage looks good. Some of the cable management could be better, but Jayson assures me that it will be cleaned up when we are done. We already started taking apart the old cage. it is/was a mess.

Since Saturday I have done nothing else but deal with this move. Once it is over I will be very happy. The good news is we think we were able to squeeze out even more space savings than we originally thought. that is good news since we are planning on expanding with a bunch of new servers soon.

Sleep

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My sleep habits are all screwed up now that I worked nights two days in a row. Tonight I don’t have to do an overnight. We got allot done yesterday so we didn’t have to go in today. I do have to go back one more time on Thursday night. I got home at 6AM this morning and slept till 2PM. Now it is midnight and I am not tired. I figured I would write a bit and then hopefully sleep would come.

My building’s maintenance crew gave me a new AC unit today. The on in my living room was not cooling. Now I am nice and cold while I sit here and write! When I called they said it would be a while for them to send someone out so I ended up going to the office for a few hours. It was that or goto Starbucks and pay for internet. At work, it is free (for me)!

I went over to Macy’s after work to try and do some shopping, but the lines were really long for the changing room. I decided to try back some other time.

I also went over to the Cingular store. I still think they are an evil company, but I bought a pre-paid SIM card to test out their service. I have been having intermittent reception issues with my T-Mobile phone. So much so that this week I have been using my work Nextel and leaving forwarding calls to that. The pre-paid SIM was cheap, so I will try it for a few days and see if I like it or not.

I also re-organized part of my living room. I had for a while 2 monitors on my desk. They took up allot of space. I had another half of the L of my desk with nothing but piles of crap on it. I cleaned it off, bought a power strip and put my 20″ Apple Cinema display on the other desk. Now I have my powerbook plugged into that and I have more room. I also moved my printer to a shelf out of the way. I still need to clean up my place, but I am lazy since I have been out of it with these weird hours. I keep telling myself I will clean this weekend.

Besides that, I tried to rest allot today. More exciting things this weekend, I hope!

More Nice Palm Software

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I am trying out the 30 day trial on two awesome pieces of Palm software. Both sync with my mac! The first is an upgrade to something that I have had for years, Landware’s Pocket Quicken 2.5. the new version is slicker looking. Not sure if the added features are worth the upgrade, but since I want to use it with Quicken 2005 on my Mac they require the upgrade. If you use quicken to keep track of your finances having this to make quick updates on the road is invaluable. Without it I would have no clue where my money went!

The other program I am using is Splash ID 3.x from Splash Data. It is a Password Safe like utility that has a Windows, Mac, Palm, & Pocket PC clients. I can use the DB on my mac and sync with my palm and then use it on my Windows machine. It is not free like Password Safe, but it works everywhere I need it to, and it has an import/export function. It took me 20 minutes to export my website links, and user names out of my access db and imported them into Splash ID. Now everything is secure and safe!

As it stands now I will be buying both products when their trials wear off!

Data Center Work

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Yesterday I got the call (email actually) that my companies new cage in our Data Center was ready for use. Jayson and I quickly got a Uhal van to move all the new gear from our office up to the new cage so we can stage everything. I ended up doing most of the lifting since Jayson had to stay with the truck. He couldn’t find parking. After dropping everything off at the cage we took the truck back.

Today we (along with Jon) will break out the gear and mount the shelves and rack kits. This will set us up for the server move later next week.

I am not used to being up this early on a weekend. Hopefully I am fully awake for the work:)

Incremental Update

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I admit I have done it again. Last week I quietly went to the Apple store and got a new Powerbook. It has been over a year since I bought my previous one. I was going to try and not upgrade but the price was right and I was so tempted. I went from a 1ghz 12″, to a 1.5ghz 12″. Several other improvements in the Powerbook lead me to the upgrade. The old one is already sold and off to its new owner. One of the guys in my group upstate bought it. So Chris gets a near perfect condition “pre-owned” mac, and I get a new one for virtually nothing!

So far I love the new machine. I am slowly moving everything over to it and using it as my primary machine! As the title says, this is not some major upgrade, but it is a really nice incremental upgrade to an already fantastic piece of hardware!

Quicken Conversion Again

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Over the past 2 years it seems like I keep ying/yanging on where I use quicken. I use the program for my personal finances (what little I have). I have used online checkbooks since like 1994. I love quicken. The problem is if I want to use Quicken on my Mac I need to export each account to a .qif file and import it into Quicken for the Mac. It is a pain in the ass. If you have certain kinds of split items or stock sales it messes up the transactions. Of course I have both, so it took me like 4 hours to clean up and move everything. I was amazed (again, I did this twice before) that I could get it to work at all.

My error last time I converted everything was that I didn’t keep both my mac and windows versions of the file up to date. This time I think I will do a monthly update of my windows version. For some reason I always need to go back to the windows version for some reason. For now I am happily running everything off of my Quicken 2005 for the Mac!