Technology

New blog look, or a small blog change

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If you read this blog, and lets be honest not many people do, you will notice that the title has changed. Also the URL or website address for you non computer people has changed slightly. I am always playing around with the name to see what sounds better to me.

I have moved the photo site completely off my Red Hat box onto a Windows 2003 server. I find it easier to manage the 750 megs + files within windows than within linux at this point. I am still running my blog on the Red Hat server until I can figure out how to move it to a Red Hat Server running under VMWare. Still working on that one.

Dinner with morgan, (and her parents)

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I went over to my sisters last night to install a new hard drive for them. That is my job in the family, to fix computer crap. Thankfully it was relitivly painless to do the install on their old Dell Dimension XPS500. The only problem I had was the ton of dirt in it. Once that was done we all went to dinner at Santa Fe. It is a steak place near Austin Street in forest hills. The food is always good. The big excitement of the night was when I was holding Morgan and she almost got out of my hands. Man that baby can move. In the end no harm was done, but I freaked, and my sister was very calm about it. I think she secretly wanted to kill me, but I don’t want to know.

Mike and I had some drinks at the bar, and then he drove me home so I can drop off a lamp and an end table they were giving me for my new apartment.

They tried to bribe me to do the computer work with paying for dinner, but I didn’t want to have them do that. I don’t mind doing stuff for them, and if it is something crazy big project I wouldn’t mind some free steak, but this only took me a half an hour and I wanted to see them anyway. It was nice that they thought to take me out though!

Dinner turned bad when we were walking back to their apartment and I got pages about errors my companies website. Turns out some stored procedure need re-compiling, or something. I have not yet read the incident report on the matter. I should get that on monday.

Amanda emailed me late, saying she was trying to IM me about going to Rye play-land friday night. I am glad I didn’t get the message till late because I would have felt bad that I was going to my sisters already. I like amusement parks.

Friday was busy, my old boss jeff from my days at Y&R wanted to do drinks also. I need to catch up with him soon.

Time for a lazy Saturday!!!

Scuba try 2

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I believe this weekend is another crash cource in SCUBA training. I am hoping to call today to get in it, but I don’t know how that will pan out. I also need to sit down for an hour and order food from fresh direct. I have been putting both tasks off for about a week. I just have tons to do.

I also need to unlock my T68i or get another unlocked GSM phone. I have another SIM card I want to put in my AT&T phone and I cannot. It pisses me off that I buy something and it is disabled even after I use it for the 1 year it was discounted for. Dam AT&T. I am about ready to sell my AT&T Wireless stock and dump the dam phone. Good cell number be dammed.

On the plus side I sold my old Palm Tungsten T, and shipped it yesterday to the person who won the auction on ebay. Looking around the house to see what can be next. I like cleaning out the house of old stuff and getting extra money to buy new stuff at the same time!!! Way to go ebay.

the short vacation is over

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The holiday weekend is over and I was back at work today. Thankfully we tracked down one of our two missing T-1’s today. I am going up to Kingston tuesday to sort things out. Dan and I are driving up tuesday morning. It will be interesting, since dan is an interesting driver!

I have some other issues I need to take care of while I am up there so it should hopefully be a productive trip. I am also planning on being up there next Wednesday to oversee our next T-1 install. I won’t let this screw up happen again.

With my cell phone and wireless internet, it is almost like I am in the office! Who am I kidding!!! It beats being totally out of touch on some island.

Got a bunch of Kingston related issues worked on today. And I survived an almost 2 hour long management meeting. I felt very productive today. Hopefully tomorrow I get the telecom issues taken care of.

Moveabletype, linux, and vmware

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I am still a huge fan of Moveabletype. That is of course what currently runs my blog. I want to keep using it running on my Red Hat 9.0 Server I built. The only problem is the place I want to put it in my new apartment requires a wireless connection. My new Win2003 server works fine with Wifi, but I am having trouble finding drivers for the card I got to work with Red Hat. For now the server sits next to my desk, but I don’t want to leave it there. I am trying to hid as much electronic crap as possible from visible sight. I want 1 computer out. And that computer will be my desktop, not my server!

I am playing around with running red hat on VMWare on the Windows 2003 server. I am a huge fan of VMWare, but I have not really been using it to it’s full potential. I started using it allot more this week, and I am finding that I love it even more. The only problem is that I need more ram on my work machine to get it to run really well with more than 1 os running at a time.

But back to my idea. So I had a red hat VMware system already built. I configured apache and threw on moveabletype. I am getting some driver error when I try to start moveabletype’s prep file. I need an expert (friend) to look at it. I am going through my config files to verify things are correct.

To cover my bases I am also installing a Windows 2000 Server instance on VMWare also to play around with moveabletype on windows. I don’t plan to use it, but I want to see if it will work and I don’t want to mess up my system I just built so a vmware instance is the best way to test it. All I need to do is make a backup of the file before doing anything and I have a complete OS backed up. Wednesday at work I took an entire vmware OS file and moved it to a different computer and it worked without doing anything special. That totally ROCKS!

I will post results of my ongoing testing. Hopefully this will work and I can keep moveabletype on red hat and consolidate everything to 1 server and just run the vmware software. I will see.

New domain registrar

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This blog may turn into a free advertisement for godaddy.com. If you ever paid $35 or more on a domain name, you paid allot. I do still love register.com. They are much better than the old networksolutions, but they cost allot. They are good if you need them to do DNS for you. I still own domains through them for that reason, but if you don’t need them to do a completely customizable DNS zone for you, try godaddy.com. Godaddy costs like $9 per domain per year. It is cheap, and I honestly don’t know how they make money. A friend at work has talked about them for about a year. To cut costs I registered a bunch of work domains through them. When you get like 60 domains, the savings adds up.

This week I transfered my first personal domain to godaddy. The transfer was mostly painless, and the cost is right. They make it so cheap to buy a domain, you have no excuse to buy that customized name you came up with. I will most likely transfer most of my .com, .net, and .org domains to them when they need renewal. I still have allot of other domain names so I won’t completely switch.

On the subject of domain names I will say I am a fan of the .AC domains. I had 4 of them at one time. I still own 1 domain from the Ascension Island. They cost a bit more $50/year, but their management tool is good, and they have allot of more common names and phrases that you cannot find in COM, NET, ORG, or even BIZ, & INFO. I did get a domain name with scott in it. That rocks! It actually still rocks almost 4 years after I bought it. I have a couple of other inter-nation domain names from different countries, but my .ac one is the simplest.

Apple support and verizon fraud

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I am having a bad week dealing with big companies. I ordered a High speed (well sort of) data card for a laptop at work. We got it through verizon wireless. the card is fine, but for some reason I got charged an extra $575 on the same day from verizon. In their defense they cannot find the charge in their system and believe it to be fraud. But it had to be one of their people doing it. I called the order in over the phone. At least my credit card company is taking care of it.

As for apple. Their support is good, when you get them on the phone. But if you don’t have applecare (i don’t) you pay first and then only if your problem requires hardware to be fixed within the first year they wont charge your credit card. First off applecare is expensive. Does other support agreements cost that much? Apple hardware is more money as it is, I don’t want to pay an extra $250 for a support deal on top of my expensive computer.

At least in my case the problem IS hardware related, but I hate giving out my credit card number to people if I am not actually buying something.

Work, ipod’s, and Blog’s

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Work was crazy since I was only in for a half a day due to the eye doctor. We are going to go with the 3 ton HVAC unit. 1.5 tons for our new computer room is not enough, but my inflated estimate came out to requiring a 10 ton unit. Sorry Gus your theory of taking a maximum theoretical number of servers in the room and then increasing the heat load by 50% sort of put us way over the top:) It was sort of funny to hear the construction guy tell me we were way off and wanted to do my math since he thought I was crazy. I sent him my calculations, and they were correct. We just inflated stuff. Oh well.

While I was out this morning I think a demo that someone was supposed to do was not up. I don’t think people were happy since the site was supposed to be ready last week. Keith said their was some yelling going on. It was something my team didn’t screw up and I wasn’t their for the meltdown. I am glad for small favors.

It also looks like we are going to overhaul our Dev & QA hardware. I am waiting to see what the needs are before I make any changes.

Gus and I went to the apple store in SoHo today. He got a new 30gig Ipod. I am jealous. it is great. I can’t goto the apple store. They make it tempting to buy a new computer.

On the blog front another person I know did a blog. Howard Morgan got one going today. I felt really stupid since he asked a bunch of questions about Moveabletype and I didn’t have all the answers. I would consider it an honor to teach howard something new. I bet his blog will be incredible. So far I was the first person to comment on it.

Dam Apple

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I am pissed. I called to get my Powerbook fixed tonight at a reasonable hour of 9:30PM EST, only to find out that apple does not provide consumer hardware support after 9pm. Uh, hello apple. People use their computers 24/7, so you should have 24/7 support. Your windows competition you love to bash has 24/7 support. What is the deal. Your hardware is not that indestructible that you don’t need to provide support. Now I have to call your stupid support people during work tomorrow. I love spending a half an hour on the phone for support people to realize what I knew when I called that my speaker port is blown.

I love this powerbook and it has been working well, but I have had it for less than 4 months and it will be in for servicing twice. That is not good. I have had other computers for years and never needed servicing.

OK, my apple support bashing is over. I actually like this company but I can’t stand when a company falls flat on their face completely on their own. Dumbass stuff like this gets me wondering if I invested in the wrong computer? Granted I still have a ton of intel box’s, but I just want apple to get it right, and then maybe Microsoft will get a clue.

Vonage is out

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OK, so Vonage is everything they say it is, and probibly more. I used the service and the phone calls are nice and clear. The call routing is great. The service is just awesome. Just one little show stopper problem that I have. They won’t let you choose a vanity phone number. I got a really crappie number and would pay anything to get a nice easy to remember number from them. The problem is they automated the system and claim that they cannot in any way let you know the number you are getting before you pay the $10 fee to change it. With Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile I talked nice to the rep and was able to select the number that I want. AT&T even stayed on the phone for like 30 minutes with me till we came up with something good. They rock. Vonage is saying no, sorry. I wanted this service for incoming calls, so a crappy number is no good to me. I would rather change cell numbers and let everyone know about it often than keep a shitty number. I am looking into returning my router and getting a refund.

It is a great idea, but doesn’t seem to fit what I want if they are inflexible. I would still recomend them to others.