Technology

Wireless Woes

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Still having AT&T wireless issues. They want me to get a new SIM card. So I went to the store. They were out. How they can sell phones without the card, I have no idea. I guess they use extra ones for replacements. I called customer care again and they are sending one, after I argued with them on why I won’t be charged $25.00 to get one. Why a SIM card will cause the dam phone not to work in my apartment is beyond me, but weirder things have happened.

Howard is looking to see if he has his old Treo 180 around that I can borrow for a bit. I am debating on if I want to get a Treo again. Now I am thinking if I can use his black and white 180, and live with it I may just get one of those till november and get the new Treo 600 when it comes out. That will save me from buying the color model that is like $300 and then want to upgrade it 3 months later. The black and white Treo 180 goes for like $130 on ebay. That is allot cheaper. I will see. If he doen’t have it I may just get it and take the risk on the $130.

On the plus side my new T-40 is great. And I got my cannon scanner to work with Mac OS 10.2 without a problem.

AT&T Wireless Officially Sucks

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Yes they do. So I bought a cheap used unlocked GSM phone on ebay. It is a Ericsson T-28w. I had one years ago. They are ok, but it was dirt cheap and unlocked. That means I can plug any GSM card into it and it will work. So I put my AT&T Wireless card in and the calls sucked just as bad as they did with my top of the line Sony Ericsson T-68i. I put my T-Mobile SIM in and the thing worked fine. It even worked decent at work, where T-Mobile with a T-68 never worked well. I was about to cancel T-Mobile last week and something told me to hold onto it for a while. I have gotten everyone to use the new number for like 3 months now, but I figured I should keep it around. Good thing I did. Now I don’t know if I am going to get rid of T-Mobile or AT&T. One has to go. AT&T, I love my phone number but that is about it. At this stage in my contract I am just thinking of keeping it and putting myself on the $19.95 plan and not use it. That is cheaper than canceling the thing. Then in November, I can keep that number and move it somewhere else. November is when phone number portability comes to cell phones!!! Finally. On the plus side the T-Mobile account is really cheap for allot of minutes. I get like 600 min with unlimited nights and weekends for under $40.00.

I am going to use both for a while, and see what happens. Thankfully I have my verizon phone still. Yes I have 3. I am only supposed to have 2, but I can’t seem to get rid of T-Mobile. I am really a techie.

Long Lost Friends

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This week was a week of communicating with people who I have not spoken to in ages. I got an unexpected reply to my change of address email from my friend from college Marty Snyder. I haven’t spoken to him in like 3 years. He is married and expecting a kid. Wow, we are getting old.

I also IM’d my friend Steve. He is buying a house up in Albany. I am need to let him know when I am doing Kingston so I can see him and Jenn (his wife, and also a friend from school) when I am up there.

And I previously mentioned talking to Sean on MSN. For some reason he can use that at work, but not AIM.

I am also sending a really late wedding card to my friend lonnie. So hopefully we can get in touch also. I wasn’t planning on speaking with all these people, but it is a pleasant surprise.

Work as Usual

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Monday was work as usual. We had our new Kingston Help-desk guy start. Gave him the really brief overview of stuff we do. After lunch he sat in on a training class for Call Center people. I bet he wasn’t happy about that.

We got our 2 file servers for kingston. They are nice. I am building Windows 2003 Server on them right now. Not 100% sure if we will use 2003 though.

We are planning a huge system upgrade at our data center that I mentioned last week. We hashed out issues still outstanding regarding that move. So far we have no show stopper issues. I gave it a go and await getting final approval for the work to proceed. We will meet again tomorrow to make sure no new issues creep up.

Keith is not happy because he thinks we gave away too much in the design changes to our development team. Or rather to accommodate issues they had. I think this is Phase 1 in a multi stage project. Once we complete this, we work for Phase 2 changes that may require reworking some site code. The work we are going to deploy represents a major step for us though. Sorry I cannot go into too much detail, but certain aspects of work are better left off the open internet!

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.