Work

No Staff Wednsday

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Just as the title says my department had a no staff Wednesday, well almost. The moons seemed to align in such a way that half the group took off today for whatever reasons they had. The rest of us got allot done! I had the typical meetings and other misc tasks to do for the day. Nothing major to report.

I headed out early to get my watch fixed again. After adding a link to the band because I thought the watch was too tight for months I realized after 2 days that with the extra link it was way too loose. Loose enough that I can live with the slightly tight fit the other way. I also brought in my recipt for when I bought the watch and got the battery replacement refunded. Not bad.

Also note to self, never take the Q train all the way to 57th street since it stops in the tunnel and waits for a free slot to park. and other trains that you want to connect with pass you in the tunnel getting us (kings we) pissed off…

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Multi Region DVD Bliss

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Today was busy, but like most days recently I can’t say my time was taken up by X. it was just hectic with “stuff”. I could give you a breakdown of the time by going into my Request Tracker system, but for this blog purposes I just don’t care! 🙂

I had to hit CompUSA today to get an external CD drive case. I needed it to build my semi-region free PC. I wanted a region free DVD player for the PC, but couldn’t find a really simple way to do it. It sucks. I own 2 different region DVD’s. Region 1 USA stuff, and Region 2 European stuff. I have mainly region 1, but do want to play the region 2 stuff. I also wanted use my DVR (now media center) pc and not my DVD player. I have a region free stand alone dvd player that worked fine up until last week (that is another story), but I am trying to do everything via the media center. Here comes the external cd/dvd bay. I found out that the region coding is per drive. so in theory (and practice) I can get a second dvd player and set it to a different region. I can then play dvd’s from 2 regions. A semi hackish approach but I only need 2 regions, so for my needs it worked out fine. I also don’t have ton’s of region 2 dvd’s so I can put the dvd player I set to region 2 in an external case and plug it into the media center via fire wire only when I need it. So I bought the case and put an old DVD drive I had around. Guess what? It worked flawlessly so far. Such a simple fix, and I didn’t find anyone on the internet talking about it. yeah a region free or region 0 player is better, but this works.

After CompUSA I went over to the store I bought my Omega Speedmaster X-33 from. The battery started to go and I needed a replacement. the branch I went to couldn’t do the work so I need to go tomorrow to the main branch and get the work done.

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Busy Documenting Crap

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Today I was busy doing documentation for Bob. he needed to be prepared for a meeting and needed my operations overview updated so he can get a handle on our systems. It took some doing but I got it down. I also had to deal with finding a suitable replacement to our IBM Thinkpad laptops. My team finally said we don’t want to deal with Thinkpads anymore. Too many issues to list here, but we ended up with a similar configured HP unit. The first user gets it tomorrow since his thinkpad is toasted.

Monday

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Meetings and catching up with tasks took up the bulk of my day today. Dealt with some technical issues that I really shouldn’t have needed to also. That got me a bit ticked, but in the end everything worked out.

Electrical Work

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Today was busy with electrical work upgrades in our Computer room. We needed to add several circuits to support filling up the remaining rack space we have. Now that the holidays are over we were able to get the work done. Next week will have a flurry of activity to clean up the room and mount and power the gear that has been waiting for a home.

Day Trip

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Today was a day trip to our other office. Had to meet some contractors and sit through an all day meeting. Man that was fun. Actually we learned allot but I have trouble sitting all day in a meeting. We ate, and had breaks but it does take something extra to do it.

I am glad I took the train up. Dan wanted to be there for 9AM so he left in a rental car really early. Funny thing was as I was getting out of the cab from the train station, he was pulling up in the rental car. Traffic sucks. I am glad I didn’t go with him since I would have needed to get up hours earlier to make it there for the same time as the train!

Jayson was up there doing some work in a computer room, so I rode back with him and nelson on the train. They had the sleeper seat business class so I upgraded. I had a nice little nap.

Jayson and I ended up at Outback for some dinner afterward. We were going to meet up with John, but he was not feeling so well and went home early. Instead we actually meet up with Gus. We both didn’t think he would show, but he did. It was good catching up.

It was all around day. Productive work day, and I got to get out for a bit afterward.

Back From The Holiday

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Today was the first day back from a 4 day weekend. It always sucks getting back into the routine. To make the day even more fun, I had a bunch of meetings planned. Thankfully a few of them got canceled so the day wasn’t so bad. I got caught up on some work, but then got side tracked by some systems issues that took up most of the afternoon. I hate issues that you cannot find the true root cause. The fix or what people call a fix is not really a fix but a putting the problem off for another day. Can’t really go into details, the symptoms go away, but the problem is still out there somewhere:(

We Can See You!

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Today I went out and bought some iSight camera’s to test out. I have said it before, but I will say it again. Most of the time I can say I play with toys for a living and I won’t be lying. One of the business managers wanted a video camera solution so people in one of our offices can see what others are doing in another office, and vice versa. The theory is to bridge the gap between the offices by seeing a small glimpse of what goes on in each location. I thought it was a really cool idea. After looking at several options I came to believe that the iSight cameras were the best bet. Several wireless network cameras were several hundred dollars each. Plus the computers and monitors we would need to show the other offices camera on, the cost got to great. With iSight we can get a computer (Mac Mini) a monitor and the iSight camera and that is all.

To test the setup I got 2 camera’s. Jayson and I plugged them into our Powerbooks and we took them for a spin. The picture looked good in full screen mode on my 19″ LCD. Jay took it a step further and plugged his Powerbook and iSight into the 42″ Plasma we have in the office and went full screen. It looked good enough that we can use 23″ LCD TV’s for this project. The picture in general looked really good. Granted we were on the same LAN, but we have decent bandwidth between both offices so it should work fine.

What is even cooler is we were able to use the video chat functions of Jabber, and not even use AIM. After showing that we can use these iSight cameras for the solution I went out and looked to get the computers. At first I was going to get the really cheap $499 mini’s but then I realized we need the wifi for one setup, and maybe need it for the other one as well. It was worth the extra $100 to have it ready if needed. I love that this stuff just worked. I plugged in the camera and the software immediately said there was an update ready for download. I clicked ok to download it, and in less than 2 minutes and one OK click later I was chatting via video. Not bad for an OS that has less than 5% of the market!

Now that we know the cameras will work for this solution I now want them to use for day to day video conferencing between the people in my department in my office and the other one! That would be really nice!

We Don’t Negotiate With Terrorists

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So the MTA workers have struck in NYC. That means the dreaded telecommute for me! Since I rely on the subway to get anywhere I am rather ticked off. But what pisses me off the most is the reasons why the union is striking. I am not the hugest fan of unions in general, and this strike reiterates my issues about them. Forget my specific issues with the unions contract. I just want to know why if you have a group of people who refuse to work for the conditions (reasonable conditions) set by the employer, that you cannot replace them with people who will? Seriously, if you were a corporate worker somewhere without a union and you said I am striking until I get a better contact you would be replaced right away. I am curious to know any non union workers who would have a job if they decided to not show up for 2 days because they wanted better benefits?

And lets talk about benefits. Back in the day (early 1900’s) unions were necessary. Without them people where exploited. Is the MTA exploiting the union members now by asking them to contribute 1% to their health benefits? I don’t know what % I contribute to my health insurance but I know it is allot more than 1%. Also where can you work that you can demand a guaranteed raise of 8% a year for 3 years for everyone? What ever happened to you do well and you get a raise?

You have a group of 30,000 people holding a city hostage. They have cost innocent people hundreds of millions of dollars because they think they are entitled to a better contract. Well wake up TWU, several other unions have been operating without a contract for a while. They don’t strike and cost others not involved in the situation money. The mayor was right, your leadership is a bunch of ignorant thugs. I feel bad for the union workers caught in the middle, because yes they too are caught in the middle of all this.

I do have to say I am thankful that the governor and mayor didn’t cave into demands. TWU, if you act like terrorists we treat you like them. We don’t negotiate with people holding cities hostage!!!

Real Checks

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Yesterday I had to deposit a real pay check. At first I didn’t know what to do! I have had direct deposit for like 4 years. Well seriously I knew what to do, but it quickly came back to me how annoying it was to goto the bank every few weeks with a check. I am switching banks (more on that later) so I needed to have 1 paper check so my employers payroll company could send a test EFT to the new bank. I will be back to the land of automatic payments in a few weeks.

The good news is my company started recently direct deposit expense checks. My last place I worked did that. It made life really easy. No need to goto the bank for almost any deposits:).