Work

Cisco Networkers 2005

by

Today was the first full day of Cisco Networkers. Allot of cool stuff going on. Way too much for me to go into too much detail. In a recap yesterday I learned what will be happening in the new version of IPCC. Some cool stuff there. I ate not enough food at the expo Cisco threw. I wasn’t hungry for that kind of fare, but it was awesome stuff. I got some information on some products I was interested in. I got some follow up reading to do. Then I got some answers from some engineers at Cisco about some products. I also got some free software that I need to try out. I could have used it a few weeks ago, but what can you do?

After that I meet up with my friend Joe. he is also out in Vegas for the same conference. We met up with his girlfriend and parents (they all came out to hang while he did his conference thing). They wanted to do the Star Trek Experience in the Hilton, but thankfully we just browsed the gift shop. They ended up eating the buffet at the hilton instead of eating at the Star Trek Theme restaurant. I ended up at a little cafe in the Paris. I am not a Vegas buffet person. I NEVER get my moneys worth at one of those. I don’t eat enough. Money wasn’t the reason I didn’t go though. I just don’t like those things. Even the nicest ones seem skeevy to me. Maybe it is memories of the Circus Circus buffet when I was 14?

Today’s keynote by John Chambers was good. He is a really good speaker. This was the second time I got the opportunity to hear him speak.

The first session I went to was overkill for me. They were talking about really high end network design of Data Centers. Cool to be sure, but I won’t be needing to apply those theories for a while. The next 2 sessions were on IPCC. What you can do with VOIP is amazing. I already drank the cool-ade on that stuff a while ago, but it is truly amazing what you can do with VOIP. Video, Soft-phone, Call Routing, Etc.

Tomorrow hopefully I will learn some other cool network stuff. I get to do a class on SNMP. I use it a bit now, but a better understanding of it would be very helpful.

Clean Up

by

I got a bunch of misc. items done today and yesterday in anticipation of my week in Vegas next week. I will be out at the Cisco Networkers conference. Unfortunately they hold it in Las Vegas:) So I will have to suffer.

I sat with Bob yesterday and discussed the project plan for our major new site redesign. It sounds super interesting. It will be just stressful for me and my team. I keep telling myself I will be bored if we were not as busy as we are. It is still hard having a queue of stuff to get to, and some of it won’t get worked on for months.

Kai and I are both out next week. he is on vacation and totally unavailable. I will be reachable, so that is good, but the team will be short handed by 2 next week.

James was off today so I ended up doing some grunt phone configuratin work. That meant besides working on the Definity I had to go under desks doing some wireing. Not fun, but I got everything that needed to be done taken care of. I have to repeat what I have said before, working on the Call Manager is so much easier and straight forward than working on the Avaya Definity or any other Avaya switch I have worked on.

Data Center Move Completed

by

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:(

The Hard Part

by

I thought working nights all week would be the hard part. Who was I kidding? The hard part is now getting back on a normal sleep schedule. I was surprisingly easy to get into a night schedule. Granted being able to sleep from 9AM to 5PM requires some dose of medication. Be it alcohol, Tylenol PM, Nyquil or something stronger. But you do sleep!

I got home today at like 7AM. By the time I unwound a bit it was 8AM, and I called Kai to go over some stuff. I figured hey, he starts work at 8. By the time I was ready for bed it was 9AM. I woke up at like 4:45PM and it felt like 30 minutes had passed. I slept that well. Now of course it is 11PM and I am not tired. I am going to force myself to sleep by the latest 12:30AM.

While being awake and having extra energy I have kept myself busy. I decided I didn’t like how I reorganized my desk, so I reorganized again. I am happy with the new layout, but I am thinking I want to plug an external hard drive into my Powerbook so I can have my iTunes collection on it. I am using the powerbook as my primary machine now a days (and loving it), so I need my tunes with me. The problem is the entire collection takes up half of the hard drive.

I did some cable cleanup behind my desk while I was reorganizing. Man it gets messy and dirty back there. Being the clean freak that I am, I had to do my best to fix things. The cables are still a mess (but better than before) but it is clean.

Data Center Update

by

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

by

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!

Nights

by

I have been working nights all week so I have not been able to write anything. I got home at 5:30AM this morning, and just woke up about an hour ago. The weird work schedule is necessary for allot of reasons, none of them I can discuss here. See the work blog for details. All good things though. I will write more when my head is clear and my living room AC is fully functional!

Working on a Saturday

by

I worked most of the day today. Busy, busy, busy. See the work Blog for details. After a late lunch at outback I was tired. I didn’t go to the beer garden for Dave’s birthday like I hoped. I ended up relaxing at home and walking to Best Buy.

I am now updating my version of Beyond TV to the latest revision, and at the same time looking through the TV guide for anything on TV that looks good to record over the next 2 weeks.

While running my software update I have been giving serious consideration to dropping the Tivo in favor of a second computer based DVR (PVR). My reading has proven that I can plug a second USB Video capture card into my desktop and use the existing Beyond TV software to record 2 shows at once, or watch one and record another. Some would say that is overkill, but even my mom who has a Time Warner DVR has asked to watch something and record something at the same time. Right now I have 2 cable box’s with one plugged into my Tivo and another one into my computer. The thing with Tivo is it costs $12.95 a month. With a video capture card going for a little over $100 depending on what I get the device pays for itself in 10 months. That is assuming I get no money for the Tivo I have.

I am still pondering what I want to do.

Data Center Work

by

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:)

Weekly Roundup

by

Took a little doing to get back into the routine this week. The week has since flown by. Wednesday was busy preparing for the inevitable colo cage move coming up. Hopefully our provider will be ready with the new cage tomorrow so we can stage things this weekend.

Today was a BBQ in our call center to celebrate the opening of the first floor of the office.

Tomorrow is dealing with the COLO and meeting about our bug tracking system, Bugzilla. Much more going on, but I am tired and will write more this weekend…