Work

Allot To Write About

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I have allot to write about, but for some reason don’t feel that up to writing today. So here will be a quick recap of the weekend.

I continued to throw stuff out of my apartment in anticipation of my move next month.

I am also getting ready to ebay a bunch of tech stuff I have. I realized that allot of my crap is not worth that much anymore used. So it is easier to just keep it and or give it away.

Had dinner with Carrie, and my grandmother tonight. Morgan also! My grandmother was in to visit my cousin who is sick. She took us to dinner. it was actually pleasant. That is not always the case with my grandmother.

Got a hair cut on Saturday. My regular barber wasn’t there. Not sure what his deal was. His father did my hair. Didn’t do a good job. it is ok, but he didn’t listen to me when I gave him instructions. That may be the last time I go to that place since I am moving. I need to find a new place in the city for next time.

We had an issue with one of our Call Manager Servers Saturday that caused it to fail. The second machine in the cluster took over fine, but we had about 15 seconds of down time while that happened. Kai is working on getting a patch for it. I spent allot of Saturday working on the phone system because of that, and other issues.

The plus side is I did some more work on our IVR. I even setup our own for Support, to prove the concept. An IVR for support is overkill but we had extra 800#’s and it shows that they system can work.

This blog entry was written while listening to Machine Head by Bush

Change Of Plan’s

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Jayson was going to goto Kingston today. Those plans have changed. He is still trying to find an apartment so he needs a few more days in the city. He leaves to go home Thursday so he can finish packing and officially move. he will be back after the 4th of July weekend.

Other change of plans include Halo night last night. We were going to John’s but when we were on the 7 train he called and said he would be later than anticipated. I didn’t want to wait 30-45 minutes on his front step at 9PM at night, so I got off the 7 at Woodside and took the rail road back to my house.

Jayson continued on to John’s house. I only assume he stayed to play. Dave was going to take him home since he is on vacation and has no where to be this week.

Sean & Kelly are still on for being at my place tomorrow. They are driving up from DC. They should be around by dinner time. They want to goto angelo and maxi’s by my work. We went there years ago and they both loved it so they wanted to go again. I could take them to a better steak place but as Sean says, don’t it is tried and true, and they haven’t been there in a while.

Kai Is (Was) In

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Kai came down from Kingston. We gave him some lovely parting gifts. he got some mugs! Those Kingston guys are really low maintenance.

We meet about a number of issues, and just worked. It is weird when people come down from the other office, or when I go up there. Part of the day is taking care of issues back in our respective home offices. The other part is to actually do stuff in the office that we are visiting.

As it turned out, we didn’t have the meeting that he primarily came down for. It was a productive day, but we were unable to have our operations meeting.

I now need to get Jayson up to Kingston next week, and Brian down to NYC sometime soon.

Productive Day

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I got allot done today. Some days I get allot done, but it doesn’t feel that way. The majority of days feel that way. It is the nature of what I do that the work I do in a day is not always (almost never) what I plan on doing when I get up in the morning. I mean some of what I plan on doing usually gets done, but there are always things that pop up.

Today I was able to work through my back log of issues. I got allot of the requests done. I only have a few more to clear out. I am under 10 issues in my “ticket box”. that is good for me. That does not include the 57 open tasks my department has. I am just talking about issues that crop up throughout the day.

I also was able to go out for lunch with cari and jayson. We went to the Old Town Tavern. it was nice. We don’t normally get to go out for lunch.

I am off to home to do my laundry, and take a nap. I have to be up by 1AM to do some work on our Fulfillment servers. I need to put them on our automated update schedule.

I hope I can nap. But I am not holding my breath.

New Technologies

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We have been really busy recently. Normal day to day work has been keeping some other projects on hold. For one is our replacement of some servers in our data center.

Other projects include trying to clean up our notification system. I need a day or two of just doing that, and I cannot find the time.

Jayson, Kai, and I also have several “new technologies” that we want to try out and see if we can use them for the office. Many of them we think would be great, but are months if not a year or so away from seeing the light of day. Because the lead time may be so long, we don’t actually look at some of this stuff. We need to because that is how we advance our office. I want to find time to make sure we all can test what we think will be helpful. On that list we have sharepoint portal services for an intranet site, Novel eDirectory for a possible Active Directory replacement, ZEN Works to use to deploy software, SMS for the same possible reasons, several Suse based projects, and more.

The Heat

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Not sure what to expect in the temperature department today at work. I am planning for the worst, and am in shorts and a light tee shirt. I hope I am cold, but I don’t think I will be.

I truly don’t remember an office environment where I was not hot. That is sad. I am prepared to take my laptop to the computer room today to escape the heat.

Back From My Trip

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I have been away. I am back now. The trip to Kingston went well. Dan and I left Tuesday afternoon. He rented a soccer mom white mini van. We piled in all the gear we needed to take with us and we drove up to the office. We got there around 7:45PM Tuesday. Dumped our cargo and went to dinner at the hotel. We stay at the Holiday Inn. People around there say it is the nicest Ho/Motel. It is ok, but not the greatest.

We ate dinner, and had a few drinks. There is nothing else to do up there. We got up early Wednesday so we could be at the office by 8AM to meet the electricians.

As far as I could tell things went over without major issue. We left at 3PM Wednesday. I was going to stay over till thursday so I could finish overseeing the cable work, but it was well under way and Kai had it under control.

It was funny Dan and I have done 3 physical moves for our company and several construction projects together. This time we were standing around going what do we do now? There wasn’t much for us to do, and we got nervous because of that. Of course in reality it meant that things were running smoothly, but it is a weird feeling if you are not used to it:)

While we were away, the AC in NYC went out again. Or shall I say the temporary AC’s went out on the hottest day of the year so far. Also problems abound on the project to fix the permanent units. It was supposed to be done by Friday, and the completion date will likely slip.

It was so hot Wednesday that Jayson and Gretchen came over and we all went into the pool after I got home from the trip. We ended up at the out back for dinner at like 10PM. I love that place, but I didn’t want to go, since I was trying to save money. Unfortunately the deli by me was closing and we couldn’t get anything there. Oh well. I wish my only problem was HAVING to goto the outback because everything else was closed. I can live with that.

Packing

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I am on my way home to pack for a trip to Kingston. Dan and I are going for a minimum of one night. I may end up there a second night. I don’t want to be there for 2 days so I will do everything in my power to leave Wednesday night with Dan. We leave tomorrow afternoon right after work.

We are shuttling up some computer equipment also, so we will need time to fill up the van with stuff.

I need to make sure I have clothes and my laptop charger and misc stuff packed tonight. I originally wanted to go see the new Harry Potter movie with Jayson and Gretchen, but I can’t stay in the city for the movie and be able to pack tonight.

For that reason I and many others, I cannot wait till I can move into the city.

Documentation

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I try to keep good documentation on what goes on in the office. Gus says it is good. I always think it can be better. The problem with documentation is that it gets stale quick if you are in a very dynamic environment like I work in.

We have a document we aptly call what runs where? It is a list of all tasks and jobs that run in our production environment. The problem I keep having is that no one updates the dam thing. We tell everyone, update the file. No one does. Today will be a day to bust heads and get the doc updated. I hope it will work. I need certain information out of this document to be complete so I can work on a new notification project I am planning.

After that I really should update our network visio map’s. Then our standards documents, and disaster recovery, etc. You get the picture. All these documents are really detailed, but after a few weeks the details tend to change. And if you haven’t ever done documentation before, it is really boring. Except Visio. I find working in Visio to be therapeutic. Not sure why, but I do. Call me crazy…

DFS On Windows 2000

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I am wondering if anyone out on the internet has had issues with Microsoft’s Distributed File System (DFS) and Windows 2000 Servers as the client for DFS? We have several developers who use Windows 2000 Server as their desktop so they can develop our website. We moved to a new file server last week and when we moved the DFS to Windows 2003, we notice very slow response time browsing the DFS from a Windows 2000 Server. Our Windows XP Pro clients are fine. Only 2000 Servers. The DFS is now hosted on a Windows 2003 box. The old DFS we had was on a 2000 box. I wonder if that is the problem? I have to google the issue. Right now I am away from the internet so I figured I would think about the issue for a while. It is a minor problem, but when I am on the train away from everyone I try to figure out the stupid little issues that I can’t think about at work.

I will leave comments open in case someone has a thought.