Work

Work, It Was Hot

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I got allot done at work today. I setup 4 websites. I configured IIS, our Cisco Local Directors, etc. now all I need to do is get the SSL id’s for them. Jayson got cracking on the 3 new servers we just got in. 1 is done, and another is partially done. We also got through a bunch of support tickets. All in all a good day, except for the heat.

We fled the heat to the server / telecom room for allot of the day. it was just too hot, and I couldn’t sit in my office all day knowing AC was 20 feet from me. I still ended up out in the heat for at least half the day.

Most of the office left early to play softball. We stayed and finished up some work. I am not ready to play softball yet.

Check out the Mo-blog. One of our developers, James went out and bought a portable pool. They filled it with water and I got some pictures of people sitting in the office with their feet in the pool. it is really funny. yes it was that hot…

Tuesday Work, And AC Update

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My apartment building finally turned on the AC for the building on Monday night. I figured this out Tuesday evening when it was really hot and I was cranky. My apartment is now cool and comfy. I wish I could say the same about work.

I am in shorts and sneakers today for work. They said relaxed dress code until they could fix the AC, so I am taking advantage of this for now. I wish it was just cooler, but I will settle for no paints now.

Last night I went to dinner with my parents. I got home at like 4PM from Jury Duty. that is hours earlier than my normal time. I went and got a hair cut and then went to dinner.

After that I went home and did some work. We were really backlogged since I was out for 2 days. I cut the backlog down allot but we still have more to do.

Construction Delays

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Since I am out on Jury duty Dan has postponed the cube redesign scheduled for this thursday. As of now it seems I will be out all week. The newly scheduled date is next thursday.

Also on the construction front is the preparation for new cubes in Kingston. We have one cable quote, and we are waiting for a new one. Once that is done we begin plan’s on Phase III of our call center build out. I guess Phase II would be the adding the remaining cubes. Phase III would be the plan to double the call center size with new space. That plan is underway now. We meet architects on Thursday to discuss the designs.

It looks like Kai and Brian will loose their office when we do the construction. The kitchen won’t be big enough for all the people we plan on holding. The IS office can be moved and a wall can be broken down and the kitchen can expand into the IS office. Because of the size of the office when the construction is done we will need a second telecom room to accommodate the new cable runs we will need.

With all this construction I at least know what my summer will be like.

Friday Tasks

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Jayson and I went to our data center today to bring up a server we just built. Man a 2U server is more than twice the weight than a 1U. Even though it is only double the size.

I hurt my wrist on a disk array we were mounting. It got stuck under the array as I was (trying to) holding it up. I didn’t realize it hurt until I tried to lift some metal rails later back at our office.

i was successful at creating a phone for the first time on our Avaya switch. I did it by myself. It was not so bad. Lets hope the next time I can figure it out again.

I also began to map out all of our phone ports. Looks like keith never bothered to do that, so I am going and mapping physical office location to the port on the phone switch that that location is hard wired to. I am slowly building a nice DB of everything.

Jayson left early today so he could hang out with his wife gretchen and friends that flew up this weekend to see him. I am catching up with them tomorrow for dinner.

Quick Bits

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Kingston was interesting. I got stuff done, so that was good. I even slept a bit on the train going home. I never do that so you know I was tired. I think I got an hour or more sleep.

I left a key for the real estate person to show my apartment. Maybe I will get luck and they will rent it right away? I doubt it but you never know. I think they may show it today.

I figured out how I can have 1 ftp user account and have 2 sub directories in the users home folder. Each of those sub directories actually redirects the user to different virtual paths. That way I can have two directory trees, one for inbound, and one for outbound. To the user everything looks normal. Next up on the new FTP setup schedule is getting an SSL certificate for the FTP server.

After 2 months of waiting we finally got a hold of a the server we will be sending to our production environment. This will replace an aging server that needs more disk space. I had to lend it out to the dev staff for a while so they could do something with it. After 2 months I got it back and I can move it to our data center. I hope to move that today if possible.

Also today I have to make sure we have a computer and a phone for a new user that starts monday, setup SQL mail for a database machine, and probably 5 other things that I haven’t thought of.

AC Update

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The final word on the office AC has came down. Turns out our master plan cannot be enacted in time for it to get hot. It will be 77 degrees today. The problem we had in the past was the water tower we use to cool our water cooled AC’s put out really dirty and warm water. 80 degrees in NYC, but the water cooling the AC in kingston is coming into the system at 50 degrees. See the difference?

The other problem was the units we have are very old, and we had a full office. We have allot less people in the office now. The plan is to plug back in our old systems since we cannot install air cooled units in time for summer. The building we are in will take over control of the water tower and fix it up. This is a departure from the past when they wanted nothing to do with the tower. We are hoping that once the tower is in good working order we will actually get cool air in the office. I am crossing my fingers and toes.

I cannot go through another hot summer like the past 2, without good AC. If the AC sucks, I will be summering in the computer room. You will see me in October or so…

Kingston Again

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Tomorrow I have to goto Kingston again. This trip is to see the plans for our expansion of our call center. If you consider phase 1 opening the call center. Phase 2 will be to fill out the call center with the max amount of seats in the current physical space. Phase 3 is what we are going to discuss. That will be to build another section of the call center that will double the total area when completed.

I will also meet with Kai and Brian about any open issues we have going on. I know Kai and I need to talk about adding licenses to our phone system. We are maxing the system out at peak times recently.

Dan and I are taking the train up together. Glenn will meet us there by car later in the day. We should be getting a ride from him back to the city in the afternoon.

What’s Going On?

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I have taken a few days off from blogging. I have been busy. Thursday night / Friday morning Jayson and I did our rewiring of our NYC computer room. We redid an entire rack. We also fixed the KVM’s in NYC. It took us from 9PM till around 4AM to complete the work. I was so tired afterward.

I was stupid during the work. I climbed onto of 2 of our racks to free up some caught cable. Getting down I hit my elbow on a rack door. It hurt. It is nice and black and blue now. Well actually it looks better now, but was black and blue when I did it Thursday night.

I didn’t get much sleep Friday morning. I had to get back to work. I ended up getting back to the office at 12:15PM. Turns out we got everything back online except 1 server. The server was ok, but the disk array plugged into it was not responding. Thankfully Gus got it working by rebooting it. This was not before he complained that jay and I were not in the office in the morning. He forgot about a little thing called sleep.

Surprisingly I completed the day friday like normal. I still don’t think I have caught up on sleep though.

I just hung out at home Friday night. I needed a night to just relax.

Saturday was another story. Due to our domain controller problem from last Monday I have had tape backup issues all week. The tape backup system runs on the domain controller that went down. So I have been working on getting the backups working like normal since Tuesday. I had to work on the backups a bit Saturday. Still no resolution. I also had to cancel plans with alison because of the problems.

After working on the backups, I got a call from Dan about a poker game. I was in.

My dad gave me a rid to the train so I wouldn’t have to leave a car there all night. As we pulled up to the station I realized it was May 1st and I had forgotten my new may monthly ticket. I should have taken that as a sign how my luck was going to go at poker that night and just go home. Of course I didn’t.

I had to get my cousin a 40th birthday gift so I went to best buy and got a gift card. I waited for the 1 train for 20 minutes before one came. That was another sign that my luck was not going my way. At best buy I did get to cut the entire line because I was paying by credit card and no one else seemed to be. That was a piece of good luck.

At poker I ended up loosing $40.00. That is not allot. I thought I was going to loose really quick. I lost my initial 2000 in chips, and then another 1000. I sat for a while before I could buy back in for the last time. By then I figured I would be out quick. Maybe be the first of the 8 to go out. Turns out I held on pretty long. I ended up being in 4th place. Granted it was a distant 4th from the guy in 3rd, but I held out for so long. Everyone left kept trying to kill me off for like an hour. That is what you do in that situation. But I just kept getting good enough (or great) hands that kept me alive. I wish that my luck was that good during the first half of the game. That way I might have had enough money to have been a threat by the end. All in all I had a good time.

I got to bed late again Saturday. actually by the time I got into bed it was early sunday morning.

Tuesday Late Night, Wednesday Work From Home

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Tuesday was a late night for me. I stayed up late to finish adding Backup Exec agents to some servers that could not be brought down until after midnight. I then did some troubleshooting on some other backup issues. The goal was to get a good backup tuesday night. I was able to do so. I finally finished work at like 2/2:30AM.

By the time I got up and dressed Wednesday morning. it was already almost 11AM. It was then that I decided to work from home. Some people like to do that. I always think I like to do that, until I actually do it. News flash, I don’t like working from home. On one hand I do get allot done since less people bother me for stuff. On the other hand it is lonely sitting in an empty apartment working on the computer. If I lived closer to the office I would have been in.

I finished working on some more backup related issues Wednesday. Also worked through an issue with Kai & Jay related to some phone problems. Dan and I also tracked down an AT&T rep to discuss a bill we have issues with.

I also worked on cleaning up some ACL;s on our firewall’s. Most if not all of our restriction problems have now been resolved.

Double Booked

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I tentatively made plans to go to dinner with my girlfriends family on Sunday. She wasn’t sure if it was going to happen or not early this week so put it in the back of my mind and left it off my calendar. Not thinking I scheduled a server move Sunday night. Jayson and I need to move this server from our office to our data center so we can do other maintenance in our NYC office next thursday.

Tonight I find out that dinner is on. Now I have plans to two things on the same night. My only saving grace is that the dinner is planned early, and we wont do anything to the call center until after 9PM. I may be able to make it, or leave the dinner early to do it. I want to stick to these plans so we can keep the maintenance cycle for thursday.

This blog entry was written while listening to Sympathy from the album “Gutterflower” by Goo Goo Dolls