Apartment Cleanup

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I spent the past 2 days trying to clean up the mess that is my apartment. It is not going well. I see no improvement to the situation. That is what happens when I decide to rearrange some piece of electronics gear. Everything gets moved around and messy. I should try and finish up tonight, but I am just tired. The events of last week have still not sunk in. It will eventually, but not yet.

Well I stopped writing and got off my but for a while and I cleaned up decent amount. I still want to tidy up a bit more. I have also decided to wipe my mini, and remove the XP partition on it. I also brought back my dedicated DVR Windows XP machine. The Beyond TV Link software and the dual booting the Mini was not cutting it for me. I will use my regular DVR machine on my TV until the Apple TV thing ships and then I will plug that into my TV as well. My Mini is now plugged into my KVM. My main Windows box is not feeling too well after the moving of stuff. I think the power supply went. It is over 2 years old so I don’t know what I am going to do to it just yet.

Still cleaning…

Interview Time

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I had a job interview today. It was my first since I decided to start looking for work. It looks like it will be my last also. The place seemed awesome. The manager and VP that interviewed both seemed cool and had a direction they wanted to take the group over the next few years. I never can gauge how I do on interviews. I have thought some have gone great and they ended up not landing a job offer. Other times I think I tanked it and got offers, or call backs. Go figure. This go round I thought it went really well but lost some hope when they said they were interviewing for another week and would let me know next friday. I should have read through that since I have said similar things when interviewing people, and they also said they have been trying to fill the post for months.

The recruiter called a few hours later telling to expect an offer later or tomorrow. He then called back and said to expect a formal offer tomorrow but he gave me the numbers they were offering and asked if I could give notice tomorrow and start 2 weeks from monday. Of course I wanted the job but I told him I would think about it and call tomorrow.

Since my parents are out of the country on a cruise I spoke to my sister about the whole situation. She is in the tech field anyway so she is a good choice to talk to. She agreed that it was a fantastic opportunity for me. It was the first interview I went on but it was also a very exciting possibility for me. Technically I did turn down another job from a friend on Sunday, but I never interviewed for that. The more I thought about it, I wanted an established company like this offer gave me, vs a startup like what I turned down Sunday. I think I made the correct decision.

It was ironic I got the call from the recruiter when I did, since Jayson, Danny, & I were at a recruiter looking at candidates for replacing them, and Andrew. This recruiter was also going to talk to me about possible positions for me when we were done, but I didn’t have to do that!

We found three possible candidates for the positions we want to fill, but I don’t know if Bob or my CEO will go for the prices they are looking for. That is part of (but in no way the only reason) why 3 people are leaving in the first place.

Now all I have to do is wait for the written offer letter and tell work tomorrow. I wonder how that will go? 4 guys leaving out of a group of 6 with one other going on leave for 6 weeks is going to cripple operations and no one seems to realize it.

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Looking

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I am now in full job hunting mode. I got back my revised resume, and it looks awesome. I am uploading it on the job hunting sites I am using. I have gotten a few emails and calls about my resume already and I only posted it on Sunday night. I haven’t even began to contact the recruiters to expand my search. I am optimistic about the outcome but I just don’t want to be at work once Jayson, Danny, and Andrew leave. The stress will be bad, especially since we are launching more sites on the new code. Top on my general unhappiness at work and it is an almost intolerable situation right now. I feel so out of control, and helpless. I know it will resolve itself, but it takes time. I just don’t want to wait huge amounts of time.

Listening to Jayson and Danny talk about their new opportunities isn’t helping the situation. Danny has a great place to goto, and I am honestly jealous of the position that Jayson has landed. He deserves it and I wish him well, but I am wallowing in self pity right now since I feel stuck here right now. I know it will pass, but I am having a bad week.

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My First Interview

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On a brighter note I have lined up my first interview for Thursday. The place sounds interesting. I am going to do more research on the company and see what happens. I am hoping to set up other interviews ASAP. I have some other things in the works but no formal meetings yet.

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The room is flooding and all I have is this dixie cup!

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Due to restrictions placed on my by my current employer I am unable to discuss what happened at work today, or my feelings about everything. I think you can figure it out. Lets just say I feel like I am on a runaway train and have no way of getting off. No the world is not going to end, but things are going to be interesting for a while.

All in all I had a horrible day. It was more frustrating than anything else. I wrote extensively about it on my private work blog. One day it may see the light of day, or not.

The Big Game

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I am told there is a big NFL playoff game today. I am skeptical since my dad is on a plane going on vacation today, but we all know my mom runs their schedule so maybe he just didn’t remember there was a game on. In any case I am about to run out for some drinks at a bar with friends while we watch the Saints game. Since Gretchen is from New Orleans and is organizing the event we are going to a Saints friendly bar. I don’t care who wins either way so it will be an interesting afternoon. I am going for some food and drinks. I mean I haven’t seen every one in so long, oh wait we went out on Friday. Never-mind.

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Dating, Well Almost

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Well after a long period of procrastination I have gotten off my but and began looking for dating opportunities. Well, I guess I can say I haven’t really gotten off my but since I am trying the whole online dating thing so I am sitting down when looking, but you know what I mean. I forked over some cash to Match.com and will see what comes of the online dating search.

It is really weird. When it comes to dating I guess I am shy and find it difficult to make the first move. My friends probably are surprised by that since if I know you I am sometimes told I don’t shut up!

I spent the large part of this evening making a mess of my apartment, and working on my online profile. It is late and I am not tired. That does not bode well for my condition tomorrow when I wake up. Oh well. I think I finally have a decent online bio, but who really knows. I am trying the whole winking thing to female profiles I like. Apparently if they like what they read back, they can do the same for you and then you can email them. It is the sort of non-threatening way of making the first contact. I wonder if has the same averages to the old saying that if you walk up to a hundred women in a bar and tell each one that you want to take them back to your place for some sex that at least one (probably a few more) would actually say yes. Granted you would need a cup for the other 90% of them, but this is only a theory. I have never tried it, but I have some friends that may have attempted it.

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A VMware Gotcha

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A minor gotcha we ran into with our Virtual Center cluster last week and again possibly today. Virtual Center requires a SQL Server (Microsoft I know) to collect telemetry I think. Not really sure why, but it does. It is not critical to operations of any VM, but you do need it for VMotion, creating new VM’s and other admin work. Well when we built our ESX cluster we put our virtual center DB on the one sql server we had on the LAN in that office that had any amount of stability. Well we were wrong. It turns out that the machine we picked (a dev db) runs out of space because our DBA’s don’t pay attention to their backup schedules. I am making an assumption there but it has happened twice in a week and a half. Well when the server runs out of space, there goes virtual center. Jayson has all the details of the issue, but it boiled down to we couldn’t use our virtual center manager until it was fixed. It is our own fault for putting it on a dev box but it was our only option at the time. We are now just building our own SQL server that the operations group will own and all it will do is the virtual center db.

This ESX roll out is a learning experience, but I still believe that we are far better off with our current infrastructure over past non vmware setup.

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My Mistery Trip

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I am writing this on the return leg of my “semi” mystery trip. I say that because no one at work really was supposed to know what we were doing this week. Apparently others are not good at keeping things quiet. I told who needed to know in my group but they always are privy to corporate secrets. that is just the nature of the jobs we have, but the rumor mill is running rampant it seems. I wrote a post all about exactly what we are doing, but it is on my private work blog right now. There it will remain until I am long gone from my current employer. I feel that the smart way to write about stuff from work. I want to write about it but cant publish it.

I can say we were doing some research. It was a very busy 3 days, and then we took yesterday to relax a bit. On this trip we ate very well. Man the food was good. Traveling always lets you eat well and gain weight. I also got the chance to see some really cool technology in action.

We rented an Iridium phone for the week because we were concerned about mobile coverage and the price of service even if we had good signal. It turned out that the Iridium phones are huge, and only really work outside. On the flip side my Cingular GSM phone actually worked so we simply used that. I don’t want to look at my bill this month since the price per minute was very high, but when you need to make an important cal you need to make a call.

I went the almost the entire trip without needing my migraine medication. Right before I got on the plane I felt like I needed to take something. At least I had a good run without the extra medication.

The trip out was uneventful. our short mini trip was nice. I have to say even smaller foreign air carriers have better service than american carriers. In the US you would never see a hot breakfast on an hour long flight but we had one.

On the return trip I went from having an asle seat in the very back of the plane to a decent window seat in an exit row. And I actually did someone a favor with that change. Go figure. The leg room is nice, especially since the carrier we are on was cramped on the way down. Hopefully the remainder of the trip will be uneventful.

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Black Box Project

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As I write this I am on my way home from several days in Costa Rica, and El Salvador. 3 of us have been visiting several sites in both countries for what would be considered a black box project in my company. If this post is ever read it will be after I leave my current job, so I feel I can write about it.

We are researching outsourcing some of our call center operations. I went along to asses the technical operations of each call center site we visited. I also wanted to get an idea of how each company integrates their systems to ours. From what I saw we can send them calls via our providers voice cloud and do percentage based routing to their system. We would allow access to our applications via a citrix or terminal solution. As of now I am thinking a VDI solution that we have been toying around with for a while.

The trip was hectic, but very informative. We visited 3 sites from 2 companies in 2 countries in 3 days. I just hope that upper management listens to our recommendation to actually try and send some calls off shore. The venture would be profitable and still keep the same level of service. I was amazed that the majority of people in both countries that worked at the call centers spoke excellent english. I am in no way a fan of off shoring call centers to places like India because of constantly poor experiences I have had. Everyone we spoke to spoke very good english at each site. And it wasn’t like the discussions were staged. Just walking around and grabbing some food or hitting a bathroom and saying hi to someone they responded with excellent english. That and the technical feasibility of this project makes me want to try it out. Hopefully we will be given the chance.