Dinner & Drinks

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After work Jayson and I meet up with John at some dive bar on the west side by his office. I don’t mind dive places. Especially ones like this. It had a nice crowd and wasn’t too crowded. The best part was the happy hour till 8PM. We where able to get a round (including 2 mix drinks and beer) for $8. This is NYC and it was that cheap. By the second round and a nice tip the drinks where pretty strong.

After a few rounds we ended up in little italy for some good dinner. Jay and John got some cigars at this little place on Mulberry street. I was full and tired by the end of the late dinner so I passed on going out for more drinks at a nearby bar. It was a good night all in all.

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Random Observations

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Gold was at like $635 yesterday, and is back down to like $610 today. It was at $600 last week when everyone was talking about it at passover. Man I should have bought some back then. I am following the market a bit more closely now!

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People Actually Read This!

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A funny thing happened when I was looking at this sites statistics. I found people finding my site from an unlikely source, VMware’s blog site. Looks like someone over there found my March 27th post about a P2V. I thought that was very cool. Especially since I don’t get tons of hits to the site. I think they have great products, and I don’t mind telling people about them. I will just as easily say really bad things about bad products. See previous posts for really bad rants! Knock on wood, that P2V I wrote about is still running perfect after several weeks. Allot of people where skeptical about the Windows server not performing properly after the conversion to a virtual machine. My group was confident, but it was a hard sell to some. Now the skeptics are glad we did the conversion, and don’t worry about the app anymore.

The reference on the VMNT Blog got me wondering why in recent months after I changed the site’s URL why am I still having allot less page views than in the past. I used to have 5 times as many hits with the old domain name. I gave google a while to spider me and still no change. Kind of weird. I don’t mind that much since I write this stuff more as a journal than for recognition. In many ways I go out of my way for anonymity!

In other Virtual news for me I have Parallel’s Beta 4 installed on a brand new Intel Core Duo Mini at work. So far that VM product looks great. I can’t wait for a final version to come out. Anything to let me run Windows on my Mac without rebooting. I am still holding out hope that VMware will make a Workstation product, and maybe a management console for GSX & ESX server. Until then I think I will get by on Parallel’s, but one can dream for the future!

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Creative Problem Solving With VMware Player

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Recently we had to deal with a rare request (or rare for where I work). We had a user who has a legitimate request for wanting linux on his desktop computer. The problem is for now we are a Windows XP desktop shop. Several systems staff have Linux or Mac’s but that is kind of unique since they are systems. The user in question wanted to try an odd flavor of linux as either a dual boot or a second desktop computer. This poses two issues for us. One, we have no security standard for end users to have linux. Secondly the flavor of linux he wanted to use was not what we currently use at all.

The solution for me seemed very obvious. Give the user VMware Player, and get them a pre-built Virtual Machine of Red Hat Enterprise Workstation (the linux desktop OS that we use internally). This way we don’t need to have a rouge desktop out there different than everything else we deploy to users. Also if there is a problem we can remove the VM and start from scratch quickly.

The user was not so keen on this idea since they wanted linux as their primary OS. We where solving an individual problem they had in the confines of our standards using VMware Player. So far things are working out just fine. The major issue I have is that the user is resourceful, and he may just go out to the VMNT site and download other pre-built VM’s that we have not authorized. I wonder if there is a way to limit what VM’s can run on a machines VMware Player?

Our long term intentions are to deploy all new desktop and laptop computers with the VMware Player already installed so if we need to do something like this again, we just send the user the VM and off they go. It is amazing how after a few years of using this software, we keep coming up with new ways of leveraging it in our organization. And since player is free, we didn’t even need to buy extra copies of VMware Workstation.

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Parallels Beta 3

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In the week since I first wrote about it Parallels Workstation for the Mac is now on beta3. So far it is shaping up to be a great product. I can’t wait for it to be gold and have the ability to use USB devices. I will wait until a final version before I start making Virtual Machines like I did with VMware workstation, but once it does go gold I will be making a bunch of the most widely used OS’s that I use so I can have them on my Mac. Very cool.

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Passover Night 1

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Spent the night with my parents, sister, brother in law, his family, and my niece. We had dinner at my brother in law’s sisters apartment. It was nice. It was also nice that it was really close to my apartment. I wasn’t very hungry, and that was OK since I am not a big passover (or any other Jewish holiday food) food fan. I had a late lunch at like 3-4PM so I had very little. I didn’t even eat dessert.

Sad to say I was on my Blackberry a decent chunk of time at dinner getting updates from Jayson about a possible issue at work. Unfortunately the problem I thought was solved may not be. Not sure yet, but that is all I can say.

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Rangers Vs. Islanders

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My friend rich called me this afternoon and wanted to know if I could goto the Rangers vs. Islanders game at the garden tonight. Not to pass up tickets for hockey I decided to go. The tickets being free was an added bonus. The seats where amazing. They where his companies season tickets. they had 4 seats and only the 2 of us. We sat in the second row of the upper area of the first level if that makes any sense?

The Islanders won, and it was actually a good game. The third period was a nail bitter. I had a great time. I wish I was able to go to games more often.

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Performance Issues Resolved

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After like 4 passes at the configuration of our network (switches, firewall’s, load balancers, etc) Danny found an abonormality that we wanted to correct and see what happened. On our core switch side we had the port where our Pix went set to full duplex 100meg, but on our Pix (configured years earlier than our core) it was set to auto. Turns out the Pix does not auto sense the 100meg full, but does not error out in the situation. You don’t even get lost packets, but you do get some collisions. Well some is an understatement.

Later in the day we set the port on the pix to be full duplex 100meg and within a few hours our metrics back to normal. This little change took us weeks to find. This is not the first time I have been burned by a port mismatch. Knowing that we even took steps to prevent this, or we thought we did.

It is frustrating to find such a little issue that does not show with errors causes so much problems..

Rough Days At Work

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I have had a few rough weeks at work. Hopefully a fix that went into place today will make things better. I know I am getting worn down, and I think others around me are also. We just don’t talk about it. Not much I can really talk about on this blog. I have written more extensively on my Work blog (password protected for my protection).

Because of the extra work, not much else to report on the social front.

New, New Watch

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I finally got my new Omega Speedmaster Professional X-33. it came in to the store and I picked it up on the 31st. I haven’t had a chance to write about it until now. It is basically the newer version of the one I had bought last year used. It was a bit more money (just a bit) but I was able to apply the price of the used on towards the new one. Having the warrantee, box and a brand new item really is better. I know I had a good deal on a used one, but with something that I use all the time and never leaves my side such as wrist watch I really want/need a new one that I can rely on.

So far it is working perfectly. Kind of like a precision swiss watch (sorry for the pun)! I will post photos in a few days. My original Speedmaster Professional (circa 1969) goes back onto the night stand as a backup. And yes I have become a watch guy, or so it seems. I used to be happy with my Timex indiglo, but I am now light years past them!

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