Call Manager Approved

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I finally got our Cisco Call Manager PBX approved for our office move later this year. After the new landlord didn’t want to piggyback us on their system did my CEO finally agree to getting a CCM for our NYC office. Actually we wont be getting a physical CCM, but a voice gateway router and phones. We will be piggy backing off of our existing call manager cluster in our Call Center.

Now we need to select a vendor and place the order. I like both vendors, but one of them is the front runner now. We meet with them next week to go over final details of the deal. In addition to the phone system we are also getting a new Cisco Catalyst 4507 for the office to act as a core switch. Our existing one is 6 years old and probably wont scale to our planned growth. That and the 4507 will do POE (power over ethernet) and gigabit.

Now we need to actually sign the lease and get a move date. That is work for next week.

Tired

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Plenty to write about, but I have just been busy and tired. I hopefully will write this weekend and catch up. I may even cheat and post date some entries! Off to bed for now.

New Computer Time

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Tonight I went with my dad to Best Buy to get him a new computer. He has been complaining about the Mac Mini I had him try. Turns out not OS X is not for everyone, no matter what good intentions I had! We meet up by my apartment and took a cab to Best Buy. We found the computer he wanted easy enough, but they didn’t have it in stock. We then went to the next Best Buy in Mid town. Turned out they had it in stock so we bought it. Shopping with my dad is so easy. We usually don’t go shopping unless we know what we want, and when we see it we just buy it. If we don’t see it we check one or two other places and then go home. No fuss, no muss!

I will configure the computer this weekend and deliver it to him on Sunday. After we dropped the computer by my place we hit an italian restaurant by my house for some dinner. It was a quick and productive evening. My dad was happy he got a new computer and that it was a quick drive into manhattan and back home again.

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Watch Drama

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After a distressing call with Tourneau yesterday I decided to show up at the store and find out what exactly is wrong with my watch. To may an agonizing story short they screwed up and the watch was still at Omega no work was done on it what so ever. I got the run around for a while, then I started to raise my voice and get a bit pissed off. The service manager stepped in and finally explained the situation since the regular worker was giving me the run around. When he said he couldn’t tell me when I would get it back until he called the service center monday I told him that was totally unacceptable. He gave me the option of taking the value of the watch I bought and buying something else. I originally thought about asking about that but I originally didn’t really want to do it. When he offered that I saw that as the only way I could get something without waiting another month and a half. Since I bought the watch used I figured I would spend more and get a new watch of the same model. At least it will have the manufacturers warrantee on it. I was then told that Omega didn’t make that model anymore. I told the guy that was a bunch of BS since they prominently advertise it on their website. He gave me store credit for the watch still in repair and then told me he would call me on Monday or Tuesday after he called Omega and found out if he could still get the watch.

I got sorta lucky and got a call a bit after I got home from the store. Turns out I was right and they still do sell the watch and I could order it and have it in 2 weeks. It cost more than I anticipated, but I still wanted it so I told them to order it. Hopefully in 2 weeks I will have my brand new Omega Speedmaster X-33 and my crazy repair drama will be over.

I now eagerly await the call from the store telling me the new watch is in…

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The Missing St. Patrick’s Day Post

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Yesterday was a roller coaster ride of a day. I had a tons of issues to contend with at work. Jayson & Danny where off because of work done during maintenance Friday morning (for those of you that don’t understand that, when you do work on a website you need to do it on off hours. That means like 1AM EST. By the time you are done and home it is like 5AM, so you don’t get up for work normal time the next day.) Of course Jay was up at 10 not sleeping so he helped a bit remotely, then Danny shows up around 2:30 since he didn’t want to stay home.

Semi related problems to the work done Friday morning plagued us all day but where annoyances more than major catastrophes. Can’t go into more details here. Then we had other minor issues that where fun to deal with while down two people most of the day. Jayson ended up coming into the office at like 7 with gretchen so we could goto dinner. We didn’t get out of the office till like 7:30, and headed over to Heartland Brewery for dinner and hopefully drinks. We stumbled upon (well she was stumbling) Gretchen’s old boss going to another bar. She obviously got off work and had a head start with the festivities.

We had drinks, food, and then desert at the brewery. It sucked that Danny had to head home early! I got really buzzed off of 2 drinks. All I can say is that I predicted it in my birthday post. Jayson’s no alcohol vow from Gretchen’s friends wedding last week lasted a whole 5 days!

I got home late and was so tired and buzzed that I didn’t couldn’t write last night.

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The Big 3 2

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Today is my birthday. I am now very much into my 30’s at 32. It was a relatively normal day. I got a ton of backlogged work done with Jayson out in the morning, and not many people dropping by for requests. A bunch of people from work took me out for lunch. I got a bit sick on some ice cream in the afternoon so I passed on dinner with Jayson and Danny.

I got the customary calls from my parents, sister, cousins etc. My favorite was the voice mail from Morgan singing me happy birthday. I missed the call but now I can keep the VM for a while. She is so cute.

My sister guilted my parents (my mom) for canceling our dinner plans for sunday so they are back on again and we will all meet in the city for dinner. Personally I didn’t care that much if they canceled, but my sister was right in saying the correct thing to do was to go to dinner and not do whatever emergency plans they had.

The birthday present I wanted didn’t happen. I was hoping my watch would be fixed by now. Saturday marks 7 weeks since it went in for repair. I will call them tomorrow to check on it. My other Speedmaster has been filling in nicely but I am still slow on the analog only watch:(

Proposals

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Today we meet with the first possible integrator for our new phone system project in our NYC office. They presented us with their first proposal. The price they came back with was very high! We had them change the design and take out a bunch of stuff to try and slice the quote in half. We shall see what they come back with again. I also await a quote from the other integrator we are looking at.

I also meet with people regarding a pilot program for open office 2.0. we are going to roll it out to 30 people at the call center to see if it will not only replace open office 1.1 for the call center but also possibly replace Office for people who have it. We estimate it will save us allot of money. Can’t say how much but it is not a small number for us. Our CFO heard great things about it from my boss who is trying it out, and then heard the cost savings and wanted to know when we could get a test done! We are taking this one slow, but we believe the return on the investment in this open source product will be huge.

Beware the Ides of March

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Personally I don’t (see title). But the term sounds cool, and most people don’t get it. Julius Ceasar had a bad day on this date in 44BC. Generally this is the first of a 3 day holiday (self proclaimed) for me. It begins with a normal day March 15, that happens to have a cool sounding reference that was used by Shakespeare. Only other significance for me is it is the day before my birthday! Other stuff happened on March 16th. The Wikipedia has yet to list my birth on their page related to this date. I assume it is just an oversight. That is supposed to be a happy day. That is the middle day of this holiday. And to cap off the 3 day gala event is St. Patrick’s. Recently this is the day I can drink to excess claiming it is a holiday, but really because I am a year older. Who am I kidding. I am a light weight drinker anyway!

No major social events positive or negative happened today. Work was busy. See the work blog for more info. I returned the PCI DVR card I bought last week since it was having major issues with interference so sound was terrible. I tried everything I could think of to fix it. I am back down to 1 tuner for the DVR. I am researching my other options now.

Bandwith

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I meet with our Voice/Data provider today with our CFO to discuss renewing our contract with them. One account rep and his boss flew out from down south, and our local rep showed up also. They offered us a nice discount off of what we are currently paying since our volume is up, but our CFO thinks we can get a better deal. Let the games begin. This is the part of my job I don’t like. It is necessary but I don’t have to like it. Other topics we discussed where open issues we having as well as some new network options we have been thinking about. it was productive but long discussion.

Other issues that came up today was dealing with the ever growing space problem. We had to plan on moving 2 people to accommodate a new hire starting next week.

CIA cited as worst freedom of information agency

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Umm, are we talking about the same CIA that I am thinking of? I would expect that CIA to I don’t know keep secrets. it is in fact a spy agency! I am not saying I agree with anything it may or may not have done now or in the past, but it is by definition a spy agency. I would expect it to be cited as the worst freedom of information agency. Not getting an award for being the most open agency for free flowing information. Get over it.

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