Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
Stayed at work late and then went out with Jayson and his in-laws to a nice restaurant in Little Italy. It was a nice night. We even hit the good desert place after dinner. Cari was going to come with us, but she got a bad head ache and took off from work.
Other than that I had an interesting day at work, but the contents of the day can’t be posted here. I have updated my Work blog (password only) with details.
About 2 weeks ago I got a new Blackberry 7520. Well it is new to me. Someone else at work had it, and never used it. They finally gave it up saying give it to someone who will use it. My group was having a new guy start so we were going to give him the Blackberry. Instead of giving him a new one, I decided to “upgrade” mine and give the older hardware to the new guy. Hey he is the new guy.
Well the musical Blackberry’s don’t end there. Someone else’s Blackberry broke this week. Instead of waiting for the replacement we configured my old one up for her to use, and we can wait for the refurbed unit for the new guy.
The new Blackberry is very similar to the old one. The major enhancements are the screen, and screen brightness of the backlight. It is a night and day improvement. Also the new unit has bluetooth so I can use my wireless headset on it, if I wanted to.
I also went out and bought Pocket Mac for the Blackberry. Now I can sync the Blackberry address book with my Mac!
We had a new guy start at work today. Allot of my day was getting him settled in, and other meetings I had planned. Not too much else to report for today. I need to keep my thoughts together so I can actually write about interesting stuff on this thing!
Yesterday was the start of the Jewish new years. I was planning on going to my parents for it. That was until I woke up with a headache. I normally don’t wake up with a migraine. When I wake up with a headache one of two things will happen. I take a shower and have breakfast and I am fine, or I deteriorate quickly as the day progressed. Monday was a slow deterioration of how I felt. I took some alive near lunch time. it didn’t work. I then took some Zomig. That worked a little but I still didn’t feel myself. I called my parents and told them I was not coming out to them. As much as I feel bad that I missed seeing everyone, I am glad I didn’t make the trip. It wasn’t worth the 45 minute trip to my sisters, for the 30 minute drive to my parents and then the late night repeat of the trip to get home.
One of my greatest fears is being somewhere away from home or another “safe place” and I have a migraine. A bad one where I need to lie down or else I will collapse, but I can’t since I am not near anywhere I can do that! It has happened before, and there here have been several close calls in my life. It is not something I ever wish to live through again. And the fear of it happening gets me err on the side of caution allot. I didn’t goto a baseball game in Baltimore last year because of the exact same reason. Call me chicken, but I won’t play the odds on a 5 hour (or 1 hour for that matter) drive and possibly getting sick along the way.
Are you one of those people who leave themselves logged into AIM (if you don’t know what AIM is just stop reading this now)? I used barely use AIM. I have a cycle. Sometimes I won’t turn it on for days, and I get people asking me if I am logged in every. Then there is the other side where you log in once (lets say at work) and never log off. I have lots of friends who do both. I am sort of in the middle. I use iChat (that is how I get onto AIM) on my Powerbook. When I turn on the powerbook I launch AIM. Never auto-start it but almost always I start the program when I start doing anything. I then leave it logged in as long as my computer is on. That means that friday night I turn on my computer at home and usually leave it on all weekend. However that does not mean I am sitting there waiting to take anyone’s IM’s at any moment. So if it says I am idle for 16 hours, or if it says I am unavailable or away I am most likely maybe away or unavailable. Why then do people feel like they have to IM anyway?
I am well above average when it comes to backing my files up on the computer. Of course there is always something you forget to backup. I have been burned more than once by loosing important information. Last month I started using rsycn a bit to backup my files. I am trying to get a bit more advanced in how I use the tool.
I also decided instead of backing up my data to a firewire drive attached to my Powerbook that I would backup the data to another firewire drive connected to my desktop. In order to do that I am moving files around on my desktop to allow me to use the firewire drive as a backup only drive.
ISO’s and virtual machines sure do take up allot of space.
Meetings took up a large part of the first half of the week. They are necessary but I never like them. I guess I like doing rather than discussing, but discussing (aka planning) is critical before you can do! So I am stuck:(
On thursday a few of us moved a bunch of gear into a new rack in the office. That was interesting. I almost messed my arm up by climbing down from a rack. I was on top trying to clean up some cables and didn’t realize how far the chair actually was. I am getting to old for stuff like that, or better put there are younger people around who could do it instead of me. Thankfully I am ok, and we got all the work done. It wasn’t needed to be an overnight affair so I was happy.
Socially nothing went on thursday. I didn’t get home till after 11. After work was done we went to dinner at this nice diner near the office and then I hopped the train home. It is never fun coming home, changing and going right to bed.
Friday I spent time working on some virtual machines. I needed to get rid of some old test box’s that we had lying around, but we still needed the apps running on them. When I say old I mean like 5 year old desktops hiding under tables in our computer room. I migrated the app’s into a virtual machine running on our GSX server. I feel much better now that things are tidy!
The past two days have been busy with meetings and very little tech work, or anything interesting enough to run and write about. I have been feeling like I am not getting anything done, but in fact I am being productive. When I feel like I am not getting allot done I realize I am doing office work, and not tech work! not bad, but just different.
I am trying to save money the remaining week of this month. For that reason I passed up going out with John and Jay to dinner last night, but then ended up going out tonight with other friends! I intend to safe the rest of the week! Really!
I was just finishing up going through my TO DO list and email backlog. I think now (at 10 to midnight) I finally am done. I am off to bed!
I like talking about technology. I work with it all day, and yet I am still amazed at how some things work, and others that don’t. I have been going back and forth with wanting to keep my Treo and wanting a smaller phone. That is why I switch back and forth between the Treo and the Razr. One program that will keep me coming back to the Treo is mRing, by Motionapps. I love the ability to have distinctive rings for a type of call, a person, or a group of people. I keep coming up with cool ring tones for groups of people.
For over a year and a half I have had the carnival circus music play if anyone from work called. I always get funny looks at the office when it rings. Recently I was bored late one night during an upgrade and I programed the phone to ring with the A-Team theme song when everyone from my group calls. It is really funny. I am also programing the imperial march in for when my boss calls. That is funny for the simple fact that his character does not fit that song, but typically when you think “boss” you think something like Darth Vader!
I am trying to come up with other good tones for others.
I updated my August 2005 Camera Phone images to my personal site. This page is everything that I post to the mobile blog (MOB) and more. I don’t work on my personal site that much anymore. I spend my free web time writing or working on this blog. I am having a minor issue with how some pages are presenting. It looks like it is an issue with the CSS of some photo pages conflicting with the way I did the site template. I need to go back and remove individual page CSS files and have everything use the default site CSS. That means I need to ensure that my global settings are what I want. Way too much tech info, I know!