Another Pool Day

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I did some scanning of bills in the AM. I got up at 8AM again. that is killing me. Then I went to the pool with Jayson for the afternoon. We watched Aliens the movie afterward. That is one of my all time favorite movies. So many awesome lines in that movie. Bill Paxton rocked. I was so happy when the DVD version came out with the deleted scenes. Saw it for the first time with my surround sound system. The explosions really do sound better. Not sure if family next door to me liked it though?

I took another 2 Butabitols today. I started feeling shitty by the pool. I feel great now with them in my system!!!

I am also almost out of guest passes for the pool club. Thank goodness I move by 7-31-04. More later, I am off to bed. Maybe I will get a good night sleep tonight???

Saving Month

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I am trying, and partially succeeding in not spending allot of money this month. I am moving in July (hopefully) and it costs allot. So I want to save a chunk of cash this month and next. Won’t talk about how much, but it is enough to make me stop and think before I buy anything.

I looked at my credit card balance and almost freaked because it was so high. Then I realized that it was 90% work related stuff. That got me to do an expense report. I hope my fiscal responsibility holds up for 6 or so more weeks. I don’t want to be down in my savings because of a move. Right now I don’t know if I can pull it off. I am keeping my fingers crossed…

Got Rid Of Backups

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Several months ago I read that CD-R’s and DVD-R’s won’t last as long as most people orginally thought. The personally recorded disks may only be good for 3-5 years. No one knows. I have been using CD-R’s and more recently DVD-R’s as my only form of backup of my computer data.

I keep everything on the computer now a days so those backup’s are important. Knowing these CD’s “rot” I decided to take all my backups dating back to 1998, and put them back on a hard drive. I then backed up that directory to another hard drive. Drives are cheap so I figure if I keep all my crap on 2 drives I will be safe from problems. Or so I hope. I took some of the really old backups and destroyed the CD’s. I still have my recent DVD’s of backup’s for 2002-2004, but older stuff is getting destroyed since I don’t really need the CD’s with them back on disk. I use a Lacie firewire drive with 200 gig of storage space.

I also decided to buy a new Firewire drive every year for backup’s of crap. I realized that I bought my 200-gig drive less than a year ago and I have only like 50-gig’s left. It is cheaper to buy a new drive than to worry about removing crap off the existing one when it gets filled up.

I still have some more archiving to do, but I am getting things cleaned up virtually and physically before I start packing to move!

Spring Cleaning

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I cleaned out some of the crap I have in my closets this weekend. I am planning on my move, so I am getting rid of crap now. I got rid of some books that I didn’t think I would ever read again. I also found some old cassette tapes I had from the 80’s and early 90’s. I tossed them since I had already gotten 95% of the music on the computer as MP3’s.

I have more cleaning to do, but I didn’t feel up to doing it yet. I have a ton of old clothes that probably need to go. Moving gets you to think do you really need stuff?

This blog entry was written while listening to Something About You from the album “America Town” by Five for Fighting

Halo Night

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Saturday I went over to John’s and played Halo again. I still suck, but I have a good time.

I also want to note I had to take 2 Butabitol’s for a migraine, or potential migraine. I haven’t had to take the drugs in a while so it wasn’t so bad. The Med’s worked.

Those over to play were John (its his place), Jayson, Dave, Dave’s sister Cindy, a friend of john’s I don’t know, Joe, and his women Karen. Joe is up for the weekend from Baton Rouge. it was good seeing him. I haven’t seen him since my trip to New Orleans way back in December of 2001. It was fun.

John BBQ’s and we played Halo. It was fun. I didn’t get home till late. I am having sleep issues this weekend. Not sure if it is because of the apartment hunting stress, or the alison break up, or just because I cannot sleep or what.

I also went to the bank today to get my deposit money for the apartment I want to get. I had breakfast with my dad, and I hit the bank. I have to remember to go over to his place and show him how to burn DVD’s of photos.

This blog entry was written while listening to Breakfast at Tiffanys from the album “Home” by Deep Blue Something

Blackberry’s & Nextel

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I finally approved getting the first of several new blackberry’s for our on call teams. I was holding off since the cost of the device was allot ($350). The current blackberries we have were only between $100 and $200 to purchase. Of course they are the smaller pager stye ones. Unfortunately no one seems to be selling them anymore. Everyone is trending towards the all in one pager, cell phone device. For us this isn’t the greatest. Almost all of us already have cell phones, so the pager/phone combo just adds weight to what we want to carry around.

The reason we are buying the more expensive units is simple. The current system we use with the pager style blackberry’s are charging a flat rate for up to 1mb of email. Then they charge you for every kb over that. We send alert pages to these devices and some months our overages can be $100 – $150 per device. Knowing that, by switching to Nextel’s blackberry server with a flat rate all you can receive plan we will over time save more money. I figure if we pay for $50 overages per pager per month, the $350 pager pays for itself after 7 months. We have had some of our older pagers for over 2 years and some of them are in great shape. That means in the long run we save cash.

Another added feature that made the decision easier was the fact that these new blackberry’s have Nextel direct connect. We get unlimited use of direct connect for free with the plan we have. It becomes useful when we deploy that to everyone who is on call. The goal is to improve our paging and on call system as best as possible while saving money. Man I am really starting to sound like a manager:(

We get our new blackberry today I hope. That would give me the weekend to play with it. Jayson already has one. We can test the direct connect. He loves the email functions on his. I have been using my Treo for a while, and I like it. But the blackberry seems to deliver mail faster, and it is easier to type on. I think my blackberry use may be making a comeback. Not sure yet!

This blog entry was written while listening to Sad Songs from the album “Beneath These Fireworks” by Matt Nathanson

Must Have Software

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I have said good things about CallShield before. I will say more good things. It filters calls to my Treo 600. So if XYZ person calls and I don’t want them to call, I can send them to voice mail, or refuse the call or hang up on them right away.

The hang up function is great. I have some old lady who keeps calling me. She is so old and or retarded she keeps dialing my number instead of whoever it is she really wants to get. So I programed my phone to hang up on her. I see in the phone log that she calls like 8 times trying to get through. People are stupid.

The reason I am praising the software again is that she tried to call last night at like 1:30AM. I didn’t know this until this morning since the software worked as advertised. My only problem is that I wont want to switch to another phone since I won’t be able to do this kind of filtering on a normal cell phone.

New Technologies

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We have been really busy recently. Normal day to day work has been keeping some other projects on hold. For one is our replacement of some servers in our data center.

Other projects include trying to clean up our notification system. I need a day or two of just doing that, and I cannot find the time.

Jayson, Kai, and I also have several “new technologies” that we want to try out and see if we can use them for the office. Many of them we think would be great, but are months if not a year or so away from seeing the light of day. Because the lead time may be so long, we don’t actually look at some of this stuff. We need to because that is how we advance our office. I want to find time to make sure we all can test what we think will be helpful. On that list we have sharepoint portal services for an intranet site, Novel eDirectory for a possible Active Directory replacement, ZEN Works to use to deploy software, SMS for the same possible reasons, several Suse based projects, and more.

Snapper Mail 2.0 Update

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OK I am having issues with my snapper mail. Not sure if it is the software or my IMAP server but I cannot connect to one IMAP box I want to get to. I can get to others. Not sure if it is because this box has a ton of mail in it. I am going to empty it out and see if it works then.

Besides that the software seems great. it does the sync between the imap server and my Treo very quick compared to versa mail. I don’t use versa mail because it is so slow. Also because you cannot schedule send and receives.

Halo Night

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Joe is in from Baton Rouge this weekend or so I am told. He hasn’t called me in ages. Of course I haven’t called him either. He is in visiting his/a women. I believe he will be going to John’s this weekend to play Halo for some record amount of time. Jay, Dave, and I will probibly also take part in the festivities. I may suck, but I have a good time playing.

I just hope I don’t get hooked on this dam game like I did with Half Life back in 99 when John introduced me to it. I lost like 3 months of my life to that game. I may actually be a recovering game addict. I just cannot see playing something for like 12 hours a day. I don’t have time to do that with anything. Man am I getting old. I remember when I had days to waste on crap like that.

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