Alergies And The AC

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For the first time in a few weeks I am breathing normal. I switched from Zertec one a day to the 12 hour version. I was finding the once a day pill slowly wearing off as the day went on. By the time I needed to take the next day’s pill I was really not feeling good.

I took the first 12 hour pill last night. I didn’t have the greatest sleep, but I am not sure if it was due to the drugs. I woke up this morning and right after I got up I was breathing normally. I took the second pill before I left work, and so far so good. One problem I think I have been having is that all the windows are open at work. All the dust and pollen from outside is circulating around because we don’t have AC. The AC situation should be partialy resoloved today. We got two portable units that we will be powering up and hopefully cool the office till the main units are fixed. Maybe then I can breath ok!

iMac Or Powerbook, Or Both

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I am getting pressure to get rid of my iMac. I love it. it has a huge screen and it is pretty fast, but do I really need two Mac’s? I have my 12″ Powerbook. I like it allot. I also use it allot. When I am home I use the iMac, but I think I over my Powerbook just because I have it. All the reasons why I bought the imac are still valid, but the question remains do I really need it?

I can always sell it on ebay. It would be difficult since it is heavy and would be a pain to ship, but it is in mint condition so I could get decent cash for it.

On the other I loose nothing by keeping it. granted I can make some cash by selling it, but I already bought and paid for it last year. I still use it, so why get rid of it? These are the things I am thinking about with regards to my computers recently.

This blog entry was written while listening to Hysteria from the album “Hysteria” by Def Leppard

Scuba Diving Procrastination

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I have been saying I want to a scuba diving course for the past year. I think I am almost ready to go take a class. I have 3 or so other people who are interested in going to one. I have birthday money to fund the class. Now all I need is a weekend to do it. Once done, I will waste countless amounts of money traveling places to do diving. It will be awesome.

On a positive note, I found my credentials stating that I did dives in St. Thomas when I was down there in 2000. I don’t know if it does anything for the PADI diving course I want to take, but it can’t hurt to have.

Gus Back From India

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My boss is back from his trip to india. My vacation is over:) Just kidding. The work doesn’t really change, but stress level does when he returns. At least he looks rested and relaxed from his trip.

We hit the ground running with a bunch of new projects he wants me to look into. One involves a new beefy Linux Server. We will probably use Suse 9.0 for this deployment. Also on the plate is Project 2003 server. Jayson and I have kicked around the idea since he got here, but now we see a real business use for it, so we will push ahead with it.

We are also pondering remote agents again. We think we can use the remote agent’s to get french reps in NYC to connect to Kingston. This may or may not allow us to free up space in NYC. The office is getting crowded again.

All this on top of the 4 new sites we are building out, and the new server deployments in our data center, and the major office move of users thursday and friday. It will be a fun week.

Remote Power Control

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I think we designed our Data Center pretty well. Keith and I spent hours toiling over different ways we can make it better over the past 2 years. One area that I think we need improvement is the ability to power cycle a server remotely. We can view what is on our KVM remotely. I can go into the bios or configure a network card even if the computer is not on the internet. This is thanks to a backup dial up connection, and an IP KVM. the only thing I cannot do is hit the power button on a computer if it crash’s. That would be the ultimate ability. Besides changing tapes, I would have no other reason to goto our data center on a daily basis.

This would also save us money. We pay to have someone go to our cage and do what is called “remote hands”.

Virus’s At Work

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If you read the news you must hear about all the worms and other “bad things” spreading through the internet. My company has been diligent in attempting to prevent these things from infecting our computers. We have not been 100% protected, but from what I have seen we are way ahead of the curve in protecting ourselves.

I have seen lots of virus alerts from our virus scanning system. Thankfully, it is able to deal with whatever comes up. Also important is the Windows Update server. That thing is a life saver. I don’t know if we would have been able to install all these updates on all of our desktops without it. We need to goto the next level and get an SMS or ZEN type system next.

I have never been a huge fan of Novel, but they have caught my curiosity. What they are doing with Suse keeps me interested. Also that their directory services work on Windows is also cool. All that and ZEN Works is much better than SMS, or that has been my practical experience. I don’t know how SMS 2004 holds up. I keep telling myself that my company is a windows shop, we don’t want Novell. The other side of my brain is saying “you know Novell is better, give it a try”. For now I am ignoring that side of the brain. I would like to get a demo of Novell and give it a test drive. When (if) things ever settle down enough that I can try that, I will. Novell NDS, running on Suse linux. Now that would be really nice, if it worked as easy as the old novell used to!!!

3TB, Still Building

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Jayson started building a 3.x terrabyte disk array friday afternoon. It began to initilize friday. As of last night it was only at 53% complete. I will give it a few more days before I get worried. 3 terrabytes is allot of drive space. We currently buy Promise SATA and IDE RAID array’s. For the money, they are awsome. You get an unbelievable amount of storage space for so little, and the speed is not far off its more expensive SCSI disk cousin’s. These array’s actually use a SCSI backplane back to the servers they connect to.

In the past year I have gone from technology snop only wanting nice SCSI disk array’s from the likes of HP & Dell, to a huge proponent of Serial ATA. I have to say Promise makes a good product. The only downside may be we go through drives quckly. Not sure if it is coincidence or what we do, but I have had 4 drives go bad over the past year on a total of 5 disk array’s. Now when you add up that each array has 15 drives, it may not seem like allot. I may be over-reacting. In fact I think I am, but I have other SCSI arrays with no problems. It isn’t an issue yet, but I am keeping my eye on the situation.

All in all, SATA, or IDE RAID is solid and more than half the cost of it’s SCSI equivalent.

Konfabulator Rocks

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Way back (almost a year to the day) in May 2003 I talked about Konfabulator. I have been using it for over a year. it is a fantastic program. It is what Microsoft tried to do with Active Desktop, but couldn’t. I have widgets (what each component is called) for the weather, itunes remote, moon phases (it is cool), cpu utilization, airport signal strength, and a host of others that I can use. I have about 4-5 widgets running at all times on my Powerbook or iMac and I haven’t once had a cpu or memory issue because of it. it sips the memory.

Some of the widgets are cool, but useless. Others like the weather and itunes remote widgets I use all the time. Ok, my endless praise of Konfabulator is over now. Back to my normal ranting….

Hanging By The Pool

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Alison and I hung by the pool today. I took advantage of the pool at my building. She came over and we got some sun and swam. it was a really relaxing afternoon.

I cut my outside time short when I realized I may get really burned if I continue to stay in the sun without any sun block. As a consolation we went to the outback for dinner. Good as always. I just had some cheese fries and crab cake appetizer. I am on a crab cake frenzy this past few weeks. I hope the fad wears off, since they are expensive.

Saturday I just hung out at home and did some work. It was a low key weekend. I like that sometimes.

Surpirse Birthday Dinner Friday

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I forget the name of the restaurant but we all meet in soho for a surprise dinner for Dari. The place was half a block from the Apple store in soho. I just remember the really weird yellow chairs.

The problem with the whole surprise was Dari wouldn’t leave work. So we were late for our reservations. We didn’t want to leave and have her leave at the same time as the group. So we all waited for her to leave. The problem was she never did. By the time alyssa said lets go, Dari was walking out. So what we tried to avoid happened. We all lied and said we were going to dinner some place. then we walked the really long way around the block so we didn’t end up on the same subway as her. It was really funny.

We ended up at the restaurant first, and it was a real surprise. It was fun. I had the chicken with crab cakes appetizer. I got really buzzed off of one kamikaze. I had a second but ended up giving it away since I didn’t want to get smashed. I am a light weight when it comes to alcohol but 1 drink usually doesn’t buzz me. Oh well…