Well not really packing, but I am lazy today. I know I need to break down my old wall unit so I can get my new stuff friday, but I just am not in the mood to do allot of manual labour. I will wait till tomorrow. Hopefully then I will be up for it. I need to carefully take apart all my electronics and store them for a day. I also need to make sure my cable modem stays on while I do this or else I won’t be able to get on the internet. And that would be bad.
Snow, Snow, And Some Cold Weather
It is freezing in New York City today. It is also currently snowing. I hope it doesn’t snow that much since I actually want to goto work tomorrow. I am working from home friday so I really could get stuff done tomorrow at the office. As of now it is a crap shoot. Who ever knows how much it will snow. The weather people have no clue and I have stopped listening to them years ago.
All I do know is it is freezing. And on that note I just got a new Pea Coat. My old one had buttons falling off and my new LL Bean one just showed up tonight. I am just worried it is not as heavy as the current one I have. For the amount I paid that thing better be warm. I have a real navy surplus Pea Coat I got from my dad. Unfortunately it is too tight on me now. That was an awesome coat. He got it from a Navy base in the 50’s. It was used in WWII and has the guys name still embroidered on the inside of the coat. You could seriously throw a bucket of water on someone when they are wearing that coat and they would still stay warm.
VOIP Rocks
I tested our VOIP link between offices today. I was able to get 12 or so people on the phones in our NYC office connecting through a VPN tunnel to our call manager in our Kingston office. I only had 1 complaint about quality. I need to do a test like that a few more times, but the results look promising.
Keith was out sick today, so I was busy with helpdesk issues. I also have to continue to evaluate our monitoring system to make sure we get notified of any server problem. I think we do a decent job of it now, but whenever anything falls through the cracks it is really bad. Also there is always room for improvement.
I had to spend allot of time reconfiguring VOIP phones today to get our test to work. We are compressing calls, so I needed to associate the phones with the compression scheme we are using. I also had to setup the phone extensions for when our customer service rep’s start using them.
Plenty of other things going on, but my head is not focused right now to remember them all. I will write more later this week.
All in all things are good, and that is all that counts!!!
Migraine Streak Continues
For some unknown reason I am still getting head aches. I was stuck in bed all day sunday with a migraine. I attempted to not take drugs since I was at home, but I ended up taking a bextra and sleeping all day.
Today I also took 2 fureset (butabital). I am hacking the spelling of these drugs! I felt better after taking the drugs today, but if I didn’t I would have a big problem. Butabital is a powerful pain medication. Thankfully I was able to make it through the rest of the day. Hopefully tomorrow I will feel better. I will try to goto bed early tonight.
Work Update
Here is what has been going on at the time sucking void I call work. Kidding. It may be a time sucking void but I wouldn’t be doing anything else…
Fixing our monitoring system. It seems like I am always doing this, but I am spending time tweaking our monitoring system that listens to all our computer systems and pages us when something is wrong.
Keith just finished setting up the VPN link to our Kingston office. Now we have a dedicated link between our offices for just VOIP traffic. We can use an entire T-1 for voice calls. We hope to get 15-20 calls over it. We will test it this week.
We are busy building and configuring new servers. it feels like we are doing this daily. We deployed 2 new box’s this week. Something to QA stuff on, and a new data-warehouse machine.
My mail migration goes slowly since I am busy doing other things. This is not a problem except we are paying for pop accounts on our current provider still when I would like to offload these users to our own hosted mail system. That is the end result. Hopefully when done I will save a few hundred bucks a month on mail hosting.
Gus has been away on vacation and now CES. He returns Wednesday. The rest of our upper management return Monday. No joke it has been quieter without them in the office. it is not them, it is just there is like 10 less people in the office. Back to normal on monday.
Bad Blogger
I have become a bad blogger. I have not posted in a week. And it feels like to me I don’t post as often as I used to. It is not from lack of things to talk about. Just lack of time or inclination to sit down after I get home and write. I don’t write on the train anymore. I am going to try and fix that.
UPDATE FOR THE WEEK:
Wednesday, Thursday, & Friday I had a headache each day. I took some bextra and furiset to stop the Migraine. Wednesday it didn’t really work, but the other days I was at least able to make it through the day. Today I don’t feel 100% but I am still planning on going out tonight.
I finally got a date to get my furniture. My mom actually setup the move. She wanted the stuff out of her place so she setup the move. She knows I am busy so all I have to do is write a check. My dad and I will supervise the move next week. I need to destroy my old living room wall unit to make room for my new one. half of me wants to keep what I have, but it is not in good shape and the new one is so much nicer.
Ready Or Not Work Starts Tomorrow
I had one last day of rest and now work starts again tomorrow. I did my laundry and cleaned a bit today, but other than that I took it easy. I still have a nasty cough, but other than that I feel allot better than I did last week. Not 100%, but better. My parents came over to measure stuff. I am getting my new furniture (there old furniture) in a few weeks and we wanted to make sure that everything will fit. I did an awesome Visio of my apartment and all the furniture in it. it was to scale and everything. Unfortunately I cannot seem to find it. It was lost when I had my hard drive issues a few months ago. I cannot seem to find it in my backups. I am not happy about it. A work skill finally put to use for my house and it is lost. I found it so funny that my sister was amazed at that visio, and it only took me like 1 hour of measuring and about an hour an a half of work in Visio. 🙁
My mom talked me into getting more stuff than I anticipated on. I am getting this huge plush chair for my bedroom. I need to get rid of my Pier 1 papizan chair to make it fit. I love that chair but it is starting to break anyway. It is take this chair from my parents or buy another $300 papizan chair. The only think I will need after this furniture arrives is a small kitchen table. I am not even sure if I need one, but I will have the room for it. I can always eat on the dining room table.
OK, I am off to bed. This will hopefully be my last night on Tylenol PM. I need to wean myself off that stuff.
This entry was written while listening to American Girls LP from the album “Hard Candy” by Counting Crows
Why Am I Still Sick
If you have been reading this blog you will have noticed that I have been complaining of being sick on and off since October. Well this is disturbing since I normally get sick with a cold once or twice a year and that is it. Well I have counted what can be 3 cold’s and the flue since October. Needless to say I am not happy.
This whole week I have been coughing allot and had a stuffy nose. It is weird, some colds you just feel like crap and don’t want to do anything. This one I just coughed like crazy and sounded like crap, but I was able to work. Thankfully I had off Thursday and Friday. I left a bit early from work Wednesday and started taking Tylenol PM. I have been in a haze ever since. I woke up this morning and wasn’t tired anymore but I could not concentrate at all. I ended up watching movies and lying in bed most of the day. I couldn’t do anything else if I wanted to.
Late this afternoon I felt a bit better and decided to rearrange my desk a bit. I took my Athlon XP desktop out of the closet and set it up on a corner of my desk. I totally cleared off my desk when I got my iMac but I decided that I had some use for my XP desktop to be out. So I shifted the iMac over and placed the monitor for the XP box in the corner. I have less desk space now and things look a little more cluttered, but it isn’t that bad. If I don’t use the computer I can always put it back in the closet with my server.
I am also giving the apple pro speakers that came with my mac a try. They don’t use a subwoofer and so at first I didn’t want to use them since my creative speakers have a subwoofer. The only thing the apple speakers have going for them is they don’t take up much space. They don’t actually sound so bad now that I have been listening to music on them for the past 2 hours.
The only problem I have now is that I think half of my computer table is not level. it is not visible when working on it, but I know that it is, so it is driving me crazy. I am to much of a perfectionist…
This entry was written while listening to Unwell from the album “More Than You Think You Are” by Matchbox 20
The Photo Album
I have for years been scanning my images into the computer. I started with camp photos I took back in the summer of 1993. Scanning stuff was my first experience with a mac. I used the scanner at the Mac lab in college. But that is not what this blog entry is about:) Like I said I have been scanning stuff for a while. Because of that I have cleared out most of my backlog of photos. I have a few left to do from my cross country trip back in 1989, but other than that I am good. All my recent photos are digital, so I just upload them to the computer. I have been doing that since 1999.
I have been telling my parents to digitize there photos, movies and stuff for years. My mom doesn’t want to look at them on the computer so she never cared. The problem is most of our family photos are in 3 big baskets in my parents house. These baskets have been near windows when it rained, baked in the sun, and other damage has happened to them. Allot of them are totally screwed up. When you view them after scanning you can see the imperfections here and there. Some images have ripped or bad areas to them. I scanned them anyway because the originals will only get worse. Some of these photo’s are 30 years old and they never kept the original’s.
The first batch of 150 or so photos I did Wednesday I created as TIF’s. Everyone says the uncompressed file format is the best so you can edit or compress the image later. Well a regular size photo at 300dpi comes out to 4.3megs as a tif. I used over 800 megs doing images as tif’s. My entire collection before that was only 2 gigs. I am going to have my dad categorize the photo’s for me and then I am just going to convert them to JPEG. then I will burn the TIF’s to DVD and put them away. No need to keep them on my hard drive. The second batch I did, I used high quality (low compression) JPEG. Each photo is only 2-300kbytes. Much better size. I cannot tell the difference, and I don’t plan on printing many of these photos. if they look good on my high rez 20″ flat panel, then they will look good on most computer displays. I am going to take a few and have prints done, just to see.
Next up is having my dad scan slides into the computer. My Mac does not work with my old HP scanner. Like 1 1/2 – 2 years ago I bought a nice $200 scanner with a slide attachment. I scanned some slides but got busy with work. Now I have a mac and since I never thought I would buy a mac, I didn’t think to check if the HP scanner had OS X drivers when I bought it. I now have a Canon CanoScan LiDE 30 USB scanner for my Mac. My sister has my HP scanner, but doesn’t use it, so I am giving it to my dad to do slide scan’s.
Once the photo’s are done we are going to pay someone to move my dad’s old 8mm film to DVD. That is the really big project, but would be really cool to do. once it is on DVD I can do edit’s on it with Final Cut if I want. With all this scanning and stuff going on my dad wants to learn how to burn CD’s & DVD’s. I forgot his new computer has a DVD burner in it. That will be a fun lesson.
Tech Shake Up
I am having problems with my iMac. it keeps crashing on me almost once a day. My Powerbook never did that on me. It started happening after I put in the Airport Extreme 802.11g WiFi card and my extra 512 megs of ram. At this point I honestly don’t know if either of them is causing this problem. I took out the Airport card. I don’t use it that much since the mac sits on a desk with a switch right on the floor. If it keeps crashing I will take out the ram. if it still is having problems I may just wipe the hard drive and configure it from scratch. I did just open up out of the box and started using it:)
I am still waiting for the Treo 600 to become available for T-Mobile. No end in sight for that. I called handspring to buy an unlocked version of the phone. They said they had unlocked Cingular branded (but it would work with T-Mobile). the only problem was that it is backordered for 2-4 weeks. No one else has them in stock either. I can get an AT&T version, but it is locked. Been there, and done that. I can also get a sprint one from anywhere, but I want a GSM version. T-Mobile has been good to me for most of the time since September 2000. I don’t count that period of 4 months after 9/11/2001 but we did have issues with service in NYC. Handspring wanted $700 for me to wait 2-4 weeks. I decided to wait a bit longer. I don’t want to order the phone and then be able to order my T-Mobile version for $399, and not be able to because I already had an order in. If/when they can ship my order same day or next day I may get it. I am not happy!!!
This entry was written while listening to Wherever You Will Go by The Calling