Rain And Delays

The Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) is delayed again today for unmentioned equipment problems. This is the second time this week that I have been delayed due to them. Monday I left work an hour later than normal. I was happy with myself since I got on an express train to my stop. Of course literally 1 minute after we left penn station we stopped in the tunnel. We had a bad train. First the door lights wouldn’t work so they crew couldn’t tell if all the doors were secured. Then the breaks were not working correctly. We sat on the tracks for 20 minutes until we started moving. then we sat outside Woodside for another 20 minutes. they didn’t say why but from the amount of trains passing us very fast the LIRR wanted to clean out their congestion of trains before they let us off at Woodside to get on another train. That train of course was a local. My normally 50 – 60 minute commute door to door took almost 2 hours. Thanks LIRR.

It is raining today so delays are expected. I don’t wish to speak to soon, but we are moving along at a decent clip right now. it is always a crap shoot with these guys.

Poker Again, Maybe

Dan wants to do poker thursday. We shall see if anyone gives the ok to doing it. I am in, unless I am wiped out from the Wednesday late night upgrade. I think we may also have a party at work that day so we may have a conflict.

Other Updates

Today I ran through some test upgrades to see if a DB upgrade I am going to do tomorrow will work ok. My problem is that I have been unable to truly simulate the current environment so my tests failed. I am working to correct the problem tomorrow.

I am also trying to get a fix for some phone monitoring software we had installed last week. we got this software and it just doesn’t work. thankfully we haven’t paid for it yet.

I got install dates for my new voice T-1 that we are getting. I also got final pricing on new data circuits we need for our VOIP traffic.

Tomorrow will be a late night to run software upgrades at work.

Still No Exchange

I stayed up late last night working on getting Exchange 2003 to work correctly. So far I have not succeeded. Howard put me in touch with David at idealab. He has done the deployment before and he was very helpful. Thanks to him I have an idea of what needs to be done. I went through all the documentation he sent me. I got further along in the process than I did before, but still nothing. I am now going over all my settings to verify I did everything correctly. so far it looks like I have done everything expected of me. I am getting frustrated with being unable to get this to work. I have a few more things to try tonight when I get home.

The Holy Grail

The holy grail for me the past 4 days has been configuring Exchange 2003 to use RPC over HTTP and getting it to work. So far nothing. I have gotten 2 exchange servers to work, but I need to be on the LAN in order to get mail via outlook 2003. I can use the web interface but that isn’t good enough. I can use a vpn connection, and that wont work either. I am so close but it still wont work.

I would like to thank Microsoft for their totally lack of a support selection on this topic. I have all 3 documents regarding the topic printed out. they barely mention how to install the dam service. You would think that would be an important part of the process.

I am just burnt out right now. I have been taking all of my spare time this weekend to get this to work. I am just frustrated because I am so close to getting it to work.

iTunes For Windows

So like allot of people I downloaded Apple’s iTunes for windows when it came out. Actually it was a few days after it came out since I was sick and didn’t read about its release for a while, but you get the point. It looked great, exactly like iTunes for Mac. The problem is that when I run it on my Thinkpad T40 it brings the system to a crawl. I cannot click or move the iTunes window when it is running. I am not sure what is wrong. I installed it twice to make sure nothing went wrong with the install. Still no dice. I am going to try it on another machine at home and then decide if it is worth the trouble. It just works on my mac!

I think that ends my bitch session about recent technology that I have dealt with…

iChat AV

So I looked at the Apple iChat AV program yesterday. I have also played with it in the Apple store before. It is really cool. I think I would actually try to use it. The only problem is that it only works with other iChat AV users. I am not buying hardware for a chat system that only like 10 people use, and none of them are people I know. I do want to play with a net cam. It is a dead fad, but I think it was a good idea.

Lost Blog’s

When I backed up data from my powerbook I forgot to backup Kung-Log the offline blog editor I use. I mentioned that before, but I am trying to figure out what I wrote about that I lost. I cannot remember. It was very early last week and I don’t remember what I was blabbing about.

I do remember 2 entries I was writing about. I was doing two long entries about the computers I have used over the years, and the many cell phones I have had. All that writing gone in a poof. Oh well. Maybe I saved them online as drafts? I don’t think I was that smart. When moving to new computers you always loose something. If that is what I lost, I am ok with it. It is funny, at work it is unacceptable to loose anything when moving a user to a new computer. But lets face it, no one is going to remember to grab everything. I am a good user and I didn’t remember the dam blog entries.

Forgetfulness

So last night I got an email reminding me that one of the guys working for me is taking 3 days off this week. No big deal. He asked about it over a month ago. What was a big deal was I totally forgot about it.

Then this morning I cannot seem to find the holster for my cell phone. I swear I saw it yesterday. Am I loosing my mind? On second thought don’t answer that.

VMware Does Its Thing

VMware does what it is supposed to do. I have been using it to download programs and other crap from the internet so I don’t get worms and stuff on my desktop computer. Well sure enough the VWware session I have that runs Windows 2000 Pro finally got gator. I just deleted it and copied the fresh VMware session of Windows 2000 Pro that I saved and was up and running in 20 minutes. The only down side was that I had to run the windows update to make sure the OS was fully patched. VMware is so cool.