Tired

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Granted I went to bed really late last night (2AM today), but I woke up at noon and was still exhausted. I went back to bed till 2 and I still tired. Not sure what is up? Saturday is my day to lie around anyway, but I am getting nothing done today. I may go back for a nap later.

The weirdest thing is when I sleep flat on my back. I usually sleep to one side or another, but sometimes I fall asleep on my back. Sometimes when I do, I think I dream that I am awake but anytime I try to move I cannot, until I force myself to wake up. It is weird. Only happens when I am on my back. Very hard to describe. Sometimes it freaks me out, and other times it is very relaxing feeling.

Meetings On The Road…

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Friday I went with about 12 others from my company to our President’s house to talk about stuff on our minds. We meet every week, but this week the powers that be decided to take us out of the office. it was a nice change of pace. We talked for a few hours then hung out and had a BBQ. I lost at pool, won at air hockey, and installed a Wifi card on a PC.

We got to play with night vision goggles also. Dean (our president’s) friend who is a next door neighbor is an FBI agent and had a pair of night vision goggles. they were really cool. Gun conversations are also interesting, I don’t talk about them much since I left Baton Rouge.

All in all a good day. I am also vindicated in my opinion of Dan’s driving. Thankfully the return trip I went with Glenn who drives normally.

Two Late Nights In A Row

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I just found out that I need to be around tonight at 1AM for a software release. This will be really fun because I will be up till the same time Wednesday for a hardware release. Needless to say I am not happy about the situation. I hope I am awake tomorrow. I have a meeting filled day from like 10AM through 2PM. Meetings are never fun.

Unfortunately Keith cannot do this hardware swap by himself tomorrow. I don’t think he can mount the gear with one person. if he could I would seriously thinking about letting him.

The Long Reach Of Voice Over IP

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Today was a momentous day. We finally received power supplies for 2 Cisco VOIP phones. With 1 entry into our DHCP scope we turned the phone on and it saw the Cisco Call Manager. Call Manager is like a PBX or phone switch. Within 2 minutes we were making calls to my cell phone to test. It worked great. The only minor issues we have are making calls to different extensions on the same phone system. Small routing issue that we are working through.

The next step is to be able to use our call center software in NYC connecting to the servers in Kingston. We are having some minor issues with that, but we are slowly working through them. If that works we will be able to take calls in two facilities using one phone system. This is big if we have capacity issues in our new space down the road.

I now have a cisco phone at my desk in NYC. I hope to fix all the problems this week. I am very excited about getting this working.

Bring Your Powerbook To Work Day

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I didn’t take my thinkpad home last night due to the dinner. So I decided to commute in to work today with my Powerbook. It is the 2nd time in a week that I am doing it. For some reason I just feel comforatable typing on it, but not on the Thinkpad. I miss the blog entries on the train like today’s entries. Of course because I have 30 minutes to type I tend to ramble on about useless stuff. That is just what a blog is supposed to be. I will see if I will want to commute with both. I doubt it though. We shall see…

Training For A Call Center

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Yesterday a new class of trainee’s started at our Kingston Call Center. We have 24 customer service reps who will “hopefully” start taking calls full time on 9/22. The class was so big that we had to put the working reps in the training room and the people to be trained sat in the call center. Joe our Tech guy in Kingston is overloaded right now. Justin went up for 2 days to give him a hand. Justin was eager to go up, so it worked out ok. I need to get up there one day next week. I will also need to be there on the 22nd.

Besides the ongoing call center build out I have hardware swap out’s to deal with in our Data Center Thursday morning. Tomorrow will be interesting since it will be a long day.

I just received my first Penguin Computing Server. These guys make cheap linux servers. The joy of it is, I can put Windows OS’s on it without a problem. The Super Micro servers I have been buying for windows will not handle Linux. I have some issues with the hardware, but for the price we will deal with it. A decent server can be had for around $1600. I can get a really cheap one for under a grand. We are actually looking to get some cheap windows box’s and may actually use these guys.

I am still awaiting a heat sync for a Super Micro test server we are testing. I got a trial of a serial ATA server. Actually we had the financial ok to buy it but instead of buying a regular server we got this to test. If we like it, we will keep it. If we don’t like it, we will send it back and get a normal IDE server. Serial ATA looks good, and this machine can do hot swappable drives, where IDE RAID cannot.

I need to also start working on our Exchange 2003 test server. Gus and I want to get one working for the Information Systems team and see if it is easy to admin and troubleshoot. If it is we may want to make a larger scale deployment. The difference this time will be we don’t outsource it and we do it ourselves. In December of 2002 we outsourced our mail and put it on Exchange 2000. It was a horrible failure. Too much latency with accessing exchange over the WAN. We abandoned that option and returned to our original mail provider with just POP/SMTP mail. We have been happy since.

Steaks

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After much delay our telecom integration company, Gus, and I finally got together for steaks. We went to Keens chophouse in Manhattan. It was really good. The team we got finally has a clue and it was actually enjoyable to sit back and eat with these guys. I don’t think I have ever been that full after a meal. I had a hard time walking the 4 blocks to Penn Station. My paints feel tighter today!

We still have allot to do so the get together was also productive. We are looking at a bunch of other solutions they can provide assistance for.

Shopping

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I just love shopping for Morgan. Well it is really not like shopping, that is the problem. I just ordered some Elmo related stuff from amazon and had it shipped to her. I wanted to get the chicken dance elmo. I thought that it was very cool. My sister didn’t like it, but said the limbo elmo was ok. I got that and a DVD. Kids like video’s for some reason. it is like a drug for them. Thankfully at 6 months old you can do almost anything and make a baby smile. It is rather funny.

Technology Scare’s Me Some Times

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My dad wants to get a phone / PDA combo device. Now he has always been ahead of the game when it comes to gadgets. I get that from him. But he is also not the biggest computer genius. He has had a cell phone since the late 80’s. Has had a PDA or whatever they used to be called for longer than that. He now doesn’t want to carry a cell phone and a Palm. He uses his palm all the time at work, but only carry’s the cell phone in case of emergencies. He now likes the idea of combining the two. Lucky for him he has Sprint PCS. I don’t like them anymore, but at some point I did. That is why he has service with them. He actually doesn’t complain about the service so we keep him on it. My mom also likes her phone number. I say we are lucky is sprint looks like it has the biggest selection of PDA Phones. I showed him my Treo 270. He seemed to like it. Of course I showed him my original Treo over a year ago, but that is another story. I think he may be better off with one of 2 Samsung phones out there. The SPH-I300 or the SPH-I500. I like the I500, but it may be too much like a phone for my dad. He will use it as a palm more than a phone. He liked the Treo but I don’t know if the no memory expansion and the keyboard will cause him problems. He did play with the keyboard on my Treo for a half an hour today and then proclaimed we will go shopping next sunday.

Shopping with him is fun. We go for breakfast, drive out to Roosevelt Field mall area. Shop for maybe an hour and then go home. We are super fast shoppers. The only slow down we encounter is if we goto Best Buy. He can browse the DVD section for like 2 hours. That store is a black whole. Everyone I know sifts through those DVD racks forever.

Family Get Together’

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Today was my cousin Adrienne’s 21’st birthday party. It was an excuse to get together with my family. It was an interesting outage to Brooklyn. I saw some relatives I actually wish I would see more often. And then there were people who you would rather forget you were related in some way or another.

I got to play with Morgan, so it was a good day if just for that. I also got to see Cerina, Merric & Arrielle. I miss them. I need to take a weekend and get back to Jersey and stay with them again. I have been busy all summer and when I haven’t been busy, I have been tired from being busy. I need to talk to wayne a bit. I didn’t talk much with him today, and I miss talking.

Then there are the cousin’s who you know, but really don’t get to know. My cousin Samia’s kids are like 17 & 18. I don’t really ever speak to them. Samia and her husband are cool, but never hang with the kids. My cousin Shelly’s kids are cool and I get along with all three of them, but I haven’t hung out with them regularly in like 10 years. It is weird that they are all grown up now.

And then there was my Cousin Mike and his kids. My dad used to be really friendly with him, but for some reason he is so distant now. We all think it is his wife. My cousin Synde almost had a fist fight with her today over seats or something weird. Family outings are always interesting. I half wish I went with my brother in law mike to the Yankee game.

All in all I didn’t get sick at the Chinese buffet, and it was nice out. A good day. If I went on about all my cousin’s, this blog would become a psyche paper.