Dinner with morgan, (and her parents)

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I went over to my sisters last night to install a new hard drive for them. That is my job in the family, to fix computer crap. Thankfully it was relitivly painless to do the install on their old Dell Dimension XPS500. The only problem I had was the ton of dirt in it. Once that was done we all went to dinner at Santa Fe. It is a steak place near Austin Street in forest hills. The food is always good. The big excitement of the night was when I was holding Morgan and she almost got out of my hands. Man that baby can move. In the end no harm was done, but I freaked, and my sister was very calm about it. I think she secretly wanted to kill me, but I don’t want to know.

Mike and I had some drinks at the bar, and then he drove me home so I can drop off a lamp and an end table they were giving me for my new apartment.

They tried to bribe me to do the computer work with paying for dinner, but I didn’t want to have them do that. I don’t mind doing stuff for them, and if it is something crazy big project I wouldn’t mind some free steak, but this only took me a half an hour and I wanted to see them anyway. It was nice that they thought to take me out though!

Dinner turned bad when we were walking back to their apartment and I got pages about errors my companies website. Turns out some stored procedure need re-compiling, or something. I have not yet read the incident report on the matter. I should get that on monday.

Amanda emailed me late, saying she was trying to IM me about going to Rye play-land friday night. I am glad I didn’t get the message till late because I would have felt bad that I was going to my sisters already. I like amusement parks.

Friday was busy, my old boss jeff from my days at Y&R wanted to do drinks also. I need to catch up with him soon.

Time for a lazy Saturday!!!

How about that weather???

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The work week is almost over. Once friday is over I can pass out for 2 days and start all over again. It is a foggy and muggy morning in NYC today. It is supposed to be nice this weekend. They say that one of the only safe topic of conversations to have with strangers is “how about that weather?” Well I think it is totally true. I take a van to the train station every day. It consists of people from my building complex and the car service driver. Almost every day that is what people talk about. Is it hot, or cold today. Someone likes it this or that type of weather. It is almost funny. I of course partake in the conversation as well. Just an interesting observation I have.

My website

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If I haven’t blogged enough today, here is more stuff I have going on.

I am working on setting up my photo website on my new Windows 2003 server. it is really my old Windows 2000 server I have cleaned off and installed 2003. I am playing around with both IIS 6.0 and Apache. I am also working on my VMWare project mentioned a few days ago. No luck with moveabletype just yet, so my existing Red Hat server still remains.

Even-though I am using IIS again I am refraining from the temptation of using Front-page server extensions again. It took me forever to get rid of them (probably not really gone, but I like deluding myself) so I don’t want to put them back. I am going to continue to use Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Moving my photo album is taking a while over the 802.11b link. I have over 750 megs of images now. I may go back and re-run the iphoto exports to shrink some of those files, but for now the archive only gets bigger!

Mail from people you don’t expect it from

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I got a card from my grandmother last week. She wanted to say hi and wish me well in my new place. What is weird is that I don’t speak to her very often. About 5 years or so ago we had some issues that she could not work through so we don’t really speak. Not going to get into it, but lets just say you don’t lie to a grandchild and then lie about the lying. In the past 2 years we have traded cards back and forth. In may she visited my sister and I spoke with her. I had other plans already so I couldn’t see her. She seemed to mellow in her old age. With the card she send a $100.

I am about to write her back right now. I haven’t wanted to talk with her, but she seems to be approachable recently so I will give it a try. She of course is my grandmother and I still love her even if I have trouble talking with her.

I am just grumpy today I guess

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On the I got screwed side of the day, I rushed in the morning and caught the early train. The train proceeded to break down and require everyone to switch trains. The end result is I got into work at the same time I would normally have. Some days you cannot win. I shouldn’t complain. I did get allot done today. I am just tired and cranky. It is thursday night and I still have not done anything to schedule my SCUBA class. I will try again tomorrow, if not try to find the next class.

Thanks to Gus for talking me out of buying the G4 Powermac I saw that was really discounted (yet still expensive). I think I will keep my powerbook for a while more. I did say that I am not getting a new laptop for at least a year. I have almost half a year left on that promise. I will see if I keep it. with my track record I probably won’t.

Scuba try 2

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I believe this weekend is another crash cource in SCUBA training. I am hoping to call today to get in it, but I don’t know how that will pan out. I also need to sit down for an hour and order food from fresh direct. I have been putting both tasks off for about a week. I just have tons to do.

I also need to unlock my T68i or get another unlocked GSM phone. I have another SIM card I want to put in my AT&T phone and I cannot. It pisses me off that I buy something and it is disabled even after I use it for the 1 year it was discounted for. Dam AT&T. I am about ready to sell my AT&T Wireless stock and dump the dam phone. Good cell number be dammed.

On the plus side I sold my old Palm Tungsten T, and shipped it yesterday to the person who won the auction on ebay. Looking around the house to see what can be next. I like cleaning out the house of old stuff and getting extra money to buy new stuff at the same time!!! Way to go ebay.

Staff meeting day

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Another mid week staff meeting day. The mornings are always shot doing this stuff, but it is needed. I have allot to bring up today. We (keith) is about done with the new switch configuration for our data center. We need to schedule a deployment of that. It will be a big deal since so many network paramiters are changing.

I also have a conference call with our VOIP intergrator regarding our project. I think we are about ready to set an install date. Our CEO wants us able to test calls on Augist 15. I am not sure if that will happen, but the big bossman wants us to try, so we try!

Eventful road trip

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My Kingston road trip on tuesday was eventful. I got allot done regarding the new AC units and electrical setup for our computer room. I also found that both data T-1’s are technically in the room we need, but the smart jack for one is somewhere else. After running around the building looking for the dam thing I cannot find it. A smart jack is the terminating end of a T-1, be it data or voice. We want the smart jack in our telecom room because if we have a problem we have easy access to the smart jack. I am working on fixing the problem with our provider.

I am also getting our cable and construction people talking to each other so we get the data cables done in time.

Dan and I found a good greasy spoon diner near the office that we can eat at. Our waitress was so friendly that dan kept saying she would be a perfect CSR.

The drive back was interesting because we both tried to get allot of work done. it is weird being on the cell phone with someone else in the car trying to do the same thing. You got 2 people holding 2 different conversations at the same time. It is just weird.

I have other really big news regarding Kingston that I want to mention but I need to wait for something else to happen before I discuss. Lets just say good things are going on!!!

I didn’t get home till late last night. I was catching up on all the missed work I had since I was out most of the day. I need to have a social life during the week…

Got my new verizon phone today

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I finally got my new Motorola T720 phone for verizon wireless. So far the phone is cool, but nothing spectacular. The spectacular thing about it is it works almost all the time!!! I will take that over some phone that does everything for you except hold a good phone call. The big test for this new “toy” is tomorrow when I take it to the remote city of Kingston NY. My T68i with AT&T doesn’t work at all up there, and my old verizon V60 worked ok. I will let you know the results.

Nothing else on the personal level happened today. I got home to late to have any sort of life! My cleaning lady came to the new apartment for the first time today! Yes, I have a cleaning lady. I got spoiled with cheap cleaning people when I was in Baton Rouge so I have someone come at least once a month now. Hey, I am a single guy living alone. I need someone to know where to dust and scrub, because I sure don’t.

OK, off to bed early tonight. I have to get up early for the road trip.