the short vacation is over

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The holiday weekend is over and I was back at work today. Thankfully we tracked down one of our two missing T-1’s today. I am going up to Kingston tuesday to sort things out. Dan and I are driving up tuesday morning. It will be interesting, since dan is an interesting driver!

I have some other issues I need to take care of while I am up there so it should hopefully be a productive trip. I am also planning on being up there next Wednesday to oversee our next T-1 install. I won’t let this screw up happen again.

With my cell phone and wireless internet, it is almost like I am in the office! Who am I kidding!!! It beats being totally out of touch on some island.

Got a bunch of Kingston related issues worked on today. And I survived an almost 2 hour long management meeting. I felt very productive today. Hopefully tomorrow I get the telecom issues taken care of.

The beach club

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Today I went with my family to my parents beach club. They have had this cabana since I was like 11 years old. They still love it. I am no longer a fan of the beach, but I went so I could hang with my niece. She is so cute! It was really hot. The only cool place was standing in the ocean while a breeze went by. The water was cold, but the air was so hot you didn’t care.

I haven’t been sleeping well, so I got a little nap in during the day. My dad and I had steaks for dinner. My mom had hot dogs, and I don’t remember what my sister had.

Morgan was very playful today. She talking in baby talk so much. it is so funny. She also spent half the day sucking on her foot.

The beach club has changed so much over the years, and other parts of it have not changed at all. they have put up new play grounds, changed some of the boardwalks, but the pool is still the same. it is weird going back there. I have not regularly went to that club since I was 17. I guess time passes you buy.

I was remembering some of the good friends and good times I had there when I was 11-15 or so. I don’t keep in touch with many of them anymore. Time and distance does that sometimes. It was interesting going down memory lane today. It was especially so when I am making lots of changes in my life recently. A new apartment, new changes at work, etc. A trip down memory lane puts everything in perspective if you ask me. You are after all a sum of your memories and actions. You don’t know where you are going if you don’t remember your past. Enough of me trying to be profound.

hanging out

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It is good to know you have friends that you get along with so well that you have a really good time just getting take out and hanging out playing a board game and drinking until 1AM. Sounds boring, but sometimes it hits the spot. That’s just what we did Saturday night. Rich, Amanda, Vivian, & I just got some food (deli for Rich and i. The ladies had Chinese) and ended up sitting on the floor of my place (no chairs or a couch yet) playing trivia pursuit. I showed amanda new ways to mix baileys so she was happy. Rich won so he was happy. The AC was working so I was happy, and Vivian always seems happy!

Note to self I need patio furniture for just this type of night.

Lazy day

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With unpacking done and it is only Saturday I decided to just relax today. I tried to sleep in, and was somewhat successful. I slept till 11:30AM but I was still tired. I felt “bla” or out of it most of the day. I tried everything to cure myself of this tired out of it feeling. Finally I just took a nap and am feeling a bit better. Just in time, I have plans with Rich and Amanda in a little bit. Not sure what we are doing yet. The movies out suck, or so it seems. I just looked at the listing and everything looks like crap. We may do dinner and just hang out. I think Vivian is joining us also. She is always interesting.

Moveabletype, linux, and vmware

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I am still a huge fan of Moveabletype. That is of course what currently runs my blog. I want to keep using it running on my Red Hat 9.0 Server I built. The only problem is the place I want to put it in my new apartment requires a wireless connection. My new Win2003 server works fine with Wifi, but I am having trouble finding drivers for the card I got to work with Red Hat. For now the server sits next to my desk, but I don’t want to leave it there. I am trying to hid as much electronic crap as possible from visible sight. I want 1 computer out. And that computer will be my desktop, not my server!

I am playing around with running red hat on VMWare on the Windows 2003 server. I am a huge fan of VMWare, but I have not really been using it to it’s full potential. I started using it allot more this week, and I am finding that I love it even more. The only problem is that I need more ram on my work machine to get it to run really well with more than 1 os running at a time.

But back to my idea. So I had a red hat VMware system already built. I configured apache and threw on moveabletype. I am getting some driver error when I try to start moveabletype’s prep file. I need an expert (friend) to look at it. I am going through my config files to verify things are correct.

To cover my bases I am also installing a Windows 2000 Server instance on VMWare also to play around with moveabletype on windows. I don’t plan to use it, but I want to see if it will work and I don’t want to mess up my system I just built so a vmware instance is the best way to test it. All I need to do is make a backup of the file before doing anything and I have a complete OS backed up. Wednesday at work I took an entire vmware OS file and moved it to a different computer and it worked without doing anything special. That totally ROCKS!

I will post results of my ongoing testing. Hopefully this will work and I can keep moveabletype on red hat and consolidate everything to 1 server and just run the vmware software. I will see.

Fireworks

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Like clockwork at 9pm people started setting off fireworks. I found a use for my patio after all. I went out there and watched the fireworks. I could swear I saw stuff going off halfway to manhattan from my apartment. it was cool. The night was a bit hazy so I couldn’t get a complete view of the city skyline but the view was spectacular anyway.

Cleaning up and wireless issues

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I was wrong in my last post. The major moving of stuff was done, but the work was not. Today I cleaned. I put stuff away, and otherwise cleaned up stuff. I am mostly done. I still have some crap in my soon to be dining area, but other than that things are neat. Well, the bathroom doesn’t count. And my desk is always a mess, but at least the computers are all tucked away. I built a Windows 2003 Server and it is up and running in my closet. I got the Wifi card I got to work without incident.

I am still having issues with my Linksys 802.11g wireless router. It worked great in my old place, but for some reason it keeps dropping connections in the new apartment. I ended up taking out my old Lucent Wavelan AP-1000 and using that along with the linksys. I still get dropped signals, but the Lucent point recovers better than the Linksys. I am betting my neighbors are using a 2.4ghz cordless phone or something. I tried half the channels I can use and all of them are having the same problem. Updating the firmware did nothing. I am getting pissed. I wanted to do almost everything in the new place wirelessly, but now I am holding off because of the problems I am having.

On a lower tech note, the stove works. I cooked up some potato’s to go with my steak I cooked on the george forman grill today. Didn’t do anything of note today. It looks like I have plans for tomorrow and sunday. I always like at least 1 day of resting on the weekend so I just had it!

The apartment

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I think I got most of the major setup work on the apartment done. The furniture I have is in its final resting places. Now all I need to do is get the new furniture.

I still need to figure out how to setup a wireless network card on a linux machine.

I will clean up this weekend, and finish getting the little things from my old apartment. Then I can clean the old place up a bit so I don’t have a problem with the security deposit. Then I am done with the old place.

So far the AC in the new place has worked well. I will see how it gets when it gets really hot again.

Not all fun and games

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Yesterday was not all fun and games though. I had two issues with our FTP site. Neither of which turned out to be a problem with the site per say but user’s thinking they had problems.

I am also trying to track down a missing T-1. Verizon claim’s they installed a T-1 Circuit for us in the telecom room we told them to install it in. Well Dan was up in Kingston on Tuesday and sees no smartjack. I have 2 guys today looking for it. The problem is that Verizon is coming out again today to do another T-1, and I don’t want them to screw it up also.

I have finalized our server selection for kingston. Unless something crazy goes on our file servers will be Compaq Proliant ML360’s. I was not wowed by the IBM warez, and Dell has not been great to deal with. Our Compaq vendor is eager to work with us, and Dell makes me feel like we are a waste of their time. Probably just a vibe I get, but I don’t get the best pricing right out of the box from them. I don’t like to do second guessing on my pricing.

Glenn our CEO is going to take my old Verizon V60i off my hands. He wanted a new phone since his star tac is beat up. I saw what he was going to get from someone else and told him he needed to take the V60, it was much better.

We are still hunting for a new Help-desk Manager for kingston. We think we may be close but we are not there yet.

Mobile Phone Jugleing

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So I got really pissed with AT&T wireless Monday and changed my pricing plan. I cut my costs per month in half. There seems to be a problem near my house. They said they knew about it, but had no ETA on fixing it. I saw no reason for paying $100 a month for unlimited cell phone usage when I only used 400 minutes on it last month. I changed to the $50 plan with 700 minutes.

I also beefed up my verizon wireless plan to 800 min a month. I got a new promotion so I had to sign a contract for another year, but I was probibly going to stay with them anyway. The service is rock solid. I also got a deal on a new phone when I renewed. I got a Motorola T720. People at work have them and like them. As much as I want to keep using AT&T I will use verizon for a while since the service is much better.

i cannot wait until number portability in november. Then I can take my sweet and easy to remember AT&T number and switch it to verizon.

And yes I have 2 cell phone contracts. I had 3, but just canceled my T-Mobile account since I haven’t used it since April. Since I don’t have a home phone I wanted 2 phones. in case I have problems with one (like I am having). I also kept one for work and one for personal, but it is turning out that work calls me however they can if they need me. Enough technology ranting. I am off to bed.