Flirting is ok, but not all the time

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Have you ever had a girl flirt with you and try to entice you into doing something you don’t want to do by flaunting her body? A girl I know was doing that to me today. Or at least I thought she was. Actually I am pretty sure she was or she has a serious back problem. She is nice and all, but if I know the flirting is going nowhere you can shake your chest at me all you want I am not going to help you do something I don’t want to do. Do women think guys are that shallow? I guess some are, but guys will do things if they think they have a chance. Being a flirt isn’t always a good thing.

(The contents of this blog are left some what vague for reasons of protecting me from getting people I know pissed off if they knew I was actually talking about them. Especially in this situation!)

never say its been a good day

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I believe that if you say the day is going well, or if it is “quiet” that fate will screw with you. I think that happened today. I said lots of good things about yesterday and it came back to haunt me today. First one of my helpdesk guy’s called in sick, when the other one was already taking a day off. then we had our site perform slow for a few hours during the afternoon. And to top it all off I get a call that Verizon is putting in a T-1 at our new office today. That would be a good thing, if it wasn’t the first time I was hearing about the install. I had no one onsite to greet them.

As you can guess it was hectic. I was able to get “back into the swing of things” but by doing that I found a bunch of problems that some people created while I was away on vacation. They say ignorance is bliss. I may believe them now.

I am looking forward to just resting this weekend.

Busy but good day, and good food Too.

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I was so packed with meetings today, and I still missed 2 because it was so busy.

Gus invited me to lunch with Howard Morgan. Howard is an investor in our company and one of the smartest people I have ever met. Besides being super smart, he reads almost everything and knows tons of people in the technology field. It was cool that he invited me to lunch with them. Never get enough of talking to Dr. Morgan. We ended up going out with his assistant Tori, and our CEO Glenn. We ended up at a Greek restaurant near our office. Gus wanted to take Howard to a authentic Greek place. Turns out it wasn’t authentic enough for Gus, but the food was awesome! I had some octopus, shrimp, steak, and this really good tasting cheese thing. We all just tried different entries. it was fun. I found it interesting to watch two really smart tech guys (howard and Gus) explain what a blog was to Glenn. Now glenn is not a tech guy but he does keep up on some aspects of the technology field. Internet culture such as blogging was not one of those fields!

I also got 2 tentative dates for some of my T-1 installs. That made me happy also. Still one more date to go. I also interviewed a guy to do some linux admin work for us. More on that later.

I am hoping I don’t get sick. everyone at the office is coming down with or recovering from something. I was glad I was away last week! The AC not working in the office very well can’t help either.

Dinner was good too. I defrosted a steak last night so I george forman’ed it up tonight. That is an kick ass little device. I need to order more steaks and stuff from freshdirect. They are a great food delivery service in NYC. The fresh meats and stuff are freaking great.

OK, time for bed. More tomorrow when my hands don’t hurt anymore (i hope).

New and awesome things I can do with my Mac!!!

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I keep finding new and cool things I can do on my powerbook that I cannot do at all on my windows machine(s) or it takes 10 times longer to do compared to my mac. I recently downloaded iSync 1.1. Now I can sync my cell phone with the mac using a USB cable and almost any mainstream cell phone. Worked great on my old Motorola V60i.

If that wasn’t enough I found a site that showed me how to use the same cable and phone to dial onto the internet using Verizon Wireless’s network. It is circuit switched at 14.4kbs but it works and does not cost extra per month to do, just uses your air time minutes.

And even better than dialing out using a USB cable is the ability to use my T68i as a GPRS modem (aka 56k speeds) with AT&T wireless. The dam software AT&T provides for windows doesn’t even work correctly with bluetooth, but the mac does without any special software! And why don’t more people use the mac again???

And have I mentioned how awsome itunes is? Or iPhoto? Winamp was good. I used it for years, but itunes blows it away!!!

Technology Treadmill

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So you buy some new device, and you are happy. Then a month later a new one comes out that is way better. What to do? That is the problem I encounter. If I sell the original device and throw in a few extra dollars I can have the new device, so what is the harm in that? It can add up.

I am pissed off because I just got a HP Ipaq 1910. It is a great little PDA. I love it, except for one limitation. It doesn’t have bluetooth. I am an early adopter of bluetooth, I think it can be a great protocol. I got the ipaq beacause it did everything else I needed, and gave up on the bluetooth option. It was a tradeoff, size vs bluetooth. Size won. The problem now is that I hear HP is coming out with a new version of the 1910 and it will include bluetooth.

Back into the routine

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Yesterday gave me the opportunity to get back into the work routine. I got a reasonable amount of work done. When I say that I mean I got some work done off my list of tasks. The downside of my job is the ever present list of daily requests by people that need to be done right away. that slows down any planned projects.

I ordered a new Wireless 3G PCMCIA card yesterday. It is a data card that fits into your laptop that allows you to browse the internet wherever Verizon Wireless provides Data services. It is a great concept, but in practice I have not seen any solution that works well. We need one for a demonstration next week.

I also got a list of quotes for our new desktop computer standard we are designing for our new call center. Once selected all new computers will be exactly the same type of machine. This makes management easy, but the problem is selecting the dam unit.

I have a ton of meetings today. I meet with our CEO about my budget for the new office project. I also have a conference call about desktop computer management options with an HP rep. I think I am sitting in on an interview for our Development team, and I also need to update Gus on all the things going on. Oh, I almost forgot I speak with AT&T about our Long Distance T-1 install dates also today.

Sunglass’s lost and then found

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I lost my sunglasses while on vacation in barbados. I don’t know what happened to them. I had them when I got back from golf but then I couldn’t find them. I want new one’s anyway, and I am going to the eye doctor on monday but I still didn’t want to loose them. My parents and my sister got back yesterday and she HAS MY SUNGLASSES!!! I am not sure where she found them, but I am happy that she did. I need to go over to my parents house and get them.

Vonage & Other Tech

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So I got my Vonage phone number and router already. That was very quick. I didn’t expect that stuff till next week. I can’t use the dam thing since I don’t actually have a phone to plug into it yet. I want to get a better phone number than what they gave me, so I am not giving the number out yet. I am willing to pay whatever it costs to get a good number, but I need a nice one.

I need cordless phone for this vonage system. The problem is that I need an older technology 900mhz phone since I don’t want it to interfere with my 802.11b/g wireless network I have at home. Man I will be lucky that I don’t get some sort of brain tumor from all this wireless radiation I got going on around me all the time at home and at work.

As expected my dam AT&T Wireless GSM phone didn’t work all day today while I was in Kingston. Thankfully I had my backup Verizon Wireless phone. It worked like a champ. The blackberry pager works up their most of the places. That is good news for our alert system.

Back to work, and then off again…

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So I had a semi normal day at work monday. I was trying to catch up with all the craziness that went on while I was away. I still haven’t caught up. I sat through a demo of phone call recording software. it was cool, but I don’t know what our Call Center QA people really want. I like that you can search people’s calls by keywords and pull up a audio file on the computer of that call. It is crazy what they can do these days.

I found out late monday that I needed to be in Kingston NY today. Construction started on our new facility yesterday and they will be having weekly meetings on the status of everything. I needed to go because I have some outstanding construction issues. I won’t do that trip every week for those meetings but I will probably need to do a few of them as this project moves along. Things are taking longer than anyone thought, but it is construction and not internet sites.

Being out got crazier on monday when I found out Gus was going to Minnesota today to demo some software. He needed a wireless intent connection on his laptop. I couldn’t get the PCMCIA card he wanted quick enough so I stole Keith’s phone and put Verizon’s high speed internet access on it.

While I was out today they did a bunch of user moves. That means that people’s desk’s got moved around. Generally in my company if you get moved you are getting crammed in with someone else and you won’t be happy. We are not popular people when that happens. We are Technology guy’s but somewhere along the line we got roped into doing space allocation and moves. We had someone almost in tears once when we doubled them up. Not pretty.

I am back in the office tomorrow and hopefully I can bang out some more work. My list of work keeps getting bigger. I guess that is a good thing, but stuff gets overwhelming sometimes. I just take a deep breath, and get by on star-bucks mocha frapachino’s (cannot spell) and snickers bars! They have a calming affect on me during the summer months.

The boss man Gus is out till thursday so tomorrow’s staff meeting might be a 3 ring circus. Our project manager Mark is good to keep things on track in those things. I think he and I are the only one’s that try to push aside the BS to smaller group chats. Of course Gus is the king at cutting through the bull, and keeping things on track. We will miss him tomorrow.

VoIP instead of a home phone

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I have not had a home phone for some time. I really haven’t used one since 1999. I may have had one on and off between now and then, but it wasn’t my main phone. I use my Mobile Phone. Unfortunately I like to switch phones and providers allot. I just find something new and switch. My situation always changes. A phone may not work at the office, or my apartment if I move, I need to travel and it doesn’t work where I am going, etc. So I switch allot. Well the people at Vonage have a home phone solution using Voice Over IP (VOIP). I still don’t want a home phone, but I want a phone number that will stay with me. I also want 1 number that I can route to multiple phone numbers. I had this solution in college. AT&T offered a 500 number service that allowed a follow you number. I guess the service never took off so they canceled it. I have been looking ever since for something that will do the same thing. Vonage looks like it will do that. For a flat rate I can route calls to any US phone number, retrieve voice mail from the computer, take the number anywhere, and other cool features. It works by plugging it into my cable modem.

I have known about Vonage for a while. A guy at work loves it, but I wasn’t sure I wanted it or needed it. I decided to give it a try because I am moving and I want to start having 1 number people call no matter where I am. So if I cancel a cell phone, it doesn’t matter people just have the VOIP number and get routed to whatever number I tell them. I also don’t need to keep my cell phone on all the time when I am at home. Another big plus is that I can finally get rid of my second cell phone. I always had a second one for the past 2 years or so because service was always spotty on one phone or another. So hopefully I can save some $$$.

If all works out, I won’t get people asking me what my phone number is ever 6 months when I change it. My family still tries to call me at numbers I haven’t had or used in over a year.

I should get the new Vonage equipment in about a week or so. I will let you know how it works. I just hope I get a decent phone number. I will call and try to change it if I don’t. I don’t care how much it costs, I need an easy to remember phone number. that is one of the reasons I still have crappie AT&T Wireless Mobile phone, I got a great phone number and I don’t want to loose it.