Apartment hunting more

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Well after a flurry of posts 2 weeks ago I have been a little slower on the posts recently. I have not had my laptop every day on the train, and I have not always been able to write on every trip. Oh well.

I am sort of apartment hunting (see earlier blog entries). I think I found an apartment that I like. The only problem is that it is vacent now. That means that the land lord wants it filled by july 1. My lease runs out september 1. I would have to pay overlapping rent for 2 months as a worst case. I wanted to look at living in the city (manhattan for all you non NYC people). I looked online last night and could not find a building as nice as mine for my price range. My range is the same 1 beedroom apartment but costing no more than $300 more than what I am looking for in Queens. The dollar value I came up with is about is about what I pay to get to work for a month. The Railroad is expencive. No buildings I saw that had pools, and other conviences that I have at my building were in that price range. Yes, I don’t always goto the pool but I like knowing it is there. I also have used it in the past. The 1 hour commute is not great, but at least I get to sit and do work. 30 minute subway ride I will stand in a crowded subway. That would be bad.

Ok, so those are the facts. I am writting htem out because I want to describe my delema. Also I am trying to make sure I am doing the correct thing. I think I am, but if I have to write a big check no matter how correct I think I am, I will be crazy and second guess myself. That is just the way it is.

The other bad thing is that if I get this apartment and move on July 1, it will come right around when we are building out our new office. You can’t win when planning things like this.

Apartment hunting & doctors

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One of the concierge’s in my building has been keeping an eye out for a one bedroom for me. I rent a studio now. Apartments in NYC are expensive even if you don’t live in manhattan. I want more space and my lease is up in a few months so I am shopping around. he came across a 1 bedroom in my price range. I called the lady who posted the notice. Hopefully it is what I want and I can agree on terms. I don’t want to have to deal with a broker. The guy I used for my current place was cool, but I don’t want to pay 1 1/2 months rent as a fee. That is just a waste of money.

My dad called and said he wants to shop around for a new computer. I need to get him to set a price so I can go shopping for him.

I need to make plans to see the matrix 2 this week. Hopefully Rich will be free. Rich is my movie buff friend from High School. Neither of us have been to the movies as much as we used to. Some movies like the matrix you make an exception. Of course I just remembered he hates kiano rieves. I know I can’t spell. I will call him later to check.

So I have a dentist appointment thursday. I am not sure how much this is going to cost me. I need 5 fillings. They say they are all minor, but when you drill into me it is NEVER minor. I need to see if this is going to cost allot or if Richard will be cool about the cost.

I also have an eye doctor apt for when I get back from barbados. it is make sure I am not falling apart season. If you knew me you would know I have had eye problems since I was born. I have had glasses since I was like 4, so the eye checkup is a holly thing for me. I am also hoping that my doctor will say the la-sic surgery is good enough for me to have now. Because of the shape of my eye I was not a candidate for the la-sic so far. I was told like 3 years ago to wait a bit. So it has been a bit, I will ask.

Home from chicago, back to work

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So I am back home from my chicago visit. I just updated my blog with the entries I wrote while I was out on the road.

CDW was cool. Our sales rep was no different in person than over the phone! I almost walked past him when we were at the meet and great. My blindness shows in situations like that! Dinner was ok. The drinks were free so thus good. They had some tech guy turned comedian also perform. It was actually funny. I never like laughing at geeky humor, but it was funny.

We saw a few booths of items that we will look at once I get back to the office. I found a multi port, com port network device that I need for our data center and our office. We also saw some new headsets we could use when buying for our new call center. What fun, the things we think are cool. Also saw a new HP desktop using AMD chips. I am a fan of AMD, and they are cheap. I am going to look at that closely for our next purchase.

We were bored with allot of the stuff we heard. I can’t stand some conferences. Other parts were good, when you learn about the new tech stuff coming out.

All in all, a productive trip.

We got to the airport really early and caught a early flight. I got home around 4:40pm. Problems at work prevented me from taking a nap. Turns out one of our Development servers had a drive fail. Some people over reacted, but Keith calmed them down. The thing didn’t crash, just make noise that it had a problem. Keith will swap out the bad drive tomorrow with a spare we had on hand. We have a good backup of the data, so no harm done. That is why you build redundancy into things. I only wish we had a hot spare in that box. What can I say, when we built it we were cheap:)

Vendor visit in chicago

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   So Gus didn’t make the flight and ended up on the normal flight he was originally on. Oh well. If I haven’t mentioned it yet we flew out to chicago to visit one of our biggest hardware vendors CDW. They wanted to show off their offices and hawk HP’s warez. We did the whole factory tour, then sat through a propiganda session with a sales guy. Off to dinner and mingle. Then they are supposed to have a comedian. I also get to meet our sales guy. I have spoken to this guy at least once a week for the past year and a half and I have never meet him. Weird. At datastream it was like that. you would speak to people all the time and never meet them. I will fill in how dinner was tomorrow.

Mothers Day

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Mothers day was nice. I went over to my parents house. My sister, brother in law and his family were over. The only no show was mikes sister. We had a good brunch, and played with the baby. it is very funny to see grown ups going all crazy over a baby. Of course I am included in that group of crazy people. I can safely say I do not like it at all when Morgan cries.

We fixed some problems with our Barbados flight. They did stuff to our seats so my sister got all pissed at American Airlines. I actually had inporved seats so I wasn’t pissed.

I also did some more work with VMWare. I got red hat to install fine on my laptop. The only thing now is to install the vmtools onto the red hat partition. That requires some config changes so I am working on getting that done soon. I also need to get the network card working properly with the vmware.

I got up at 4:30am today to catch my flight. I made it. I am writting this blog at 30+ thousand feet. I meet Gus at the airport, but he was flying standby on my flight. That means I don’t know if he actually made the flight. I hope he did. I will walk around and look after the drink cart goes by.

Cosmetic updates to the blog

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OK, so I decided to update the main style sheet that give this blog its look and feel. It is a minor change. Some colors and the font are different. Next step is to acutely customize the stock sheets mt offers. I also threw on some vanity logo’s to identify what software I use to build the blog.

I also fixed a bug I had on the blog. I was unable to do updates last night due to dns issues. When I changed the master domain I used for this blog I forgot to change the moveable type config. That meant when I pointed to the new site name I lost the ability to make changes since Moveable Type thought that the server was down. it was a 2 second fix, but I need to keep track of these changes.

w.bloggar offline tool. So far so good.

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Ok, so Gus didn’t like this tool. W.Bloggar. It is an offline blog writting tool. I have been using Kun-Log on my powerbook since I started using moveabletype. It is good, but it is for the mac only. I need something for my windows laptop. So I am giving this a try. So far so good. Setup was easy. one thing I dont like is that I cant bring up old posts already on the server. I will use it while I am away on monday and tuesday in chicago. I will not be bringing my powerbook. I like it and all but I need the “work” thinkpad. It has a much bigger screen and all my work stuff on it. Because of that w.bloggar gets a trial run.

After I finish this test post I will then go back to my VMware project. I have been working on it on and off all day. I got windows 2003 server installed on it. Red Hat 9.0 is a bit more difficult. 2 install’s have failed. More on that later.

Lazy Saturday’s

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I am being lazy today. I need to get a mothers day gift for my mom, but that is all I have on my agenda today. I slept late, and I am just hanging out now. My idea of laying low is very geeky. I am installing VMware 4 workstation on my desktop computer. I want to get red hat 9 on it so I can use windows xp and red hat on the same machine. If it works it will be awesome. Right now it is installing red hat.

My mom instructed me that she wants some pocket book or something. I will give her money and she can go get it for herself. That way I don’t have to get the wrong thing. I was also instructed to get flowers. I just love the surprise involved in this day.

Since Gus fixed my linux box I now have a choice. Should I leave my site on Red Hat or move it back to Windows? As of right now I have a copy on both. My friend jayson is letting me use his box to host my site, and I still have a copy on my Red Hat server. I am thinking I am going to leave the blog on red hat and have the rest of the site on windows. That way I don’t have to mess with taking the front page extensions out of the site. I was trying to deal with that for a few weeks and so far have gotten nowhere. I just don’t have the time. For now I will leave everything in both places. Unfortunately I don’t have the photo site up at all during this transition. it is 800+ megs and I don’t want to deal with it right now.

I have been following the apple music store since it was announced last week. I have a mac. I like it allot. I also find I use iTunes over winamp 99% of the time nowadays. I also went out a few months ago and got an ipod. That also kicks ass. So I am in a position to use this new music service. 99 cents is not bad for a song. I am still unsure if it is worth it. I saw an entire album I want to maybe buy and see if the service is any good. Limewire and the gnutella clients, and kaza are tempting. I am on the fence right now. The file format is supposed to be better, but I still like MP3’s. I was not sold on Microsoft’s windows media format, and now I am skeptical of this new AAC stuff. What is weird is that Microsoft comes across as more evil big company like, and Apple is the underdog hip company. In fact they are probably both just as evil. Right now for work I of course an clearly a Microsoft guy, but for home I am a apple guy. All this rambling boils down to eventually will buy stuff on this music service. If anything I want to know if I am missing out on something really good, or just saving my money.

Lots to learn about linux

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Gus is the linux master. Well, he knows allot more than me. That may not make him a master, but he knows his stuff. My red hat server has been serving up web pages really slow for weeks. I had no idea what it was. Gus got into it and found a line of code trying to find a dns server that is not in existence. Once that was fixed, it served up pages nice and fast.

No major plans set for this weekend. I am spending time with mom on sunday. I am going to wing Saturday. I am going to check and see if we are going drinking after work.

I am also going to play with Microsoft office 2003 beta. Howard got it and he says it is stable and nice. My cousin wayne also said the same thing last week. I will give it a try on my laptop. I also want to try out VMware. It looks great. The problem is it is expensive. I am going to see how long the trial is for. I probably would buy it if it works like I think it will.

OK, today is the day we sign the telecom contracts. I have said that allot over the past several weeks, but today is the day. I think we have ironed out all the problems. Now all I need is for Gus to say ok, and put pen to paper. We are starting to slip on the schedule. That is the unspeakable topic though. Of course it is May 9 and it takes 30-45 days for a T-1 to come in and we haven’t ordered 4 of them yet. You do the math. Will we be live on June 6th? The plus side is that construction is just as delayed, actually more so. It feels good not being the reason something is held back from completion.

We had a stupid outage this morning for work. I got woken up by Justin (Help-desk guy) that the call center site was not loading. Turns out that a database job failed taking everything with it. It is back up now, but I need to see what checks we have in place to prevent this. Also why they didn’t work. This is the third outage in 3 weeks related to a release of new code. I am very pissed about this. Gus says he is very disturbed by this. I want to bash people’s heads in at this point. I need to think happy thoughts.

I setup a new application server in our Corporate DMZ. A DMZ for people who don’t know is a place on a network that is isolated from the internal company computers but allow to be “open” to the internet. You make it so you can web browse to it, or ftp, or whatever you need it for. The point is to isolate it from everything else to do this. Well this new box is finally running the mail server I setup. Our QA mail system is now working fine on it. I also setup a small admin website for internal use. It is only one page for now. Also on deck is the Norton Anti-virus setup. This is big. I am also thinking if I need to move our chat server to kingston this can serve as the local chat server. I don’t want to move the chat system though. Probably will need to discuss with Gus on that point.

Keith is slowly working on our Layer 3 switch for our data center. He has the design concepts down. I laid out what I wanted to do, and he seems to be picking stuff up quick.

I get to go on my first buisness trip

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Well, actually I am going on my first business trip for my current company. My last job all I did was go on business trips. I haven’t been on the road for work for over 2 years. This will be a quick trip to Chicago for 2 days next week. Gus & I are getting taken to one of our big vendors for a conference. Unfortunately I have a 7-am flight Monday morning. That is really early. Gus is on a later flight but they said I couldn’t switch.

I still haven’t unpacked from my trip to my cousins from last week. I need to do that before I pack for this trip.

Our CEO is away on vacation in europe for a few weeks. With him goes any chance of getting approval for some hardware I need for our new office build out.

Gus is back today. We need to do something with our voice T-1 contracts outstanding. Not sure what we will do just yet. I also got an email from our Project Manager for our VOIP project. I will call him today and setup a time to meet on friday. Things are shapping up, just not as fast as I like. I move fast on stuff, but I am always held back by something.

I finished moving the QA mail system to the new server. I still need to do the anti-virus stuff on it.