Poker finally

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So I have been waiting since december to do poker with friends at work. Still nothing going on with that. So I was surprised when my friend John IM’d me today asking if I wanted to play poker this weekend. I think I just spoke about him. He just moved back from New Orleans after only living down there since january. I haven’t played in a while, but I used to play in high school so I told him I was in.

Speaking of New Orleans friends, I spoke with jayson like 3 times last week, and then he disappears again. I left 2 voice messages for him and no response. This reminds me of most of college for me. I would go years without speaking to him and then he would show up. On the weird disappearing friend front, I don’t know what is up with Jori either. Not sure if she actually was moving or not. I need to call her. I feel bad that I missed her birthday party in april. I didn’t speak about that in the blog yet. Jori is a long story. I will talk about it at some point, but not right now.

My dentist appointment went ok I guess. he only drilled 2 teeth. He will do more in 2 weeks. My dentist also said that he won’t even fill some cavities. All of them are so small that he claims wont get much worse in 2 years. So why drill now when he doesn’t have to. I trust him so I wait. I just wished he did all 4 teeth that he wanted to work on in one procedure. Now I need to go back. I hate not feeling my face for 4 hours after he is done. The not being able to talk is also bad.

Standards, Standards, Standards

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So today and tomorrow we deal with standards. Our hardware standard, the basis for how we buy and configure our Database Servers has been in place for just over a year. I have been getting complaints about no space, and some speed issues from others. I have called the brains together to get what is required for a standard over the next 12 months. That way I can buy them what they want and then tell them to shut up when they complain about it. Well, not exactly. But we need a blue print for how we do things for the next several months.

Also tomorrow I am meeting with our development people (well some of them anyway) to discuss our build standards for web servers. Same concept as hardware standards, but we talk about how to configure the OS on our web box’s. Once done we will refresh our web servers and set them up fresh.

As I left the office yesterday we had a problem with an apache web box we are using for a small project. turns out that this is considered important to our call center management. Now we need to fix the problem, and then take this applicaiton and make it redundant. We probibly will need to put it on 2 linux machines and place them behind our local directors. A local director is a device that splits the load of a web site amount multiple servers. Cool device.

On another front I have tons of outstanding quotes to get approved. Hardware requests just pile up. What is crazy is most of this stuff is not even related to our new office build. This is just normal office stuff that needs to be taken care of.

I haven’t yet found someone to run our new office’s helpdesk. Most applicants are not from the region. We need someone near by. Also most don’t have the skills. People do not read online job postings. They apply for jobs that don’t meat their qualifications at all. It is just a waste of time for everyone.

We spoke with our Project Manager and team for our phone system build out. The hardware is almost all in. We are sending them some network diagrams and stuff. Then we stage the system. I am excited. This will be awsome if it works out well. I think it will. Brand new systems can be designed without having to factor in old problems. We shall see… In the tunnel now. More later.

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.