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.

Left work on time. Wow!

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So I actually got out of work sort of early yesterday. I hopped on the subway and went to my sisters. My parents came over and we had dinner. The baby is still fun, but she is cranky. Not sure why. I won’t go into theories here. When she isn’t cranky she is awsome. I installed a CD Burner for them so they can make CD’s of all the pictures of morgan. Also they can try and free up hard drive space. They are always getting out of disk errors.

We took Morgan to Barnes & Nobles. My mom got a ton of baby books since she had a discount this week. Mike was working so I didn’t get to see him. His rotation for his residency has crazy hours for the first year.

Keith fixed dan’s Wireless Router. He dropped it and did some damage to it, but according to dan it was dropped after it stopped working. I need to check today and see how it worked out. He called with problems last night, but he was going to call Keith to help him out.

I spoke with my friend jayson for the first time in months on Tuesday. We used to talk like once a day. We both got busy I guess. He had questions about frontpage. I got him setup on his server. I also setup an IIS site on his server for me. Running just apache is not working for me. I don’t have enough time to move my site off of frontpage. So I either can have it run all half asked or put it on an IIS box again. He gave me admin rights and I will probibly setup the site there or in one other spot. That way I don’t need it on a server at home.

Jayson is doing volentier police work in New Orleans. He said he wanted to do it, but I didn’t know he started. It sounds pretty cool. He is one person I don’t want with a badge pulling a gun on me. He will use it if he needs to!

Contracts and interviewing oh my

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Monday was more contracts to look at. I have a 12 page data T-1 contract to look at. AT&T said that their contracts cover all possible options. I can tell, they put fee structures in there for everything. It is crazy.

We did our weekly management meeting. They are not 2+ hours anymore, but some people have to cut out all the crap they talk about. Gus and I only say like 3 things and then move on. We don’t even put half of what we do on the agenda. Some other managers put everything they do, and then speak about every last one of them. I am glad I bring my laptop with me. At least I get some work done. I know it is bad etiquett to bring it, but I haven’t really cared. Sometimes other people bring theirs also. Dan always have me run the daily sales numbers for him so he can see how we are doing for the day.

Tuesday I had 2 interviews. That kept me busy for a while. Keith actually got dressed up for the interviews. It was so funny to see him in a nice shirt and khakis.

Gus is off to indiana with our presendent for a day doing a presentation. he left tuesday afternoon so I didn’t get my weekly update meeting with him. Wow, I sound so offical talking about meetings. it is weird. I still am working on more voice/data contracts for him to go over.

A cool tech thing I actually did tuesday was finish building a new Application server we got. I put a mail server on it and will migrate off of another server we currently are running mail. I also finished configureing a domain trust between 2 Win2000 domains. Now I can slowly migrate people off one of those domains onto the other without loosing security permissions. Still to do on that build out is install Norton antivirus, and deploy the agents. Also need to install the backup exec agents on the servers in that domain. I hope to do that today.

Family weekend & Dan’s Computer issues

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I haven’t written in a few days.  I was busy (well sort of) at my cousin’s this weeknd, and I was exhausted last night.  The weekend was fun.  Some ups and downs.  That is what you get when you are spending time with kids.  I don’t spend nearly enough time over there anymore.  Arriell is 8, she is still awsome.  I have tons of fun with her.  Merric (he is 10) is way too smart for his age.  The baby, cerina is a ton of fun.  I hope morgan is that much fun at 1 year old.  We ate in Friday night, and I stayed up late talking with my cousin Wayne.  We haven’t sat down and hung out for a while.  Saturday the whole family just hung out.  I ended up napping on the couch for a few hours.  It was very restful.  We had BBQ for dinner.  Sunday Wanye and the kids planted a tree, and fixed up there garden.  I supervised.  AKA, I don’t like gardening so I just hung out on their deck with the baby.  After all that work we hung out in the whurlpool and lied around on the deck.  it was nice.  We then went to the mall for a quick shopping trip and dinner.

My cousin Synde’s friend Merrill gave me a ride to the train monday and that ended a peacefull weekend.  I will be back there on the 31’st for Cerina’s 1st birthday party.  The kids had their moments this weekend but were mostly good.  I miss them.

I missed out on Cinco de maio festivities monday.  I had my weekend luggage so I didn’t want to carry that around when everyone went bar hopping.  Good thing I didn’t go with work people.  They went accross town to a mexican bar only to find it packed.  Go figure, a mexican bar packed on a mexican holiday?  They only stayed for 1 drink.

Tuesday Keith and I went to Dan’s place to fix his compute.  Really didn’t need 2 of us but I wasn’t complaining.  We got a free dinner out of it.  The problem only took a few minutes to fix.  We went to this villagesque pub by his house.  It was good.  I had the fish and chips.  I also tried a chocolage martinie.  I have had them before, but this one almost tasted like yuhoo.  It was great.  The watress was also hot, so that helped the evening along.

I got home like 10pm tuesday and got a call from dan saying that his wireless point is not working now.  I treid to fix it over the phone, but I couldn’t.  He is bringing it into work today for me to take a look at it.

The weekend is almost here

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I have survived (almost) another week at work. Now I can have either a stress free or stress filled weekend with my cousins! Probibly stress free but you never know. The down side of going over to their place right after work is that the commute sucks. I don’t know how wayne did it for a few years. NJ Transit sucks, and the trip is really long.

The up side is I really love my cousins that I am going to see. They are like the only family I like that I see in any normal interval. I wanted to go roller blading with my cousin arriell, but ran into some problems last night when I was packing them up. About 2 years ago I went out and bought brand new top of the line roller blades to replace my aging roller blade macroblade equip’s I bought back in 1994 when I was working at Timber Lake Sleep away camp. They were top of the line then but they got beat up so I decided to get new ones. Well I don’t work out as much as I used to so the new blades ended up sitting in a closet for 2 years, or maybe more. I can’t remember. I got them out last night and realized one of the wheel bearings on a back wheel was busted and was not spinning well. I couldn’t fix it in thime so I didn’t bring them. I am pissed because I wanted to go out and do that with arriell, but I wasn’t going to bring them if they were broken. I was not sure if I could fix them. It is alot of extra stuff to bring when I am taking the train.

I will think of something else to do with her, I hope!

Interviewing may be harder than going on interviews, or maybe not.

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Today I have 2 phone interviews with Gus for our Helpdesk Manager position for our Kingston office. Not that anyone who is interviewing will read this, but I have lots to say about the first guy we talked to, but I can’t discuss here. Trust me lots to say, most not good. Not sure if giving an interview is worse than having an interview. Both are not fun.

I am slowly trying to setup moveabletype on a red hat box at work. Gus wants to use it for project based blogs. I think it is a great idea. The problem is I can’t get people to follow simple security procedures let alone use a blog to document a project. We will build it anyway, and hope for use I guess.

I think Gus is having buyers remource with the VOIP solution we just purchased. He knows it is good, but he still worries. Keith is all excited about the new toys to play with. For some crazy reason I think I am the level headed one in this situation. I think it will work, but we cannot play up the “new toy” part of this because it is not a toy. It is the bet we made with alot riding on it.

Yesterday we had an interesting converstation with a bunch of our DB guys. Our QA guy rajive came asking if we can get a faster staging DB server. Staging is a place you put stuff right when you are ready to actually open it up on the internet. It is a staging area, or a place to make last minute testing of code. Well our staging database server was running something really slow, so people wanted to put the process on a production machine and run it from their. I was like no way. You don’t mix “live stuff” with “staging stuff”. I did feel bad because not allowing that screws up rajive’s testing, but I couldn’t do what they asked. So no one liked that answer and Gus gathered us all around to discuss the problem. We started with Keith and me saying this is a bad idea to everyone agreeing it was a bad idea in like 30 minutes. I don’t understand what happened. Boris one of our DBA’s made a complete 180 on the decision. Don’t get me wrong I am happy, but it was weird.

I did feel bad about rajive. he is like one of the most level headed and coolest people I work with. But he needs to rely on other people for him to get his work done. I mean it is his job to test everything, so if stuff is bad it makes his life harder. If people ask him to test 5 things at once, his life sucks.

No life, or so it seems some time

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It feels sometimes that I have no life outside of work. I know I am not the only person who feels this way sometimes. For the past several weeks I have felt that way. I have been so busy with stuff going on at work, I have not done anything after work on weekdays. I didn’t get home till after 8 on yesterday and tuesday. Tonight I need to go home and pack. Hopefully I will have a life this weekend when I visit my cousins. Hopefully!

Still not sure what we have planned to do. I probibly will call my friend lefty and try to hang with him sometime while I am there. We don’t hang out much since he lives in jersey.

Stuff breaks

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Yesterday was very interesting. That is technobable for really really stressful. As I was getting into the subway yesterday morning I got a page staying one of our e-commerce sites was having issues. Justin our helpdesk guy onsite at the time said he could not place orders on the site. After much debate with our cracker jack development leader (sorry mark, it was broken) it was determined that we did have a problem. One of our developers figured out the issue and fixed it, but not for like 45 minutes. The problem was a stupid mistake. I won’t go into details.

The long distance provider we selected for our Kingston office put tons of crap into their 50 page contract. We are seriously thinking about someone else. Gus is not to happy since he was the one who has been pushing for us to use these guys for the past year. I am happy with their data services though. Go figure. I have someone from verizon scrambleing to get us a contract hopefully today.

Our local Voice T-1 was ordered. When it will be installed is anyone’s guess.

This morning I woke up to another problem. Looks like one of our web servers is not happy. We are not down, but we only have 3 left.

Yesterday was also tons of stress since Keith left early. He was complaining of a cold. He needs to toughen up a bit.

People actually goto this blog!

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It turns out that I do have visitors to this blog. I am not tracking anything just yet, but according to someone at work people in the office are looking it over. Does that means I cannot say bad things about those moron’s anymore? No, they are not moron’s. I was just kidding. I will however continue to speak my mind, good or bad. This blog was originally for my own use. People reading it is just a plus.

I have been told that I ramble on in these entries. Yeah, that is my writting style. I just write what I am thinking about. Also that every other sentance has a sarcastic undertone. My responce to that is “Realy” I hadn’t noticed.

Work yesterday was ok. I finally got the Internet T-1’s ordered for our new office. Still waiting to sign our voice T-1’s. I have a guy selling Internet access at the facility that we are going to. it is cheap and high speed. The problem is one guy runs the company. Also his install and labor costs make the savings on the T-1 be very low. I had serious issues with going through a reseller who we would rely on their equipment, and only one person worked there. Spoke with Gus about everything and he was like make a decision. So I am going to pass on this guy. He was eager to be agressive on the install cost, but he had some fixed costs he could not come down on. Also the support issues scream for attention. I know I am making the safe decision, and will find cost savings elsewhere.

I had a really bad experience with a sales guy trying to save me tons of money on my phone bill tuesday also. He was a real pain. He was like can you sign agreements? And 5 or 6 times asked to speak with someone who had more purchasing authority. This is even after Gus was like speak to Scott. Do people think they will get anywhere when they act like that? And then this guy is telling me things that I know are incorrect but thinks I am wrong. In a nutshell, smells like a big scam. Dan agreed with me. This guy should have been happy that I didn’t have Gus sit in on the meeting. I kept quiet. My boss would have killed the guy. Now that would have been fun.

What is on the agenda for today you may be asking? Tech staff meeting for one. Then a tech management meeting, and a Call Center project meeting. Don’t you just love going to tons of meetings all day? I also need to meet with people to sign the verizon local T-1 contract for our new Call Center. That should happen first thing this morning.