Today I was busy doing documentation for Bob. he needed to be prepared for a meeting and needed my operations overview updated so he can get a handle on our systems. It took some doing but I got it down. I also had to deal with finding a suitable replacement to our IBM Thinkpad laptops. My team finally said we don’t want to deal with Thinkpads anymore. Too many issues to list here, but we ended up with a similar configured HP unit. The first user gets it tomorrow since his thinkpad is toasted.
Hardware
Electrical Work
Today was busy with electrical work upgrades in our Computer room. We needed to add several circuits to support filling up the remaining rack space we have. Now that the holidays are over we were able to get the work done. Next week will have a flurry of activity to clean up the room and mount and power the gear that has been waiting for a home.
Day Off
I took a personal day today. I wasn’t sure if the strike would continue and I didn’t want to deal with the commute so my plan since Tuesday was to take today off. Turns out the strike ended, and my company gave everyone in our office the day off anyway. It was nice. At least I didn’t use up my personal days.
I ended up at the office anyway. I had to ship out my sold powerbook. it is easier to do that from the office than at home. I also got some shopping done. I got cards for everyone that I needed to, and went to the bank.
I meet up with Jayson at night and we went to Compusa to get IDE disk enclosures. We both have internal drives that we can’t use now that we have laptops and use Mac’s. I got a IDE disk enclosure for like $45. It works great so far. USB 2.0. I just plugged in my drive and formatted it. Unlike the other one I got before the summer this one does not have a fan so I don’t have to worry about the bearings burning out like the old one did. I will go back next week and get another of these cases to replace the old broken one. I should say it is not broken. It does work, but when running it makes an awful sound.
iPod 60Gig
I took the plunge. I went to the Apple store and Kai and I both got a new 60gig iPod. My old 40gig (non color) iPod is being cleaned up for resale to someone. I didn’t get the new one for the video functions, but that was a benefit. I got the new iPod because it is supposed to have great battery life, it is slimmer than the old one, and it FINALLY comes in black. And of course the main reason to upgrade is the fact that it is 60GIG’s. I actually use the thing as a portable hard drive so I was running out of space on the 40gig. The color and video are nice extra’s (maybe even the final extra little feature that got me to buy it) but they are not the main reasons.
So far I am not happy that there was 1 type of case available for this model iPod at the apple store. What gives with that apple? So I am stuck with this really pathetic case they give you. Another, what is up apple? For $399 you can give me a better case than this. A cradle would be nice, but my old cradle works so I am not happy. The only other complaint I have is the fact that my nifty wired remote no longer works since apple decided to change the physical inputs. What gives there? Did you guys sit down and ask what good feature can we take away to piss off customers?
Yes I am griping. Why? Because I spent allot of money on a portable music player, and I expect to get my moneys worth. In general I am happy so far with my new pod, but it could be better! And yes in my book it is still the best out there!
iPod Reformat
I am formatting my iPod right now. It was working perfectly but it was setup for use on a Mac only. I want to use it as a hard drive to move files between my home PC and Poowerbook. I also want to use it to migrate data from my Dad’s dell to a mini I am giving him to try out. You need to have the iPod setup for use with a PC to do that. So now the Pod is formated with Fat32 and I am coping my music collection back onto it. Not done yet, but so far no issues.
I am also in the process of getting my Mini ready for my dad. I hopefully will give it to him next friday. Hopefully he will like it and I can get him off of windows. Less headaches for me, and I think he will be happier.
Holiday Lull
Lots to do this week, but for some reason there felt like a little holiday lull. I guess it is the short week. We had a release explode on us twice in the past week (the same release on two different nights). that was fun getting a call from Danny at 11PM Monday. I am also trying to get a deal finalized for a new network switch. Getting to the right price is always interesting.
Our new batch of servers finally arrived Wednesday with more on the way next week. We also got the licenses for our copies of Vmware’s ESX server so we can build those out.
I also had the electricians in the office to spec out adding another couple of circuits to the computer room. They think they can do what I want, but will have to play around with the power a bit to get as much juice as I need. With this power upgrade done we will max out the room. Any further expansion most likely will have to go somewhere else.
The rest of the week was taken up by paper work and project plans!
Fall Cleaning
Today I decided to do some Spring Fall cleaning. I did both physical and virtual cleaning. I moved around some components and moved a piece of furniture. I am trying to move my computer gear into a place where I have easy access to it, but it doesn’t make my living room look like crap. I pulled out a huge pile of wires that I don’t need anymore. or I hope I don’t need them, but everything seems to be working without them so far.
What started the whole day of cleanup was my powerbook not performing as well as it used to. I have put allot of crap on it, and tried some stuff out that I probably should not have put on my main computer, but I did anyway. I had been pondering wiping it and reinstalling everything for over a month. I was going to do it over the long weekend next week, but I woke up this morning and felt daring. I backed everything up and took the plunge. The majority of the rebuild didn’t take anywhere near as long as I thought. In under like 2 hours I had most of the main software I use on the computer, and I was well on my way to getting all my custom settings back. I know I will be customizing everything for a few weeks but the majority of what I use is back up.
While the powerbook was rebuilding I rearranged the furniture and pulled the cable. I also went to best buy and bought myself a wireless mouse & keyboard for my DVR computer. I also got a 4 port USB PCI card for the machine since I ran out of ports. I put that together (in 15 min thankfully) and my TV setup is basically done.
Feeling even more daring now that I moved the DVR functions to a dedicated computer I decided to wipe my Presario desktop and put a fresh copy of Windows XP on it. I am in the middle of the updateathon of windows patches now.
Once I am done with getting Windows on the Presario I won’t be putting any programs on it except for VMWare Workstation. My goal is to put all applications in a virtual machine. that way I can easily remove or revert back to old setups. I am trying that at the office also. In theory it is a sound idea. I will let you know how it goes in a month or so.
Wiring Day
Today Jayson and I spent most of the day rewiring a cabinet in the office. Try as we might these cabinets get super messy with cables everywhere after a while. We rewired this same cabinet over a year ago but it looked horrible again. The issue is that we keep putting in and taking out different kinds of gear. The cables get really messy.
To keep things cleaner we moved the PDU’s, rewired all the electrical, moved some servers to different racks, and took out the thick analog KVM cables and replaced them with IP KVM’s that run over regular CAD5. The result is a much cleaner rack. That and everything is neat and tied down helps. We next need to get the electrical guys to come in and add some more circuits.
We still have to clean up the mess of cables and old servers we pulled from the cabinet, but we can do that during the week.
The work was messy, and we came in on a Saturday but the results where worth it!
Freevo Version 4.0
I have been using Snapstream’s Beyond TV 3 for almost a year now. I have spoken before of how great a product it is. They just announced Beyond TV 4.0. Having no need for over the air HDTV tuning I bought the upgrade anyway. Truth be told I wanted to check out the Divix encoding option on the new version.
For a few months I have been pondering turning my custom built celeron pc into a media center box. I have been using Beyond TV as a PVR on my good HP box. I had been too lazy to reconfigure the setup. The announcement of the new version of Beyond TV got me thinking, upgrade. I did some research on decent PCI video cards that are compatible with my TV Tuner USB device. The computer I was going to use as the DVR has a built in video card that is not compatible, and since it is such a small PC it didn’t have an AGP slot. I found a good PNY card at Compusa for the unit. I also upgraded the 160gig drive in the computer to a bigger 250gig. I performed the hardware upgrade and checked that the gear worked. then I installed windows from scratch. All I put on the machine the latest windows updates, the USB IR drivers, the video capture card drivers, remote, and Beyond TV. I did some heavy rearranging of my living room and moved the computer to my entertainment center. I rigged it up to my computer using the computers built in VGA port (nice).
There were a few minor issues, but all in all the upgrade went well. I am running some test recordings now to verify the system works correctly, but so far it looks good. This setup actually fixed an issue I had with my old computer not working with the resolution of the HDTV I have. The new video card plugged into the VGA slot (vs the RCA slot on the old setup) fits the screen perfectly. What is weird is the resolution the computer is at is not the native resolution of the TV but it works, so I won’t complain.
Once I am happy with my new setup I can blow away the HP computer and rebuild it to use as a general workstation. I use my Powerbook as my main computer but I always need a Windows box around for something.
Now I am off to clean up all the dust and dirt I created and unearthed with all my moving of stuff around my living room.