Hardware

Two Late Nights In A Row

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I just found out that I need to be around tonight at 1AM for a software release. This will be really fun because I will be up till the same time Wednesday for a hardware release. Needless to say I am not happy about the situation. I hope I am awake tomorrow. I have a meeting filled day from like 10AM through 2PM. Meetings are never fun.

Unfortunately Keith cannot do this hardware swap by himself tomorrow. I don’t think he can mount the gear with one person. if he could I would seriously thinking about letting him.

Training For A Call Center

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Yesterday a new class of trainee’s started at our Kingston Call Center. We have 24 customer service reps who will “hopefully” start taking calls full time on 9/22. The class was so big that we had to put the working reps in the training room and the people to be trained sat in the call center. Joe our Tech guy in Kingston is overloaded right now. Justin went up for 2 days to give him a hand. Justin was eager to go up, so it worked out ok. I need to get up there one day next week. I will also need to be there on the 22nd.

Besides the ongoing call center build out I have hardware swap out’s to deal with in our Data Center Thursday morning. Tomorrow will be interesting since it will be a long day.

I just received my first Penguin Computing Server. These guys make cheap linux servers. The joy of it is, I can put Windows OS’s on it without a problem. The Super Micro servers I have been buying for windows will not handle Linux. I have some issues with the hardware, but for the price we will deal with it. A decent server can be had for around $1600. I can get a really cheap one for under a grand. We are actually looking to get some cheap windows box’s and may actually use these guys.

I am still awaiting a heat sync for a Super Micro test server we are testing. I got a trial of a serial ATA server. Actually we had the financial ok to buy it but instead of buying a regular server we got this to test. If we like it, we will keep it. If we don’t like it, we will send it back and get a normal IDE server. Serial ATA looks good, and this machine can do hot swappable drives, where IDE RAID cannot.

I need to also start working on our Exchange 2003 test server. Gus and I want to get one working for the Information Systems team and see if it is easy to admin and troubleshoot. If it is we may want to make a larger scale deployment. The difference this time will be we don’t outsource it and we do it ourselves. In December of 2002 we outsourced our mail and put it on Exchange 2000. It was a horrible failure. Too much latency with accessing exchange over the WAN. We abandoned that option and returned to our original mail provider with just POP/SMTP mail. We have been happy since.

I Am Glad I Kept The Powerbook

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As much as Gus made sense when he said I should sell the powerbook and buy a desktop mac, I am glad I didn’t listen to him. I love this little powerbook. I don’t use it on the road much anymore, but when I do it is golden. It is light, the keyboard still is one of the best laptop keyboards I have written on, and the screen is bright. The fonts may be a bit small, but I can deal. Granted I use it plugged into my desktop monitor at home most of the time, but this type of portability is awesome. I also don’t like putting all my personal stuff on my work computer. I just got around to putting quicken on my Thinkpad. The only reason I did that was so I can sync quicken with my Treo.

The downside of this powerbook is that it gets HOT. Man this thing is charging and my legs are getting hot with it on my lap right now.

Sleep Habits All Screwed Up

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So I got home at 3:30 Saturday morning from my crazy day at work. I slept till 1PM. I awoke to problems with 2 servers. One just needed a reboot because terminal services was not working. The other one wouldn’t return from a reboot. We have had issues in the past with that machine and its onboard RAID card.

Gus was nice enough to run down to our data center and fix the problem. I cleaned up my place and tried to rest for the remainder of the day.

I went to my parents for dinner. Carrie and Morgan were there. Morgan is still so cute! We ordered italian and sat around watching my mom freak out about all the dirt left behind by the construction crews from their kitchen/bathroom renovation. She won’t listen to everyone telling her to get a cleaning crew in to fix the place up. The place does look nice though.

A bunch of people are going golfing again in Princeton NJ sunday. I was on and off about if I wanted to go, but I didn’t have a car today to do the stuff I needed to do, so I need to go tomorrow. I called Dan and let him know. I want to golf but this turned out to be a bad weekend.

Wireless Woes

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Still having AT&T wireless issues. They want me to get a new SIM card. So I went to the store. They were out. How they can sell phones without the card, I have no idea. I guess they use extra ones for replacements. I called customer care again and they are sending one, after I argued with them on why I won’t be charged $25.00 to get one. Why a SIM card will cause the dam phone not to work in my apartment is beyond me, but weirder things have happened.

Howard is looking to see if he has his old Treo 180 around that I can borrow for a bit. I am debating on if I want to get a Treo again. Now I am thinking if I can use his black and white 180, and live with it I may just get one of those till november and get the new Treo 600 when it comes out. That will save me from buying the color model that is like $300 and then want to upgrade it 3 months later. The black and white Treo 180 goes for like $130 on ebay. That is allot cheaper. I will see. If he doen’t have it I may just get it and take the risk on the $130.

On the plus side my new T-40 is great. And I got my cannon scanner to work with Mac OS 10.2 without a problem.

Work as Usual

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Monday was work as usual. We had our new Kingston Help-desk guy start. Gave him the really brief overview of stuff we do. After lunch he sat in on a training class for Call Center people. I bet he wasn’t happy about that.

We got our 2 file servers for kingston. They are nice. I am building Windows 2003 Server on them right now. Not 100% sure if we will use 2003 though.

We are planning a huge system upgrade at our data center that I mentioned last week. We hashed out issues still outstanding regarding that move. So far we have no show stopper issues. I gave it a go and await getting final approval for the work to proceed. We will meet again tomorrow to make sure no new issues creep up.

Keith is not happy because he thinks we gave away too much in the design changes to our development team. Or rather to accommodate issues they had. I think this is Phase 1 in a multi stage project. Once we complete this, we work for Phase 2 changes that may require reworking some site code. The work we are going to deploy represents a major step for us though. Sorry I cannot go into too much detail, but certain aspects of work are better left off the open internet!

Dinner with morgan, (and her parents)

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I went over to my sisters last night to install a new hard drive for them. That is my job in the family, to fix computer crap. Thankfully it was relitivly painless to do the install on their old Dell Dimension XPS500. The only problem I had was the ton of dirt in it. Once that was done we all went to dinner at Santa Fe. It is a steak place near Austin Street in forest hills. The food is always good. The big excitement of the night was when I was holding Morgan and she almost got out of my hands. Man that baby can move. In the end no harm was done, but I freaked, and my sister was very calm about it. I think she secretly wanted to kill me, but I don’t want to know.

Mike and I had some drinks at the bar, and then he drove me home so I can drop off a lamp and an end table they were giving me for my new apartment.

They tried to bribe me to do the computer work with paying for dinner, but I didn’t want to have them do that. I don’t mind doing stuff for them, and if it is something crazy big project I wouldn’t mind some free steak, but this only took me a half an hour and I wanted to see them anyway. It was nice that they thought to take me out though!

Dinner turned bad when we were walking back to their apartment and I got pages about errors my companies website. Turns out some stored procedure need re-compiling, or something. I have not yet read the incident report on the matter. I should get that on monday.

Amanda emailed me late, saying she was trying to IM me about going to Rye play-land friday night. I am glad I didn’t get the message till late because I would have felt bad that I was going to my sisters already. I like amusement parks.

Friday was busy, my old boss jeff from my days at Y&R wanted to do drinks also. I need to catch up with him soon.

Time for a lazy Saturday!!!

My computers & Blogging stuff

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I realized yesterday that I wrote a bunch of blog entries. I decided to write an entry on on topic, or group of topics. So if I want to discuss a few things at once I will have multiple entries broken down for your reading enjoyment.

I am back into my routine of writing on the train. that is how we got the morning and afternoon posts yesterday. I just forget to post when I get to work and just have to post time-stamp things later on. I tried to use the thinkpad for blog entry’s. I found a bug in w.bloggar. Well I think it is a bug. The dam thing wont work on my laptop. I use it once after install and then it crashes every time I try to open it after that. I just gave up on Monday. My powerbook works great, and it is light. I can do without the thinkpad some days during the week.

Yes I do have two laptops. You are reading correctly. I have my own personal Apple Powerbook G4 12″. it is the little powerbook. It is awesome. I am new to the mac’s. I have only had a mac since last july. The other machine is my company issued Thinkpad T31. It has a bright screen and weight’s around the same as the Powerbook even though it is bigger in shape. It is also an awesome machine. The down side is that as much as I tried, I cannot get any windows laptops to go into and out of standby and hibernate modes properly. The mac usually works. Also the smaller mac is easier to open on the train.

Then we have desktops. I have 3 computers at home (not counting the laptops). I currently have an AMD Atholon XP 1500+ computer running Windows XP Pro. That machine is my main desktop computer. I don’t use it nearly enough anymore, but I bought it in December 2001 when my desktop was my main computer. This box is tricked out even though I don’t utilize it that much. It has a gig of ram, 180gig hard drive, etc.

My next two machines are used as servers. I have my old desktop, A Pentium III 800 with 780megs of ram. I use that to test different things on. It used to be my windows 2000 server. Then I have an old Dell Dimension desktop that I think has Pentium III 700 in it. That is now my main server running Red Hat 9.0.

While I am on the topic of my computer gear I can say that I am using a Linksys DSL Cable router with 802.11g wireless built in. That gives me fast wireless while I am on my Powerbook!

There you have it. I am trying to shrink down the size or amount of stuff I have so it doesn’t look so bad in my living room. I just put the AMD computer into a new smaller & cooler looking case. The other two are already in mid tower cases so I am not sure what I can do with those.

More work, less hacking, unless it is for work

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It is monday again, and I am off to work. Today we meet with another telecom provider to see if they have a good deal. We need to make a decision this week.

OK, time for me to gripe about something. I am on the train, and cannot stand it when people receive cell phone calls (or make them) and have an entire conversation. In addition to that these people usually talk like a plane is flying by. Now I am all for cell phone use. I have 2 of them, and I don’t even have a home phone (another story). When I am out and about I will receive calls but only talk for a min if it is not important. If it is a work emergency (which I get more often than I would like) I talk. What is with this casual talking on a train with 100 other people. We don’t care what you have to say to your friends or family. We don’t need cell phone restriction laws, we need some etiquette from people. Ok, I am done ranting.

Speaking of cell phones I am kind of bummed that my main phone (an AT&T GSM Provided Sony Ericsson T68i) won’t work in our office in Kingston. Actually it wont work in kingston at all. I am not sure what will work well up there. I know verizon works, and t-mobile, but not sure if either of them provides good signal at our site. I have a verizon phone but I wanted to cancel it. No I am paying the monthly fee to wait and see. I also have a T-Mobile SIM card, but no phone. I am holding onto that for a bit longer also.

I gotta tell you, I go through phones (just like PDA’s) fast. I just upgrade to the latest and greatest allot. I was on ebay last night looking for a phone for the CEO of my company. He is going to europe and wanted a phone. He has a SIM already, but no phone. Since I didn’t have any extra he said to look for one. Well after looking I don’t see any GSM phones that do everything I want, except for the one I already have. For my CEO we are just going to rent one, but I started looking for myself also. Like I said I don’t have a phone for my T-Mobile SIM. It is weird. For the first time in a while I am ready to spend money.

OK, back to work talk. This post was supposed to be about work. I ended up sending back the low end Compaq 1U server we got. FYI, 1U is the size of it. Computer racks are broken down by U’s. Each standard rack has 42U. A 1U server takes up 1U of that 42. They are really small. It turns out the compaq server we bought does not have a RAID card for IDE like were were told 3 times. The were going to send me one for free, but I decided to send it back instead. Part of my reasoning is that we were going to get 2 of these. And I want to get them and see if I like them. if I do like them I want to standardize on them later on. If we got a free raid card, I would have to pay for them in the future. That would put the cost well over what I wanted to budget for these low end machines. I ended up ordering a super micro box and saved like $600 off my original quote. It is a no name brand, but we already use no name VA Linux machines, and this thing has a 3 year warrantee. I will see if they are any good.