Life, Kids, Technology & that move to another continent
I have actually been having thoughts about getting rid of the Tivo. I know you must think I am crazy. I love that thing. It is like a pet or something, but yes it is true I have had thoughts about getting rid of it. Why you ask? I have been looking into ReplayTV. I have heard good things about it. Not sure if they will stay around even after they have been bought up. See ongoing legal saga regarding ReplayTV.
I am hearing that it is just plain better than Tivo.
I have mostly kicked my cold. I have a slight cough and runny noise but otherwise I feel much better. Of course Alison is sick now. Also Keith called yesterday and he is not coming in today because of a fever. I have (or someone else has) successfully passed on the bug.
Last night my family went to Peter Lugar’s. As usual it was a fantastic steak. I think morgan liked the bread and water more though! What does she know, she is 1. I had the steak for 2 with my brother in law. It was dam good. I even made room for desert. Cheese cake. It was good too.
Unfortunately I had to take migraine medication both Saturday & Sunday. Saturday a mild head ache was dogging me all day. By the evening I took the drugs because I felt it might deteriorate quick. That is the big fear, so I took some Furiset.
Sunday I took the meds because I wasn’t sure if I was getting one but I wanted to be ok for dinner. I didn’t want to have to cancel twice for my birthday dinner. Normally I wait too long and the drugs are less effective, today I probably took them too soon. Sometimes I feel like I am always medicating. Then I think about a really bad migraine that I have had, and I realize I don’t care if it will prevent even one of those from happening.
Sunday I got some, but not allot of work done. Instead I cleaned up my apartment. I also cleaned out my closet. I got rid of some old clothes or stuff I don’t ever wear. Then of course I went on line and got some new stuff. I spent more than I would have liked at LL Bean. I am finding I like that store allot.
OK, maybe being over the cold was a premature statement. As I sit on the train writing this I am coughing like crazy. I wont speak about being better again. That way I won’t jinx myself.
I cleaned off allot of shows on my Tivo. I got through a big backlog of stuff that I haven’t watched. I still have loads of crap on it but the recent stuff that I wanted to see is taken care of. I love getting a weekend to just sit and veg out.
Friday night Glenn our CEO took us all out to dinner. I had the surf and turf. It was a small but great fillet, and a lobster tail. Both were really good.
Then we saw John Steward in concert. He was awesome. I was almost in tears with laughter. It was 90 minutes of funny. I am going to start Tivo’ing the daily show again. He is just good.
I saw the first episode of the new season of the Soprano’s. it was OK, not fantastic and not bad. I watch that show on and off. I saw most of last season but missed most of the 2 seasons before that. I loved the first season though. I have the soprano’s back in my season pass list in Tivo.
Another crime drama, or shall I say really bad ass bad guy as the star drama is the Shield. That was on again last night. I Tivo’ed that, and will watch it tonight or this weekend. I have actually watched the first two seasons of that show and it has been pretty good so far. I will season pass the 3rd season and see if it is any good.
Lets face it nothing else is on TV right now. All major network shows that I like anyway are in rerun’s for march and part of april. So I am trolling cable TV for good things to watch. Granted I am watching allot less TV these days but I am always looking for something good to watch…
Yesterday was very busy. it was one of those days that you don’t remember where I spent most of my time, but I looked up at it was 3:30PM already.
Today and tomorrow will probibly be just as busy. Stuff is going on I cannot really discuss just yet, but the work will keep Keith and I busy for a while.
Jayson went to Dave’s again last night. His mom was cooking dinner. I declined to go. I was tired and had things to do around the house. I got some stuff done, but ended up watching some stuff I had on Tivo. I have not had a chance to watch much TV since last week, so I have allot of stuff on the tivo I have to see or take the chance that it will be overwritten soon.
Tonight Jay and I may goto Angilo & Maxie’s. it is a really good steakhouse right by my office. I need to talk with him later about it to see if he is still up for it.
I got my new furniture friday as planned. It looks as good or better than I anticipated. Most of my stuff is put away now. I only have 1 issue with were to put all my home entertainment components. My Tivo & DVD player don’t fit where I wanted them to go. I need to cut a hole in the back of the wall unit in order to move them somewhere else. Other than that things look good. I need to hang my large map now that I know where my couch is. I have a massive map of the US with marks on every city I have been to. It was fun doing and is nice to have around. I will probably move my DVD collection to the new wall unit also. It will make room in my front closet where they are now.
I need to have my old wall unit removed. it is in pieces in the corner of my living room while I figure out what to do with it.
The really big foot rest in my bed room is making it hard to walk around, but it goes with my new comfy chair so I am torn with what to do with it. I pushed it against the wall and am hoping it is out of the way. You really need someplace to put your feet up on when you sit in a comfy chair. My Pier 1 chair had a small foot rest. That chair is now on my patio. it will be for warmer weather use outside.
This entry was written while listening to Farmhouse by Phish
Today was a lazy day. I caught up on what I had on the Tivo. I also did some email and just hung out. I did some food shopping since they say it may snow tomorrow. I had no food left, so I figured it was a good time to do that.
I also installed 512 more megs in my new 20″ iMac. Now I have 768 megs in it. I can put a full gig in it, but apple decided to only include 256 with them machine. If I want to get a full gig, I need to remove that 256 and put a 512 meg chip in its place. The only problem is you cannot get to that memory without going to an authorized repair center. It is sealed within the machine. The other slot is not. So for now I am at 768 megs, it should be enough for now. I also put my airport extreme card into the mac. I don’t have the laptop anymore so I figured I would use it. Since my server is in the closet on wireless, I get no extra speed by leaving the mac wired to my 100megabit switch. I cannot transfer files between the desktop and server any faster than the wifi anyway. Now I just have 1 less wire plugged into the iMac.
In my free time I also imported most of my online photo album into iPhoto. Photos imported allot faster on the iMac then they did on either of my Powerbooks. I need to get photos from my parents to scan and increase my album a bit.
Also today I watched some DVD’s. I just got 2 more shows on DVD. I got Firefly on DVD. It was a scifi show that didn’t last too long on tv. It was actually very good, and I was surprised when it came out on DVD. I didn’t watch too many of them, so I decided to buy it. I also got Buffy season 5. I mocked that show for years, and then Rich gave me season 1 to watch and I actually liked it. Go figure.
This entry was written while listening to Maybe Katie from the album “Everything to Everyone” by Barenaked Ladies
I got most of the OS ISO disks recovered today. thankfully I had most of them at work. I am still missing some programs but I think I can find them on some backup’s. The rest of the really recent stuff I can always get if I find I need it later.
Most of the video’s off Tivo are lost forever. The VMWare Virtual Servers were also lost. I had allot of them backed on my laptop and work, but some of the configurations I had are lost. I will copy what I have at work tomorrow and bring it back home. I was trying to make a basic VMWare configuration for every OS that I use so I have it if I need to use it.
I also began to robocopy (like rsync, but using a windows resource kit utility) to sync my applications folder up with a drive on my 2003 server. I have realized that I cannot back everything up to DVD anymore. I just have too much stuff. Some things can get backed up, but most will have to sit on more than 1 disk drive. Either that or get a DLT system that I don’t want to get.
Well I am off to bed. My hands are starting to hurt. I need a good night sleep since it will be a long day tomorrow. Keith is taking the day off. As much as I bust on him for stuff, he does good work. He just needs supervision. And if he is reading this, hey Keith you know I am telling the truth!
As the tag below will state I wrote this while listening to one of my all time favorite songs. I am not as big a Creed fan as I used to be, but this song still rocks!
This entry was written while listening to Higher from the album “Human Clay” by Creed
I may have made a huge tactical error. I went to reinstall windows XP on my desktop at home today. I have 2 drives in it. A 18 Gig 15,000 RPM SCSI drive for the OS, and a 180 Gig IDE drive for all my stuff. So to reinstall XP I just formatted the SCSI drive and expected to just have the data stay safe on the second drive. I have done it before. Always no problem. Well the problem I realized after it was too late was that Windows trys to install on the first IDE drive it can find. It doesn’t matter what you set your system to do. I wanted the SCSI drive to be the master. It didn’t care what I wanted if an IDE drive was present. I lost everything. The correct way to do this was to have removed the IDE drive and built windows. I didn’t figure that out until I lost all my data.
Now I have backups. All my personal files (documents, photo’s, music, etc) is on my mac and safe. I also did a DVD backup 2 weeks ago. What I did loose was all the shows I pulled off Tivo and didn’t have a chance to burn to DVD. I also lost any programs I downloaded and didn’t get to DVD. The last time I did that was the end of July 2003. I am bound to have lost stuff that has changed since then. Not a catastrophic mistake, but a big pain in the ass. I also lost tons of backups that I had. I was doing a project where I took all my old backup CD’s and put them to DVD so I didn’t have so many disks lying around. That project is bust now that all the copies on the hard drive are gone.
I don’t know why I am so calm about this right now. I truly don’t know what really needed and lost.
One think I do know is that I am going out tomorrow and getting a 200 gig firewire hard drive to put my stuff on. I am not taking any chances again. I have been pondering buying one for a while, but now I am going to do it.
If this was at work it would never have happened. Why am I more careful with other people’s stuff compared to my stuff? I guess I cannot get yelled at for messing my own stuff up!
OK, now I am a little pissed that I screwed this up. Not much stuff is lost forever, but what pisses me off is that it will take me months to get everything and organize it the way it was. I think that is what pisses me off the most.
I am now making a DOS bootable disk so I can wipe the large drive again so it doesn’t have an OS on it. Then I can remove it and build my computer with the SCSI drive in it and then insert the IDE drive back and use it as a secondary drive. if you are asking why don’t I just use the IDE drive as my primary drive, the answer is that it has more space. I need it for my stuff. the 18 gig drive is large enough for my OS and applications.
I slept like crap again last night. I can’t understand why I am so tired when I am sick and yet I cannot sleep. I also can’t understand the lack of appetite. I didn’t eat anything at all from Tuesday night till Thursday night. I then didn’t eat anything bread until this morning. I got the chicken sandwich last night and then as funny as it may sound I wasn’t hungry for it. I ate it for breakfast this morning. I also ate a slice of pizza for lunch. Don’t tell my dad since when he called to find out what I wanted for dinner he laughed at me for asking for pizza. So I had my mom bring me another chicken sandwich. I didn’t even finish that one. I am just not hungry. I would figure I would be. I am also surprised that not eating for only a few days messes up your digestive track like it does. Enough said about that!
I checked some email from my desk for the first time since this all started. My dad thought it was a good sign I also watched some TV and some movies. I spent less time in bed today. That is good. I spent it lounging in the Pier 1 chair I have. I am so bored. I cleared off the tivo of anything I will probably watch. The rest will just sit there until it gets erased, even if I think I may one day sit and watch that crap. This was that day and I didn’t touch it. I did watch the good movies and some shows I watch done.
I am now back in bed with the powerbook. This time with pillows propping me up. Man this is probably very bad for my back. I do like it to write though! I stopped writing the blog’s right into Kun-Log (the offline blog tool I use for Mac OS-X). I am writing the blog in word and then pasting it into Kun-Log. The position I am in the font’s in Kun-Log are too small. In word I can pump the display up to 500% normal. I do have bad eye sight so it helps. Right now I have it at 300% normal on the PowerBooks 12” display.
It is just after 10PM in NYC and I am bored. I can’t go out. I am tired but sleep won’t come, yet again. I hope I get a normal night sleep tonight. I was told I could take a Nyquil last night but I didn’t. I thought about it. I had one out at 2AM but I didn’t take it. I wanted to get on normal sleeping habits. Well without the drugs I didn’t get onto one yet. Lets hope tonight is different.
When you were a kid did you ever look forward to a sick day, or a snow day? Just a change of pace? I used to. Now that I am older and working I look at things a bit differently. Staying home sick is boring. I have been cooped up since Wednesday. Granted I have been in no condition to do anything, but that is half of it. Now that I am feeling a bit better I want to get out and do SOMETHING, anything. The problem is the medical people who are so helpful when you are sick are also a pain in the ass. My dad is “suggesting” I stay in another day. His suggestion’s are usually do this or you are stupid. I am feeling a bit better today. So I wonder why I can’t do anything tomorrow. The answer is that the body needs time to fix itself. I am listening since I don’t want this to come back again. Twice for me is more than enough. I am so bored I will probably remote in from home. I got permission to do that, but I was told to “take it easy”. I know he means well. I am not off the hook with doctors anyway. My doctor wants to see me, and he wants me to speak to a headache specialist again. I may not have been in contact with my doctor, but since he is friends with my dad he has been in constant contact with him this week. It is nice having people in the family that can do stuff like that.
I don’t mind going to see my doctor. Tony is cool. He is my dad’s doc, and I just hop on the 4 or 5 train by his office and I can be at work no later than like 10:30. The headache guy is another story. I went to him once like 2 years ago. I stopped going since I left one health insurance company and went to another when I started full time work at my current company. At the time they had a bad company that he didn’t take. Now we are on a different plan and he takes it, so I can go see him. The problem is the first time I went he sent me for an CAT scan. Never fun. It was my second “head shot”. I had one when I was like 11. they found nothing. That is good. The headache guy wanted to put me on some heavy duty preventative medication. He told me the side effects of them and I said no way. The compromise was the Nadolol that I am on now. The next time I go see this guy I am taking my dad with me. All of my dad’s medical friends including Tony think this is the best guy around for headache’s. at least if he is going to want to put me on powerful drugs I can have my dad around telling him he is on crack or something.
Ok enough depressing crap. Most people don’t want to read about my medical issues. And the truth be told is this blog is more for me than anyone else. But I don’t want to turn off the 3-5 readers I do have. I am just bored and writing like this is good. I like doing it. I just write what I am thinking about. Right now it is how I want to be better and doing something else, anything else than what I am doing now.
Written while listening to Pink, Just Like A Pill…