OK, so this is a bit late, given that it's the next weekend already, but here's the update from last weekend..
Kestrel and I headed down to Austin to visit the folks again for the 4th of July holiday. Kestrel was transferred to another dept that does NOT work on Saturdays, so she got the weekend off when she normally would have had to work.
We got in fairly late as we always do when we head out after work. Went to bed, got up the next day and as usual I got put to work fixing all the various computer stuff that broke since I was last down there, including figuring out why Mom's printer stopped working and helping install a wifi range extender.
Since I'm running hospitality for the Lone Star Mensa RG this year, Dad took me out to see the facilities so I'll know what I'm working with. On the way we met up with dconnect so he could buy the birthday present he promised for me. Several times in the years I've known him he's claimed he was giving me a computer of one sort or another for my birthday. None of them has ever appeared for various reasons (he always has an excuse. The Sun U10 was classic.) Now, I don't expect my friends to spend that kind of money on me, but I'm not going to say no either when one offers to buy me a Netbook. So this time Martin actually came through and he bought me an HP Mini 1000 1030NR. He had another event to attend so we parted at Frys and Dad took me to the hotel to check out the hospitality facilities.
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Just got woken up by the neghbors. Let one use my phone to call 911.
Police are here now. He's clearly drunk.

Will post the "weekend" post I've been meaning to do for 2 days later.
Must get a cheese steak some time while I'm here.

Current Mood: hungry

Great for concentrating on tedious data-entry / massaging tasks and shutting out the rest of the world around you.
Who knew?

Current Mood: awake

Not surprisingly the customer that has postponed their hardware upgrade every time it's been scheduled for the last two years did so again. What's surprising this time is the reason: they already completed it. Apparently there was some misunderstanding and they deployed all 4 new servers in their primary site, upgrading the 2 old servers, instead of deploying 2 servers in the new site and the other 2 in their secondary site. Their understanding was that they were upgrading the primary site from 2 to 4 servers and we were going to ship them 2 additional serves to upgrade the secondary site, now to be considered a disaster recovery site.
The good news is, I'm done working for the day (well, done with my scheduled work. I have other projects I can give attention to that normally wouldn't have been touched today.) and the Deployment Coordinators can get sign-off that this deployment is complete. That removes the longest running project from our dashboard. That also means the Account Exec can have a chat with the customer about selling them the two additional servers the customer THOUGHT they were getting, and we can finally get the old servers shipped back to us (and retired. We don't use that model any more.)
That means an outstanding task off the board and new sales. It's also good news that his customer wants to upgrade their existing install. That means they like the service and they move from 4 to 6 machines. Always good for the balance sheets.

Current Mood: cheerful

I walked into my cube this (now yesterday) morning and gave my usual quip to a stack of Dell boxes sitting in the middle of the floor: "New toys for me?!"
Pulling my laptop out of my bag to dock it, I found my workstation in might disarray, my keyboard off to one side sitting on top of my phone, etc. It took me 30 seconds of staring and wondering who would ransack my area like that to notice I had a new monitor. My old Dell CRT had been replaced with a spanking new wide screen flat panel display. W00t! New toy!
Now I have to install updated drivers from Dell to get my laptop to use it to it's full potential (It doesn't want to do the rotate thing until I update the drivers).

Current Mood: awake

If there's one thing I HATE, it's "protected" domain name registration.
Damnit, these stupid "private / protected" registrations defeat the entire POINT of whois!
Look, if you're too cowardly to put your real name / phone number / email address, etc, on your domain name registration, at least use a business name/address or something.
What set me off tonight? I'm researching getting RHCE certified. I found a site, redhatcert.com "All about Linux certifications". The name implies some affiliation with Red Hat, so I wanted more info about them. Are the owned by Red Hat? Well according to whois they're "none of your damn business who owns this site".

"Linux Training Online - Using the Linux cd Command to Change Directory in the Linux File System" ...? Now THAT'S sure to be on every Linux cert exam!
"How to become a Computer Technician - Training, Experience, and Certification" another article is titled. "The computer technician, or information technician (IT) as they are often called, has almost unlimited opportunity in the job market today" OK, now we see what this site is up to: suckering people who don't know anything about the IT field.
What this site boils down to is very basic instructions for people who have heard of "that 'Linux' thing" and maybe want to try it out. It is most certainly NOT, as the name implies, for anyone who has been using Linux long enough to be thinking about certification.

Current Mood: annoyed

And in other news, I had to teach another customer the word "obfuscate". He'd never heard the word before and was confused when I told him his firewall was "obfuscating his SMTP transactions".
Luckily when he called his firewall consultant about how to turn that off, he knew exactly what I was talking about and walked him through how to turn off ESMTP inspection / "fixup" in IOS.
Normally not a problem, but our product is an email encryption device. Disabling TLS is a bad thing.

Current Mood: bored

I love having to be at work early for a conference call with an overseas customer who claims that their server is sending customers to the wrong URL, only to find out when we get in the call that it's sending to the right URL, it's just displaying the wrong banner.
<thud>

Current Mood: tired

From joedecker

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

About 90%of my list. I think about the only exception is densaer . I met him through a BBS.
There are folks I met through conventions... which I was attending due to people I met through the Intertubes.

Current Mood: cheerful

Not mine unfortunately. Kestrel is going back to school (University of Phoenix) so we went out and got her a laptop to do her school work on. Her desktop machine was hopelessly out of date and badly virus infected anyway, so that just wasn't going to do.
We went out to Best Buy and holy-shit, I qualified for a credit card. An honest-to-god, not co-signed, not secured credit card. The limit isn't much, but it was high enough that, combined with a little cash out of her pocket, we were able to purchase her a laptop that will get her through at least the first couple of years of school.
It's nothing super high-end, but it's easily the most powerful machine in the house right now. AMD Athlon X2 w/ 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive, Nvidia mobile 8200. It's got Vista Home Premium on it.
We had to wait until today to bring it home as they didn't have any "stock" laptops in stock. The only ones they had on hand had already had their Geek Squad "optimization and security" stuff done to it (removing all trial software, "optimize" the registry, install some anti-virus software, etc). I didn't feel like spending an extra $160 for what I can do myself. They agreed to take one of those and "restore" it back to factory. They couldn't get it done before we had to be at uhrwerkmensch 's place for game, so I worked from home today and picked it up while running errands at lunch.
I have now played with Vista more today than ever before, this being the first computer I've "owned" (eg: the first computer that has been part of my household or for which I am in any way responsible and have regular access) that has Vista. I can see why all the bitching about it constantly asking for permission to do things. What's worse is that it seems to bitch TWICE for each thing: one to say "this requires admin access" and one to say "do you REALLY want to install/uninstall/change setting"?
Other than that, it seems OK. Granted, it's only been a few hours and I haven't really done anything other than uninstall some crap and install AVG, Firefox and Thunderbird. Performance is pleasing so far, but other than FF, I haven't tried to run anything that would stress it.
In about 20 minutes I burn it to the ground and install Windows 7.

Current Mood: cheerful

We had our first game session tonight. Everything went well. Our "gamer rookies" had a good time and managed to keep up with the flow.
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Current Mood: awake

Just by searching Wikipedia.
I've expanded my vocabulary of strange Japanese sexual fetishes quite a bit today.
Someone mentioned photos of naked women and octipi, someone else cited the earliest known
example in Japanese literature. I look up that name... and am lost in a train wreck of articles on Wikipedia...
I had no idea most of this stuff was classified so specifically as to have words to name them!
Of course, Japanese culture is hardly unique in that regard...

/em ponders the advisability of reading LJ at work, then hitting Wikipedia...

Current Mood: silly

Well at the rate things are going, this is not going to be a very productive month. I've done one actual customer install in the last two weeks. Had lots of installs, upgrades and what-not scheduled, but only one that has actually gone through. After the debacle that was Saturday, yesterday's had to be terminated when we realized the backup from which they were doing their install was from the wrong version of the software. Our bad on that one, we forgot to tell the customer the existing serves would need to be upgraded to a compatible version first. Luckily their change control is flexible enough to get that into the schedule quickly. It helps that the site that needs to do the software upgrade was planning to do that soon anyway. They just stepped up the urgency.
Today, the customer is having phone issues and hadn't called by lunch time. They've now been rescheduled to next month.
The HUGE install I was supposed to fly out and do two weeks ago, but got postponed due to other things things on their schedule just got canceled. Some Account Exec is going to be pissed over that. That was going to be a very large sale and the customer decided to stay with the product they're already using.
At least I got to go to lunch with the gaming group. Got two rounds of Race for the Galaxy in.

Playing with Gentoo in VMWare now.

Current Mood: cheerful

Saturday started with what was supposed to be a simple phone call with a customer assisting them cut-over to putting their server into production. With testing to make sure mail is flowing and being encrypted properly, this should have taken maybe 20 - 30 minutes.
The call started at 10:00AM.
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Current Mood: content

Today's blog topic: Google Wave.
What are your thoughts? Is Google trotting out the magic again, or is this just another "collaboration suite" doomed to failure?
Personally, I think after bringing out android on the G1 to compete with Windows Mobile (anyone who thinks they're really after the iPhone isn't paying attention.), this is a second shot across Microsoft's bow. This time they're aiming to take a chunk of the Sharepoint market.
They're pouring the Open Source sauce sauce on this one again, which is a point in it's favor. But is Google just going to be the next monopoly? Is this just one more way in which Google will intrude on your privacy?

Current Mood: curious

Had a pretty good weekend. I got to sleep in on Saturday, while Kestrel had to go to work to make up for being sent home early on Tues (EVERYONE got sent home early, due to power outage. Coming in on Saturday was not optional.) We had a bit of a blowup over the fact that my snoring kept her awake and she was thus exhausted when she got home from work.
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I got the lawn mowed, Kestrel came home from work and I took off for a picnic to meet up with mizdandylynn , hubs lllvis vulpine137 nuclear_jesus gwyndragon jesslla techie_ and assorted other folks who's LJ handles I can't seem to keep straight. Fun was had in Arlington. We adjourned to Braums in NRH to meet up with masonstone and ? (plus spawn).
I stopped on the way home to pick up some of those "nasal strips" that are supposed to help with snoring. (two days on and she says it's better. It remains to be seen if this is a long term solution.)

Sunday was veg at home day. I went out to my car to get my flip flops (I'd changed out to my sneakers at the end of the picnic) and found my long lost GPS! I've searched that car no less than FIVE TIMES since it disappeared 2 1/2 months ago. I've cleaned it out at least 3 times. But there it was, sitting by the B pillar between the driver's seat and the driver's seat belt. The loss of a $200 gadget aside, I really hated the thought that I'd left it on my desk at work and it had walked off. I really hated the thought that one of my coworkers (I really do like all of them) would steal something like that. I'm much releaved that I was wrong.

I picked up a G1 last month, which means I have a GPS, connected to Google maps, but as I found out on Saturday navigating to the picnic site, it is not an adequate replacement. The issue of trying to mount my cell phone where I can see it while driving aside, it isn't as good at tracking my current position, telling me what to do next and doesn't have voice prompts. Glad I found the GPS before my next business trip.

So far today I have helped the one customer I was scheduled to work with today set up their relay host (a task that I could have talked him through on the phone in 5 seconds. They sounded sheepish when they found out how simple it was.) I was thus done with work by 8:30AM. Wandering past the Support area for the 3rd time I saw that one of the senior guys was still working the same call. I got nosey and peeked over his shoulder. Seeing he seemed to be stumped with an issue I happened to be familiar with, I offered my thoughts, ending up getting roped into doing his support call (Importing a signed SSL certificate into a Tomcat keystore), which ended up being "Customer forgot the password for the key that goes with that cert." He's SOL if he can't remember that key. That means buying a THIRD new cert in a month. The last time he had to do that was our fault. The same support tech I was "helping" and another one had nuked his original key from the keystore file before importing his cert. I did the same thing, but luckily for me his device had run it's monthly backup last night so I was able to restore his key. THEN We found he had set a password on that key and didn't remember it. I have no sympathy for that.

Having nothing better to do with the rest of the day, I started watching the introduction to Google Wave when the Customer Support manager came by my desk. He tapped to get my attention (wearing headphones) and asked me to put my video on pause. I figured I was busted watching Youtube / Internet videos when it turned out he wanted to discuss the content of what I was watching, seeking my opinion on it. Yay for techie bosses!

One of the reasons I'd been wandering past Support (and specifically prevously mentioned senior support tech's desk) is that he still has a Dell R200 sitting on his desk that he's SUPPOSED to be turning into an RT ticket system for the Support dept. He's the second support tech to take on the project and it's just sitting there, not even plugged in. Since If ind myself with lots of free time on my hands at work lately, I figured I'd offer to take over the project. Ended up discussing this with the CS manager and he agreed that might be a good project (though it seems the scope has changed in that they're not sure RT is the system they want to use now.) He agreed building SOME kind of ticket system would be a better use of my time than me going bored.

Current Mood: cheerful

So as I pointed out to vulpine137 earlier today, I don't really read LJ very often any more. No particular reason. Probably because I so rarely post. And this is because lately I just haven't found any great desire to post about the mundane things. I posted a lot when I was unemployed, or in school. Now that I'm working for a living again, it's just.. eh, work. I don't really think most people care to read about the boring, day to day things that happen in my work life. No "I had a cheeseburger for lunch today." that kind of thing.
But as I was driving back from dropping a video off at the video store and picking up 5 more tonight, it occurred to me that today had been a good day. Nothing exciting. Nothing big. It wasn't a GREAT day. Just a good, pleasant day. And really, life has been pretty good lately. Again, nothing exciting. No big events. Just, good. Pleasant. Comfortable.
Sure, I still worry about the bills, not having enough money, never seeming to be able to save up enough to get any of the medium-big ticket items I want, let alone the truly big stuff like the down payment on a house.

What got me on this line of thought this evening? Well the train of thought was really sparked by the birds, but I'll come back to them in a minute. I saw the birds because I went to the video store. I was going to the video store because I was returning a video. This is something I would very rarely have done in the past, as I very rarely rented videos. But we discovered Family Video recently and have been renting a lot of videos from them. They're pretty cheap, they're just down the street, they have a pretty good selection and they get lots of new stuff in all the time. All those movies that I keep seeing ads for but never get around to going to see in the theater because movie theaters are highway robbery these days (Seriously? $20 for 2 medium drinks, a bucket of popcorn and a rip-off size box of candy? That after paying almost that much just to get in?)
But going back further, I was realizing that today at work had been a good day. I had just enough work to do today to actually feel productive, and professional. 2 conference calls with customers and coworkers, 1 call with another customer to fix their problems. 1 email to write up the project proposal from conference call number 2.
On the way home from work, get SERIOUSLY tailgated but some impatient asshat, who, upon discovering I wlll NOT go faster for him (thus tailgating the guy in front of ME), he proceeds to weave in and out of traffic, changing lanes like mad, for a net gain of about 100 feet ahead of me when I hit my exit 5 miles later and I think about yeah,  I want to mention that to Kestrel when I get home. No big deal, just one of those things that was part of my day that makes something to talk about with my partner.
I get home, do some chores in the kichen while she starts preparing dinner, end up with a cleaner house (and fridge). Sit down to watch some TV together until dinner is ready, then eat dinner in front of the TV. Something we didn't used to do a lot of until I broke my desktop computer and had to switch to using my laptop all the time. Which means I can do it in front of the TV, with her.
She goes to bed early, I watch a little more TV, then run the rented video back to the store. Which brings us back to the birds.
I'm driving across the parking lot watching the light show in the sky and for some reason notice something odd sticking up out of the pavement in the middle of the lot. Curious, I swing the car in that general direction to get a better look, thinking it's a bird, but oddly still and why is it in the middle of the parking lot at that time of night? Then I think it's a dead bird, but that's odd to as it's strangely upright and intact.
I slow down and it doesn't move. I get about 5 feet away, looking at it through the side window and thinking "what on earth is a mallard duck doing here?" Suddenly it jumps up and runs away several feet and it's not a duck, but something much smaller and 4 little chicks. It's running very fast on it's little legs (and suddenly I'm thinking "that's an awfully small road runner...") but it doesn't want to run too far away because it's chicks can't keep up. And I think "Wow, that's the coolest, sweetest thing I've seen all day. I must remember to tell Kestrel about that when I get home. I'll have to wake her up to tell her about it though.
So I drive off carefully so as not to disturb momma and her babies any more and park the car, return the video and end up renting 5 more (for a total cost of $3 and change). Get back in the car and drive across the street to McD's for a small vanilla shake and decide I'm going to make that my guilty little pleasure and tradition from now on: get a small shake when I go to the video store. I'm an adult and I can have shakes when I want.

And all of this was the train of thought that ended up with "I want to write about this on LJ. Today was a good day, and even if it's boring as hell, I feel  like sharing it."

Current Mood: contemplative

• 03:02 @bragi0 and people think *I* sleep hard! #
• 03:06 <sigh> Post a twitter update for the first time in weeks, immediately get auto-follow spam. #

• 12:46 @sherrif72 it was in reference to short.to/69gq #
• 16:47 I think I just killed my desktop machine. Cleaned out dust, now it won't boot. #