Saturday, July 31, 2004

Two days without an entry

Well I’ve gone my first two days without posting an entry in the blog. Oh well. I’ve been a little busy. Thursday at work I had a lot to do, the whole messaging team went to the data center in Owings Mills to see the Network Appliance storage lab. It was pretty cool, but some of the demonstrations we were supposed to see didn’t work. The cool part about that place is that it is an emergency relocation office for critical business functions. It has this huge warehouse type room filled with fairly new Pentium 4 Compaq Deskpro computers with dual monitors and a phone at every station. It is basically just tables laid out in rows, nothing fancy, but cool none the less. I thought of one thing, LAN party! Fridays are long days for me, I get to work at 7, hang around there until 5:30 or so, then leave to go get Andrew at 7 to bring him to my house for the weekend. That is every other Friday of course. Yesterday I also hit hard on the Exchange 2003 design for my company. We have some crazy disaster recovery requirements that I’m sure will be toned down once they see how much it will cost to implement. We have Microsoft and Network Appliance engineers coming to our office on August 5th, and I have a lot of design points that I must finish before then.

That brings us to the weekend with the kids. Taking care of them, going shopping, finishing the grass, doing laundry and other odds and ends will be the theme. Hopefully we will get some swimming time in there if it is nice!

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Dress and ring(s)

After work today we went to pick up Amy’s newly cleaned wedding dress. It looks a lot whiter than it did before. We also picked up her engagement right that has been bonded to her wedding ring. Now, she can’t wear it until we are married. We did it early just in case it got messed up or needed more work.

Just saw an ad on AIM that was a little weird, it was a rocket flying around my desktop. At first I didn’t know it was AIM, but when the rocket flew into the AIM advertising area, I realized it was an AIM advertisement for a movie called Thunderbirds.

Exchange 2003 – coming to a network near me . I’m working on yet again another Exchange 2003 project. Also integrating an acquired company, had a lot of trouble, turned out that the firewall wasn’t letting it through. Hopefully that is fixed and tomorrow it will work. Also went to Fuddruckers for lunch, ate a burger and played Galaga & Mrs. Pacman. Sung and Aaron are really good at Galaga, Sung cleaned up on Mrs. Pacman also. I pretty much suck at both.

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Battlefield Vietnam F4 Phantom

What a day – spent the work day in a pretty long IM argument with Amy.  Basically, I need to communicate better to her.  On the way home, I bought her some roses and a DVD.  The DVD was 50 first dates, one that she wanted.  That was accompanied with an apology of course.

While Amy watched the reality show, “Trading Spouses” I played some Battlefield Vietnam.  I spent my game trying to get good at flying the F4 Phantom.  The jets in BFV are a lot better than they were in Desert Combat.  The physics in DC were no developed for vehicles with that kind of speed since it was only a mod of Battlefield 1942.  I never really got good, but I got a couple of kills.  Of course, those were bots.  I’ll see how I do against the living in a little more than a week when Richard has his LAN party.

Also at work, I attended a few meetings on integrating a newly acquired company’s e-mail system to our own.  What fun, the way projects work around there are a little chaotic.  There is no overall plan of action.  Also finalized what the routing group connectors should look like now, and after the Exchange 2003/site consolidation projects.  

Monday, July 26, 2004

Virus anyone?

Sitting at work today and started hearing some chatter, a bunch of people are saying they are getting non delivery reports for e-mail that they didn't send.  Odd, yes, but it was getting worse, they had attachments.  People were opening them.  Of course, it was a virus that there were no antivirus definitions for when it arrived.  It seemed to take forever to get the updates, we blocked files and handled the calls, cleaned the servers.  When it comes to viruses, you can just be unlucky sometimes, if someone in your company gets it and launches it before the updates are out, that is bad luck.

I spent some time with my friend Richard tonight.  I haven’t seen him in a while.  We talked about everything from George Bush to cars to computers to motorcycles to his house, and a lot.  Talked a lot about old jobs where we worked together, especially the City of Baltimore, since his brother, Dan, and friend Brian were there and now work on the City of Baltimore contract.

They said my entries were too long – so – here is a short one.

Sunday, July 25, 2004

When Sunday is really Monday

I had an urgent incident at work late Sunday night.  Someone wasn’t able to log into their office web mail.  For that user, it was Monday morning, they were in Australia.  It wasn’t a big deal, just a password issue that I shouldn’t have been called on anyway.  It brought back memories of one of my old jobs when I was dealing with New Zealand, Japan, & Europe office all the time.  With the way the company I work for now is growing, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a European or Asian office pop up.  Right now it is just one or two users here and there that use web mail.

Amy and I saw the Bourne Supremacy today, it was pretty good.  Amy liked it more than I thought she would.  We also mailed out our last few wedding invitations, although they won’t get picked up until tomorrows mail. 

Well, it is late, time to go to bed.

Saturday, July 24, 2004

Weekend movie, wedding prep, & shopping

I was watching the news this morning and realized that something I thought I saw was real.   It sounds kind of weird when I said it that way.  Anyway, I was driving to work one morning last week and it was a really hazy morning.  So hazy that you could look right at the sun and not go blind, but still see it clearly.  I saw what looked like a large sun spot, but thought to myself, that can’t be a sun spot, you really can’t see those with your eyes.  Then I heard about it on CNN, and realized that that must have been what I was seeing after all.

Amy and I finally saw Spiderman 2.  It was pretty good, we went to an early show after eating lunch at Quiznos Subs.  After that we came home to get Amy’s dress to take it to the cleaners, we looked one up in the phone book and went to look for it.  We couldn’t find it so we had to come back home to look at the phone book again.  I decided to call, the phone number was disconnected.  So, we called a different dry cleaner, they were open, and actually closer than the one we were going to go to.  After that we went to the mall to have Amy’s engagement ring bonded to her wedding ring.  They should fit better that way, the wedding ring is more of a wrap for the engagement ring.  They were not a set and did not mate perfectly so getting them bonded seemed like the way to go.  We also looked at pearl necklaces, Amy has always wanted one.  They happened to be on sale and in my price range, so, I asked Amy if she wanted one.  After looking at them and trying one on, she said she wanted it.  I really wanted to get it for her, so, I did.

More shopping after that as we went to Costco.  We really didn’t need much except for soda.  We picked up Mountain Dew, Coke, & Sprite in that department.  We picked up a few other things, cereal, dish washing tabs, soap, etc.  I also needed coffee but they didn’t have what I wanted so we went to Giant and got that, milk, & a bag of baked lays, our favorite chips in the world.

Last night, after Alex was picked up we decided to grab salads at McDonalds for dinner.  I can see why McDonalds sells salads, they are pretty expensive for what you get, I’m sure they are making a ton of money off of them.  I took Amy up to the court house because they said something about doing the short ceremony outside if the weather was nice and she wanted to see the outside of the courthouse.  We also took a walk along Carroll Creek, since that is right around there and I want to get my dollars worth out of our parking space. 

Last night we also went shopping, I got a new suit to get married in, along with new shirt and tie.  I bought Andrew a tie.  Andrew’s tie isn’t the best, but all the clip on ties really didn’t look that great.  Everybody has clothes to wear, although I have to ask Andrew’s mother if his dress shoes still fit.  Amy and I also went out to TGI Fridays last night and had a drink with Brad and some of his friends.  We just decided to do that on the spur of the moment, it was kind of fun.  We don’t go out much because we normally have Alex, or are busy with other things around the house.

So now, it is almost time for dinner, and Amy has agreed to watch the Bourne Identity with me and possibly even go to see the Bourne Supremacy with me tomorrow.  Busy busy weekend.

Friday, July 23, 2004

Couldn't print response cards

My titles won't make a lot of sense in these entries.  I always have more than one thing to talk about.  Today I was supposed to print up our wedding invitatinos.  I had a little trouble printing them, but I eventually got them to print.  The little response cards, however, were a different story, they would not feed through the printer because they were to small.  We want to send out the response cards so we know how many people to plan for.  Its not a great big deal if we don't have them, it is going to be a small informal wedding, but we would rather have them than not.  Maybe we will hand write them :).

Work today was a bit better than yesterday.  When I got in this morning, I realized that the mail restore from the day before was still in progress.  The data had been restored to our restore server, but the database was corrupted and needed to be repaired before we could get the mail out of it.  My cube mate was working on it until well after midnight.  I checked it out a little after 7 this morning and was able to see exactly where he left off.  Basically, the command to repair the corrupted database took about 6 hours to run.  I was able to mount the store (database), connect to the user's restored mailbox, and move the deleted mail to the user's actual mailbox.  Restoring e-mail isn't the simplest thing in the world, especially not with Microsoft Exchange.  It does get a little easier in Exchange 2003.

This weekend will be busy, I have to cut the grass, do laundry, do some wedding things like take Amy’s dress to the cleaners.  We also are going to see Spider Man 2.  If I’m really lucky, we will be able to see the Bourne Supremacy too.  I really liked The Bourne Identity and I’m hoping I’ll like the sequel as much.  I’m not sure if Amy has seen The Bourne Identity, I probably asked her, and she told me if she did or not, but I forgot.  Something tells me that I asked and she said she did but didn’t like it that much.

I can remember the phone number I had when I was three years old (304-823-2053) but I can’t remember a lot of stuff today.  If I could just purge all that useless info, my brain might be able to retain more important things.

 

Thursday, July 22, 2004

Busy day with magic tickets

The helpdesk system they use where I work is called Magic.  I don't think I like it very much, it is a little slow and web based.  It seems to work, although some of the forms we use are not designed the best.  I must have closed 20 tickets today.  One ticket that I got yesterday was to do an e-mail restore for the CFO of the company who some how deleted most of their inbox in a way that we were not able to recover from the online system.  I started work on it and quickly realized that the restore lab that was set up a while ago was in bad shape.  In short, the Active Directory in there didn't work, and without the AD, there wasn't much I could do.  Since the person was so high profile, and I was on call and had to handle all incoming tickets, I really didn't have time to do it and assigned the ticket to my cube mate.

Got home took some generic tylenol for my heache and laid down in bed for a while.  I ended up falling a sleep, when Amy called me for dinner, I didn't come down stairs.  She came up and woke me up since I am the one who asked her to make spaghetti.  I also had to fix the computer, well, Amy wanted a font installed, I installed it but it didn't show up for her.  Rebooting the computer fixed it.  Rebooting computers fixes most of their problems.  The font is for our wedding invitations that we are printing out ourselves. 

New Blog / Journal

Ok.  My fiance' (soon to be wife) has had an online journal, www.modernprincess.com, since 1999.  Maybe even before then.  I have decided to start one too.  I really don't know what I'm doing.

This week I am on call at work (IT E-Mail guy).  Any and every incident and problem gets assigned to me to handle 24 hours a day.  It is quite a bit of work.  Every night this week, I've gotten a page at least once.  Hopefully it will quiet down for the weekend. 

More importantly, my fiance', Amy, and I have decided to get married.  Well, we decided a while ago, but a lot of things have been going on that have been preventing us from acually doing it.  We decided that there will be no more excuses and that we will get married at the court house next month.  After that we plan to go out to eat then take a trip to the beach for the weekend.

 
What else?
Yesterday I saw the craziest thing.  I was driving on 40 west in west Baltiomre and saw what looked like a guy fall into the street.  Then some other guys jumped down and started beating the guy up.  I called the police and spent most of the time trying to explain where it was happening.  After that, I called my friend Brad who drives the same way home to see if he saw it too.  He said that he saw a naked guy walking down the street and figured that someone beat him up and took his clothes.  Since he passed it 7 to 10 minutes after me, we figure that is exactly what happened.

Hopefully I will get better at this blogging stuff.