So far so good on the job front, on my 3rd day solo, 2nd day on the payroll, I’ll get paid the 1st it looks like, or a very small check on the 16th, but so far so good, I finished the last leg of the HR hoops today (well the core stuff) by peeing into a cup, first time for doing it, even when I worked for KHSD I didn’t have to do a drug screen, I think it’s random in that case, but here I got to pee in the cup, it was a tad awkward with a wall-length mirror, but I survived!
Last night was fun, had Scott, Sara, Sarah, Beth, Michael, Ron, Karan and ME! we went to El Pueblo for dinner to celebrate the excitement that is my employment, it was awesome food, dad got mine, I got his (Chicken vs. Beef) - but still lots of fun, good laughs - I was going to hit Denny’s with Scott later, but I just got super sleepy - and backed out, still not 100% on this new schedule, and my body isn’t yet fully used to the concept that I can’t sleep whenever I want anymore - but it’ll level out in time, probably after the first check direct deposits into the bank I am sure that’ll give me peace of mind, but it is seeming like more and more I’ll be getting the apartment in March I am guessing, not a huge deal but it works.
Worlds are colliding with Work and Work, as it stands MLS is migrating from it’s current email offering with the local guys (who’s name I dare not speak, in fear I’ll go on a rampage) - but the replacement is the big question, I think Google Apps is the route I am going to take, it’s a nice solution for outside sales folk, 25GB of storage, etc. etc. but it’ll run the company about 3k a year in costs, as it’s $50/account - so we either need to slim down the email -or- one of these other options, currently Fusemail has my attention some, fair pricing, takes the cost for 25GB TOTAL storage down to under 1k a year, so a big savings in comparison. Granted I could always just setup something in-house, there’d still be some cost, but not sure. Already have the OK on Google, but I know there is resistance to it, so I want to have alternatives in the wings just in case, plus some of these offer anti-spam solutions so more for FH/TN to consider.
Anywhoo - things are good, getting the swing of things pretty well, the MBP is doing nicely (where I am typing now) and the office Dell I use for work, is not to shabby either. So now I am going to sit here and continue reading, lunch is in 2 hours, so tasty food is on the horizon! (I hope) I am thinking maybe of grabbing a slice or a dog from Costco down the street…. time will tell.
And so it begins…. as of today around 2:45pm, I got the official word from the co-owner that I am officially on-board! So needless to say I was pretty excited - this means a lot for my monthly budget, my plans for my life, etc. this weekend I’ll probably even hit up the apartment complex and see what they have open right now - Lord Willing, I Hope they have the 2 bedroom + garage that I can come look at, that would be wonderful!
But a good first day on my own, only had 2 calls to the last guy for help, which meant calling my brother but all in all things went well - just wrapping up the afternoon, I have been on the phone here the last bit calling friends and family inviting them to come eat tomorrow night to celebrate, my sister made the good call and said El Pueblo, so needless to say my belly is excited! So tomorrow we will celebrate it up, and I imagine tomorrow I’ll get things going on my employed status, paperwork, etc.
So big thanks to everyone for their prayers! More news to follow I am sure, but I am just quick blogging this from Textmate here on the Mac - once I get home and settled in, I’ll probably post more thoughts, for now, PTL!
Well so far at least 3 pieces of shingles have come off the roof. If the wind weren’t so bad (20-30mph gusts now) I’d climb up and take a look at the damage on the roof, because the rain will be following shortly it appears, the doppler is massively orange/red in some spots, we have a big yellow/orange blob coming towards bako - and when I say coming towards, I mean moving very, very, very, fast, under an hour ago the system was off the coast, its truckin.
So I am hoping my final migrations wrap up soon, as I am on the last batch, and it’s moving quickly, but the power has blinked 2-3 times already, thankfully the UPS is keeping up with the blips, so no interruptions on the internet/imac as of yet, but I have the phone and MBP charged and ready to go - just totally crazy.
Anywhoo - looks like things will be done within the next hour, maybe 2 tops, load across the server migrating is smooth, so I am hoping things will be complete very very soon, unpacking one massive site, packaging a massive site as well, so hoping things will wrap up, come Monday I can put in the final bits, and tada - all good. So as long as I don’t blow away here soon, I’ll be done and I can rest easy for a while. Night all! Happy Sunday!
So tonight is it. The big move (just started). Granted it’s not 100% done, but the last move is mainly of FH/TN websites, so that’ll go Tuesday at the latest - mainly want to keep it in one place till after a day or two of tickets is taken care of, but Thursday I’ll be requesting the other servers be shut down - which still leaves me with a bill, but something manageable, until I can relocate that final server - then I can be completely off the old provider.
It’s busy lately it seems, we met up at 9pm last night to see a old friend, however we never heard back that’d he was coming, but we figured - never hurts to try - so instead we had a fun dinner, and I had a nice chat with Jacob, it was a fun evening, I finished it up with some more relaxing - almost too relaxed for tonight, but I am hoping some moving around here at 6:30pm tonight will help wake me up a bit - but the move seems like it should be pretty straight forward, just have to move data, upgrade DNS, and only thing I can see as a “bad” thing is having to re-compile PHP4 on some servers, as I am sure there are some issues I’d rather simply not deal with right now, so I’d be going PHP4 on maybe 2 servers tops.
Got some more work today it seems, still waiting to hear back from EE on the final bits of it, I need to get RM up and online this weekend too - had hoped to get it last Monday, but I just have been so beat from these moves, thankfully this is the last weekend, then I may have a standard 9-5 so a semi-normal sleep schedule steady pay checks, rebuild my savings, get an apartment, build a time-machine, etc. etc. - so preparing for some big changes.
Just got in from a fun evening with the guys, it was pretty fun, had a good meal, some painful GH3, some ice cream from ColdStone - a good relaxing fun to lead into server migrations - so thus I am sitting here with the iPod crankin my car playlist, going to code some between packaging accounts - maybe sneak in a nap later… time will tell Prayers are appreciated! Oh and on my Grandma, they put a shunt in one valve and the meds had helped the other - so she’s going to get to go home on Sunday it looks like! Thanks for the prayers!
More later! Off I go to get this migration rolling!
Well today I decided to call and get a update on my “VECTOR” search at WAMU - as usual the intro level folk just gave me the usual run down of what we’ve already covered, and so the guy said “Want to talk to my Supervisor?” well the call in total all levels of discussion lasted 40 minutes but in the end, Dave finally saw where I was coming from, he saw notes on the vector that were contrary to what I’d been told at my local branch. So I intend to have a good chat with the local branch manager again, as he claims they should of never started the vector as it was done probably moments after I left, as it’s very clear cut.
But what makes Dave special in my mind, is he realized all the ups downs, around etc. I had been thru in all this, and agreed to reverse the $30 issue, he explained things, and went over some past similar timeframes and worked it all out, so in the end, it came out wonderfully, of course I plan to push these fees over to the two companies who essentially caused the issue in the first place, which will cover fees I got from my old credit card processor, which I hope to have done with by tomorrow.
In other news, servers are nearly ready, working on some tweaks to the Apache/PHP configurations to make things a tad more zippy, but it’s an amazing thing to watch the monitoring info I have on this, I signed up for a new monitoring as the old one was becoming unreliable (it was a OLD OLD never updated Beta) - but the last 48 hours the current servers have had lots of ups/downs where as the new boxes, even the one with about 5-10 sites on it, all steady, solid, sexy. So writing up the FH newsletter, prepping to move some friends tonight to Trogdor, but it’s all coming along nicely, by Feb. things should be happier than happy!
I appreciate all the prayers, keep em up, lots coming up, lots to do, and back to it I go!
So a busy night. After my internet went out this afternoon, I gave up and just loafed, which means of course more work today, but hey what can you do when they are doing “brief work” on your line that lasts for 4 hours. LoL. So then I hung out with my sister and brother in law here, my packages came… one was pretty obvious that they figured out, the new 26inch LCD TV for the bedroom, the other ones weren’t so easy. I picked up a Xbox360, a Video card and a TV Tuner for the AMD rig, going to build a nice little Vista rig to do media, I got a good card, linux compatible if I get bored, but I want to link vista up with the 360, so we’ll see how that goes.
So I got things setup, signed up for live, then of course it was Nacho time. Tasty. Fun. Exhausting. We played GH3, Rock Band, and just hung out and munched on some grindage (buuuudy!) - twas fun, left around 11:30, but a good nice, relaxing, fun evening - good friends, some I hadn’t seen in a while, Rock Band was new and fun, but not really my cup of tea.
So that leads me up to now, Money issues, only partial payment from the kMan is expected, which made me sad - he had said he’d adjust his budget to accommodate, but I guess he too is having the money flow problems - then one of my big accounts had their card fail, so not sure what’s up there, but I contacted em, and I was assured one way or another it’d be fixed up, so really, nothing to worry about, especially if I go check my Mail and there is a nice pile of checks, which I am hoping for - but all in all, I hope I don’t have to fidget funds again.
I am now waiting for Vista to install, my copy hasn’t really done much, ran it on Parallels but really not much in the realm of speed - so I am hoping as a stand-alone media rig, it’ll do nicely, be able to record some TV, and since most of the shows I watch aren’t in HD to begin with, no major loss, probably just ditch HD cable here at the first of the year, and build a home-brew DVR for the house. So pretty excited, it’s at 40% extracting, and it’s being navigated with my old Apple Keyboard (tee-hee) - so good stuff indeed.
Anywhoo - back to it, need to go over some of my nightlies, have a meeting with the kMan around lunch to get a check, maybe even sneak in some sleep here somewhere, not sure where - but somewhere, and soon I hope so I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, pictures coming soon!
A good day thus far, barely 5pm and so far so good, a large lunch (Subway FEAST), got my final mailings done for TN - included a letter about the switch to making invoices digital - worked on the books a bit to look at the move on servers come 2008, worked on code for RNKDF, basically wrote a small mail form app with some nice little features.
It was a cool day, and now I think I have my bedroom all figured out - picked out a TV for the room, and going to convert the current Linux rig into the Vista rig as planned, picking up a TV tuner so I an use Vista’s media center features, but it should be fun, plus from my couch across the way I can relax, veg out, and use the laptop.
Tonight is working on graphics for the Affiliate programs, and getting things rolling for that on the 3rd, as well as getting the new features ready for each site and ready to go for the big push thru December and into 2008.
Good stuff, looking forward to things moving forward, put the Google Ads on a few sites I sponsor and here on the blog, making about $1 a day - not a TON, but hey, every little bit helps - and all part of playing with Google AdSense on pages to really get a feel for it, as I have been toying with a website again, and have some folks still interested in interacting with it - so time will tell.
Anywhoo - back to it, more EE code to do, may have a extra leg on it to work on, extra $300 will come in handy on the budget, really need to get it up and up more, so we shall see! Have a good on folks, I am off to it.
I am sure that’ll give me peace of mind, but it is seeming like more and more I’ll be getting the apartment in March I am guessing, not a huge deal but it works.
but all in all things went well - just wrapping up the afternoon, I have been on the phone here the last bit calling friends and family inviting them to come eat tomorrow night to celebrate, my sister made the good call and said El Pueblo, so needless to say my belly is excited! So tomorrow we will celebrate it up, and I imagine tomorrow I’ll get things going on my employed status, paperwork, etc.
