Well I beat my last 2 years time in making a plan for my birthday! Hooray! This morning I sent out word of the gathering this evening - Denny’s is the place, may seem odd, but its last minute, mid-week, and I know many folks will be maybes at some point, but already we have 4 for sure, and some folks as maybes - the real-deal is Saturday at Ming, in what looks to be sunshine and lovely weather - so one step at a time.
Today I got pictures of Mr. Solomon Poon, good looking baby! So that brightened my morning after surviving a marketing meeting… I and about 3 other people nearly fell asleep at the meeting, it was hilarious, but all in all today has been a good day, I am hoping to squeeze in some private work here for a bit, I hate my auth scheme for EE - so I am going to do a quick swap and see if the new idea I have in mind works, I just backed up the code so going to give it a whirl.
All in all though for 4 days straight here at the new job, it’s going well, things are smoothing out, even got a few folks thanking me for my hard work, just a lot of little things I am trying to iron out, Charlie did some good work out here, but as he said I am a salesman, and a few things I have sold them on are taking hold, Google Apps vs. Arrival (hooray!) and I put in for a quote for on a entry level dell server with 1TB of storage/no-os/2gb ram/mid-range drives - so I may have a big dell order, who knows maybe they’ll hook me up with a dell XPS laptop ah a man can dream can’t he!
Anywhoo! Off to code, if anyone would like to come out to Denny’s to celebrate with us, 7:30pm @ Weedpatch, buzz my cell so I know how many seats to ask for, you know that place get’s packed out! More later!
What a day what a day. You know I have truly been blessed with amazing customers on the FH/TN side, patience, understanding, the occasionally “WHAT IS GOING ON?!” but usually after a brief “Here’s the situation” they breathe, it’s all good - today coming into a freshly migrated office, I got a pretty mellow response, nothing crazy, nothing bad, just a few questions, so things were sorted, problems dealt with, some people wanted their hand held, not a major issue, if it gets it taken care of, then by all means, hold a hand some - but then there was the trouble one… there is always at least one.
Nothing I could do could make it fixed it seemed, and most of it was an issue created by the crazy configurations of Netscape 7.2, so trying to explain that didn’t help. So the battle of not even a little tech savvy + high stress + 4 smokes later, they were still frustrated, but I tried to keep my cool because it had been a crazy morning of questions, calls, etc. so I was trying to keep my head on straight, stay patient, and really work towards getting things fixed, and to put their mind at ease, I opened a ticket with Google, they of course saw nothing wrong, it was just a slow email day, but it’s change.
So the day wrapped up at work, I got about 5 minutes into the projects I had planned, but I think email will be good to go tomorrow, of course I think the boss man is going to try and get me to goto his house to work on his desktop - but none the less, day was done, time to move towards home, but we had plans for dinner @ Scott’ so I called, he’s on the way home asked I could just show up early, he said it was cool - so I hung out there till about 45 minutes ago, we had dinner on his patio, played some Xbox, talked some, ate some brownies, it was pretty fun - but all good things must come to an end, thus I am home, working once again.
I have an order to fill on FH, some emails to sort thru, I have been pushing some cPanel upgrades, but nothing too serious, tomorrow I hope to get some time in on 2 ecommerce projects to wrap them up, there is a pesky software upgrade that is bugging me, more code on EE to see if I can’t meet a deadline of this weekend for Mr. Sean, but busy busy busy it seems, going to only go till about 11:30 tops, then flip the TV on, and just fade away to sleep - quite a day indeed, PLUS I still need to figure out a final plan for my birthday, Rollerama is still seeming like the “plan” but my birthday has some interesting things to it, more on that tomorrow.
Anywhoo - back to it, lots to do, little time Night folks!
Quite a weekend, scripts, email, email, scripts, ecommerce, sleep, church, rest, church, carrows, babies, coding, work, sleep, denny’s, no power, battery backup, random, scary, alarm - etc. would describe this weekend - but as we lead into this last week of Feb. for me it’s the end of not only feb, but of being 27, as of Thursday, 28 will have arrived at my doorstep, and I creep one step closer to 30, but not a huge deal, but my niece did make me a picture of a cake that had 29 on it lol. I love you kiddo, but slap your father.
To explain a few things from that list, would take a while, but I wish this weekend had a few more hours in it, to explain it, and work on some things, but for now I am going to call it a night, curl up and watch a movie as a pass out, and try to get to work a bit earlier than normal to make a run thru of computers and see that email is coming in, as well as get a few things ready on my own desktop - personally I think I am going to give up a email client at work, and just use the Gmail interface - it’s good stuff.
Anywhoo - if anyone has birthday ideas, let me know currently folks are throwing around the idea of Rollerama (skating rink) for my birthday and while it sounds silly, I am not sure what I want to do as usual lol - so who’s up for the lake again? but we’ll see what happens, hopefully something will come to mind and we’ll get it rolling. But for now, sleep beckons. Night all.
I have a amazing core group of friends, they are more like family to me, they are supportive, good company, and always a open ear, tonight we tried to get as many of us together, granted I know some folks Monday is not a good night, but the Foster’s were in town but leaving at 5, the Poon’s had a due date for baby, and yet somehow from a lunch with Matt we got ourselves together at Cindy’s for some grub, good company, and Uncle Chuck the Human Jungle Gym.
It was a good day overall, got some more stuff cleaned up in the office, organized a bit, got a laptop finalized and ready to go, all in all it was pretty nice - throw in the lunch and the dinner - a great time, and while I am exhausted and then some I would do it again in a heart beat - we sat, we ate, we talked, I played with Ethan, Evan and Carlie - even Jake had some fun with Evan, it was a good day that just had some really great high points to it, I hope the rest of the week has good stuff in it like this! If only everyone could of made it, Scott had plans already, and some folks have class on Monday’s so just not possible, but were going to setup something big and fun soon.
Anywhoo - busy week, got a copy of EE on the laptop, so I can work on it on the mac during the dead time, also have a few assorted things I am working on with FH/TN, and of course MLS has the Google Apps migration this week, I need to get the corp. card and get it paid for, as well as a few other purchases I need to make for building a small server to test a backup system, so lots to do! But for now I am going to zone a little to some TV, and then probably try to crash out early. Sleep will soon become my friend… I hope. Night folks! Thanks for the continued prayers!
So I have found my first gripe about work. We use Windows. LoL - it’s not that bad, but being on Mac as a primary for so long, I haven’t used Windows keystrokes for a while, I have gotten used to the command+c vs. ctrl+c for copy and such, tonight back at home and not passed out from my day, I have been working on the computer a bit and I keep using the wrong keystrokes! Silliness indeed.
I have been considering asking work for a Windows Laptop, be nice to have for various reasons, one of which is to use at a workstation, or take offsite to some of the administration’s homes where I do some work on their “work” stations, but we’ll see - after this next week we move to Google Apps, so one step at a time I suppose, looking forward to 25GB of storage, plus I hope to migrate folks to the mail interface online vs. @#%! Netscape 7.2 (replace special characters with angry/nasty/obscene words) - they use it for Mail & Browsing, my goal is to do some streamline work across the board and replace Netscape 7.x with Firefox 2.x (none of them use IE!), and instead of Netscape Mail put in Thunderbird or Outlook, at this point I am game for ANYTHING more modern than 2004!
All in all the first full week went well, survived my first meeting, fixed some problems, made some calls, did various things to lay some more groundwork across the board for improvement, Monday I am going to start experimenting with a backup solution for all the workstations, only going to need 2TB of data storage, shouldn’t be too hard but I am getting there, balance of TN/FH is going fair, haven’t been on top of reps, but over the next week or so things should really start to level out.
Anywhoo - again, I can’t say it enough - big thanks to everyone for their prayers & support, and I ask that you say some extra prayers for my good friends Dan and Val as they are expecting their first child this next week! (Feb 18th is the Due Date!) so keep them lifted up to as they prepare for some new excitement in their life but as for me, I am going to wind down this week with a Cheese Pizza, some mindless TV, and a long nap into Saturday - which I get $300, some time on a computer (Re-Install XP for Matt) and of course if time and management allows, a walk-thru of an apartment! So much to do, so little time Have a great weekend folks!
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.
ah a man can dream can’t he!
Night folks!
