Well another weekend has arrived, a long week has gone, and a new week of challeneges lies ahead.
Friday really did lay out some interesting happenings, one of which was the 2hr conversation with my direct boss, he is back east, and thus I mainly discuss things via Email, but he and I get along pretty well, so we discussed my job description as it has become grey’d and as much as he and I would both somehow agree to say “It’s a small company” it still does not change the fact that if I am picking up the job of a Graphic Designer, IT Manager, and Off-Site consultant - I should be making a heckuva lot more money than I am now
The talk went well though, he heard many of my concerns, and went over them step by step, bottom line I came out of it all with, is this company is not looking to really upgrade or step it up, something is holding them back in the concept of computing and IT in general, this isn’t a “show stopper” for me per-say, but it does make my job harder, and extremely more boring, as I don’t get to experiment, expand, grow, enhance things, but at least my job description concerns were heard, and an adjusted one will be sent to me on Monday, and from there I can give it a final review before it goes to their big staff meeting.
In other non-work related news, my storage system failed last night, I woke up and was starting to clean around the room, so I was going to watch a show I had snagged, well the entire system was rebooting in a loop, cleared bios and drives disconnected, it was still in error. So I took the big media storage drive out and after some toying I got a EXT3 drive mounted under Windows Vista (thanks fs-driver.org) - it works good, speed is nice, and it was good to see all my lovely files safe and sound.
So I have sped-up the search for my Media Center replacement, and I may have found it, custom building a AMD Quad Core box, and once it’s up I use the media rig hardware currently to become the storage box - once the budget is happy again then I’ll pickup the Drobo.
The stats, for you nerdy types out there is as follows:
2 x Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 (not 1 tuner, but 2! So 4 shows can record at once)
500GB SATAII Drive
Antec Aluminum Veris Fusion Black - Micro Case for Media Center Rigs
All in all it come out cheaper than the original Dell rig I built, but room to expand/upgrade as needed, and more power to boot, the motherboard has a intergrated HDMI port so I can still do 720p to the TV, so pretty snazzy indeed, I threw in a copy of Vista Home Premium 64bit as well, so I’ll have a hotspare of Vista lying around (32-bit Build).
Not sure about build/buy time, maybe tonight, maybe in a few weeks, but I am thinking sooner than later, just getting the budget all in place to cover it, and still afford monthly costs, which shouldn’t be a HUGE deal as I got 3 new deals that came thru on my own business, so who knows maybe in due-time I can ditch the day job but for now it all works, and an apartment might be in the cards again as the house deal is a 50/50 shot again.
Anywhoo - I do appreciate the prayers from those of you who still check in from time to time - things are getting there slowly but surely I think, for now off to check for more deals, clean some more, and find dinner. Have a great weekend folks!
Remember at 10AM(PDT) Firefox 3 will be officially released, and the goal of reaching the most downloads will begin! If your not currently a Firefox user (no real excuse, I use it on Linux, Windows and Mac) - Firefox 3 is a great time to check it out, lots of great new enhancements, great slew of updated plugins - and you can be a download that helped reach the goal.
A while back I ditched my Treo 650 for the T-Mobile Dash, and I missed your software, your classy chimes, your endless supply of quality apps - then I made the move to the iPhone and even more missed you as I could no longer tether my phone to my MBP for internet access on the go, till today.
Today I found a new friend, I upgraded my work phone to the Palm Centro, brand new, fresh, and delightful - now to get the important things working, like internet access tethered via BT, contacts sync’d in Linux, and of course the must, lots of applications I already own moved over and activated! More later I’m sure!
Kinda, sorta, not really - okay maybe. I got home earlier, and just crashed out. Dead to the world I needed sleep, I woke up about 2 hours ago, but I am about to crash out again - just wanted to do something for lil ol me, aka upgrade the Blog.
I had read mixed thoughts/feelings about the latest upgrade to Wordpress, some liked it, some thought it was too sparse, some thought it mucked up things - honestly? I like it. Light, simple, some options aren’t exactly where I would think to find them, but such is change.
At some level I think the trade off of features/fixes should of given folks more to try, but as usual plugin conflicts for some were their un-doing - but a nice feature of the new system is live updating, which I know many groups will complain about the security of the concept, but it’s no different than that of Windows / Mac Update systems, you use / trust that product enough to do updates, why not your blog?
Anywhoo - all in all I think it’s pretty slick, it was a simple upgrade, sent my DB backup to Gmail, and uploaded the files, easy peasy - but for now, I am going to wrap up, and goto sleep, meeting @10am tomorrow, last day of “freedom” so to speak, as the boss-man comes back on Thursday, and I am sure he’s gonna have a pile for me. So I’ll say goodnight, and Happy Fake Friday!
So far nothing bad has happened, no one has called angry and threatening to sue - so so far so good, only 1 small server to roll tonight, should be pretty painless. I got some sleep, but not as much as I’d of liked honestly, but as it stands at 10pm the last bits will move over, and come Monday, DNS servers will be moved, and Tuesday I’ll migrate TN/FH to the new server for them, so going well.
If FTP is down for you, your using the old server, try OpenDNS or clear your DNS cache and close out apps, and try it again. For now, I am going to zone out and pass out, so if you have issues, email me.
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!
So what do you do when a upgrade goes smoothly, you combat a few memory hogs, add in a few system tweaks, and just have a good upgrade window? Simple. You make a no bake cheesecake. Mmmm cheesecake. It’s in the fridge now on it’s last bit, since it’s late and when it’s quite electric mixers are insanely noisy, and folks are sleeping - I did the mixing by hand - I feel so old school.
All in all though, things did go good, did a run down of sites, even found a few dead ones, I should do a audit and clean up each server before years end, but honestly, smooth - looks like folks have been doing fair keeping things up-to-date, now if I can provide some easy tutorials to get things rolling in the “Bot Proofing” of apps, that would be even better! I have been looking at reCAPTCHA as an option, in some apps, there is plugin support, so should be pretty simple, but between that, and getting dead beats finally off, things can push forward, and by Feb. (if not sooner) I do want to try and be migrated to the new server, 8 cores, 8gb ram, mmmm tasty.
So I am counting down the time before I can go dig in, with as cold as it is, I could probably go eat it now and it’d be cold, I think it’s colder outside than inside my fridge (31F), there was a 3/16in layer of frost on my car, chevy heaters though, top-notch, from 31->198 (coolant temp) in about 5 minutes, very nice, very toasty, and makes for a quick get away at 5am (hey I was out of milk!).
Anywhoo - Happy Saturday to ya, and if anyone wants to get me something for Christmas (hint, hint) keep an eye on my Amazon Wish-list, I am going to expand it soon and add in some apartment things, starting to plan, and get some of the expenses out of the way now (cooking goods, furniture, etc.) - so aside from the movies/games/books on the list - watch for more goodies for the home, as I would LOVE to have my own place by my Birthday in Feb. I mean hit 28, have my own place again - would indeed be nice. Happy Saturday Folks!
Have a great weekend folks!
