I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks, so let's just say I was busy... I back to reading my Cisco QOS book, and I need to schedule my test for early November at the latest... I want to get my CCVP certification complete by next summer...

Have a Great Day!!!

EDIT 10/2/07 - I forgot to wish my brother Happy Birthday, so Happy Birthday Theo :)

--Joe

Whew! Time Flies!

WOW - It has been hard to keep up lately...

Saturday - Installed new mice in the school lab. We purchased optical mice from NewEgg for $3.99 a piece, so that was reasonable and they seem to work well...

Sunday - We had our first co-ed softball game! We won 2-0 and the game went super fast. Our team is named Stockmeyer Sod Farm, because they have sponsored us for several years now...

Monday - We had an outage with our UCCX (IPCC Express) Server at work, so it rebooted itself. I opened a Cisco TAC case, and we are working through the issue of the Node Manager stopping. The TAC Engineer seems to think that it is related to a connectivity problem between the UCCX Server, and the Unified Communications Manager (Call Manager) Server. I find that hard to believe, but we will go through the steps they have requested.

We also went to see the Detroit Tigers, and they won 5-4 in the bottom of the 9th inning. It was Awesome. On the way home I went into work, and rebooted our Cisco Unity Server, because it was out of sync with Lotus Notes due to a SAN issue earlier in the day...

Tuesday - The day at work was pretty normal... We went out to the bar later at night for one of our Intern's 21st birthdays... The short story is that he lipped off to three guys who left and came back... I had to be the voice of reason (man I feel old), and let them know that he was in bad shape, and apologize for his actions... He is in the office on Thursday, so it should be fun to replay the nights events. I did manage to work on the Linked-In Network and my network has grown by 87,000 people since September 11th :)

Wednesday - Today I had a couple of contracts signed at work for purchasing some Telco Services, and had a meeting with one of our vendors to review some items on our invoices that I have questions on. I did have to make a couple of changes to our VPN configuration, because another one of our VPN Admins made some changes last night, and then took today off :) I made sure to call him early, and we changed the access list, and all was right in VPN land... Ok, time to play some WOW, because I haven't been on in like a week...

Go Tigers!!!

YEAH!!! The Detroit Tigers have won two in a row now!

Wednesday's Highlights...

The world of work wasn't too exciting, but I did manage to make it to the gym to work-out. I didn't do anything too special, but it was the first time there since early in the summer. I have this deal with a buddy that he will try World of Warcraft (WOW) for an equivalent amount of time that I spend working out. So, 45 minutes of working out means that he is in for 45 minutes of trying WOW :) It seems so horrible, because he is trying to make me healthier, and I am trying to ruin his life...

Thursday's Highlights...

The exciting telco moment of the day was the escalation to a large carrier, because they are working on delivering a new MLPPP circuit to one of our locations. The LEC wasn't willing to deliver to the appropriate dmarc location, so I had to do some escalating... They have sup'd the order for a new dispatch, so hopefully they will get it right next time. We have 2xT1 via equally balanced static routes, but due to some application problems we are trying to convert to MLPPP which unfortunately requires new circuits to be delivered...

My oldest son had the final day of his hockey draft, and he did well. He was selected by a coach he has had previously, so that will be easy on him. The first practice is already on Saturday.

Well, tomorrow is Friday, and we will have made it through the first week of school... The time is flying already and it is only going to get worse :)

Thinkpad Tuesday

The highlight for today was trying to troubleshoot why my Thinkpad T60 has battery issues... I have 3 batteries total including 2 for the port in the back (6 & 9 cell), and an Ultra-bay 3 cell battery. The problem is that the Ultra-bay is always designated as the first battery to discharge which causes issues, because I can't swap from my 6 cell to the 9 cell (or vice-versa) while running on the 3 cell in the Ultra-bay... That is unless I keep the Ultra-bay out of the laptop, and only put it in when I am trying to switch my big batteries. That is just too much work, so we put a call into Lenovo, and we are waiting on a reply to determine if there is support for determining which batteries should discharge first. A guy from our Help Desk did find that if I was running linux we could configure this, so now I have to determine whether to run linux primary, and then use a VM to run all the apps that are Windows specific... I will keep you updated as this story unfolds.

BTW - in case you were wondering the Computer Lab at the school worked according to the Principal, but my 6 year-old son mentioned that a couple of computers weren't working, so let's see if I get notified etc... We did order some new optical mice from newegg.com today, so that should improve the user experience.

Busy Weekend *sigh*

The long Labor Day weekend is over, and I don't know if could get anything more packed into a weekend if I wanted to :)

Friday - We are going to continue our Co-Ed Softball Team into the Fall League, so we had a practice in Reese followed by a grill-out with everyone bringing a dish to pass... The practice went great, and then everybody had a good time at the house, we built a small fire, and stayed out on the deck until, 1:30 AM or so...

Saturday - I had made plans to take my Dad out for lunch, because he has now retired (as of Friday) from the Nursing profession. He has been eligible for awhile, however, he was forced to hurry it up a little, because of some health issues. We went to Genghis Khan which is a Mongolian Barbecue place, and had a really nice lunch. It was nice to just be the two of us, because we just don't do that very often. He remarried after my parents split up, and has two boys, and of course I have the dynamic duo (Tommy and Austin), so we both keep busy with our day to day households...

The boys and I headed up to the school (Catholic School my boys attend), and worked on the computer lab. I utilized a program called G4U to re-image most of the 24 PCs that are in the lab. It really worked well, and saved me quite a bit of time. I rolled out of there about 1 AM (the boys went home during my dinner break). I went home, and looked on the internet for an Open Source equivalent to Deep Freeze, because we have a limited budget at the school, and it would be nice to limit the changes to the PCs between rebuilds. Dawn and I headed to bed about 2 AM or so...

Sunday - I made big breakfast for the family which included Pancakes, Bacon, Hashbrowns. I then headed up to the school and worked in the lab for most of the day and into the evening except for a long dinner break. I really need to learn more about Active Directory, because it seems that I am really slow in adding users to our Windows 2000 Server. The great news is that I got the lab entirely done, and it is ready for the new school year...

Monday - We headed out to the Bean Festival which is held in the town where my Mom lives. We watched the parade which included lots of tractors, fire trucks, and festival queens, and the boys seemed to really enjoy it. Afterwards, we had lunch at my mom's, and then we had to bug out, because we needed to do a little shopping. We did stop at Dawn's Grandpa's house on the way home, and had a nice visit. The boys rode on his golf cart that he uses to get around his yard etc, and they really enjoyed it. We then headed out to do some shopping, and I got lit up by some young kid at the grocery store. I was "air drumming" to the song "I've Done Everything For You", and he walks by and says, "Isn't it fun jamming to the oldies"... OMG - Am I really to the point that a song from the 80's is an Oldie? Oh well, I thought it was funny... We came home and I took the evening off except for cooking dinner, and helping to clean up... The boys are in bed, and I am starting this blog :)

Tomorrow - The first day of school tomorrow, and as the husband of a teacher I am ready for it to get here... It seems that there is so much ramp up that I just want school to start, and the family to adjust to the new routine of everybody coming and going etc... I have created us a shared google calendar, so that hopefully we can coordinate everything better :) I should know better, but it is worth a try...

Ok, well you are all caught up...

My First Post

Well, this is just a post to get started... I will write more later about my weekend etc...