1.24.2006

Ah yes... the cubicle... And what could be found herein?


A SpongeBob 'Foam-Fit' puzzle pinned to the wall.
A Hobbit Calendar, featuring Beorn's Hall for January
A NEC DTerm Series E Phone
A Dell 17" LCD monitor
Scissors
A Dell D610 Laptop
A small Christmas tree that is tied up with Christmas lights (it doesn't look very happy)
numerous failed SCA hard drives (Marked 'DEAD' with a 1" tall label so no one thinks they are good)
two failed blade servers
several good SCA hard drives (not marked 'DEAD')
A picture of Angelina Jolie (from Inside Atlanta, where she is wearing the Tomb Raider 2 outfit)
The latest MSDN DVD release, along with an unfilled MSDN binder
A tape dispenser
A swingline stapler (it doesn't bind like the boston)
a set of headphones
a pen cup (ok, it is square, but it could still be used for a cup)
misc papers, cables, markers, notepads and other such crap.
another pair of scissors?
a broken LCD panel from a Dell D600 being used as a mirror
A Mr. Crabs stuffed doll
Roasted soy nuts (REAL old- ugh)
a CD/MP3 player boom-box type thingie
A chair
Boxes of parts and cables
a cooler with five Diet Cherry Vanilla Cokes
Two dead PCs (old-ass Dells that were once servers)
Me!

That is all I can see now....

1.23.2006

More blog time?

Well, I installed Semagic at work... My efficiency should improve at least two-fold...

What to write about? Well, my computer is acting like a cat that has taken too much acid; randomly locks (hard lock) and dies... I think it may have been from the mouse- I was trying a logitech piece-of-crap-cheap-ass mouse that we bought for the office; and now I am using a Logitech Trackman wheel.

Quiet weekend; shopped most of Saturday with Diana (roommie#1) and then wandered around Sunday afternoon in the new little shopping center close to my house. BestBuy bores the hell out of me now; Lowes is over priced; Target has some awesome 'clearance specials' every now and then; I buy stuff at Barnes & Noble (mostly magazines) and never read it; Koger is WAY too busy for any sane person to go into. I did find they opened a Willy's and a Great Clips- so I got a burrito and a haircut (not at the same time). Pretty cool. I spent another hour in Target and bought some useless stuff. I went home and tried to start one of the yoga videos- ok, I need to stretch a little more... :o)

Today: 2.05 miles at the gym this morning and then spent then next 5 hours running around between our main data center and the remote data center; got some stuff done, but was pretty much a wasted day. Lunch at Fudruckers and I am probably going to either Fry's or Microcenter this after to look at water cooling stuff with Omar- he wants to cool off his video card (in a shuttle) and I want to quieten down my whole PC system.

Anyway- another 15 minutes of time spent at work; I think 2/3 bosses are gone- if the last has left then I will give the customary 5 minutes (to let him get out of the parking garage) and head out to Fry's/Microcenter.

1.20.2006

I need a new job...

I got home from work- late as normal, but I was waiting for traffic and working on re-writing the Dragon Warrior IV walk-through (yea, for old NES but on JNESTER for PSP).  I finally got to bed at a 1/2 way decent hour so I can get up and go to the gym in the morning and then my phone rings... and the Nextel alert goes off... and someone is trying to PTT me (luckily the last three are on silent).  It is one of my managers and he wants me to come in to baby sit a customer's server as one of their backup servers is down.  I complain how useless it is and head in- it takes me about 15 minutes to get there.

I am the first one there; followed by the CTO of our office.  The on-call WinOp is at our second data center fixing the downed server.  Later we get a member of the NetEnginners, the DBAs, the Imps, Development and a technical architect- all because our CTO wanted to do a little hand holding with our customer to give them a warm fuzzy feeling that we were taking care of them... as they have been down several times in the past several months.

I stayed until 2:00am looking at logs and really doing nothing save a chronology of the nights events via email.

This is not the first time that this has happened and this is pretty much the norm when I am the on-call winop.  I realized in the shower this morning that I have lost control of my personal life: I cannot decide when I sleep, exercise or do other things to take care of myself. 

I need to find a new job that I can leave at the office when the day is done. I need to figure out what the minimum amount of Income I can make and still pay the bills and be above the poverty line.

This page was just a personal rant that I will look back on in several years and see how much better/worse my life was... :o)

1.18.2006

The old days...

Wow... I was looking through Classmates.com and I realized that I remember the phone number of my first high school girlfried- from like 20 years ago!  (it was 504-892-7158, but the area code has changed).   I did a lookup (with the new area code) and it still belongs to her parents.