A tribute to my headset

Ok here is my NEW headset. Yes being in the computer support biz I use a headset b/c its so much nicer to bang away at a keyboard and talk on the phone instead of having to balance a receiver on you shoulder / chin. SO I probably wouldnt make a post about this but my first headset I really liked and was an over the ear model but it never really worked well with my glasses. But it was cool until it died. Then I was given this crappy hand me down piece of junk that is basically our "spare" in case one breaks. It was also an over the ear but the mic sucked big time and like nobody could hear me talk. SO I used that for probably a year before I finally complained and asked for this one. SO I got it about a week ago and its sheer bliss. I really like the over the head style better as it does not get in the way of my glasses. SO I just thought this little guy deserved some praise.

Thats all for now.
Cheers!

Quick update

Ok I know I always say quick and then I write a book but oh well deal with it! SO here we go

Oh and guys make sure you read my "tip for guys" later in this post.

Work: Oh my goodness I dont think that I have ever been this stressed about work before. I just have so much to do and no time to do it all. This is the first time in my life that Work is actually making me feel physically sick while I am at work and at the thought of going back. SO I realize this is a really bad thing so I am trying to focus on relaxing at work and not taking the whole thing so seriously. It is afterall just work and being hyper stressed over things is not going to magically increase my productivity in fact it probably brings it down. SO to stress I say RUE the day that your messed with Sparky -- Rue it....RUE IT!!!!

solution to stress = vacation. Thats right this saturday lisa and I will be leaving for vacation and we cant wait. We are going to the southern tip of florida and despite the fact that their might not be any place for the plane to land we dont care and are still excited about all things florida and relaxing. I look forward to having lots and lots of pictures to share as well as some good stories too.

Tip to all guys out there -- Ok to most guys nails are nothing very special or interesting. they are in many ways a tool. C'mon we know you have used a nail as a flat head screwdriver before! but seriously how many guys out there have taken the time to really understand fingernails? I have and its paid off big time. You see guys Girls care about nails. They care alot. But most of them hate doing their own nails and I think in many girls minds their is something very ritzy associated with having your nails done. SO heres my story. Back in 10th grade I had the most boring math teacher and a nail file in my backpack. I still dont know why I had it but I did. SO for most of that year I spent each day shaping my nails with the file. I learned all about how nails that are regularly cut and filed to the same length become really strong and heathly. I learned how to file a nail so that their were no jaggies or sharp edges and how to make it very comfortable and good looking. SO where am I going with this. Here we go back to what I said before. Any girl would be thrilled to have a guy who could do their nails. Not only do them but do them well. to the point that they are asking for you do do it for them regularly. Let me tell you this is a good thing and something I think most girls wish they had. SO probably tonight I am going to be doing the following for my sweety.

1. Cut and shape of finger and toe nails.
2. French manicure for finger nails
3. strip off old toe nail polish
4. Application of new toe nail polish.

Last night lisa called me her "nail guy" and I corrected her and said no sweety im your personal nail engineer! SO guys pay attention to your nails a little bit more and maybe you can impress your girl one day.

Gaming (saved for last for those who dont care) - Ok I have not had a gaming update in a really long time mostly b/c I have not been playing much of anything but thanks to the fact that lisa has been working on some stuff lately that has given me some time to play FFX and well I finally did it. I finished it on Saturday evening. WOW thats all I can say. The game was truly fantastic and just like with VII their is still tons that I can go back and do if I want some more time in Spira. But wait I do want more time in spira and thats why I started X-2 saturday night! Back to X. well I said I wasnt going to do it. I said I knew how the game was going to end so it shouldnt be a surprise and therefore no emotional strings should be pulled. I was wrong. Its amazing how when you spend 55+ hours with a game, a really well done game that really focuses on character development and story how you can be effected so much emotionally. SO yeah I cried. Just a little bit but im not ashamed. X had a very happy yet extremely sad ending and they pulled it off flawlessly. Oh and the ending is not some corny little 15-30 second in game blip like halo 2 its a 15-20 min cg movie that is done really really well. It was the perfect ending to an amazing game and Im glad I got to hear Tidus' story.

Well thats all for now
Cheers!

Move in Weekend

Ok well guess what im back and guess what -- no digi cam for the trip so I had to improvise. Dont think of this as a hi-def presentation of "Sara moves to college" think of it more like what it would look like if Ed wood sketched story boards for "Sara Moves to college" Also with the excpetion of my "eat bacon jacko" that I posted many months ago this is my second attempt at being "artsy" Who wants to guess why im an engineer??? SO anyway sit back and enjoy the show

Heres lisa and me driving "snuggly" down to Chattanooga. The car had no A/C so we drove all the way down with the windows down. Except when it started raining. All in all the car did really well and depite the fact that 99% o f the drive is on 75 it went quickly.
Friday was Family Day at the Acquarium. Heres Grampa by one of the tanks. Check out the teeth on that shark ! Youch! Then we hit lupis for lunch. Lupis is the Bomb. Calzones are wonderfull!!!
Heres lisa and me Carrying some of Sara's stuff up to her Dorm. It was super duper hot that day. Move in day went pretty smoothly. We got sara in her room and unpacked in about an hour so that was nice to be able to do for her. Then it was off to the various offices to get her all checked in and scheduled out!Here we all are on sunday afternoon before we left. I think everyone looks so good in their sunday clothes dont you? Ok if we are all there then who took the picture??? trippy.

Hope you enjoyed the photo journal of "Sara Moves to college"

Cheers!

Its stinky, tastes like crap and can be used in Construction. You know what it is!

Ok I want to rant about something real quick and that is Spam. Ok everyone hates spam and everyone complains about spam. Computer networks spend millions a year on trying to find ways to combat spam and stop it from getting through. I hate spam just as much as the next user and I have felt it in all its current deviants. E-mail spam, blog spam, AIM spam. you name it and I have been spammed. However for the most part this does not bother me. Its an annoyance I know but its just a tiny bit of digital information that comes through the line and within a click its gone. If you have used a computer for any length of time you should be able to quickly sift through the spam and delete it most of the time all in one or two clicks. SO yeah it sucks and yeah its annoying but is it really that bad compared to what else is out there? What am I talking about??? Junk mail -- the original spam. Why is it that are willing to pass laws banning spam but its legal for someone to send me unsolicited blank checks WITH MY NAME ON THEM! I would say on average I get more junk mail then junk e-mail in a given day and that disgusts me b/c junk mail wastes actual physical resources!!! It takes up real space people. It boggs down the mail, I then have to open it. evaluate the legitimacy of it then I have to in most cases shred the little bastard so that no one else can use it to steal my identity or take a several thousand dollar loan out in my name! And this is legal and not being fought! Whats wrong with people and why if it comes in our real mailboxes is it ok? Plus think of all the trash this generates! Oits! Their is one really good Seinfeld where Krammer goes to the post office and tells them he wants to be cut off. No more mail. Its a very funny episode portraying the post master general as a sort of "god father" of the postal system. SO anyway thats where I think the real problem is. No im not some liberal hippy tree hugger who likes to dance in fields or anythign like that. I just think its wrong that someone can send me checks that I never asked for as well as lots of other things that waste natural resources.

SO anyway. thats what i think.

cheers

Zzzzzzzzz

Ok im am crashing work has been killer and to top that off I have not been sleeping well (guessing stress related) so that makes for a really fun combo. Also since I gave up caffeine couple months back I dont have any crutches to stand on. Normally I would be pounding a soda right now or drinking coffee but no not anymore. Yea! for trying to be healthy! SO anyway This will probably be my only post this week as Im going out of town tommorow and wont get back till sunday night.

SO whats up???

Work -- Blah blah blah I dont want to talk about it. Its busy and im tired. LEAVE ME ALONE!

gaming -- Lisa and I finnaly played some mario golf on the borrowed gamecube and its pretty fun. Other than that nothing. Im still on the verge of finishing FFX but have not played in over a week.

Other stuff -- Hannah gave me her laptop on sunday and I attempted fixing it which was really just me doing an upgrade. I wiped her Hard drive like 3xs and then installed Panther on her mac. she had jaguar before and it was a very very sick kitty. Like the laptop would not turn off. Now with panther I timed it and its around 8 seconds to shut down. not to bad if you ask me. SO hopefully that will work well for her this semester.

My parents got in yesterday afternoon and well their car has been having issues and appears to maybe not worth fixing. SO if anyone has a car they dont want and is just dying to give it to a worthy cause my folks could really use a car. Mr Trump if your reading this they are really great people and could really use a car. Thanks. SO they are trying to figure out if they will ditch the car here and rent a car to get home or what. sigh life sucks. I keep saying "this was not in the brochure" and I mean it.

Why am I going to be gone this weekend you ask??? well let me not keep you in suspense any longer. Lisa and I are helping to move Sara down to covenant this weekend which means that after work on Thursday I get to drive snuggly down to Chattanooga! oh joy! Can you tell im excited? Ok it would not be that bad but the car has no A/C, although it has been cooler lately, and no power steering. Its a beast to drive. Plus its stick so only sara and I can drive it and she will not be there. but hey I will get to relive my glory days of going back to school by driving a beat up old car full of junk to college! I hope to get some good pics if lisa brings her camera -- man we really need to get our own digi cam -- and then I will try to post them up next week.

Well I gots to go but hey everyone have a fun and wonderfull time.

cheers!

Picture pages -- Picture pages lots of fun with Picture Pages...

WOW two posts from me in the same day!! Can you tell I wish to die? j/k so yeah im exhausted from yesterday so im blogging so yeah thats what im doing.

Ok first up is a pic of Lisa (left) and Sara (right) at the Lebanon Blues festival last weekend. It has been Sara's life long dream to be a mascot of some kind so for a few hours her life's ambitions came true when she got to answer to the name "westy"

Another "westy" shot but from a little farther away.

Here is my attempt at being westy! I have to say I think Sara made a cuter westy. Probably much less frightening to small children as well.

Transition Time!!!
Here are the promised motor bike pics. This first one is from the front when the bike was all torn apart.

Shot from the back rear. It looks like I've been in a wreck or something. But I was not.

Front right -- if you look above the front fender you will see a black piece of plastic that looks like a backwards "y" thats my RAM air duct!!!!

All my plastic bits carefully placed to the side so they did not get damaged and my broken upper cowl is on the bottom left. I dont care about that one so much.

TA DA!!! All back together and looking mighty fine. I also chopped the rear fender which you may or may not be able to tell but it came out really well.

Oh did I mention I got LED's for the bike. They look sweet! The front ones are only really visible from the front but I think the engine and tail came out AWESOME!

Another side shot.

Oh the lights are out again!

Ok hope everyone likes the pics.

Cheers!

O - i - ' - T - s

Ok so last night I got started at about 7:30pm. Everything was going really well. I had all my backup plans in place and felt pretty good about the upgrade. Bill showed up about 8:10 and it was go time. I started working through the instructions for upgrade and things were going pretty well. I hit a snag here and there but I was able to push through them and figure out what needed to happen to make it work. I completed the whole upgrade process, which took 2 hours, and got to the final step. Let me go back a second. What I was doing was basically upgrading the operating system on a router which uses only flash memory for storage and nothing like a hard drive. SO its quite a bit different then say installing windows. Well I had the new IOS (internet operating system) installed and it was running smashingly. I was so excited! But it was kinda faking it. You see when you get to the point I was at then you have to delete all the old IOS files and get rid of them to make room for the new IOS image. SO I did that. Double checked all my boot parameters and proceeded to the last step which was to reload the router. I typed the command and then just about died. Cisco routers in general are pretty bomb proof and really wonderfull to work with. That being said they do have their moody moments and well I hit one last night. When I reloaded in that split second the router forget that I had put the IOS image on it and could not load. Imagine having a computer with a blank hard drive and no floppy drive, optical drive, or usb / firewire ports. What would you do? How would you repair it? SO after screwing around with it for like 15 min. I called tech support @ $250/hour (yikes) and after screwing around with it for another 30 min got the official "Man thats hosed" diagnoses. SO I started thinking and came up with an alternate plan that just might bring this little guy back to life but at that time it was 11pm and my idea would require another 2 maybe 3 hours of work minimum to get this thing back so we fell back to the redundant router and called it a night.

SO yeah that was my night. how was yours?

Coming up for a breath of air

Ok so wow yeah things have been crazy busy for me and they are just getting crazzier (insert funny voice) Im sorry for anyone who is or has tried to reach me over aim in the last few days as I have not been around which is unusual for me. Im not ignoring you guys! Anyway to give you an idea of what my day was like yesterday....

got to work and instantly started to take calls. I had a number of places I needed to go to but just could not get out of the office so that really stunk. Ended up getting on the road at about 10:45 I then went to

1. Immaculate conception school -- to apply an Access List to help combat virus traffic.

2. Fairborn Jr High -- They have 3 T1's between their HS and jrHs and only 1 was working. But I was able to get them back up on all 3!!!

3. Trotwood Jr High -- Again another T1 problem they have 2 but one was running dirty. Ohhh its sooo dirty. Had a vendor meet with Verizon and isolated the problem and replaced some equipment.

4. Soita -- which is in franklin (I live in franklin!) so that was a nice place to end. They also had a t1 issue but it turned out to be a port issue. Swaped ports and did some voo doo config magic and BANG! it was a working.

So all in all I worked about 10 hours yesterday and drove over a 100 miles to get to these various venues. SOOO thats why I was not around.

Now today. today I have training all day then I come back to work tonight for quite a major project. The funny thing about this project is this, what I am going to do tonight I have never done before. What I am going to do will take our ENTIRE network down. That includes the 37 school districts, the 35+ non public schools and the 10+ community schools we service. Not just my office. If I get it right and everything goes well I will be a hero. why? because I will have saved our company around 5 grand in installation charges. Now what happens if it goes bad. hmm lets just say "career limiting event." So my maintanace window is theoretically 8pm to 10pm but I can go longer if I need to. I have my fall back plan already in place and I feel pretty good about it. Although to be honest just writting this up is making me super duper nervous. Oh well sometimes you have to just throw caution to the wind and hope that in the end you are as good as other people say you are!

Well thats pretty much it. Hopefully if a certain someone ,lisa, emails me pics of my bike ,lisa, then I will be able to post them today ,lisa, so if you want to see pics of my bike e-mail my wife lisa. I bet you thought I would put her address on here. Sorry but nope. Oh I did get to ride my bike into work today which means that between that and the likely hood of sara straitening her hair, it will pour down rain today.

Well thats all for now.

Cheers!

Oi'ts

Ok so if I have not told you already that Oi'ts is my new word. Thats right I invented it and its like saying Oi' but with some spunk. SO the the next time you feel like saying Oh Crap or awww shizzle say Oi'ts instead. Its dramatically more efficient. ^_^ SO why am I telling you about my new word? Why did I feel the need to invent said word??? I will tell you!!!(!! those last two were for you hannah ^_^) Becuase I am dreadfully busy at work lately and have been saying Oi'ts quite a bit lately. So that is a good indicator of a busy life. The need to invent a quicker way to say Oh crap b/c oh crap takes just to long to say. SO on to whats up with me

Work continues to be a sore spot for me. People are coming back to school earlier than I had anticiapated and that is making my life a nightmare. Well it would not be that bad except the other tech in my department has been out sick for like the last 3 weeks and our wonderfull doctors cant figure out whats wrong with her. Although despite the fact that her primary symptoms are:

1. numbness in the right side of her body
2. Incredibly painfull headache that has not stopped once in three weeks.

The Doctors are certain that the large brain cyst (guess) / tumor (possible) has absolutely nothing to do with her HEADaches or body numbness. No they are ignoring that large roadside like sign that points a big arrow at her brain with a caption that says "HERES THE PROBLEM" in favor of ignoring her and going on vacation. Seriously thats what her neurologist did. Oi'ts!

So since we lost our intern and now her most of the work is falling on me and well yeah I already had quite enough to do. That coupled with the fact that if our receptionist is sick or has to leave the office for anything I become the temp receptionist well yeah I think you are seeing why I feel like those little chipmunks in the outpost.com commercials. ^_^

SO thats work -- yuck!

On to my life........hmm j/k ok so I was supposed to work on Saturday really big project but I had to scrub it. I just was not ready for it and its on the caliber of "career limiting" should I botch it so yeah I scrubbed it and instead spent the day working on my motorbike ITS DONE!!!!! pics to follow soon! I promise. I also played a lot of FF X which I will not bore anyone with the details but I am maybe 2 hours from the end if I can stop dying that is. Lisa and I did something out of the norm and went to blockbuster and rented a couple of movies. first up was hitch. WOW that movie is really good. If your looking for a good romantic comedy / date movie this is my top pic right now. Its very well done and its just very very funny. The next one we got is one I think everyone in the country should be forced to sit and watch. Supersize me by morgan spurlock. OMG that movie was amazing. I swear after it was over I never wanted to eat fast food again. I had no idea how he went about doing his experiment which if you dont know he spent 30 days eating only mcdonalds food to see what the effect was. Well he really did it well. He had 3 different doctors monitoring him as well as a nutritionist analyzing his meals and telling him what he was feeding his body. SO it was much more scientific that I thought it would be. I just pictured a guy eating tons of fried food and then having the runs or something but he blew away the doctors who said the only thing they thought they would see was elevated cholesterol. Im not going to give away all the stuff he goes through b/c that would ruin the movie but like I said everyone should watch it. Yes its that good. Well I have ranted for long enough and I have too much to do to so I will say

Cheers!

I cant believe it

I have a few mac friends and one thing I have always said to them is this. "When Apple finally abandons a single button mouse I will start taking them seriously. " Well they have done that and in true apple form they not only came out with something new, they came out with something truly inovative. I have to say this is the coolest mouse I have ever seen and I want one really badly. Touch sensitive left and right buttons and a 360 degree wheel/ball. It makes so much sense yet no one else has done it. I cant wait for this to be the standard mouse shipping with all macs. I think apple is really starting to do things that are making the world take notice and although this is probably a minor one I think it will have a huge impact for them.

More later Im too busy to have even posted this which shows how impressed I am about it.

Cheers!