Tuesday recap...

[feren]

I went into work at the proper time (11:00 AM instead of 7:00 AM). Yay!

I participated in troubleshooting a few applications that were wigging out during stress testing. Meh.

A lightning strike from four weeks ago finally took its toll on the CSU/DSU at our Miramar, FL campus. The poor thing started registering one error after another and started dropping a great number of packets. This required an RMA. Yay! The TAC engineer was not the swiftest and the parts depot did not communicate effectively with my on-site contact. Boo! The part got there in under the promised four hours. Yay! The idiot on-site engineer pulled the old DSU out of the router's chassis while it was running, then plugged the replacement DSU into the chassis while the router was still running, thus nearly frying a $4,000 part. BOO! BOO, BOO! He didn't fry it, though, and upon a reboot everything came up nice and happy and clean. Yay!

We use NTP at the office to coordinate system clocks. We have set up our network to multicast the NTP time signal from our "One True Clock" to any interested devices on the network. One device refuses to register and thus doesn't receive the signal, resulting in an out-of-sync clock. Meh. I can't figure out why. Boo!

I set up a new extension for my Cisco SoftPhone, thus eliminating the problems I was having previously by "controlling" my desk extension. Yay!

I purchased a headset/microphone combination that plugs into my PC via USB, thus allowing me to USE my SoftPhone from my PC at home. Yay!

It works well.YAY YAY YAY!

I've got my old extension at work forwarded to my IP phone on my desk. Using the web interface I forwarded my desk IP extension to my SoftPhone extension. I have SoftPhone running on my desktop at home, connecting to the VoIP network via the Secure Client VPN tunnel software. So yeah... if you call my old extension it's forwarded to a second number, which is forwarded to a THIRD number, and that gets piped across the Internet via a VPN tunnel and makes my PC ring like an old 2500 set. YAY FOR HORRIBLE GEEKINESS!

While at CompUSA I purchased an APC UPS for myself. I got the BX1000, which is the residential version of the Back-UPS RS. It ran about $149, and I tacked on a two year warranty just for the heck of it. I brought it home, plugged it in to the wall, plugged my outlet strip into the UPS and was pleasantly surprised to find that it came with a copy of PowerChute Personal edition and a USB connector cable. The software is loaded on my PC now and I'm able to pull statistics like runtime and battery voltage from it through their little program. It's not as good as PowerChute plus, but it will have to do for the time being. Yay!

Another package arrived for me today, but the Post Office is holding it ransom. Since I have the swing shift for the rest of the week I can take advantage of this to drop by in the morning and pick it up before work. Meh.

I got captain18's wedding present today. I'm smug, I think he will like it. SMUG!

spoothbrush is proving much more difficult to shop for. Doh.

My flight plans to NJ for the wedding got changed, so I have to mail out my updated itinerary. The new hours are... far from ideal, and I'm not happy about it, but I have to deal with it or I'll end up driving out to New Jersey on my own, which is horribly unacceptable. MEH. M-e-h, Meh.

I found out today I'm being penalized for being "underage" on my car rental, resulting in a $25/day additional charge for renting the car. Bastards! BOOO!

I spent my lunch out of the office today, walking around the Oakbrook Corner Mall. That place is really neat, because it's an "open air" mall. This makes shopping there a far less oppressive and distasteful experience than most of the other mall experiences I've had. Yay!

Pictures are being posted from Cap's bachelor party, and man... I look really good in some of them, frightening in others, and just weird in the remainder. I'll wait until they're all uploaded before I share the link. Yay!

Before I attempted to spell-check or post this I copied it into my clipboard, since I didn't want a repeat of last night's stupid disaster. Meh.

I changed the layout of my LiveJournal. If you view it via the direct url of http://feren.livejournal.com/ you will see how it's changed. I'm not completely happy with it because there are one or two things I'd like to see fixed (like the text color for my additional text) but overall I think it looks sharp. It's pretty easy to read, moderately unique (until everyone else starts using it) and rather versatile. Yay!

Can I see your sweet, sweet smile?

Comments

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

You also see the new format when you go to reply to one of your articles.

You set your phone up so you could control it from home... Why? I figured you to be one to want absolutely nothing to do with your office phone once you left the office at night. o.O

Preachy Feej! (Referring to early Sunday morning's evangelization in the hotel room. ;))

[feren.livejournal.com]

[You set your phone up so you could control it from home]

Not to control, but to be able to take and make calls from the company's PBX.

[Why?]

Because using my cell phone is a pain in the ass at 3:45 in the morning when i get a call from a frantic helpdesk tech who wants me to juggle sixteen commands at once. Plus I'm being yelled at to cut down my minutes, and this seems like the way to do it -- use the company's phone system, instead of the cellular!

[I figured you to be one to want absolutely nothing to do with your office phone once you left the office at night.]

You're absolutely right, but that doesn't absolve me from having to take calls and make calls when it comes my turn to be the On-call Engineer for the week. During those 7 days my personal time is not my own. The good news is that only happens one or two weeks out of a month these days since everyone on the team's been thrown into the rotation.

[Preachy Feej! ]

The Church Of Gin!