brokebit’s

The mind must be smooth.

The mind must be steady.

The mind must be resilient. 

I'm done with class. Took my final yesterday. Don't have a grade yet, but I think I did fairly well. I finally get my evenings back.

I went to install some HBAs in our Exchange server this evening. I disconnected all the cables from it, unscrewed the screws that secure it and stop it from sliding forward/backwards and tugged. It didn't move, at least not easily. The server above it was not on rails. It was literally sitting on top of it and it was our production database server. I could not shut it down, and I couldn't pull it out live. So I got creative: 

We had Eno's six month Neuro followup this week and got some great news. Dr. feels that Eno is recovering fast and better than he expected. They are rating him at roughly 75% recovered with a solid chance to getting to 100%. He gets to cut his thearpy back to once a week now instead of twice. 

WOW! Things have been totally busy. I have a midterm coming and have spent almost all of my free time preparing for it. Test includes the Constitution, Congress, President, Articles of Confed, Bill of rights, Civil Rights and Liberties, Federalist Papers, the framing of the constitution, etc, etc., etc. Should be fun. It's three parts. Multiple chose, fill in the blank, and essay questions. GULP.I think I got a B, I find out on Tuesday.

Work has been crazy too. Got back from New York and have been working on a whole slew of stuff. Installing new Cisco switches, disaster recovery planning, learning about multicast.. Too much to write about now. Still not hired yet. Some HR issue. Argh. But I'm having fun and being challenged. We had an incident this week were someone rebooted a production DB server. As a result we cannot make any changes (or even login to) production servers during trading hours. Can't even go in the datacenter unless it's an emergency. Oh, and we also have an opening for a Windows/Linux/Cisco (Jack-of-all-trades) admin. Give a shout if you know anyone that's interested. Probably contract to hire.

I love having vendor meetings with my Boss. He shows them no mercy! He wants the best service, cheapest price, and a ton of free stuff from them. He doesn't care how the sales guys feel and will just grill them until they beg for mercy. Plus he lets me poke holes in their technical proposals! It's kind of funny to think about they way my former boss dealt with Vendors like Capgemini who blatantly took advantage of him.

Family is doing good. Last weekend was totally busy. We had four kids birthday parties to attend. One was at a place called Pump It Up! Basically it's a warehouse with about half dozen gigantic inflatable bouncy bounce things. Other then the parents of the birthday boy I was the only parent that stayed at the party. The kids chased me around for two hours! It's amazing how much exercise one can get from simply jumping.

We finally have a weekend with no obligations except for my ever growing list of household to-dos. Fix the lock on the door, fix kitchen cabinet, hang curtain rods, take cat litter out, blah blah blah.

Oh! I almost forgot. Eno actually started to swim in his swimming class last weekend. How cool is that?!

I was just in the checkout line at Whole Foods when I heard a little girl scream "Mommy, Mommy! Look it's a giant!" as she poined up at me.

For some reason I felt compelled to define the word "busy":

*Raising a 5 year old son
*Working an average of 55 hours per week
*Going to college
*Being married to someone who is working two jobs

It was a nice weekend. Saturday Eno had therapy, swimming lessons, and a birthday party. The birthday party was at a tennis park in Winnetka so we both got sun burnt. ON the way home we stopped at best buy and got one of the dance pads you can connect to your play station. Man those are some hard games. I totally sucked at it, but I'm sure you would have all predicted that anyway. Sunday I spent about 5 hours in the library reading. I have about 200 pages to get through on a daily basis for this class. I'm mainly reading the Federalist papers, constitution, and the framing of it. It's amazing how someone like Bush could have become president compared to someone like James Madison!

I finally got our CallManagers upgraded Friday. Weee.. going to NY sometime this week to install network equipment for our new WAN connection. We are getting dedicated 6MB between all of our offices.

Product Features

Technical Details

• Screen size: 32 inches
• Color: Black
• TV type: LCD
• HDTV capable: Yes, with integrated HDTV/ATSC tuner
• Game mode: Yes
• Resolution: 1366 x 768 pixels
• Aspect ratio: 16:9
• Speaker wattage per channel: 10 watts
• Number of speakers: 2
• Response time: 8 ms
• Brightness: 500 cd/m2
• Contrast ratio: 4000:1
• Viewing angle: 178 degrees
• Comb filter: Yes, 3D Y/C digital
• 3:2 pulldown correction: No
• Scan velocity modulation: No
• Line doubling: No
• Color temperature control: No
• Includes DVD player: No
• Includes VCR: No
• Signal type: NTSC, ATSC
• Auto channel setup: Yes
• Closed captioning: Yes
• Last-channel recall: Yes
• Multilingual menu: Yes (English, French, Spanish)
• Parental control: Yes
• Picture-in-picture (PIP): Yes
• Remote control: Yes
• SAP: Yes
• Sleep timer: Yes
• Composite A/V: 2 ( side)
• S-Video: 2 ( side)
• Component video: 1
• DVI: 0
• HDMI: 1
• RF: 2
• PC VGA: 1
• USB: 1
• Firewire: 0
• RS232 (Serial): 1
• Headphone jack: 1
• Front/Side AV jacks: Side
• Surround sound: Yes, virtual SRS TruSurround XT
• Sound leveler system: Yes
• Item width with stand: 31.5 inches
• Item height with stand: 23.7 inches
• Item depth with stand: 9.9 inches
• Item width with stand: 31.5 inches
• Item height with stand: 21.6 inches
• Item depth with stand: 3.1 inches
• Item weight: 32.6 pounds
• Stand included: Yes
• Wall mount type: VESA

The holiday is over. It was a long three days of grilling, drinking, bouncing on the trampoline, swimming, and just plain having fun. I’m exhausted! This is the first down time I have had.

Here the quick updates with photos.

1) T1 line got installed today. On Memorial day! Covad works on Memorial day! More to follow on this later.

2) Here is a photo of the WiFi antenna installed.

3) All the plants and veggies have been moved into the ground!