brokebit’s

We went to the Bristol County Renaissance faire in Wisconson last weekend.

More photos here: http://www.dynowski.com/bristol

Faire website:  http://www.renfair.com/bristol

It's worth a visit. Mud wrestling is PG-13. 

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?!

Today has been a total buzz kill!!  I'm out in NY to install a new WAN connection between the NY and Evanston offices and reconfigure the local network. The connection is a point to point Ethernet connection at 6MB and it was supposed to be tested and ready to go last week. I woke up at 4AM this morning to catch a 6am flight to LGA. Take off was delayed because some backup "electrical system" on the plane had failed. We had to wait for replacement parts to arrive and get installed. That was about a one hour delay. Once I arrived in LGA I got delayed another hour because United crew couldn't unload the luggage due to lightning strikes on the tarmac.

Once I finally arrived at the office I went up to the telco closet to locate the new connection and associated equipment. It was nowhere to be found. I called the provider (Yipes) and after several hours we discovered the equipment had not been installed. Remember this was all tested!  Yipes finally dispatched a tech with the router and switch. I figured we were home free now! NOT! We could find the four T1s that were supposedly installed. Nobody knew who the carrier was or were the DMARC was! After another several hours of searching I found four unmarked/unlabled T1s that happened to be the right ones. We wired up the router and switch and boom it works! So I proceeded to connect our Cisco switch and establish a dot1q trunk with the Evanston office. Once again it doesn't work. After two hours on the phone with Yipes tech support we discovered the Yipes equipment was miss-configured. Once again, remember, this has been tested and confirmed working last week.

Ok, now that switches are working time to reconfigure all the desktops. I quickly reconfigure my laptop and soon discover I cannot access the Internet. UBS (Our office space provider and ISP) has not configured their firewall for the new subnet. So it's now after 7pm and the chances of getting someone on the phone are not good. What! I did get someone.. Oh. but they don't know the password to the firewall.
It's now been over 14 hours.. I'm going to get dinner and back to the hotel.
My wonderful wife researched some vegetarian restaurants for me. Mmm nice dinner. NOPE! Sorry! The restaurants are now closed.

Argh!!!!!!!!

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.

We were eating dinner last night with Larry and his family. Around 5pm I noticed a firetruck and ambulance in front of my home. Naturally I ran out to see what happened. Our neighbors daughter tripped while running and bumped her head on the sidewalk. Nothing to serious. Lots of blood. I came back to my pizza. About ten minutes later an ambulance screeches by the house. I immediately thought maybe the little girl passed out and ran outside again. No, she was fine and the ambulance kept going down the street. At the end of my block were two police officers talking with a neighbor. I approached them and asked what was going on. They explained that someone had forced their way into a ladies home down the block and stabbed her. That was who was in the ambulance that just blew by. After some more questioning it turns out Lonnie may have had en encounter with the suspect. About a month ago someone came up to our house. Kind of raggedy, dirty, ripped clothes, smelly, missing tooth. He explained that he just moved to the neighborhood and was our neighbor. (Lonnie or I have never seen him.) Said his wife's car go towed and he needed ten or twenty dollars. He asked if he could come in and do some handyman work around the house. Lonnie said no. A few minutes later she saw him sitting in a pickup truck in the alley staring in to our house and immediately called 911. After talking to the police yesterday about the stabbing they explained a person of this description had been going from house to house in our neighborhood giving the same story for about a month. Whats his motive, why force your way in on an old lady, stab her and run away on foot? Hopefully she is OK. Last I heard she was in surgery. It's also pretty bold to do this during the day when people are around. She was assaulted around 5:15pm. There were firetrucks and ambulances one block down the street from the scene! Obviously he did't care. I think I am going to devise a siren on top of the garage with a hidden switch behind the front door. If anyone tries to forcefully enter the house Lonnie, Eno or I can just flip the switch and set off the loudest damn siren you ever heard.

Updated: http://www.nbc5.com/news/9409553/detail.html

Congrats to Brendan!