For the last 3 years I have accompanied my cousin Henry to New York City 2 nights before New Years Eve to see the hot band Gov’t Mule and this year was no different. It rocked. The set list says it all.

First Set:
Mr. Man > Perfect Shelter> Lola Leave Your Light On>
Livin Lovin Maid She Said > Tommorow Never Knows Jam (with verse of vocals at end)
Tastes Like Wine
Banks of the Deep End
Suffer
32-20 Blues with Ron Holloway

Second Set:
Game Face> Mountain Jam> Game Face Johnny Bratton Jam (from Miles Davis Jack Johnson Sessions)
Hunger Strike> Dear Mr. Fantasy> Hunger Strike
Wandering Child> Drums> Devil Likes It Slow w/ Ron Holloway (and a smokin’ solo from Warren as always!!)
Oh Well Little Toy Brain
Lively Up Yourself
Mule

Encore:
John The Revelator (Danny on Trumpet Playing the Outro as he comes across the stage)

This was the first show in all my years of going to shows that I actually wore my ear plugs the whole night. I bought a pair of ER*20 High Fidelity Ear Plugs a few years back from Etymotic Research and they were great. They deadened the sound but didn’t effect the sound quality of the music. They were worth the money. My hearing isnt the greatest any way from playing my music to loud all these years and going to shows with unprotected ears. It’s been getting so bad they are ringing even after I get out of the car with radio on to loud. So it’s time to change my ways and turn the volume down……

It seems like just the other day I was wishing you all a Merry Christmas. Yesterday was spent doing some last minute shopping and then ended up at work for a few hours. Then headed out for dinner with Avery, Carolyn and my sister in-law at the Chines Buffet. Yes I ended up at work on Christmas eve…I decided to get the server room network cabling redone. I used 3 different colors red for Public network(Internet) nics, Orange for the DMZ nics and Green for the LAN nics/servers. I had to get this done, I was stepping on net work cables that were lying on the floor. I also got the KVM wires cleaned up and put an IP KVM on my 2007 wishlist the KVM wires I have now are to bulky and to hard to get routed the way I wanted them.

Well I have to go and start cooking Christmas breakfast and then start dinner after opening the gifts with the family……

Again MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

So Saturday was my companies Holiday party. A good time is had by all that go, the down side being I have to wear a suit and tie, it confuses the users though so it makes it worth it. This year I was celebrating being with the company for 5 years. At this company you get $500 for 5 years of service, $1000 for 10 years and so on. So this year I got my money which I just spent on a DELL UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor for my office at home. I have been using a 19″ monitor that is slowly going bad and it has a big scratch in the middle of the glass. I have been looking at these monitors for a while but the price has been to high. But they dropped to bellow $500 dollars with a 25% special and free shipping so I couldn’t resist….Now if I could only get my company to buy me one of these.

Well the gang went to the Uno’s at 225 Sloan Avenue Hamilton, NJ 08619 for lunch today. We got there at around 12 and didn’t get served till 12:50pm. We only got the food because I went to complain to the manager. Who went right back to the kitchen and wasn’t back there more then 30 sec when he came out with our food. The only compensation we were offered was free dessert for each of us. They also made the mistake of leaving 4 comment cards on the table so I filed them out. Not favorably either. Then when I got back to work I shot off an E-mail to the corporate office.

Here is a copy of the E-mail:

My party of 10 arrived at the Uno’s in Hamilton , NJ between 11:45am and
12:05pm. We placed our order around 12:15 after our waiter took our drink
orders. We ordered the following items:

3- Uno Burgers
2- Chicken fingers
1- lunch Fish & chips
1- Soup and Salad
1- Lunch Penne pasta
2- Pizza and soups

We didn’t get our meal till 12:50pm and that was after I went and complained
to the manager. There were 4 parties around us that were seated and orders
taken after we ordered and they received there food right away.

We usually go to Uno’s at least 2 times a month for lunch. And when we have
a person leaving our company we usually have the going away party at the bar
of the Hamilton Uno’s. Usually we run a $500 to $1000 drink tab at these
parties. This experience is making us look into going somewhere else for
lunch and taking our party business to another location.

——
Now before you tell me how bad Uno’s is we don’t usually have a problem with service this bad before. Actually the food is ok and good for lunch and the bar has a good beers on tap and the happy hour starts early for parties.

Well as you can see I actually wrote a book review. I read a lot of tech books but “Time Management for System Administrators” really has helped me. I am one of those people who say yea I will remember to do that thing you want me to do but I forget or get distracted and forget to do it. So I figured I needed to write the review so others can be swayed to buy and read the book.

I have been working on getting RT up and running at work so I can go live with it on Jan. 2nd. It took me some time to get the auth part of it talking to our Active Directory/LDAP server. I found this site was a big help with this overlay it is working great. Now I can have my users send an E-mail to RT and it will generate a work ticket that they can track to see the progress of the problem resolution. I also got NAGIOS back up and running monitoring my servers and routers in all the offices.

At home Avery and I got the front of the house decorated and the tree into the house last weekend. Carolyn got the tree decorated this week and it looks real good. I will get some pictures up later once I get the digital camera working again. I still haven’t gotten my Christmas shopping started for Carolyn and Avery, I plan to go on Sunday and get it all done and not have to worry about it during the week. Carolyn took care of getting my folks and everyone else’s gifts that we are giving out this year..not that we are giving a lot we are on a tight budget this year but we are trying to get something for everyone in the family.