Looking at a new PDA

Got all the Linux servers upgraded…I love Linux in the respect that I can do upgrades on the fly and not have to reboot the servers. Been looking for a new PDA that I will use for just about everything. I have decided to get the Sharp SL-5500. It’s Linux based, has a command prompt, TCP/IP stack, takes a wireless card (wich is good for me since we are adding a WLAN here at the office in the next few weeks.), nice color screen and a built in keyboard.

Squeaking in my head

I can feel that it’s going to be one of those days. The printer on the other side of the room is squeaking every time it prints and it’s giving me headache. Luckily we have a service contract so I don’t have to figure out the problem.

Didn’t get to play D&D last night…Del got called into work in North Jersey so they postponed it till tonight, but Nat just IRCed me to tell me there pipes were frozen. Hopefully we get to play tonight.

Working on getting all the Linux servers updated with the current errata.


Going to be in the paper

Life can be so strange. I just got off the phone with a reporter from “The Trentonian”. He found the rocknroll.com site when he was board and surfing the web and decided to run a feature on it. So check the Wednesday Trentonian for the artical and this picture.

The weekend was good…Nat and Del came over Friday for dinner and to have Carolyn help with Nat’s wedding dress. Then they were back on Saturday to help paint the kitchen to get it ready for there reception we are hosting at our house on Valentines day. It’s cool to have some friends who will help out and who we can help. It’s also neat to just hang out and talk computers life and the universe with good fun people.

Tonight I am heading over to there place to play the ultimate geek game D&D. Should be fun I rolled a good character so I hope to have a good time.


New Style and Software

Well I did it I switched the journal over to Movable Type software. The main reason I did this so it’s easier to add enteries from anywhere anytime as long as I have a internet connection.

The look of the site will change in the next few weeks when I have time to sit down and work on the layout. Till then I will try to keep adding entiries a little more often.


THEY MAY NOT BE THE BEST AT WHAT THEY DO, THEY’RE THE ONLY ONES THAT DO WHAT THEY DO!

Wow what a great couple of months. I have been to a bunch of concerts culminating in a 2 night run in Philly by The Other Ones. TOO = the Grateful Dead – Jerry + 3 others. The first night was Sat. The first set was a little slow and it started making me doubt buying tickets for both nights. The intermission was filled with one of the greatest song writers of recent history Robert Hunter walking around stage playing his guitar and sing a lot of his hits. The second set was started with a bang and just kept right on going full tilt boogie. During drums Phil came out and joined Bill and Mickey on the drums. Here is the set list for the first night.

Here is the Set List:
Set 1:
Saturday Night>
*Cumberland Blues> Jam>
*Down the Road Again
Hell in a Bucket
(stop – technical problems)
+Friend Of the Devil> Jam>
*Here Comes Sunshine>
Jam> *Dancin’ in the Streets

Set 2:
Shakedown Street
Lazy Lightning>
Supplication>
^Drumz> Space>
St.Stephen>
Jam>
Terrapin Station>
Jam>
*Sugaree (ST)
E: Donor Rap “Rapped” to
Goin’ Down the Road
Feelin’ Bad
E: And We Bid You Goodnight

^Phil playing Mickey’s drums
*with Susan Tedeschi
+Bobby on acoustic

My cousin Henry and I both agreed that the first set was lacking and the second set defiantly made up for the not so great seats we got from mail order. We did get lucky and snagged some seats about 5 rows down from where our tickets were for. Row 9 was our friends…..

The second night at the Spectrum started much better. We got good parking in the FU center parking lot and saw about 100 cowering Shakira fans at the FU box office entrance.

The Sunday night show was great it started off with a bang and the crowed was much more alive then the night before. Our seats were much better closer to the stage. Right above Bobby and a good view of Mickey and Bill. The whole night was much better then Sat. We all enjoyed it. The big change from Sat. to Sunday is that they moved Jimmy Herring to center stage and put Bobby stage left.

Here is the set list:
Set 1:Jam> Liberty (BW)
^Cosmic Charlie
^Queen Jane> Jam>
+Hog For You Baby>
Good Morning
Little Schoolgirl (BW)>
Caution (ST/RB)>
Spacey Jam>
Jack Straw

Set 2:
@Uncle John’s Band>
@Jam>
@^Playin’ In The Band>
@Jam> @^Scarlet Begonias>
@^Fire on the Mountain>
Drumz> Space>
^Mister Charlie (ST)>
^I Know You Rider>
^Midnight Hour
E: Golden Road

@Bobby acoustic
^with Susan Tedeschi
between PL & JH

Now I have some observations about the Spectrum and the Dead fans.

1. If you are in the 300 or 400 level the steps are vertical.

2. If you have seats in the 300 or 400 level don’t get to trashed to walk up the stairs.

3. I also love it when the Dead Fans sit in the aisle. Now most of them
leave space for people to walk up or down thew stairs, but then you have
the guy who then sits down in the space and wonders why people are kicking
and yelling at him.

Over all it was 1.5 great shows. Sunday was a much better show then Saturday and Jimmy Herring was definitely in the spot light more then the first night.

My next show to close off the year of 2002 will be Govn’t Mule at the Beacon in NYC on Dec 30,2002.

Check back in the next few days will be putting my Christmas wish list up on the web.


Working 24 hours can not be good for ya..

It’s been a interesting week since 9/11. Went to lunch on Wed and came back to a power outage at the office. Headed out side to listen to the transformer and it was humming real loud and the generator for the 2nd floor was sounding really bad. It was determined that one leg of the transformer went.

As I was leaving for the evening the transformer was smoking and leaking the oil that is inside to keep it cool. Called 911 and sat around with the firemen and watched the transformer turn black….I left to get dinner and came back to a smoldering boiling oil transformer…

On Thursday PSE&G put in a new transformer and the electricians took all day to rerun the cables from the transformer into the building and get them reconnected. Then the fun started…

At 7:30pm the power was restored….

At 7:45pm it became obvious that the main File Server for work was not going to re-boot….

From then on I tried all the tricks of Windows NT administration to get the system to boot back into NT. From an ERC disk to a regular NT boot disk.

Around 11pm I decided to try a parallel install but it kept giving me blue screen of death. I did get in once and saw that the data on the raid container was still intact. The reason this machine takes forever to work on is because it takes for ever to reboot around 2 min a reboot. And with NT you have to reboot after every change.

Around 1am Friday morning I bit the bullet and called Microsoft to get some help forgetting that you now have to pay for support so no help there.

I tried removing RAM and moving around the slots thinking a piece of RAM got fried when the power went out. I had given myself a dead line of 2am to try all the simple stuff..

At 2:00am I started to get ready to redo the OS partition….

It took only 15 min to install Windows NT and all the Dell drivers..Rebooted and….. SUCSESS…I was able to get on the machine and all the data on Raid Container….

It took the rest of the night to get the service pack,Norton Anti-Virus,our Cadd licensing server and Veritas Backup-Exec installed.

I got out of here around 7:00am Friday….

Crashed out till 11am when Carolyn woke me up to tell me Mike had called and no one could log onto the network but administrators….

So back to work for what should have been 1/2 hour but turned into another 3. The log in problem was a wrong pick in the licensing choice. I picked per server when it should have been per seat..4 clicks all fixed.

Then the complaints of lost files started which made no senses since the data was not touched. Ended up being someone else moved them to the wrong directory. What a long 3 days.

Still trying to put out fires from this situation but should be all done by the end of the day.


My Kid Sitter rules….

First I would like to thank Julianne for all the kid sitting she has done for us in the last 2 weeks. Carolyn and I really need the break and Avery just hates having to go to the hospital. She really loves hanging with you and Bea..

And she wanted to say hi….

It’s been a long August. My father In-Law is back in the hospital and my sister In-Law is back. It’s just been a bad month for Carolyn. I hope the rest of the year goes better for her.

Yesterday was Carolyn’s and mine 10 year wedding anniversary..we did nothing. Actually we went out the night before to Macaroni Grill..we were not impressed. That’s about all we did.

The last few weeks at work have been going pretty well. Got the new mail server running on the new server. Now I just have to start getting the small things working. Like the company wide address book, public folders, and getting web mail working faster. Then I will get to go around and switch all the clients over to IMAP from POP3. Oh the fun.

Weekend plans look like I am going to redo Carolyn machine tonight and then redo the WAP to really become a WAP and hand out addresses and DNS settings. It will make my life easier when I take the laptop to work and back. I also plan to finally watch “Lord of the Rings”. If you are in the area give a call and stop over and hang. I should be home all weekend…


My Big Fat Greek Wedding..A Must See

Weather has been good and cool. I’ve been getting better nights sleep now that the AC is off and the fan is back in the window.

Took Carolyn out for dinner and a movie last night. Got Jule to baby sit and she and Avery got along splendidly.

We went to the China Buffet for dinner then saw “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. I would recommend this movie big time. It was the first movie I have been too in a long time where the crowd really laughed at everything funny. It was funny and very touching. It made me think of my own family…reduce the number of cousins and aunts and make them Italian instead of Greek and you have the Bilancio’s.

Now all I have to do is write a quick review for La Vigna on line.

Work is going well I am working on the laptop and trying to get the 3com wireless card to work with Linux so I can take it home and use it on my network…more on this later.


I love the overtime thing and boy is it hot today…

Spent most of Saturday at work. I decided to install the Adaptec RAID 3210s controller and 2 more 34 GIG drives in to the FTP/WEB box at work. The install of the hardware went well. I made a RAID 5 container to get a total of 101.75 gig and a drive for parity.

Stuff started happening when I went to install Red Hat 7.2. When the install got to formatting the partitions it would stop formatting at the biggest partition and the and the numbers 4,7 and 6 LEDS on the RAID controller just kept blinking. After moving the drives around and switching the cable it still kept doing it. I finally went to Adaptec’s site and re-read all the info they had on Linux and buried at the bottom of this article was the answer. Of course it’s been fixed in the Red Hat 7.3 kernels. If I had found this article around 4pm I wouldn’t have been here till 9:30pm. At least I had allot of good tunes to listen to.

Came back on Sunday to get the web mail set up so our new employee in Minnesota could get his E-Mail. Spent only about 5 hours here so I think with the 2 days of adventures I should have enough money to get a new laptop for myself and give the old one to Carolyn.

Finished up the whole FTP/WEB server this morning and can now coast for a few days before I start loading Q-Mail on the box for the new mail server. Guess I am finally going to have to go to the supermarket and get groceries now that Avery and Carolyn are done working on the father in law thing.