Last night I was pretty wiped out. I wanted nothing more than to get a good NYC pizza and kick back to watch a flick. I had brought my NetFlix movies with me and was going to watch them.
The first thing I did was hook my laptop up to the TV via an HDMI cable. No problem there, even if the TV couldn’t support the resolution I was using. Then I popped in my BluRay disc and…..nothing. Apparently, the piece of crap software provided by Dell wants to go out to the Internet and download 54MB of updates before it will play a disc. Over my crappy hotel internet connection this just doesn’t work, so it won’t play anything. I fought this for about ½ and hour while my pizza got cold.
Next, I took a non BluRay disc and popped it in hotel provided DVD player. So far so good, until the disc started to pixilate and then stopped working altogether. I popped it out, but it didn’t appear to be particularly dirty or scratched. My guess is that the DVD player is old and abused and has gotten bumped one too many times.
So I resigned myself to watching whatever I could find on the cable channels, eating my cold pizza and having some wine…..
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Back in the Big Apple
Yesterday I returned to NYC for the first time in, I don’t know, at least five years. Maybe longer. It was cloudy when we flew in, but you could still see the urban sprawl going on forever and ever. Sometimes, when we land in DFW I hear people commenting on our urban sprawl, but we have nothing on NYC.
I grabbed a cab and headed into the city to my temporary apartment. I’m going to be here for a month and staying at a hotel that was just big enough to open the door wasn’t really an option. Besides, we lucked out and I found a great place for under $300 a night – in Manhattan that’s almost unheard of.
On the drive in, I again noticed how old everything looked. I always forget how long NYC has been here and that while there are about a billion buildings towering into the sky, most of them are fairly old, not new. The architecture and the clash of architectural styles is always interesting.
Of course, the first thing that really hit me when I got into the city was the smell. Just general food and garbage. Strange. I’m staying roughly at the corner of Third and 37th. I don’t quite have my bearings but I think it’s just at the edge of the Manhattan district because it’s not quite “snooty” yet.
I had a nice Italian dinner and there are plenty of things to eat around here – typical NYC. I crashed early because I was tired, but the sun started coming up at about 4:30am. I lost track of when the sirens and noise stopped – if ever, but they were in full swing by 6:00am. I have a feeling I’ll be tired by the end of the day…..
I grabbed a cab and headed into the city to my temporary apartment. I’m going to be here for a month and staying at a hotel that was just big enough to open the door wasn’t really an option. Besides, we lucked out and I found a great place for under $300 a night – in Manhattan that’s almost unheard of.
On the drive in, I again noticed how old everything looked. I always forget how long NYC has been here and that while there are about a billion buildings towering into the sky, most of them are fairly old, not new. The architecture and the clash of architectural styles is always interesting.
Of course, the first thing that really hit me when I got into the city was the smell. Just general food and garbage. Strange. I’m staying roughly at the corner of Third and 37th. I don’t quite have my bearings but I think it’s just at the edge of the Manhattan district because it’s not quite “snooty” yet.
I had a nice Italian dinner and there are plenty of things to eat around here – typical NYC. I crashed early because I was tired, but the sun started coming up at about 4:30am. I lost track of when the sirens and noise stopped – if ever, but they were in full swing by 6:00am. I have a feeling I’ll be tired by the end of the day…..
Sunday, May 16, 2010
A Friend's DUI
Recently, one of my good friends was attending a going away party for another friend of mine. My first friend apparently gets pretty messed up and acts a bit obnoxiously. The other friends offer him a ride home, etc., and of course he declines.
Now, I’ve had to deal with drunks before and I’ve had to deal with this particular friend when he’s been wasted. I have never, not one time had a problem getting his keys from him so he wouldn’t drive home. Sure, he’d give me a bit of shit about it but he always gave them up without any real confrontations.
My other friends say that they “gave him every chance in the world,” etc., but what do they do? They called the cops on him. I couldn’t believe it. I have never even heard of such a thing. So my friend gets a DUI and now is in a pretty hard spot. He’s facing a lot of legal problems, fines, etc.
I was pretty pissed off about it and let my other friend know, in no uncertain terms, that I was not happy and that I thought the situation was handled poorly. Again, they professed that they gave him every chance in the world. I wasn’t there, but I find that really hard to believe. Instead of getting any kind of apology I get a rebuttal about how one guy was hit by a drunk driver and still has problems and how this friend had to deal with an abuse husband, etc. Great. So it sounds like they decided to take their anger out on my friend – and this friend is one of the nicest guys I have ever met. I’ve never even heard him say anything bad about anyone.
The other thing was this whole sense of self-righteousness that I read into it. I’ve hung out with these people before and I’ve seen ALL of them get blitzed. I still can’t believe that they did that. I am still reeling I am so angry over it. I hope one day I am not as angry as I am today because I do value the friendship of this person. Still, right now, I don’t even want to talk to them and I may never get over feeling like I won’t ever want to hang out with them at a party or anything. Who knows when they might decide to call the cops on me for some reason?
It kind of sucks to write off an entire group of friends, but as I was told – they all pretty much agreed to the course of action and upon further debate said they’d do the same thing again. I guess fucking over a friend isn’t that big of a deal to them…..
Getting Fooked in DIA
I hate flying through Denver. It seems that every time I fly through Denver something happens. Flight is delayed….flight is cancelled….get diverted to alternative airport and then get fooked by something else, etc. In fact, in the last two years I think DIA has a 100% track record for fooking me in some way shape form or fashion.
Today, there are storms in Dallas and it’s screwing up my flights to get home. Now I know you are thinking “That’s not because of DIA!”….but I disagree. It’s a Karma thing, or maybe a conspiracy thing. If I had flown through SLC, there wouldn’t have been storms and I would have made it on time.
Bling! Says it’s because of the Latter Day Saints – the Mormons. But I’m pretty sure that those are the ones in SLC, not DIA. Still, it does kind of play into a nice Jesus Freak conspiracy theory. So do you think there might be something to this? I think it warrants further investigation. We could do some research about it tying in all the Jesus Freaks and how they conspire to screw us non Jesus Freaks up when we travel. We can even call the book “How would Jesus Fly?”
I took about a month of from writing in here. For those few of you who read this and are interested in keeping up, my apologies. I kind of had a bad snap there with a bunch of things happening at once including another big trip to work out at the power plant. Those trips are brutal – 6 and 7 day work-weeks pulling 15+ hour days.
I also was struggling with the loss of some of my relatives as well as my own personal issues and struggles with death. I am going to be 40 next year. I always wondered if I would have a mid-life "crisis" and I think that in some ways it’s already started. It’s been hard for me to not think about that, but I seem to be getting back to normal.
Since my friend and co-worker quit, I’ve also had to carry his workload and as luck would have it all of our project s are hitting at the same time. To top it off, we also have a lot of customer requests hitting and while they sat there for weeks or months not ready for us to work on their projects they are suddenly all ready. I just can’t keep up.
But!!! I did get a new laptop and it’s pretty sweet. It’s a Dell Studio XPS 16 and it’s totally loaded with features and whizmos!!! Unfortunately, it took me almost three days to totally wipe it out, re-install it the base OS and move all of my files over to it. Why did it take three days? See above – I’ve had NO time to work on it. Last night I stayed up until about midnight so I’d be ready for the work day today. There is nothing like being in the middle of two laptops and you can’t really quite use either one.
As usual, when I don’t write, I’ve had a lot of thoughts and ideas to write about but simply did not feel like getting to it.
However, you might find this interesting –
We have a few systems that monitor client networks. This is a service we provide to them. Last Thursday one of the monitoring systems freaked out and sent out, oh, maybe 1000+ alerts. These alerts come to my inbox in the form of an email. This same email also goes to our trouble ticket system and opens a trouble ticket. When a trouble ticket hits the system, I also get an email.
So right now, that means I am getting at least two emails for each alert – and as I said there was well over 1000 of them.
The initial email was also supposed to go to an old email address for a guy that used to work for us. Let’s say his name was Fred. Our email administrator had just killed his email account. So all mails that were supposed to go to Fred were getting rejected by the email server. The email server would send a notification of the reject out to the ticketing system – generating more tickets, and thus more alert emails to our in-boxes.
So now, figure for each alert I am getting three email – that’s over 3000+ emails. Then, the coup de grace… if a trouble ticket is opened for more than about 15 minutes, it sends and alert to my phone, and then it sends another one 10 minutes later if nobody responds. My phone was hit with god knows how many text messges. It had to be in the thousands. It basically crippled my phone. I had to mute the phone because I was getting a text message on the average of about one every one-to-two seconds. So if people called me I couldn’t tell. When I would try to call out I had to wrestle with the phone since it was constantly alerting me I had a new message, and, oh, did I want to read it right then? If I could get a call out it would beep at me constantly due to the new messages coming in. How long did this last? Until Saturday evening. Roughly 2.5 days.
I also was struggling with the loss of some of my relatives as well as my own personal issues and struggles with death. I am going to be 40 next year. I always wondered if I would have a mid-life "crisis" and I think that in some ways it’s already started. It’s been hard for me to not think about that, but I seem to be getting back to normal.
Since my friend and co-worker quit, I’ve also had to carry his workload and as luck would have it all of our project s are hitting at the same time. To top it off, we also have a lot of customer requests hitting and while they sat there for weeks or months not ready for us to work on their projects they are suddenly all ready. I just can’t keep up.
But!!! I did get a new laptop and it’s pretty sweet. It’s a Dell Studio XPS 16 and it’s totally loaded with features and whizmos!!! Unfortunately, it took me almost three days to totally wipe it out, re-install it the base OS and move all of my files over to it. Why did it take three days? See above – I’ve had NO time to work on it. Last night I stayed up until about midnight so I’d be ready for the work day today. There is nothing like being in the middle of two laptops and you can’t really quite use either one.
As usual, when I don’t write, I’ve had a lot of thoughts and ideas to write about but simply did not feel like getting to it.
However, you might find this interesting –
We have a few systems that monitor client networks. This is a service we provide to them. Last Thursday one of the monitoring systems freaked out and sent out, oh, maybe 1000+ alerts. These alerts come to my inbox in the form of an email. This same email also goes to our trouble ticket system and opens a trouble ticket. When a trouble ticket hits the system, I also get an email.
So right now, that means I am getting at least two emails for each alert – and as I said there was well over 1000 of them.
The initial email was also supposed to go to an old email address for a guy that used to work for us. Let’s say his name was Fred. Our email administrator had just killed his email account. So all mails that were supposed to go to Fred were getting rejected by the email server. The email server would send a notification of the reject out to the ticketing system – generating more tickets, and thus more alert emails to our in-boxes.
So now, figure for each alert I am getting three email – that’s over 3000+ emails. Then, the coup de grace… if a trouble ticket is opened for more than about 15 minutes, it sends and alert to my phone, and then it sends another one 10 minutes later if nobody responds. My phone was hit with god knows how many text messges. It had to be in the thousands. It basically crippled my phone. I had to mute the phone because I was getting a text message on the average of about one every one-to-two seconds. So if people called me I couldn’t tell. When I would try to call out I had to wrestle with the phone since it was constantly alerting me I had a new message, and, oh, did I want to read it right then? If I could get a call out it would beep at me constantly due to the new messages coming in. How long did this last? Until Saturday evening. Roughly 2.5 days.
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