Category: Jake

OK, I left this office at 2:00 AM last night, after having a boat-load of trouble getting the new RAID array setup on our servers here at the office, getting the data copied, and then getting the old one out of the picture. It was a barrel of laughs. I nearly lost the data on the drives three times, thanks to stupid software problems. And at 2:00, I finally got Windows 2000 and the new hard drives installed.

And then the s**t hit the fan.

Due to the fact that it was really frickin’ late, and I was tired as hell, I made the mistake of not testing it as hard as I should. I logged it, tried a couple programs, was good to go. Unfortunately, I didn’t account for the wackiness that would ensue — screwed up profiles, inability to print or go online (the latter thanks to MS’s asinine Internet Connection Wizard that had to be run for every damn client), and a whole bunch of other weirdness. I came back into work after about 3 hours of sleep, got everything fixed about an hour ago.

And then my Windows 2003 IIS machine went stupid. And this is 90% the fault of our crappy online reservation software (DOS-based — no, I’m not kidding), as sometimes it’ll get stuck in and endless loop and start 50 copies of itself. I rebooted it, and now the machine won’t boot properly. It’s running about as fast as a 286, and isn’t fully loading Windows.

I’ve tried my butt off to get the thing to work. It won’t even load safe-mode. The drive is getting bulldozed tomorrow, Windows 2003 Web Edition reinstalled, and I’ve stuck a stupid disclaimer on our site.

Then tomorrow I’m going to call and yell at our Reservation Software provider for making simple tasks such a royal pain in the ass.

Meanwhile, I’ve got about 500 links in my “To Blog” folder that, one of these days, I’ll clear out.

I get to spend the evening at work again tonight. One of the hard drives in my Citrix machine’s RAID array is toast, and I need to replace it (as it’s a RAID 1 array, so it’s down to one drive). Since it was an older system, it was cheaper for me to buy two new, bigger, faster drives instead of replacing the one that was dead in there, so I’ve got a pile of imaging, partitioning, and upgrading to deal with tonight.

Just a reminder that if you want a good show, the Cascade Winds Symphonic Band concerts are today at 3:00 PM and Tomorrow (Monday) at 7:30 at COCC. Admission is free, donations gladly accepted. I’ll be there, as will my dad (who plays in the percussion section with me). If you’re reading this site and come to the concert, feel free to say “Hi”.

Light blogging because I’m busy as all hell today at work. I did want to follow up on something, however.

It’s not the original hat, but it’s still the same one. I posted earlier this week about a dilemma I was having about a hat of my daughter’s that we lost. Rick was kind enough to volunteer to look at a factory outlet at a trip he was going on, but you don’t need to bother.

My wife’s funny. She won’t make stupid phone calls for things, but when it comes to something she really wants, she’ll call everybody and their dog to get things taken care of. She not only e-mailed Carter’s directly (along with attaching pictures that were on my previous post), she called every factory outlet mall in the state of Oregon. The last one she called, Lincoln City, had the same hat, but different color, so she was all ready to order it.

Until she opened her e-mail. She had given up on Carter’s because it had been three days since he wrote them, but in her inbox is a message she didn’t recognize. Carter’s had forwarded the e-mail to the company that actually makes the hats for Carter’s. The Vice President of the company wrote back, saying that yes, they still have that hat in their warehouse, and they’ll happily send us one. She said the pictures were adorable and are now hanging on their “Product In Use” wall.

Needless to say, that made my wife happy, and, in turn, made me happy as I don’t have to listen to my wife complain about the guys at Food-4-Less throwing them out.

Been a while since I’ve posted some pics of the little-un. But I have an ulterior motive here. Read on…

    

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Or some other way of erasing a bulk bunch of DLT tapes or Travan tapes that I’m selling on eBay? All the tapes’ data was encrypted on the tapes, but I’d still like to erase them to avoid trouble. Both the drives that used those tapes are toast, so I can’t erase them that way. Anybody know any good way to get rid of the data on them?

I’m a whole 26 years old today. I’m going to try to do as little as possible today, and that would include looking at my computer. Back to blogging tomorrow.

Well, the good news is that I’ve got two years to pay off my hospital bill. The bad news is that they’re not giving me a single friggin’ discount.

I sent them a letter a few weeks back, basically stating that while a complete wipe of the bill would certainly not be argued with, I’m not asking for that. I’m asking to be billed what an insurance company would pay, which is usually about 20-30% less than what’s originally billed. Does anybody know anybody at any insurance companies that I could fax this to just to see what they’d pay, just for kicks? I’m not insured, otherwise I’d send it to mine.

So the good news is that I’ll only have to pay $90/month for the next 24 months, which is a little bit more manageable. But it still annoys the hell out of me that I’m not getting a single discount while if an insurance company were to pay them 70% of what they were billed, they’d just write it off.

I just crimped off my 12th ethernet cable to replace some of the aging crappy wiring here at the office. Thank frickin’ god I’m done now. Once I figure out what’s wrong with my boss’s printer (my guess is user error), activate the rest of the network outlets in the building, and finish updating my backup server, life will be good.