Category: Jake

Forgot to post something about the garage sale aftermath. We ended up selling $300 worth of stuff. We probably would’ve sold more, but the weather didn’t cooperate so we just crammed everything back in our garage. I told Lydia that if we made over $250 that we’d buy a new stroller/bike trailer that will hold both of the kids, so we went to Costco and grabbed it for $147, and the other $150 was used to pay down a few bills.

Over all, the sale went really well. Jon‘s wife stopped by and said “hi” since she’s not going to be able to make it to the meet-up on Wednesday. She didn’t buy anything, but I won’t hold that against her 😉

We still have a couch, a 10 gallon fish tank with all the trimmings (just needs to be cleaned up), and a pile of baby clothes and a few toys left. Pop me an e-mail if you’re interested in any of it. The couch is sitting in my driveway, and if anybody wants it, they can come and get it — I just want the thing gone, and was getting to the point that I was trying to pay people to get rid of it.

If anybody cares, we’re having a garage sale at my house in Bend on Friday and Saturday. We have a TON of baby stuff (it’s most of the garage sale — clothes, toys, saucer, bouncer, swing, play gym, carrier, formula, whatever), but I’ve got some electronic stuff I’m getting rid of, a lawnmower (Snapper Hi Vac — don’t know anything about it other than it runs good, we just have a newer one), some end tables, a dining table, a couch, a bed, a recliner, a doll house, a 19″ TV, a 10-gallon fish tank with equipment (needs to be cleaned), and some other stuff.

It’ll be Friday/Saturday, 8AM to whenever. It’s at 1319 NE Watson Drive in Bend. Stop by, say “Hi”, tell me you read the site, buy something, contribute to the “man I’ve got a lot of frickin’ bills” fund.

I have a copy of the latest version of Quickbooks Point of Sale Basic 3.0 (I was a beta tester). I received the software as a beta tester and have no intention of using it. However, I can’t sell it as its an Not-For-Resale (NFR) package and I could get in a bunch of trouble for trying to sell it on eBay or the like. Anybody want/need it and could trade me something useful for it? Comment here or e-mail me at jake [at] [the domain you’re reading this site on].

Update: I’ve gotten rid of the program. Thanks for the interest!

I might get a blog entry online later, but I doubt it. I’m in the process of writing a letter to St. Charles Medical Center’s (SCMC) billing department, and it’s taking all the strength I have to not get angry.

Anybody who’s read this blog long knows I had back surgery in December. It was a very necessary surgery, but I wasn’t insured, so I have to pay out of pocket. Most of the folks involved cut me deals on the costs, but SCMC has been less than friendly. The lady that I’ve been dealing with there has been less than friendly, and didn’t even care to hear what I’ve been going through, that I have no extra money, blah, blah. I’ve already paid the bill down from $3100 down to $2100, but they’re requiring me (according to this lady) to pay it all off in six months. Right, like I have an extra $350/month to spend. I just got a letter today from them saying that if I don’t start making good payments, they’re going to send me to collections. Lovely…

I don’t expect them to wipe it all off, but generally when as many people reduce costs like they did (the anesthesiologist even did), the hospital should follow suit. Heck, since I’m paying cash, at the very least they could reduce it to what the insurance companies would reimburse them for (which is usually like 60-75%). I just don’t want to be billed like an insurance company, I want to be billed like a human who is struggling to pay his bills and feed his kids as it is. I just thank God that Michelle has finally outgrown her intolerance to anything but the horribly expensive baby formula, so I might have a few bucks to pay down the bill.

As always, donations are being accepted, and if anybody’s got a large chunk of cash burning a hole in their pocket, you’re welcome to send it to SCMC on my behalf ;-). I just want this bill to go away so I can not worry about it anymore. I hate being in debt more than anything — granted, I have student loans and a house payment, but otherwise, I have no debt other than this bill.

OK, I’m done now — just had to get that off my chest. Meanwhile at work, I have to build an offsite backup server since I’m just sick of dealing with my tape drives. So at least I get to buy computer parts, so that always makes my day when I get to spend other people’s money. Regular blogging to return tomorrow when I catch up with everything.

Update: BTW: Everybody’s pointed out that I haven’t really talked much about my surgery. You’re right, I haven’t, because I don’t like to drown people in my personal crap, but the surgery helped a ton, and I’m about 100 times more functional than before. I’m able to walk again, and even jogged a hundred yards (which felt really…well….funny). I still get pain down there now and again because the scar tissue occassionally still hits the nerve, but I’m still far better than before.

OK, the DLT drive at work has gone dead — again (this will be the 3rd DLT drive I’ve been through here). The primary reason for using tape here at our office is so somebody can take it home nightly so we can have an off-site copy.

I’m looking to ditch the tape drive, and move to a permanent off-site solution. I’m looking into either an outsourced off-site (online backup) solution or rolling my own and just keeping the server in my garage at home until I can find cheap co-loco in Bend.

Have anybody rolled their own off-site backup system or used an outsourced provider? Has anybody used a reBYTE system for off-site use? What about using something like Ahsay’s off-site software? Or does anybody else have any bright ideas? I’m all ears.

OK, I’ve been cleaning up the closets at work and at home to help pay some bills, and have been adding it to eBay. So far, here’s what I have listed. I plan on adding a few more things later tonight (a Denon Reel-to-Reel, a classic Guerciotti road bike with extra racing wheels, some baby stuff, among some other things). If any readers of this site want to buy the items I have for sale outright, I’ll happily cancel the auction for you.

I’ve got a friend who’s looking to get a laptop/notebook/whatever. She’s not a big geek or anything, so just getting something functional, but easy for me to repair, is the goal. Needs at least 256 MEGs of RAM, PIII 700 or better, CD-RW, Floppy, modem, and that’s about it. Anybody have anything?

OK, I’m supposed to be leaving work in an hour, and so far, I’ve been up to my ears in broken crap. Started my day with a full reinstall/restore of our company’s accounting software, because something had gone corrupt. Then one of our modems for our off-site workers stopped working. Then the modem for our credit card interface went bonkers, and all day long, people have been bitching about how slow online bookings have been on our site. So I go upstairs and come to find that a script that was setup on our server to process the credit card transactions got stuck in a loop, and started up over 100 copies of itself. Needless to say, the server’s been less than response.

On top of all that, after I reboot, I find that I can’t get the online booking interface back up, and the server’s running dirt slow. No processes in task manager are taking over 5%, so what was going on? Ran SpyBot, no problems, ran TrendMicro, and it finds a backdoor virus installed on the online booking Web server — my most locked down server in the building (in theory). How the hell it got on there, I have no idea, but I’m trying to find into on how to eradicate it, meanwhile am scanning the entire building to make sure there’s no other holes in things.

OK, I’m in the process of just bulldozing our network, and have decided to migrate and start from scratch with Active Directory instead of dealing with the cobbled up nasty mess that kept me up all frickin’ night. Does anybody have any good reading recommendations, books, tips, sites, or other places to start? I’ve learned a lot about it reading around like I have, but I’m looking to take advantage of it to the fullest extent possible. Comment here, or e-mail me.

So some people don’t think I’m dead (**cough**yoleen**cough**), I just wanted to post a note to let you know I’m at work, have turned off online bookings on our server, and once the office shuts down in about 20 minutes, I’ll be dismantling things as much as humanly possible (per my previous post). My goal is to be out of here by midnight, but looking at my long to-do list for the evening, I might be here until about 2 or 3 in the morning. We’ll just see how it goes…

Update at 9:47: Random thought: I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many progress bars going at one time on three different screens. I’ve got one system doing a Ghost disk image in case something goes bonkers in those whole process, I’ve got one that’s downloading Windows 2000 SP4, and then the other one’s going crazy: about 50 windows open and 6 copy-file progress bars, backing stuff up to another machine, as well as a couple Winzip sessions. Meanwhile, I’m going across the street to get more caffeine.

Update at 12:02 AM: OK, it’s really frickin’ late, I’m still here, and really starting to hate the jackass that set this place up to begin with. He’s hard-coded FAR too much stuff and it’s hard for me to work around. I’m in the process of resetting up all the various profiles and policies. I’ve got the accounting software moved and setup, OS fully installed and Active Directory running on domain controller, so I just need to reconfigure all my thin terminals, profiles and policies at this point. The store across the street just closed for the night, and hopefully my caffeine supply will last me through the next couple hours.

It’s 1:30 AM…I’m tired, haven’t accomplished nearly as much as I would’ve liked, the profiles from before are apparently stored in pieces on several different servers. Why? I haven’t a f**kin’ clue. I did get my domain controller upgraded to Windows 2000, but a fat lot of good that did me — because the profiles and settings are stored all over the place on my old Citrix/Terminal Services server, I’m not able to get them stored in the right place on the new server to make everything function happy. To top it all off, somewhere in this frickin’ mess there are group policies that are conflicting with one another, basically locking down stuff that shouldn’t be locked down as well as opening up stuff that shouldn’t be open.

F**k it. I’m going home. The terminals have been reset to log into the old server, new server taken off line. Damn it.