minupla

test

2008-01-22T04:11:41Z

14:30 All laundry mats should have wifi #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

test

2008-01-05T04:11:14Z

11:44 At a client site #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

test

2007-12-16T04:10:05Z

12:32 Done my exam, commencing self-memory wipe.... #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

test

2007-12-13T04:12:10Z

11:04 twitter #
11:04 reinstalling windows #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

test

2007-12-08T04:16:23Z

11:17 Fixed the domain controllers at the client. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

test

2007-12-07T04:17:46Z

10:59 Consulting means never knowing what today will being much less tommorrow #
15:39 I hate it when I leave my laptop at home when I go to a client site. I ALWAYS end up needing it. #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

test

2007-12-05T04:22:29Z

09:07 Working on ISA server for a client #
17:10 @medwyn Like this? #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

test

2007-12-04T04:10:16Z

23:39 Thinking I should be going to bed and not playing with Twitter #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Catchup

2006-11-03T11:11:44Z

OK, I think I've proven that I'm hopeless at remembering to post on this thing :(.

Letsee, long story short (for those of you who don't follow my wife
peachtess's journal, since she actually posted all this in real time :))

Over the last year

My company bought another company, and basicly replaced our IT dept with theirs. Only two people survived the purge of our IT dept, I was one. We also got an office in Toronto
I got promoted to Security Coord, and got relocated to the office in Toronto
My company sold out all operations to another company which has offices in Vancouver

Obviously I left out a lot of drama, but thats the last 2 years in executive summary bullet points :)

So the new bosses want me to come visit in Vancouver. So if you're reading this, and are in the Vancouver area and want to get together for lunch at some point, I'm not sure of my exact schedule yet, but I'll be leaving for the lower mainland on Sat and back on Thursday of this week (I just found out Weds.)

Drop me an email if you're interested in getting together and we'll sort something out :)

Min

Well that was anticlimactic

2004-08-05T11:01:21Z

Well Tropical depression 2 fizzled. So all my worrying and prep work is for naught. Oh well, I'm sure there will be other tropical storms.

Not you understand that I want one, just seemed a bit anticlimactic (pun intended) that it only dropped a couple of rain showers on us here :)

Tropical Depression Two

2004-08-03T17:18:39Z

Ack, I've been badly delinquent in writing in my LJ. Time to give everyone a bit of an update.

Looks like we're about to get a bit damp from a Tropical Storm (Currently Tropical Depression 2) in the next day and a half.

As my lovely wife points out "It's the world's best fan" :)

Information on Tropical Depression Two is here.

Hopefully we won't see any major damage here, since we're a fair ways inland from the coast (relatively speaking. It's probably 2 or three miles, but in Antiguan terms, it's a long way!)

Wish us luck, we might be off line for a bit if the power goes down.

Take care.

New icons

2004-06-29T10:44:41Z

Oh and I really must thank Slack & Hash's Domain for the extra geeky Reboot Hexidecimal LJ icons :)

Mornings

2004-06-29T10:10:49Z

Now it's a well known fact. I HATE mornings. Loath them. I wish they were never invented. If I had a time machine I'd go back and strangle the first person who muttered the M word. Getting the picture?

Well I'll let you in on a little secret. Every once in a long while I wake up for no apparent reason, rested and ready to wake up at 6am. On these strange bizzare mornings I get up and I watch the sun break through my bedroom windows and I feel an emotion that I find it hard to credit with any time before noon... a happy, contemplative feeling. Content. But don't tell anyone. I'd hate to get laughed out of geekdom!

So good morning to you, but you didn't hear it from me!

Sims, and quakes

2004-06-28T15:49:43Z

My wife and I spent a very enjoyable weekend playing The Sims together. Now you need to understand, my wife is a HARD core sims player. She can sit down and design whole houses from scratch, and goes off to various sites looking for the right cupboard for her themed areas. I begin to get an idea of how I must look when I'm tackling a thorny technical problem. I'm in awe of her Sims prowess.

On a different note, the island had quite a little shaker last night. My boss's area got quite shook up, my wife and I got a bit of a jolt too. Everything's fine, no damage, just a bit of a surprise to feel the earth move. :)

Also, I (finally) have a Gmail account. There was much rejoicing. It's cool, and fast, and let's face it, a gig of mail storage is VERY nice.

Oh well back to work. See you next post!

BBQs, Cats, Vets, oh my

2004-06-20T23:29:41Z

We were invited to our fisrt nieghborhood BBQ today. We brought a cake from fresh from the expat supermarket. Our hostess is a vetrenary nurse who is down here for a year trying out Antigua for a friend who is a full vet and needs some help running the practice.

Seeing as how we have a hyperactive kitty, knowing a nearby vet is NOT a bad thing at all. Even better, her husband is an avid reader with a bent to SciFi books, so I will be raiding his library liberally I believe :)

Dinner was good, and food was abundant. And we got to meet people who were not work related, which is never a bad thing.

Then we came home and the aforementioned hyperactive cat has stolen the ear bud protectors from my Ipod and hidden them root knows where.

The cat and I are currently NOT on speaking terms.

Thanks Maple!

2004-06-20T05:36:21Z

Thanks to Maple (gerimaple) for letting me know she's on LJ and that a bunch of my friends that I'd lost track of over my long period of worklessnes (I'm SURE my adoring wife will chime in here with some comment about my propensitiy for crawling under rocks when I get down. After she wakes up :)).

It's good to see you guys, and I'm sorry if I fell out of touch. I'm back and on my feet again, if a lil ways from Vancouver.

Minupla

Another day in paradise

2004-06-20T03:58:44Z

OK, I'm going to kill the cat, the computer, or both. Probably both.

First the cat woke me up at 7-oh-god-it's-early-clock on a saturday, by the tough to ignore expediant of droping a vase off the table onto the floor. I ignore this. I assume it was the tail end of some nightmare, and try to go back to sleep. Then I hear the cat playing with chunks of broken glass. sentimentality won out over prudence and I rescue the cat from his potentially leathal playthings. Back to bed. No luck, turn on the Ipod, pick up the palm pilot and read some more of an e-book. Go check on my service pack 1 download. Crashed. Big blue screen of death crashed. STOP 0x0000000000077 (your 0s may vary). Fsck. reboot, look up the error code on the laptop. It seems that windows was unable to read the memory off the paging file correctly. This could be caused by:

bad block on the harddrive

virus on the computer

device driver wierdness

bad hardware on the bus

screwed up trace on the montherboard

random wierdness in XP

bad karma from killing too many fuzzy woodland creatures in a former life as a dinosaur in the late Mesozoic Era

Unfortunatly debugging consists of trying something and letting it sit for hours hoping that you've fixed it. I think I'm on stop error #4 now and have ruled out virus, bad blocks. Bad karma is looking suspect tho. Or at least it will be after I kill the cat.

So about this time the cat decides that running across the house, boucing off the bed in the spare bedroom and over the back of the chair I use at the computer and onto my bare back with claws extended sounds like a REALLY fun idea.

But oh well it's midnight, Peachtess is asleep, the cat is through destroying the house and taunting the landlord's dogs. and windows is working at least for the time being. Well see. Tommorow can't much help but be better in terms of that stuff. But hey, it's small stuff. I finally have the woman of my dreams living with me. A few broken furnishings is nothing I can't handle. As for the cat... well I suspect I'll forgive him too, if he don't jump on my back again tonight.

Tommorow we have a BBQ with a new nieghbor that moved in a few houses down the road. Understand a bit about where we live. We live on a dead end street with a hill behind us and about 7 other lots on the dead end road. All of which are empty. Aside from the occasional goat anyways.

So to say they're a nieghbor is probably streaching the point in what I'd used to consider it, but we can see their house and that makes them close here.

In major news, the only bookstore worthy of the name on the island expanded this weekend, and now have *drum roll* a sci fi section. There was MUCH rejoicing. I might actually be able to read something with more technology then canal boats. peachtess got a book for herself, which made her happy. Unlike me she's attached to the idea of owning dead-tree editions of books. She thinks nothing of buying an MP3 from Itunes but the idea of buying an ebook is anthipetical to her. Can't say I understand it really, but I love her, small quirks and all. :)

I may have to revise my decision about letting the cat live another day. he's currently crawling up the back of the desk and is trying to hit the escape button on my keyboard, which would probably cause my poor LJ client to dump my whole post into the electronic bit bucket. He's only gotta last 3 more minutes till the day ends. He'll probably make it.

Oh well, that's it for today. Good night gentle reader, and see you next post.

Fish and Chips

2004-06-19T01:04:08Z

Fridays in Antigua are the best. The reason? Chippy's Fish and Chips.

Let me explain. Chippy's is this little trailer that pulls into an otherwise vacant lot beside the road in one of the more touristy areas. He's only open on Wednesday and Friday, but he serves the best Fish and Chips, lobster bits (deep fried too), and shrimp that I've ever had in my life. English style with the beer batter. Mmmmm.

Particualry living in a foreign land, those little touch stones of Canadian culture mean so much. At work, I quite often 'order native' as one of the other people in the systems department put it, and order things which I am still not always sure what will arrive from the name. (Previsions are big banana type things. Who knew?)

So Friday peachtess and I treat ourselves to Fish and Chips at Chippy's.

If you're ever on the island, give him a shot, he's out Dickenson Bay way. Just make sure it's a Wednesday or Friday night. If in doubt ask any of the ex-patriots. We know where he is :)

The workday report

2004-06-18T18:55:45Z

Today's new toy is

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a [...]  >') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

Today's new toy is <a href="http://www.mamboserver.com" title="Mambo CMS"  target="_blank">Mambo</a> a very slick website in the box that we're deploying as an internal intranet server at my workplace.  It has the ability to add on more modules as you need them and makes for a very easy install and deployment of a consistant, slick looking website.

Check it out next time your boss says "We need a website by 3pm today".  You won't be sorry!

I'm very glad my wife, Medwyn (<lj user="peachtess">) has decided that she doesn't need to swipe my laptop anymore.  Will save me sleeping with it under my arm!

She's such a geek...

Oops, Nagios is complaining.  Enough live journal for now I guess!

Windows installs

2004-06-18T01:52:22Z

Well here we go again, another windows install. You know you've installed windows too many times when those little blurbs (you know the ones, "Windows is easier to use", etc) that flash up in an attempt to brainwash you while windows is installing start to take on a sarcastic tone instead ("Windows is more fun?! Ya, right, do I LOOK like I'm having fun?").

And once you finally get windows installed, you're faced with the daunting task of service packs and patches. Now mind you, since Microsoft provides no realistic method to get the patches offline, you're faced with connecting your poor vaunerable impressionable young install onto the mean nasty internet, and download, possibly for hours, service pack after service pack, while you hope that a worm, or script kiddie doesn't decide to knock your house of cards over and leave you to start all over again.

It's no wonder that people dont' patch their systems. After several dozen reinstalls of windows, it's hard to find the enthusiasm to secure yet another install of windows.

The WorkDay Report

2004-06-17T19:48:25Z

A relitively quiet day at work, just building some machines and playing around with

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a [...]  >') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

A relitively quiet day at work, just building some machines and playing around with <a href="http://www.nagios.org" title="Nagios"  target="_blank">Nagios</a>.  Nagios has got to be the coolest network monitor out there.  I have it monitoring tempature in the server room, hard drive space on our various servers all over the world, and a host of other things.  And when it finds a problem I have <a href="http://www.festvox.org" title="Festival"  target="_blank">Festival</a> speaking the alerts aloud.  The cat's meow!

Goodnight

2004-06-17T06:44:20Z

Well I got my live journal up and running, and the client working, and the default page cleaned up so I look a bit less like a newbie. Now I'm crashing, and taking my hyper wife with me. Good night all!

First entry

2004-06-17T04:33:23Z

Well it's another hot night in Antigua. Of course, you don't know that there were any previous hot nights in Antigua, since this is, after all my first Live Journal entry. I come to live journal following my wife. She followed me to Antiuga, I followed her to Live Journal, it seems fair doesn't it?

Well as you have probably gathered by now this entry is just an excuse not to post the stereotypical "Welcome to my live journal, I will be posting here soon" message, while I try to fix up my page to look like something other then an explosion in a typeset workshop. With luck it'll be more tidy by the time you read this, gentle reader.

Good luck and see you next update.