Eh Steve! pt Deux

So I got around to upgrading quite a bit of my stuff today and that also included my wordpress. This post is to test the new support for the iPhone wordpress app

Not really sure if I should have made 3 separate posts for this or not but I’ll try and not write to poorly.

*** Life in Kansas

So far all is going well. I recently discovered I don’t really live in Kansas or Missouri. In between the two there is a really nice area called Johnson County (joco for short). Basically it’s the super nice area of both states from what I understand. I was able to determine this over time talking to people. If you spoke to someone from Kansas they would talk about people from Missouri in a certain way and another way if you were talking about someone from Johnson Country and vice versa.

So far not doing to bad making friends in the area. Actually except for a few hiccups I am doing pretty well. The job is going really well almost to good to be honest. At this time I hope that the customer decides to renew the residency program. Do not get me wrong I do believe I am helping them quite a bit with their implementation of Netbackup.

**** Phones

So I finally got out of the stone age with my phone. I am currently sporting both an iphone 3gs and Blackberry bold. I have not had them both very long at the time of this writing but I thought I would share my quick thoughts on comparing the two. The blackberry is stronger in the area of call quality and battery life while the iphone is stronger in applications and it’s screen quality.

Regarding their keyboards they are both fine I can use them both with somewhat equal accuracy. A couple of quick things about the iphone. The interface and apps are really what makes thing more preferred in my opinion. What I find ironic about this is that Apple learned this all important valuable lesson from their friend Microsoft. Historically when Windows was released it did so well because of it’s visual interface, applications and ease of use. Ease of use this is a concept that I hope Microsoft recaptures in their upcoming Windows 7 and learned from the mistake of Vista.

I actually just today got an invite for Google voice. I haven’t used it that much but after reviewing it’s features it seems awesome. No integration with the iphone right now unless you jailbreak it. I’ll probably wait a little bit since both are somewhat beta right now. As cool as Google voice seems right now I really look forward to Google Wave.

*** Travel

I’m gonna be on a boat! pretty soon

Below is my travel plans for this year so far. There may be a trip to Jupiter at somepoint over Xgiving and/or Xmas. Lemme know if there is anything going on.

This post is so long overdue I am not really sure where to begin on the number of things that have changed. I’ll probably just list them and then write more.

- Got new job

- Got new Car

- Brother is now living with me

- I moved to Kansas City

Long story short the new job is a Symantec Resident Consultant for the West Region. It was an offer I could not refuse but required me to move to Kansas city for the residency itself. This would be the first time I have ever moved outside the state of Florida. I will have to deal with some pretty big life changes like going to a place where I know no one, snow!, new job.

I am single with no ties so I was able to make the change. I could always come back is my thought. Today would be my 28th day here and so far things are going pretty well. The new job is going well I like it a great deal more than my old job so far. I have only met one person outside of work so far but what an individual it is.  I am still exploring Kansas city. For the record it isn’t as bad as it sounded, so far.

When I finsih uploading my facebook stuff you should check it out. Also some of the pics are geotagged which you can see my collection at http://www.flickr.com/photos/12930767@N05/map/

Notable things I have done so far are:

- Went to a Kansas City Royals baseball game

- Saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live

- Went to the Kansas City Power and Light district

- Went to the Plaza

Ok going to bed

Life has been keeping me quite busy. Unfortunatly most of those things are things I can’t talk about publicly so that probably has contributed to me not writing. I am writing because I want to comment on this while it’s still fresh.

Fast forward from my last post to this weekend. I went shopping, twice. For 2 different things I went looking at cars which is a first for me. I have never actually shopped for a car and I can tell you what an experience it is. I know it won’t really shock you if I told you that I heavily researched the whole car buying process on the internet.

I went to test drive a car and my friend warned me ahead of time that afterwards you kinda have to give them a “thanks for ride goodnight kiss”. I already knew the MSRP of the car and the invoice price. I even had a quote from their internet sales dealer.

I drove the car around for a bit came back 20 minutes later and of course the sales guy was like blah blah blah. I said give me 2 things, 1 your contact information in case I want to contact you and 2 your BEST out of the door price.

So as predicted he went to talk to some manager guy and came back with a number 1k less than MSRP. I laughted at him and said I already have better than that from this same exact dealship. He asked I said some number and change and he quickly replies “if I can do that minus the change can we do this today?”

My thoughts here are sharp and to the point this IDIOT did not quite hear me the first time when I asked for his BEST price. See here I think the problem is that the whole car dealship practice has not yet conformed to a paradigm shift of internet/technology/business.

When there is a paradigm shift businesses need to change also or they will die. My good friend and role model Ben got into the computer business during the late 80’s early 90’s. During this time period computers were HOT. He built them and sold them as a distributer, business was good.

Come up to now if his business model was still the same he would likely be out of business and working for Microsoft or something else. That is not his story he shifted the focus of his business model and now is a service oriented seller with hardware on the side and is still doing well.

The second item I saw I happen to see while out with my brother at Target. I saw a eee pc 8.9 inch netbook for 329.99 . This stood out to me because the much much much superior model (recently released even) is around the same price but light years ahead of the model I saw. It’s on sale on Amazon.

In both cases if you are internet capable and shop around you’ll find the best deals around. I personally think that if I were to run a business the model would be slightly different than those of today. The only reason why you can’t completely abandon the old model is because there are still a ton of stupid people and even the savvy ones still have to hands on see the product. So far the car dealship I would only keep a couple of sales people, fire the rest and be very competitive against any dealers in the area.

Lata

Soo yea lots of stuff going on in my life right now. Games are on a slight cut back do lots of stuff I need to do. Listed in no particular order and there are some items omitted since this is world readable.

- My brother and I are looking for a place to live in the Orl area currently. This is not set in stone as it could depend a little on 2 ommited items

- I am currently patching my ESX server for the first time and I have to say that this is ESX’s biggest weakness. The patching Method BLOWS I, repeat I had to script it to make it bearable. So far my server has not melted

- I need to order my irl funds even though I don’t have much I should probably look at it more

- I Solved a really tough PureDisk today at work. It took 3 days and a Puredisk developer to fix it but I was very on with my diagnosis of the problem. Since the fix required a database alteration a developer’s opinion is needed.

- I need to settle the rest of the cruise details

- I am still trying to prepare upgrading my wordpress to 2.7 but some other computer projects are higher priority right now

- After dealing with ESX patching I thnk I am going to make a virtual machine sometime that is a ESX patch, Netbackup Liveupdate and Windows Update server. Most likely I will have C Horry Assist with this project.

- Part of the reason why I am upgrading my ESX server is because I am trying to get vmtools support into Ubuntu 8.10 while I realize there are hax ways to get it I don’t hax unless I need to. The reason for this is so I can practice a MediaWiki Mysql recovery

!Server patch done , wish me luck on the reboot

WARNING: Incoming techno-babble!

So I just finished building and testing some features of the Symantec product Puredisk . I really have only recently began to dig into this but I think it’s going as well as it can go. This product is quite complex maybe even more so than Netbackup.

While I have learned much on my own the process is so much slower. As I have said before professional athletes have coaches for a reason. As talented as one may be they can be hamstrung without guidance. Talented teammates could also help make the dissection of this product much easier but we are all under the same restriction, TIME.

To give one an idea I had to build and test the products operation using my own time and lab equipment outside of work. While I recognize that backline engineers in my profession also do this it’s not something one should expect a frontline guy to do. The bad part is that this is unavoidable if you plan to learn and be good at Puredisk or any software. It’s just very frustrating that IT managers do not understand the complexity of these softwares and what it takes to overcome them.

I swear they must think the software we work on is easy to work on and anyone can do it. Actually the latter part of that last statement is probably true. Personally I disagree with the hiring methodologies in my department. Prior to the economy server crashing we hired a good number of people. Very few of which I would have endorsed. While I realize that my position is more an intro spot what I do is not a pushover joke. We need talented people.

While that’s the rough end of my job there are some good things. My boss is still cool. I pretty much get whatever vacation I need, my peers acknowledge my talents, and I can come in a little late no problem, oh and I still have a job.

On the side I have a couple of other projects I need to do when I get a chance those are listed below. I start vacation soon so maybe I’ll be able to work on some of these.

- Test recovery of an external wiki database export (and document it). This is a reminder to myself I want to know if import a database again if it clobbers or xor’s

- Upgrade 1-900-steve.com wordpress to v 2.7 this should be good I have seen sneak previews of the 2.7 release and look forward to it.

- Test new backup solution for 1-900-steve.com via backup exec system recovery. I’ll do this before upgrading my personal wordpress site.

- Test wordpress plugin that auto formats page for iphone. Anyone know if there is something similar for g1’s?

– Sy out

For us gamers Xmas is coming a little early this year. Below is the list of games I should probably play or else I’ll probably lose my gamer status. Yea and I thought last year was bad, hope nothing important comes up in life.

Out Now  – Dead Space , Fable 2 , Star Wars Force Unleashed , Mercenaries 2 , Bionic Commando Rearmed , Mega Man 9

Oct 28  – Red Alert 3, Fallout 3

Nov 7   – Gears of War 2

Nov 13  – Wrath of the Lich King

Nov 18  – Left 4 dead

Dec 4   – Prince Of Persia

????  – StarCraft 2 beta

So a bit of good and bad, probably more bad. At the top of the bad is the economy. The economy just ended probably my only chances of landing a job I could be happy with. I really hope that I get another chance at something great.

The good is that I just got back from Blizzcon and it was a blast. A bit of an expensive one compared to PAX but still fun. I met some really cool people and got to see some friends that I had not seen a while. Major highlights from the trip include meeting some super cool people, seeing old friends, and eating at the in/out burger (damn good).

I have a ton of things to do writing here was just one of them. I’ll probably try and make a seperate page to describle the list of things I want to do.

-Sy out

With so much to do al the time I am not really surprised why I do not update my blog so much. Anyway I’ll just get on with the interesting stuff as of late.

- Finally got a digital camera , a first for all mankind

- Evan, Caroline, and the Hayford came into town this weekend to play some cards. I played really well and it was really nice seeing good friends from out of town

- I am still on gaming suspension but I took a small break this weekend since friends were in town. Do not worry games on hold is a good thing right now.

- I just changed the way backups are down for 1-900-steve.com I think the new method is supposed to be a little better however I need to test the restores for it sometime.

- For future reference those who really want to learn alot about web computing should try hosting their own web domain it’s no easy task however you WILL LEARN alot.