Since the playoffs started I have been arguing with everyone telling them that the Giants are going all the way. Everyone thought I was nuts and wanted to have me committed. Well here we are, the eve of the Superbowl in which the Giants will face off against the Patriots. Nearly everyone on the planet believes the Patriots are a sure win with a double digit lead to boot. I’ll tell you now what I told everyone else when the Giants were heavy underdogs during the playoffs: ‘This team is not the same team you know from the regular season’. The last time the Patriots played the Giants they only won by three points, three measly little points. The thought of this being a blowout by the Patriots is a joke. My prediction is that the Giants win by at least six points. That’s just my opinion I could be wrong, but highly doubtful.
Vegas Update
I have been really busy the past couple of days sightseeing and non-stop partying. I would tell you about the non-stop drinking and partying but the phrase “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” is appropriate for this trip. You can see the photos by going to the following link: http://www.pc-doc.com/photos/album/72157602198350370/
Ciao!
Time For A Change
Please bear with me while I retool the site. I got tired of looking at the same template and decided to change it. Another reason for the change was because Safari and Flock were both rendering the page differently and incorrectly. I should have everything done by the end of the weekend.
Finally
It took some time for me to get this long overdue post out. The move went smooth and the servers are now sitting in their new home and new cabinets. There were a million little things that needed to get worked out and that chewed up a lot of my time over the next couple of weeks. I wore my body out over those two weeks, so much so that I came down with a cold and then finally a sinus infection from it. I am taking some antibiotics now for it as well as some other medications to keep it under control and keep me functional. Below are some pics from the job, both of which will take you to the Flickr gallery for the job.
Three Weeks Out
Things are finally coming together at the new location for my client. The server room is already at the point where I could bring in three of the four racks being installed. The fourth rack is in production and cannot be moved until the day of the move. The racks are attached with special bars that lock the units together. The racks had to be brought in so the electricians could drop down the power drops to the units and also ground the racks. The wiring and telecom guys should be dropping their lines into the racks starting next week.
New Office Shaping Up
I visited my client’s new office today to look over the progress. I met with the contractor, electrician and AC guy to discuss the server room needs. Here is a picture of the main entrance and soon to be conference room.
Hip Hip Hooray!!
It looks like my rank glitch is gone. My percentage between ranks in G.R.A.W 2 had been frozen (stuck) for nearly two weeks. Microsoft gave me no solution to my problem, however one of their community members made a suggestion that seems to have done the trick. He told me to host an unranked player match and the go into a ranked match thereafter. That starts another glitch, when you do that no matter what rank you are you show up as a rank 1 to others. After two straight wins my rank now shows 5% towards next rank. YEAH!!!!!!
Keeping Busy
One of my clients is about to move to a new location in the city. They just ordered some new Dell equipment to augment their existing IT infrastructure. The new equipment arrived on Saturday and I was able to get them up and running in a temporary location. I was able to get them to the point where I could remotely finish the work needed. I’m working on moving a large number of user directories to their new 3 Terabyte array. The array is attached to two servers and backed up by a LTO-3 tape library. Their existing server room has one rack in it and cannot accommodate the new equipment. Three new racks are going to be added to the new location at which point the new equipment will be placed in their permanent home. Working on the servers should keep me occupied all weekend with the occasional break to play some Ghost Recon 2.
Sick, Sick, Sick
Sorry that I haven’t posted anything in while, I was pretty sick. I had a sinus infection which had me laid out for several weeks. I usually get them at least once a year. The one I had this time was a real bad one. They gave me Cipro to knock it out, which is a pretty heavy Antibiotic. I felt a little better after a week but then my chest started acting up. This time I went back to the specialist that I usually see. He scoped my sinus cavity and saw the infection was still there. So he gave me some antibiotics which were stronger and a syrup with narcotics in it to suppress my coughing. I am starting to feel better now and hope this is the end of it all.
Crossing my fingers!
Throwing In The Towel
I am officially throwing in the towel on Vista. It just got to frustrating to handle, it was so unstable that anything could bring up a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death). I cannot blame Microsoft entirely on this one. But what I can say without a question is that NVIDIA & Apple should be thrown in front of an oncoming bullet train. They were the two companies that made my life miserable the most with Vista. NVIDIA’s role in this nightmare was not being able to deliver stable drivers for their motherboard or video chipsets. It’s not like this new OS was sprung on them out of nowhere. The final shipping version of the OS has been available for enterprise customers since November. They have been receiving a lot of flack about the current state of their drivers from their faithful fans. I just couldn’t stand my system sitting idly and then all of a sudden *BOOM* blue screen. Or my raid array being broken every couple of days and having to wait for it to rebuild. Enough is enough, I’ll give it another 3 months or so before I attempt to install Vista again.
Now onto my gripe with Apple, can someone say iTunes? Is Steve Jobs insane enough to think that by holding back on a version of iTunes that works on Vista, it will make people jump ship for Macs? Enough already iTunes worked better on Beta versions of the OS than it did on the retail version. Their latest release of the software that supposedly fixes Vista compatibility still crawls like a dog and is still not recommended for x64 versions. God to import several MP3s took about 15 minutes for processing alone.
Last night when I had the latest crash for no reason whatsoever, I had to have a little reality check. Was there any benefit at the moment to running Vista over XP? The answer was a resounding ‘NO’, not even close. Besides all the eye candy there is not much else being offered as a benefit at the moment. I could however list all the negatives, the biggest one being lack of drivers. So back to XP I went and quite frankly my system runs faster under XP then it did with Vista.