Back on April 20th I took a plane to Boston and spent a week in Sandwich, MA(which happens to be in Cape Cod). It was work related so I did not have much idle time to see the sights. The flight was not much fun as it was over 3 hours each way. I did like the temperature up there. It stayed nice and cool the entire time. if only the South Texas area had that kind of weather constantly…cool weather I mean, not the snow that MA has.
I know it has been way too long since I have graced the Interweb with my presence. A lot has been happening these past few months that my blog lay slient. I will start with my Son of course. He has been doing great, he is a very good natured baby so far. He smiles a lot and will laugh often enough. He is eating solid-ish food along with his soy formula.
On the job front, at the end of July I took a new job at a company called Glacial Energy. It is not a bad place to work and the responsibilities have increased compared to the job with Wells Fargo. I enjoy the responsibility so that is always good. It is also more along the lines of what I like to work on and do. I manage the network, the servers, and the workstations. Of course I also do the helpdesk part of the job, which is not bad. It does help that most of the people that I talk to are of a nice sort so it makes the troubleshooting a rather calm affair. I am slowly trying to improve the way things are done and optimize my job as to make things easier on everyone.
Now, on to some of my hobbies. I have of course ‘mastercontrol’ as the AD server here at home with ‘zoidberg’ running a RAID 1 setup using two 230GB drives. I have a third sitting around just in case one fails. Unfortunately ‘zoidberg’ currently seems to have a problem when it comes to uptime; which I may have found the solution to it. As usual my mind seems to revolve around the computer and related topics and so most other hobbies tend to take a back seat. I do want to work more on my chess playing and get back into trying to learn the guitar. I have some natural talent with chess but no music talent at all so the latter will be a bit harder to do.
I got a bicycle from my niece Jessica and her husband. I have kept finding excuses to not fill up the tires with air so I can exercise more. I need to start because when I look at my Son I do sometimes think of what would happen when I depart from this rather buoyant body I am attached to. If it were to happen before he is grown then that would of course not be a good thing.
As you can see I have done a bit and have been mulling over a lot of things recently. I know I ought to update this blog more but time is not a luxury that I seem to have a lot of.
Well, today was my last day as an employee for First Community Bank(FCB). They were purchased by Wells Fargo(WF) and WF had no IT job openings in or around Houston, TX for me to pick up on. It was not a bad run as I started my employment with banks starting with Community State Bank(CSB) in March of 2001. After a few years or so they were bought by FCB. I got to work for FCB until today, September 30th, 2005. Technically the last month or a little bit more was under the WF tent but it was still going by FCB. All those Bank regulations are fun to follow, don’t ya know. I am sure I will find another job soon. Maybe it will be closer to home. Anyway, I am going to get going. I got chores to do around the house and all that rubbish. Later…
We have been a bit busy these past couple of weeks working on seperating the Houston branches from the San Antonio ones. I think it came out ok even with a lot of little odds and ends to take care of.
So far this week has dragged on. Oh well, the weekend is coming up and it will be a long one at that. No work on Monday means good times. This week up at work I got the Cisco 1721 router talking to the new T1. I even got the Cisco PIX 505 almost totally configured. I still have a few items to set up on the PIX and it will be all done. I enjoy how easy most of the Cisco stuff actually is to configure. Of course I never use a GUI or anything like that. Command line all the way as usual. Much easier that way it is…
My boss and I are going to be up in San Antonio some of next week to open a new branch of First Community Bank. It will be fun. Mostly we make sure the network equipment and workstations are ready for opening day which is still slated for early next week. Thankfully I am not doing the driving or we would be screwed. I was never good at finding my way on city streets and freeways. I will miss one thing, well, she is not a thing. My wife and I do not normally spend that much time apart(except when at work) but I do have my cell phone and we have the nationwide long distance on our home phone so it’s all good. Got to go…lates.
No, not the bug spray. RAID means “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks”. It is a term used in the computing world for a collection of hard drives with fault tolerance so if one drive were to die, you could just replace it without downtime. Up here at work we just got a new server with 2gigs of RAM, two Pentium 4 Xeon 3.06Ghz processors, and two 36gig drives for a RAID 1(mirror). The second RAID device is 7 146gig drives acting as one which happens to be running RAID 5. This is fun stuff at least to me…anyway, gotta go…
Over at First Community Bank we are opening up a third location in San Antonio. Right now I am using the internet connection in the hotel I am staying at. We plan to go back to Houston tomorrow afternoon but the time depends on when we finish. Anyway, I am going to watch some tv and pass out from being tired. Smoke if you got em…
Looks like I do not have to work today…W00t…anyway, lates.
It does seem easy for me to forget and update this blog. Oh well, I am doing it today. Right now I am still up at work fixing a database problem. OT here we come…heh. Anyway, I cannot wait until the weekend. I have been having trouble sleeping lately and so Saturday’s have been when I catch up on sleep. On a side note, I think I may have some ideas again to redo some of theuncle.com and maybe smock.com. I gotta get going to finish the database fix. Lates…
Well, so far at First Community Bank I have been keeping busy. I have had to go back to Community State Bank once this week as some problems cropped up. FCB has been wearing me out which is a good thing. I have learned a few new things which are useful. Well, time to jet…lates…
If I remember correctly in one of my earlier posts I mentioned that Community State Bank was being acquired by First Community Bank. Well, I was informed yesterday that I will have a job even after it all goes through in January. I talked to the HR department it is all good. I still have the long drive but the fact that I still have a job is a good thing. heh… Anyway, it will be fun to have more hardware and software to take care of. In fact that is one of the reasons I signed onto being in the IT Industry. Getting things to work and tinkering is and hopefully will always be fun for me. This coming Monday I start working over at FCB. I am still on call for CSB of course as to leave them out in the cold would be a bad thing and would just be rather rude. All I can say is that it will be an experience.
Yes it has been a bit of a long week. All this week I was doing planning and slowly implementing a change up at work. A server there was having trouble and so I had to create a BDC(Backup Domain Controller) and then once everything worked promote it to a PDC(Primary Domain Controller). Since the original PDC was having trouble I was thinking this might not work and leave me in a big mess. Luckily it went somewhat smoothly. I still had to stay after hours but it was all good.
It seems that the bank I work for, Community State Bank, and First Community Bank are merging. The latter bank is quite a bit larger than the former. From what it seems, this might just be a good thing for most if not all.
I know, an odd title for this entry but as I was working I was thinking of the original Transformers movie where they first crashed to Earth. Teletran-1, their computer in the Ark, kept saying that. The Ark is the ‘name’ of their ship that crashed to Earth on the first episode/movie. Anyway, I had to fix an update on a couple of computers as I forgot an update a short bit back. Oh well, It works good now. Later…
Well, up at work a PDC server is starting to go so I am creating a BDC that will hopefully take over until a permanent solution makes itself known. It is scary that I remember how to do just about everything in NT4 in almost all regards. One nice thing is that Windowsupdate seems to work just fine if you get IE6 installed on NT4. It is updated and seems to be handling things ok. This solution is of course temporary as the computer that is being the BDC is a Compaq desktop and most people know how reliable they are. 
Anyway, it is getting closer to the time that I must take my leave for the day so, later.
This is of course a major irritation to have to make sure all the workstations that I lord over are patched. They all seem to be and this I guess was patched when I started doing all the updates. Below is a link from Symantec.
Blaster.Worm fix/removal
Well, at the moment I am making copies of data CDs. I have to make 2 copies of each CD and I have over 100 to make copies of. It will take a while but it has to be done. All this and on only 3 or so hours of sleep. I was off visiting family and got home at around 3a or so this morning.
You know, I have been updating the computers up at where I work now for the past two weeks as I have to work around the schedule of others. I do not mind that because that often is part of the job that IT Admins have to face. It is just that the updates are all the same. Good ol Windows. The joy’s of installing a service pack. I normally don’t have an issue with Windows service packs but I really do not like that Microsoft seems to think that it knows better and re-enables all the services it wants to. It never asks. I have a few services always disabled on all the work systems and even mine at home. “Automatic updates” is one as I do not need my computer deciding to connect and check for updates on it’s own. I also disable “Remote Registry” since there is no need for it on this set up or any others that I work with. “Windows Time” and “Windows Messaging” are also not needing so I disable them. Enough of my rambling on this subject though…