Posts made by jt1001001

Bridges are crazy busy this summer, we've avoided going to Canada just cause of the wait times. Over a 1/2 hour one day at 7:30 AM, usually its a couple minutes at that hour.

@Minion-Queen I'll drive for cookies, you're only what an hour away if that??

Need Coffee.. Took me a bit

The whole home lab thread got me itching, so I set up my raspberry Pi last night that I got for Christmas. Good! SSH from work into this morning, rebooted it:
shutdown -h now
OOPS
so now I guess I have to work rest of today

Contract review with the carrier provider we do not dare speak its name. Unfortunately I'm just the tech input our VP of Carrier Services is actually handling the negotiating part. I have a feeling my documented cases of outages (or is it outrage in this case??) may be enough to get a lower price but not enough to switch.

Slept on the Little Rock when I was a Boy Scout. They still offer troops an overnight experience so one the kids are old enough I have a feeling I'll be back there.

Its only what 6-7 hours depending on traffic. Though keep in mind that's me driving with a 3 year ond and a 1 year old so frequent stops a must unfortunately

I like basic as basic as possible, and also what I call "1 click close" where I click one button to close a ticket and not have to jump through tons of hoops to close out.

Speaking of lab stuff: After my boss gets back next week, I will probably have a couple big (and very very heavy) Dell 2900 towers to get rid of. They were former lab systems for us. I know one has 16GB ram in it, no idea what the other one has, either 160 or 250GB drives and PERC raid card (might be real raid cards not sure) if anyone is interested let me know otherwise probably off to the scrap heap. note these are VERY HEAVY TOWERS so would be local pickup in Buffalo NY not going to ship. Again have to check with the boss first to make sure its OK (company gets really weird about giving stuff away for some reason). Just want to put it out there

seeing if I can get this old junk laptop to fire up. Might become a freepbx box

When I was in college we had a computer "lab" for the Electrical Tech dept (lab in quites of you coudl call 2 non-networks computers a lab I guess) They were always breaking down and I was fixing them up on my own. My dad was a computer hobbiest so I had access to magazines (at the time) like PC Magazine, Computer!, Computer Shopper (remember those? as big as a phone book!) so that was actually how I learned about computers, reading and fixing up the lab stuff. After I graduated I applied to Ingram Micro for their call center thinking I was going to sales but was interviewed by one of the tech support managers. I ended up getting hired, had 3 days of training then thrown to the wolves on the phones every day. Picked up quite a bit and learned both Customer Service skills and tech skills as I went along

Back from Family Reunion weekend. Well, not really back we never left they all came here. Did all the "tourist" things we never do except when family's in town...Niagara Falls, CanalSide, etc. Fun tiems but ready to get into my next project, mailbox moves!

I fall in the "used to have" category. Cut my teeth on my basement lab where I took every scrap PC/Server i could find and made it something. I had an old 486 (back in the day) that became a NT 4.0 machine that barely ran. A Laptop with a broken screens became an exchange 5.5 servers. Network was a scrap barely functioning 3com hub, and i managed to get at the time Proxy server running on the NT box for dial-up "cached" Intenret access. Today i WISH I could have that all back but with wife and 2 kids, I've got a very tiny corner of the garage, so much of my learning is either VM's on my laptop (windows 10 is a GODSEND here with real Hyper-V)or ugh cloudatcost (yes got suckered into that ponzi scheme, never again) and then finding time to play which may only be 1 or 2 hours a week. But the passion to learn new items and do it hands on is still there and I get very excited when I actually get my hour or so to "play". I am in agreement with hiring someone who has at least similar passion and maybe not a true home "lab" but has the for lack of a better term "desire" to have a lab environment. We have an employee here we brought in as a intern. At the time, he asked if we had any broken computers and told us he was setting up (and I quote) "this FreeBsd thing called PfSense because I hear I don't need to buy a router it just works and I want to play with it" I immediately recommended we hire him. he's now our top network engineer with the home lab that I drool over

Excused. Turns out I know one of the witnesses in the civil case. Off to family reunion weekend

Postponed back in January when my younger one was in the hospital so have to serve now

Jury Duty today. Big hurry up and wait.

and much cheaper than the $20 or $30 the baby stores want for their white noise makers. We got one at our shower and I think it lasted maybe 3 or 4 months then died. Looked a replacement, said forget it and put a clock radio tuned to static in my older ones room at the time. For the younger one didn't even bother with a white noise maker and just did a radio from the get go.

@coliver Garage Sales! Usually can find an old radio

@coliver said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

That's pretty much what it was. Emilia is used to white noise so without it she kept startling herself awake. Normally she wakes up at ~3AM and goes immediately back to bed after a feeding. Last night she was up ~every 10 minutes.

WIth my boys, battery powered radio on static got us through some overnight power outages. Being an Amateur Radio nut, it was easy to just set one of my ham radios to an unused frequency and I have enough batteries to go all night.

@coliver Miss the "relaxing" part, now its the Chase after the 1 year old while making sure the 3 year old isn't up to no good!
Cleaning house this weekend out of town relatives coming in hope I can get the kids to help. One of these days I'll actually get a home lab setup!