Another MS Monday

Okay so today’s troubles weren’t exactly Microsoft related. I was scheduled along with another coworker to attend an online Made2Manage virtual class. I was first to log in and called in soon after for the voice side of the class. Probably about 10 minutes into the class I loose sound in the phone. So I informed the instructor that I was heading up to the coworkers office to attend from there. Then I found she too was not getting sound. All of the office was down! We could call each other inside the office and receive DID calls from the outside, but no incoming to the main number nor could we pick up an outside line to make calls. So I borrowed a cell phone from someone and call our Executone office and they were going to call back on the cell. Needless to say… this techie could not figure out how the dang thing worked to answer it! I kept bringing up the address book. Then when I got it figured out, it wasn’t the call I was waiting for! Oh well, they showed up and fixed it after some time by just resetting the cards. Learning more and more each time he comes out to fix us up. I was telling him if he kept that up they would become obsolete.

Me and the family went to our home town this weekend. Didn’t want to since we had planned to for Easter too. I figured we’d better now before it got any closer. It was supposed to be a non event visit. Turns out they made it a combined birthday party on Sunday for my daughter and nephew who’s birthdays was on the 22nd. We were only there for about 24 hours. Sometimes those short trips are the best but they also kill the weekend. I’d say most of my weekends feel like three days but this kind of trip made it feel like one day. I had a great talk with my grandmother. She is a devout Catholic/Presbyterian. Attends church both Saturday and Sunday to both churches. She also tithes to both! I gave her the “Purpose Driven Life” book for Christmas. I almost thought it was the most meaningful gift I ever gave her. She expressed a satisfying thankfulness for the gift. This trip I see she has read 7 chapters. Doesn’t have a lot of time to read it she says. Not sure if that is the case but rather a hard to swallow conviction maybe. Her beliefs go deeper into tradition than I could expect her to give up. She thinks the death of so many churches is because of the parents. She thinks having a personal relationship with God means feeling his presence as a physical touch. She prays in memorized prayer. She has a problem with the woman’s position God has given them in the world. This was an awesome opportunity to tell her about what my relationship was like. I told her that the death of so many churches are due to their inability to change tradition to accept younger people. Our church is well aware of this and employs ongoing changes to the music worship ever year. Not to mention many other youth inviting places to server. Having a relationship with God could include feeling his touch, but there is a more indescribable feeling when you are close to Him. Having a continual chit-chat with Him throughout the day. Not getting stuck in repetitive meaningless chants. The Lutheran church we attend there sounds so robotic! Every prayer is written in the handouts and there seems to be no prayer from the heart. Everyone prays with their eyes open reading the words instead of listening. Not going to mention the off key tone deaf singing. But then again God does love all forms of worship! My point here is finding the reason why churches are dying today. If God has answered me, he has mentioned that nothing will save these dying churches. Only new born-again churches will rise. Some will occupy the same buildings, but most will not be of the same denomination. Religion is spelled as “D-O”, what I can do to get what I want. Christianity is spelled “D-O-N-E”, what has been done already. Jesus has already made the biggest sacrifice for our eternity and we can’t repay him. To attempt to repay him is an insult. Like paying someone back for giving you a birthday present! I would be insulted for getting the gift back. So I pray that my grandma would think about what I had said and that God would open her mind to a new rebirth.

I think I’m going to just give up on the virus updates. There are just too many to keep up on to mention here. I recommend updating your data files every hour!

Last Friday I determined this SCSI tape drive we have here has a bad motor for driving the tape reals. Talked with Certance, who handles Seagate tape hardware now. The tech said I needed to call their warranty dept for a swap and pay ~$165 for a refurbished unit that has a warranty of 90 days. The gal I spoke with wants $250! So I flat out said she must be pulling my leg because I could get one elsewhere for less without sending them my broken one. Without the core they would charge another $500 something! So I have now found a few sites selling refurbished units for less like I said without having checked, plus some do 90 days and others do 1 year!

Was unable to post Thursday. Bresnan had upgraded some hardware causing major outages and thus changing my IP again. I had a bigger skuff about this with our business account and the fact that we pay for a static IP. I wanted a discount because of this as well. Point being that they missed our account for calling before the outage. I want to make sure they understand that we are serious about keeping the same IP we pay extra for. On the flip side I got a new bill from USA Digital. They charged us $150 for not returning the cable modem the corporate office already conceded that we own and said they would let the local office know. In my talking with the corporate office again, they got that straightened… I wasn’t going to bring it up but now that this communication problem keeps rolling around with them, I had to mention that we have not been getting our $5 discount for the past 2 years then. So she was going to check into that and get back with me. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to keep dragging your feet. I was going to just let it go, but since they just want to milk us I couldn’t resist.

Getting Back to Normal

Life is getting back to normal. Had a great weekend. Most ppl might not think it was so great. But knowing how good it had been, my family is getting back to its better days again! I do need to get out of my dead-beat Sundays. The past few weeks I have neglected to shower, shave, or brush my teeth on Sundays. Just hanging around the house in my pj’s or previous days clothing. Total laziness! Of course the kids get that way too, but they do that even on the weekdays.

Worked on a friends PC Saturday most of the day. Didn’t need the bootleg Quickbooks CD after all. Turns out his 2004 CD is a full version. I thought this might be an easy one and just uninstall, clean up the directory and reinstall a fresh copy. He did have a working 2003 version on another PC and I got his backed up data restored into this so he at least has that as his backup. There was some bad data integrity found and fixed. I also attempted to condense the data that stretched back to 1998 or so! That was the kicker that took most of the day. But even with the fixed data 2004 wold not work. So I need to do some online forum chatting to find another solution. I also plan to barrow another XP box to test on. Seems he may have had some Windows updates needing to be done as well. However he being on dial-up left me setting it up and leaving for the day.

The bosses 21″ CRT monitor started making strange flickering a couple times this morning. Turns out we got his PC in December of 2000. I think it just went out of warranty. It had an extended warranty even. So a replacement is looking like $450-500. So I talked him into getting a flat panel and putting his PC upright on the floor. Suggesting a 17″ for about $430-450 he opted for a 19″ at $680! Sometimes I think he just waits for others to suggest getting things fixed or upgraded before he does something for himself. He has this old crappy cheap office chair and the arms were all broken up. He finally went out to get a new one and it turned out something was wrong with it. So he returned it and our purchaser ordered a replacement arm for the chair. I assume it was free as they probably send this stuff out as missing parts all the time. So he still has this crappy chair! Don’t know how he does things at home. I think his wife must handle all that kind of detail. It wouldn’t fly with her! Maybe this is a humbling part I need to learn.

Bresnan came with the new cable modem. So I had to run over and get the server refreshed with this. The guy that set it up said he was able to register it with them. But he seemed to insist that I needed to reboot. After I couldn’t get my Linux server to connect outside I humoured him and restarted the server. Still not connecting. By this time another tech came and had me point the browser to their modem and I went through their registration process and all was well. So I’m guessing that there might be some time-out issue that occurs after registering you need to have a connection process happen. Although I have no idea what he did while I was driving over. So now I have USA Digitals cable modem and called their corp. office up to check for any history on them ever replacing our modem. Turns out this is the third modem they have ever registered for us. Now I just hope they will be honest about identifying one of those other two MAC addresses as not theirs. I don’t think we need one anyway, but I just don’t like being ripped off any more. The lesson learned now is that you either be present at all times of tech services or write down all your serial numbers when you purchase these types of equipment. After a couple calls back and forth with USA Digital, we have come to a conclusion! It seems that modem models ending in “R” are retail models. It just so happens that the one we have does have the “R”. A call back later and they concede it must be ours then. Hey at least they had been pretty honest the whole time and not trying to be evil. They probably now have a task at hand to get a db going on their units vs. customer units.

Spent the afternoon creating DNS records for several known big ad trackers such as doubleclick.net and fastclick.net. The zones I have created now point to the machines themselves. By that I mean they point to themselves instead of the real site. Seems to be working. Will have to make sure no error logs are filling up somewhere tho later tomorrow.

The True Meaning of Friday the 13th

Our ISP OneEighty Communications has had major problems with their service since yesterday. When I called, they seemed to have an idea of what it might be and were on it. Today they had no clue yet. I was going to be bummed if I couldn’t post today! Anyway they seem to have it under control now just before noon. Almost seems faster than before too.

Now the QC wireless isn’t connecting properly. I’m thinking it might be an incompatibility issue. Looking into the driver/firmware versions. So It can still connect to the farther but open AP.

First thing this morning at work I had two users with no connection to the AS-400. I used to see this once in a while and just had to recreate their profile for the connection. Luckily I didn’t forget to try that and it worked fine for both. Seems to have been sparked by some administrative duties my coworker was performing to eliminate extra sessions that were laying around. Will have to keep that in mind next time it happens.

Got the dual VCR/DVD unit set up at home now. Haven’t tested any media out yet but was just configuring it for channels and date/time. Seems that it can get the date/time automatically via broadcast from local channels. It didn’t set over night so I just set it manually this morning.

Put the UPS in-line. Seems that one of my plugs on the wall is a little loose and the battery kept kicking in so I moved it to the bottom plug and all is well. Must be a short. Also played with the Seagate tape drive. I recalled working on it once before. Seems that it fails to turn the tape. The only tape motion is by the rubber wheels tugging it but who knows. I’m going to check if they might repair it for a descent price. They are worth about $150. Who knows, maybe I’ll buy it from the company for my home server.

Wow the USA Digital techs came already this morning to pick up their antennae. I think they planned to take their modem as well but I got the manager trained well to call me about everything. I told them to hold off taking it because I wanted to investigate the possibility that they may have taken ours during one of many service calls.

The Search For Yesterdays Software

Got a call earlier this week from a fellow Christian friend wanting my assistance with his Quickbook troubles. Seems during an upgrade to 2004 software left him with a malfunctioning application. In attempts to go back to the previous version, he snapped the CD in half trying to get it out of the case. Bummer! Talking with Intuit via India, they offered to restore him for around ~$700. So today I have been scouring the net for a bootleg copy somewhere. He at least has the license to make it somewhat legal.

Installed the replacement PC for Building B this morning. Problem is the optical mouse is a USB mouse and there is no USB connector on the PC. Dates this somewhat eh? But hey this Dell smoked the IBM with less of hardware even. Go figure. So I am working together a shopping list. I need a couple mice and a 5 port switch. Optical mice run nice in the dirty place we have here. Need the switch to replace the base 10 hub that connects our conference room and Building B to the LAN. The wireless to Building B is a max 11 anyway but the conference room needs much faster with Made2Manage classes coming in there. It run like a turtle when we had our M2M consultant come in last week and that was with just an educational company.

I tried upgrading the firmware using Internet Explorer and that seemed to do the trick. A bit disappointed that they Linksys might require such a browser to do such a simple task. Oh well I seem to be buying less and less of their products these days anyway. Had two 5 port switches go bad on me in less than a year.

My brother called me last night from the Big House in OR. Sounds like he has picked up some interest in Linux! So I think I will send him a book on this OS. We seem to have a lot of the same passions. Now if he would only open his mind to what the Lord has to say. I sent him a three book series of John Elderidge’s. Mostly for the Wild at Heart book. Never got a chance to ask him about it tho. He just seemed very interested in a lot of security and such for computers. Well so do I but it’s very hard to grasp even at my status.

Thursday mornings I get together with a few guys from our church for breakfast and do a Bible study. We have been reading a chapter a week out of the Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. This is my third time through this book. We often go off on tangents and today’s was on baptism. The oldest in our group seems to be thinking a lot about the purpose for being Born Again as an adult. By this I mean being baptized by water submersion. He, like others in the group was baptized at birth and went through confirmations later in life. Our leader mentioned some one might think this as a scape goat thinking that all I need to do is baptize my kids early and they would be saved automatically. No more worries. Too sad for thinking that way. We all agreed that it’s not required for being saved. I put my thought in saying I did it for two reasons: Worship and as a demonstration of my love for the Lord as a public display. Not as some private back yard hot-tub baptism. I think those who do it that way have a misunderstanding of baptisms purpose. It’s not a form of works! I too was baptized earlier as a child at 8 for the Mormons. I knew at the time I was too immature to understand why I was doing this. So shortly after accepting Christ again back in the Summer of 2001, Kassie and I were baptized again. I denounced the previous baptism based on a disbelief in what I was doing. Besides… my god-parents were split up later in life and were not model godly people. We also spoke about the purpose of god-parents. We don’t do sponsors in our church for dedications or baptism however, but I’m speaking about those churches that do. I often get disgusted when ppl choose ungodly ppl as god-parents for their newborn child. Some even think the purpose is for choosing guardians in the event the parents pass on before the child matures. I find that hardly legal. But today so many ppl choose their cool friends or even their siblings. Not even sure the thought passes their minds as a test. “Do I want these ppl to care for my child after I’m gone?” How does that work anyway if you choose two sisters? Oh the dumb things we humans instill as traditions in our lives!

This afternoon has been fairly productive! Got some petty cash and stopped at the CNC shop to pick up the equipment for USA Digital to cancel the account. Get to their office and find the gal is out to lunch and to return about 2:13PM. That’s just crazy! So I had to pick up a couple switches and a couple mice. Swing through the Arby’s drive thru and get a Jamoca milk shake and back to USA Digital. Had a few minutes to wait yet. Their records state that they own the cable modem! Man oh man! So I get back to the office and try digging up some receipts. No luck. So I figure that with all the troubles we have had with the wireless connections there, they must have switched out our modem with theirs. That could have happened over a year ago. Besides… even if I had the receipt I would need the MAC address to prove. That way they could track down where mine went also. So I called Bresnan to get a leased modem from them before pulling out USA Dig’s. They only charge a $3 lease fee. Besides that Bresnan forgot to not change us the fee anyway. Guess it worked out for him then. So now I have the optical mouse on Building B’s PC and replaced the 10 base hub with the new 100 and bumped the speed for the master port and it’s rocking and rolling!

Tomorrow I need to put my ups in line and test out an old 8mm tape drive out. Just realized it is a 24GB drive! My current one is a 20GB Traven.

A Weeks Worth

What a busy week! Just now got a chance to begin posting this weeks goings on. On Monday I got the call to fix the CNC shop server. Coincidentally the power supply was discovered dead the same day Bresnan was to come in and install their Internet service. Luckily I already had a power supply from a clone of the same PC I had refurbished last year. Plus I grabbed some RAM for this. Although it only recognized half of it’s capacity, I installed 256 to get 128 out of it. Oh well… it won’t be in service too long. It only had 32MB previously, so still much farther ahead. Bresnan was amazed at what they’d have to do to get their service into the building. Being so tall and on the opposite side of it’s destination. They ended up doing what I had suggested even! Crossing the ally two times and enter through the phone conduit. They got it running and we’re happy with the speeds so far!

Tuesday through Thursday I spent troubleshooting the AS400 connection going to our second “Building B”. They manufacture shipping containers there for exporting. So they have one node over there to our main office. Coincidentally when they have trouble we have trouble with our packing slip printer. The beauty of serial networked connections. I think it’s called twin-ax? So I spent most of my time building a PC from old parts to connect the modern way. Last summer I installed a wireless connection between the buildings using two access points with boosters mounted inside PVC boxes outside both buildings. Started with putting Windows 2000 on this PII 300MHz box using a Dell by proxy. You see we only had it on a restore CD so… well we won’t get into that here okay. Anyway… plopping the HD back into the destination box and booting up, it freezes during boot up. So I figured there must have been some difference with the HD parameters between the two boxes. I then put it back into the Dell and installed Windows 98 but this time putting in in the Dell just for speed. Again back in the other box it freezes but only after some new devices are installed. I discovered something was corrupting the registery. This was fixed by removing some of the Windows updates and skipping the loading of the registry. I get into Windows and reinstall the updates. This seems to smooth out the flawed registry! You would think it was smooth sailing after this, but then I get keyboard problems. Switching keyboards doesn’t help. Some combination of removing the keyboard and booting, failing, rebooting with keyboard does the trick. BTW this is an old IBM tower. Okay so once in the Building B more troubles including boot failures, bad monitor and tight network security. Geez Louise! Needless to say I am working on a different, hopefully not so possessed PC for them. For the time being they are running.

On and off through the week I have had to attempt getting another PC for our QC dept. It has been ready for them for weeks but was just waiting for the chance for them to accept it. They have been too busy to let me set it up that is. Two troubles cropped up here. Wireless network and COM1 problems with some ancient DOS application. As of yesterday I have gotten the COM port working but now have software problems… possibly OS incompatibility. I need to call to find out and then maybe just upgrade! For now I have two wireless networks for him to choose from: one is secure and the other is open but farther away. Yeah yeah… it’s open! Working on it! So the secure AP is closer but seems that every time this exterior door opens I loose connection. Strange but also I’m not getting DHCP to move through either. Seems to be working fine for the mentioned IBM box in the Building B warehouse. For the time being it’s just using the farther but open AP.

Made2Manage sent their customization consultant Wednesday and Thursday. I feel it was a good visit. However my co heart data analyst seems to be showing truer colors now. I am suspecting she is contributing to some failure in the process of our migration. At times the boss wants to just fork out the money to get this show rolling but she consistently steps in and makes show stopping issues and then blames it on money. Next would be the training issues. These ppl have been trained over 2 and a half years ago and have had a bad experience during this training due to technical difficulties. I had a ton of training a couple summers ago and a lot has changed to that point even. My experience was rather smooth. Problem is we have some flunkies that can’t handle being in a class scenario where you have to pay attention and try to lean something new. We also have such a flexible system now that they don’t want to tie themselves down to one way of doing things. There is a pride issue at play too. Our way is the only way! What does it hurt to see how others in the industry are doing things? Then of course nobody wants to be doing it the M2M way because it’s their way and not any one way. Our ppl don’t want to learn with some bogus test company. They want to train with our own part numbers. Waah Waah! A bunch of whining basket cases. I say model with the damn test company data, learn what works and doesn’t, customize and then maybe model again with our data. It’s all very time consuming and may require hiring a consultant to model with, but we’d be moving forward. We’re into something like our third year migrating!

Tonight will be a fun one! Our babysitter finally called last night to agree to watch the kids this evening. We were wondering if she was avoiding us. Anyway our community group will be rehearsing for this weekends sermons at church. One of the pastors asked if we would do a skit for all four services. It’s probably only for the first few minutes of the services. I chose to take care of the kids early on so not to worry about what to do with them. I wanted Kassie to do the skit because she used to do this stuff in high school drama class/club. She needed to get more involved in the group anyway. She has taken care of the kids too many other times like this. Then after the rehearsal we head to our normal biweekly community group meeting. Our community group has a passion for serving. So many of us do little things for the church and community, I feel that the church picks on us to be examples. This is our second group we have joined. The first was with an older group but we were there because our mentors were apprenticing with them. They moved to Laurel and thus giving up leading a group so we needed to get with a group more of our age and with kids. We are still a bit younger than most and so are our kids but we are getting some younger. We have sort of a love/hate feeling about our group too. We hate making preparations to go but love the fact that we did go. I keep thinking it’ll get better but I really should expect it to get worse. You see Satan attacks you most when he sees that you are getting out of his grasp. How’s that for making sense? I have to share one quote from someone I chat with often. He has a major lacking of moral values and he was getting upset with me for my lack of political involvement. He wrote “I encourage you to get involved with me in politics… because I think it has more of an impact on people than a church visit every Sunday.” You draw your own conclusion. I chose to ignore what he said. At that moment I couldn’t respond while my blood pressure was cooking. The truth of the matter is that what he says may have an immediate point but my purpose is not for my future life but goes much further than that. I choose to do the things in my temporary life for eternities sake not just the here and now.

I had a nice surprise yesterday. One of my mentors called for lunch unplanned. I just so happened to be available. This week was so busy that I hadn’t had time to eat much but to work during the chow. I let him know about how I was feeling down from the previous Thursday morning with my accountability partners news. I was happy to hear that I wasn’t far off key for feeling this way. He too thought it was not a very cool thing. I’m so happy that he is always honest with giving it to me straight. I informed him about how God has been so good to us over the past couple months. Not that he never is… it’s just that we have grown to put such faith in God and he has shown faith in us.

The Dueling ISPs

Just as I was leaving to head home last night I get a call from Bresnan trying to set up a time to schedule our install for Internet connection at our CNC shop downtown. Not knowing the time he agreed to call back first thing in the morning. With the cold temps the past weeks our CNC shop has been having great difficulty with their wireless connection with USA Digital. Being very close to the tower on the rims across from the Conoco refinery posed a problem during the winter months. The steam and vapors coming out of Conoco has been so thick the connection would fail to the Internet. So I thought I’d call Bresnan to find out about business service thinking they aren’t ATT@Home any longer, why would they restrict their service still? They actually have great service plans! At any rate, I also called our current provider OneEighty to hear their offer. They have DSL for cheaper but slower as well. It would take a bit longer to provide the install also. They would also take over our normal lines making it cheaper in the long run. I needed to call Bresnan back to cancel the installation. A while later Bresnan calls back with the deal of a lifetime proving that cost was my issue. They offered twice the speed for the lower cost and dropped the installation fee! Ooh that reminds me I need to inform OneEighty too now.

Just got off the phone wthi M2M. We’re going to do a WebEx session today! Lets pray this does the job.

So I guess the second strain of this latest virus is out: mydoom.b. Not sure I have seen this yet unless my system thinks it’s the A strain still. I had to turn off notification of the virus to it’s destination. Strange it took my coworkers this long to start asking questions about all these virus notices. So now only I get the notifications. I cheer when I see a virus by a different name tho

After 2 hours and 45 minutes on the phone with M2M at $165 per hour, we got the SQL2SQL update done! Turns out it was some drab technique ADS used to install our Made2Manage system. They assured me it wasn’t something I did. So I’m glad to have this behind me and we are now progressing without ADS.

The hidden stress of getting taxes out of the way is gone!

I’m recapping from last night to start; my family normally attends Wednesday night church services, and I decided to take that opportunity to start the drudged taxes. I have been doing my taxes for the past three tax years online with Turbo Tax. The past two years required me to use Netscape since they had some java scripting that detected your browser. Even the cool feature in Konqueror for changing its identity wouldn’t fool it. No I had to use the good old Netscape. But hey! I was adamant about using Linux to do my taxes. I always had been very cautious about doing it online, and therefore it took me 1-2 weeks to finish. Last night… start to finish in about 2 hours! Also with Mozilla this time! I highly recommend using Turbo Tax online as it comes out the same if you were to purchase the box-set. The only advantage of having the box-set (I think) is that you can possibly share it with others but they’d still have to pay for the electronic sending. But then again I have never used the box-set. My dad does but he also does both grandmothers, two aunts and a great aunt’s taxes with it.

Finally got started on setting up the bosses new Dell computer I had ordered with three other Dells about three week ago. This is the machine is going into his office at the mansion :-\ For a third day in a row now, I have gone to his place for various computer fixes. Today was a classic MCN email account setup! I was glad to see the old settings still work with Earthlink. FYI I worked for MCN a couple years ago as a part time technical support person.

Just got notice a Butte Linux Users Group exists! Added them to the growing list of Montana LUGs. Sounds like they have a very healthy start. I hope to make it over there some time as it’s in my old stomping grounds; I travel back to Anaconda quite often. I wish them well and hope for their success.

Mozilla 1.3 is finally announced! Gee I must have missed this on their site by minutes today. I installed a nightly build of 1.3 (non beta) I downloaded on Feb 28th to my bosses new Dell. I paid a visit to the Mozilla site because I was surprised to see it saying I was using old 1.3b version. Guess I really was but didn’t see the official 1.3 listed. I highly recommend this version; it is awesome!

This week has been the least Linux week I’ve had in over a year!