March 31, 2011: Racking and Stacking

It is rare that I actually get a chance to go and do some old school rack and stack work but after work today I was given my first chance in many years.  The day itself was normal.  In the office, blah blah blah.  Work has become a bit boring, as I think might be obvious in my posts.  It is pretty much the same thing, day in and day out.  It’s fine, just nothing to talk about.  I don’t go home and talk about work either.  Very little ever happens at work these days.

Around a quarter to six I ran over and met Souder to begin the racking work for the evening.  He was there maybe twenty minutes ahead of me.  We looked at how much work there was to be done and realized that there is a ton more than we had originally anticipated and I had not managed to get any lunch today as I was just too busy so we ran over to Rockfish and grabbed dinner before starting work.  It was a really nice evening so we sat outside on the patio while we got dinner.

We ate quickly and were back working on moving the equipment in no time.  I had originally thought that we were just moving a server, plugging it in and taking off.  Twenty minutes tops.  Why oh why do I imagine that anything could go that way?

We had to reconfigure a rack, move tons of equipment that was in the way – including networking hardware with lots and lots of connections, a server and more.  The big item was moving a large UPS which is never fun.  We used wooden rails on the floor, a dolly, etc.  When we plugged the UPS back in we had the excitement of it actually exploding!  There were real flames a bit of the back of the unit actually hit me.  Now that isn’t the type of excitement that you get every day.

It ended up taking all evening to get everything done.  Of course, as with any simple little project, there was some huge disaster.  That one tonight was the main server not being able to restart after the move!  The motherboard appears to have partially died and we got stuck spending a lot of time trying to get that up and running again so that people could work in the morning.  Fun.

We were quite  exhausted when we finally got back to the house.

March 30, 2011: Club Day

For lunch today I had a meeting at La Cima so I got to go over and have lunch there.  It has been weeks since I have had a chance to eat over there from what I can remember.    It was nice to get over there.  I miss it when I am gone for too long.

My big event was a young professionals meet up at the Dallas Tower Club this evening – so today ended up being a double club day for me.  I almost never get a chance to go to downtown Dallas even though it is only minutes away and I look at it every day.  Although I go far, far more often than Dominica does.  In fact, now that I think about it, I can only think of one occasion when Dominica has gone in to the city at all.  She did the same thing when we lived in New York City – she may have gone in to the city no more than five times in the years that we lived there even though I worked in the city every day.

The Tower Club was awesome.  It has been renovated far more recently than has La Cima and it is much larger and higher up on the forty-eighth floor on the Thanksgiving Tower.  It has one of the most commanding views of the city of Dallas.  In 1982 it was the second tallest building in the city and is now the eighth.  It is around the twentieth tallest in the state at 635 feet, fifty stories.  It is amazing seeing Dallas from up so high – it is not the developed city that you imagine.  Looking to the east you really get a sense of the city just stopping.  It just drops off, very weird for such a massive city.

After the networking event we stayed at the club and had dinner there.  It’s good to be a member!  This is my first time, after being a Club Corp member for a year, of taking advantage of a different club other than La Cima.  It was really easy and a lot of fun to get to check out a different crowd.  The Tower Club is far more lively than La Cima – quite a different feel.  And they are much more lounge oriented rather than La Cima that really focuses on the dinning room.

I went home via the “backroads” winding through Dallas to the north.  It gave me a chance to experience Highland Park which is absolutely amazing.  I had no idea that there was an area like that in Dallas.  Very nice indeed.

March 28, 2011: Beginning of a Very Busy Week

This week was a very busy one for me.  Brian is mostly back to normal today and is back in action after more than a week of being pretty much useless.  He was seriously sick and still is not back to normal but is doing mostly okay at this point.  It is clear now that he is on the road to recovery, at least.

Dominica has been very busy, still, with work.  She has been working more the last week or so than she has for months.  This is not good as her laptop is in horrible shape too.  The motherboard was damaged by someone visiting us and now she has to baby the power cord of the machine loses power and just dies.  The battery died months ago or more and the keyboard hasn’t worked well since HP replaced it some time ago.  The laptop is just getting worse and worse but we don’t have the money right now to use to replace it so we are stuck for the moment.  I am thinking about getting a MacBook Air to replace my own laptop and then Dominica would be free to use mine.  That’s a great plan if only we had money to get a MacBook Air now and if the Air was in the latest revision which I want to wait for before purchasing anyway.  I’m hoping that a new version of the Air comes out at the same time that Mac OSX Lion comes out this summer.  So we are trying to figure out what to do.  What a pain.  Very bad timing for her laptop to be having issues.

I’ll be mostly out of commission this week so don’t expect too many posts.

March 27, 2011: Telephony Day

Today is my dedicated “lock myself away in the office and work like a madman” day.  There are no plans today except for working at home.  So I am hoping to be able to get just tons and tons done.

It ended up being a very good day and I actually managed to get the work done that I needed to do.    Still no electricians today.  And no response from them either.  No one can find them.  It seems odd that they would avoid us when there is so little work left to be done.  It’s not like there is any significant amount of work to “get out of” but we do need them to wrap up a few final things.