audit’s day-to-day thoughts

Time to move on?

Have you ever had that feeling that your just stale in your current job and not really important anymore? If so then welcome to my world. I think I’ll be updating my resume tonight and sending it out to some old recruiters. Maybe it’s just because I’m within a year of that 40 mark in my life and feel that it’s time for me to get with a company where I’m not the only IT guy. It’s not fair to my family for me to be grouchy every night when I come home and not able to give my wife and kids a vacation because I’m on call 24/7/365/366.

I love the work that I do but doing EVERYTHING in IT is getting be burned out and fast.  I need set vacation days where I know that I have x amount of days that I can take and not need to worry about only being able to go so far away from home in case someone can’t print, they need a file restored, someone’s Blackberry isn’t working right, a piece of spam came through the filters, etc.

Oh well, my wife wants me to stay because of the $ that I make but I think it’s time to make her understand that if I continue like this, she’ll be feeding me though a straw not so far in the future.

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Dataoutages.com and Blackberryforums.com have teamed up.

A match made in heaven if I do say so myself. A couple days ago I received a PM from Guess who is the owner of Blackberry forums about a new site that he started called Blackberrynews.com and I saw that they gave a nice shout out to my pet project, dataoutages.com. So I replied back thanking him for it. Then the next PM was a reply from him about partnering up with us. That was a no brainer for me because Blackberryforums.com is the #1 forum on the internet for anything blackberry related.

So yesterday Guess and I spent about an hour on IM talking about what we could do to compliment each other and since this was his idea, I let him run with everything. The next thing I knew, he had setup a dedicated forum for outages. It’s been very well received by the community so far and it just gives Dataoutages.com more credibility.

So now I’m just going to sit back and take this all in for a few days before I start moving forward with starting up a couple more lists. Even though we primarily report on Blackberry outages from carriers or from RIM themselves, we don’t want to limit ourselves to just that. There’s plenty of potential and now it’s up to me to figure out what that is. If you have any idea’s, feel free to reply with them.

Posted in Network Security, Personal, Thoughts, Wireless | No Comments »

Work + Travel + family and personal life

Well I’m in the middle of a project at work that will have me going back and forth to Chicago for the next couple months. I really can’t say what it it for obvious reasons but needless to say, it’s something that I’m not looking that forward to because of the infrastructure of what I’ll be dealing with and the lack of knowledge that I have in it. The only good thing I can see from it is the fact that it’s something new that I’ll be learning and that’s always a good thing.

Over the years I’ve become convinced that the more a person learns, the more people forget. With my health issues, I’ve forgotten things that I used to know and be able to do blindfolded but my dr’s have said that’s normal for some of the health issues that I have.

So I’m thinking that I’ll be posting more often and now with summer coming up, I’ll be doing a lot more with the family and with that comes pictures.

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This says it all

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Familys loving youtube

Well Karen and my daughter have decided to start making video’s using XP’s Movie Maker so I thought I’d toss the 2 they have made up here.

The first one is my wife’s video.

Then we have our daughter’s video

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Happy Easter.

For those that celebrate easter, HAPPY EASTER!!!

Now that’s over with, I saw an article titled, Lose cell phone, get cast away from society. I can relate to that but more with my Blackberry since it’s more or less my little world. I have EVERYTHING on my 8310. I’m horible with birthday’s and I know that I should memorize dates like my kids birthdays and other important things but as I get older and since my TIA’s, my memory hasn’t been as good as it used to be and I find myself looking at my BB for everything. Each day starts off with me waking up to it as my alarm anyhow and I spend at least 10 minutes reading my emails in the morning before I even think about crawling out of bed anyhow.

I remember back when only the VERY RICH had cell phones and they were built into the cars themselves, not something so small now that you can fit them in the coin pocket of a pair of jeans. Has technology made us dumber and lazier? I say yes it has and anyone that says no should really try to go without their cell phone, computer, PDA, cable or satellite TV for a month or even a solid week and see how it affects them. This includes dealing with family/personal/work emergencies or anything else that your device does.

For me, I’m shutting my 8310 down for the rest of the day and putting it in a drawer and listening to the radio while I enjoy this special day with my wife and kids.

Posted in My Toys, Personal, Rants, Thoughts | No Comments »

Oh well.

Well today we turned our 3 cats into the animal shelter because they were just getting 2 expensive to have, wouldn’t really come around, kids refused to take care of the cat litter and a few other reasons. We’re still keeping our dog because she’s a great little dog that’s loves to be around us and is very protective. She loves being around my wife more then anything and really never leaves her side, I guess that’s because Karen’s home all the time so she’s more protective over her.

Now on to the car. It seems reverse is going out in the car and that’s NOT a good thing. As a matter of fact, it really pisses me off so I called the guy that I purchased it from this morning and he told me to get the fluid flushed out on it and if that doesn’t fix it then wait a couple weeks and he’ll backdate the warranty that he offered at the time of purchase for $420 and then they will take care of fixing that and my damn SRS light that won’t go off as well as go over the car with a fine tooth comb to make sure nothing else is wrong with it. I wanted to get the warranty but I was scrapping just to come up with the $ to get the car. So now I have to raise $420 for the warranty so if the fluid flush and change doesn’t work, which I doubt it will then I can take it to his shop and let them fix everything on it with me sitting right there making sure everything is done perfect.

My wife thinks that it’ll be a lot easier now that we won’t have 3 cats to buy food and litter for but she doesn’t realize that it was only about $30 month to take care of them, one of the main reason’s she wanted them gone is because they were tearing up our furniture and neither one of us believe in declawing them. After this weekend, I’ll have a better perspective as far as where we’re at $ wise and what med’s I can skip so I can get this car repaired.

On a good note, it looks like the weather is going to start getting better sooner then I expected but that means yard work again for spring cleanup, (IE: Cleaning all the dog crap from the yard, garbage that got buried under the snow storms, cleaning out the shed which is going to cost me about $75 for someone to come take away 90% of the stuff that’s in there. I’m slowly trying to get away from being a pack rat and that means cleaning all my computer stuff in the den also. But I’ll have my shed back which was my get away place in the summer to just sit back and relax. Over the last couple years it’s filled up with more and more stuff that Karen and the kids put in there. So once I get that area back then my son and I can get back to father son time again just sitting back and talking about different things.

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Waiting for warm weather now

Well now that I have the car cleaned up as far as the outside goes, all that’s left is for the weather to warm up to the 60’s - 70’s so I can get the buffer out and start cleaning the paint and then 2 different coats of wax. All glass is coated in RainX now as well as RainX wipers on the car. I still need to coat the inside windows with the RainX wipes though but that’s nothing that can’t wait a couple weeks as I believe I went over my budget by about $50 for things to clean it up for me for my daily driver.

I’m hoping this week or 2 we can get some rain to melt all this damn snow we’re getting here and what’s built up. 400lbs of salt still hasn’t cleared it up and it’s aggravating.  I’m still having a issue with the airbag light staying on in the car but I’m slowly getting used to it. It’s not a fuse as I haven’t found anything in the manual to see that a fuse controls that.

So this week will be the first full week driving it back and forth to work so I’ll get a better idea of what kind of gas mileage I’ll be getting which will help.

I’ll be posting more as I do more things to fix it up. My son wants me to get a body kit for it and a kick ass sound system but that’s not me, not at 39 at least. Maybe 20 years ago it was but this is turning into more of a family car more or less. I’m still not sure if this is something we’ll be using for our Christmas vacation next year to Floriday or not, as much as I’d like to because of the mileage, I’m not sure If I can trust it. I’ll know more this summer as I do more driving and get used to it.

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Gas Milage, here we come

Well we finally got a second car again and I’ve done something I said I’d never do and that’s buy something non American. We purchased a 2000 Honda Accord LX with 115k miles on it last night but it’s fully loaded, get’s GREAT gas mileage and Honda’s are known to last forever if taken care of properly. This one has been taken care of and the interior looks brand new more or less and after we get some warm weather, I’ll be outside with the buffer and cleaning the paint and then a couple coats of good wax.

It has a bigger tank then the 2006 G6 that we’ve had as our only car so it costs more to fill up but from what research I did and the person we purchased it from, the thing averages over 32MPG on the freeway which is where I spend the majority of the time driving. He said he was getting close to 28MPG in the city also. With gas prices rising each week it seems, I can see this thing saving me a small fortune in gas and we won’t be going as far over the lease miles on the G6 as we were heading. At the rate we were going, we were looking at being around 12k miles over so now that it can just sit in the driveway 95% of the week, it’s going to be nice.

I still have some small work to do on the Honda as far as an oil change, replacing a couple burned out fuses and replacing the battery in the remote but that’s minor work. The only thing that’s bugged me so far is the burned CD’s that I have won’t play in the factory CD player, I’ll be checking tonight when I get home if a store bought CD will play and if that works then I need to figure out a way to trick the CD player into playing my burned ones or find a format that it’ll play. I’m also thinking about putting my XM radio in it but taking it somewhere to have done.  So in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy not watching the gas needle move as I drive home each day from work and turn this into the family car.

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Just when I think they have gone away, they come right back

My TIA’s that is. A TIA is Transient Ischemic Attack or Mini-stroke and I’ve been suffering from them for over a year now. They seemed to go away for awhile but over the last month have really come back strong again and each one does more damage to the brain. Last night while we were at our church orientation, I had another one but there was one difference, another lady in the class suffers from them also and saw the attack start. My wife started getting really upset because of the attack again but she was relieved to find out that this lady also suffers from them also and like me, had a hard time finding a Dr to tell her what was wrong.

We ended up leaving our orientation class early last night and Karen drove us home because I obviously wasn’t able to because of the shaking that comes along with it and the blurry vision that comes along with these attacks. I still am having one hell of a time speaking today and still have the shakes but my vision has cleared up some. At least it was good enough for me to take back roads into work all the way in this morning where I didn’t need to worry about traffic or worse yet, kids waiting for a school bus.

So today I need to get through work again and do it without talking which isn’t much of a problem considering where I work at and then try to get home again. We have another winter storm watch for tonight again which really sucks since I can barely get in our driveway as it is now with all the ice/snow buildup at the end of it now without scraping the bottom of the car.

Life goes on and I will continue to do so. I don’t give up easy and this is a fight that I refuse to lose. I may not have control over my brain and these attacks but I sure as hell can do my best to continue to work and provide for my family. I can’t take the time off work to get my back fixed right so I know they won’t give me the time off to get this issue fixed. It’s just not the way the company is.

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