It’s the second weeeked of the new premiership season, but the first time that Arsenal are on Fox Soccer Channel.  I’m pumped and may even wear my new Fabregas jersey, even though he’s still out with injury :(  Go Gunners!

In other news, it’s been a very busy two weeks.  Work has been filled with setting up new computers, going into the ceiling to wire cat5e cables to rooms and moving other employees computers and desks in a massive office shuffle.  It’s all in preparation for 3 new employees starting over the next 2 weeks.

When I get home there’s no shortage of sporting options.  There’s the Olympics, NFL preseason, MLB baseball, EPL soccer, etc.  It’s been particularly disappointing to see the US Track & Field team underperform after watching them at the Trials here in Eugene. Phelps was quite exciting, even though the west coast never gets to watch anything live.  So, I had to avoid all media outlets during Phelps’ 8th gold medal try and then watch the 3 hour tape dealy on NBC.

The fantasy baseball playoffs are approaching fast.  There’s only one more week fo the regular season and I’ve been holding 5th place for quite some time.  The top 6 make the playoffs, but i wouldn’t mind slipping into 6th so that I could avoid the 1st place team, who I’m losing to this week, if I make it to the 2nd round/semifinal.

3 weeks ago was Lollapalooza and it was a great weekend to be in Chicago.  Great weather and great music, what more do you need?  Radiohead were that Friday night’s headliner, playing all the new songs and other classics from In Rainbows and providing a great light show throughout.  Saturday night was Wilco,  who played a very nice set while tricking out their suits with Hello Kitty patches and lots of other stuff.  Sunday night was NiN, who I had never seen before.  They had a great rock show and a very cool stage setup that included a screen that comes down in front of them that Reznor can manipulate with lights.  Their bassist is JMJ, aka Beck’s bassist, and he definitely added a lot to the set.  All in all, great headliners choices so that made it easier to avoid Kanye and Rage Against the Machine. A few other great shows during the days were: Girl Talk, Explosions in the Sky, The National, The Foals, Bloc Party and The Black Keys.

The weekend also gave me the opportunity to see TDK at the Navy Pier IMAX late in the morning on Sunday.  It was fantastic and IMAX really helped the action scenes.  I’ve now seen the movie twice and it is easily the best movie I have seen this year.  I really noticed some of the screenplay subtleties the second time around that gave hints to things that would happen later on.  Ledger’s Joker is truly great with so many memorable scenes: the bank robbery, the pencil trick, the Nurse uniform, the interrogation, it’s goes on.

Hello all.

It’s been many days since my last post.  I have excuses, but my best reason is laziness (but you already knew that)

Right now, I’m embroiled in a Microsoft Ticket/Case.  Upgrading Team Foundation Server 2005 to TFS 2008.  Let me tell you, if you have the opportunity to wiggle out of buying this product, then take that opportunity and hold onto it for dear life.  This product also helps prove my adage: “Buy Microsoft so you can get support.  Get support because you bought Microsoft.”  We’ll see if this putting this phrase to print

Back to the present.  I am on call No. 6 (being generous, probably 10) with someone in India (a fine country I’m sure, I enjoy the food immensely), which is the start of call that will probably last 5 hours (35 hours total on the phone, again, being generous).  My case has just been transferred to a new person, who is not very familiar with all the troubleshooting I’ve done with my buddy Vimal.  This case has been going on for 3-4 weeks and we’ve retried steps in teh Microsoft-certified instructions many times over.  Now that I have a new person on the case and we are retreading old ground and getting nowhere.

The problems all started when someone at Microsoft said, (paraphrasing, don’t sue me) “Hey, let’s integrate Source Code Control, Reports and Documents for a Software Project.”  Problem is the TFS designers decided to use all these separate components as is and paste them together.  So, TFS is really: SQL db for source-code, Sharepoint Services for docs and SQL Reporting Services for reports.  Now when you upgrade one component (see previous posts on the subject if you interested in sleeping) other components ‘break’ or don’t work how they used to and the MSDN Forums aren’t much help.  SOOOOO, you get to call MS$ support, which you have to pay for, and then wait for someone in India to remote in and solve problem, give or take 3-30 days.

Thank goodness I decided to use a virtual environment to do a 2005 to 2008 test upgrade.  But, we are still unable to recreate teh working production environment, after 3+ weeks.

And that is where we sit, working on getting a working duplicate of our production server up and running.

I have no faith in the production upgrade, thank goodness for music (next time more fun: Sasquatch Festival ‘08)

Hello readers,

It’s been a while since I last wrote. This is due to teh explosive combination of work and laziness. The new year has seen quite a few new projects at work, some planned, some not. To give you an idea, just in January, I’ve becoming the administrator of a new Incident Management web app, installed a new firewall (with the help of consultants) and am in the process of rebuilding a Windows NT Server with SQL 6.5.

This has meant a few 10 hour days and long weekends, but it’s starting to slow down a little. The next project could be a video-conferencing system or something else, but nothing as tough as recreating this NT box that needs to run a mission-critical SQL db. It all started when I tried to restore a SQL backup and it failed. Apparently a failed restore in SQL 6.5 kills your ability to use the current db, so we tried again and again and ended up going to a 2nd box for a temporary fix. Now we’ve discovered that the 2nd box isn’t going to be good enough either, having to do with limited licenses for NT (10 user limit for an MSDN install). Now it’s on to the 3rd box and hopefully there will be success.

The Australian Open has helped keep my mind off work. I don’t know what was a bigger upset, Tsonga crushing Nadal or Djokovic pwning Federer. I would have liked to watch all of the final live, but with the damn timezone difference I fell asleep half-way through the first set. No matter, Djokovic won even though losing the first set. He looked to have the game and experience to beat Tsonga anyways. Tsonga plays with very flat shots and doesn’t have a slice, but wins with his powerful groundstrokes and serve. Djokovic could handle the pace, so it was just a matter of time.

Podcasts I’ve been listening to:

The Bugle (John Oliver ,a la the/a Daily Show,+ Adam Zaltzman)
Around the Horn
PTI
WNYC’s RadioLab (recommended by This American Life)
The Kong Show
B.S. Report with Bill Simmons
Windows Weekly (I do administrate a Windows network, so I feel somewhat obligated)

The Thanksgiving weekend is almost over and it was a very nice 4-day break. It’s over just in time for me to fly to San Jose for software training, where I’ll be learning TeamTrack, another application I will need to administrate. San Jose is quite close to San Francisco, so I’ll be able to visit Oculon on his new home turf. I may even drive by the Google’s headquarters for giggles.

As referenced in teh title, Arsenal beat Wigan in a very close match to take the top spot from Manchester United. Arsenal were without Cesc Fabregas due to suspension, and it showed, but they still prevailed with a great run and header by Gallas in the 83′. Rosicky finished it off for a 2-0 victory. The win was made even more enjoyable when I read that Man Utd lost to Bolton!!?!? Now Arsenal is 3 points up and still have played one less game than the Red Devils.

In Fantasy Football, my team slipped again and as I watch this week, both of my starting QBs (Bulger and Garcia) have gone down and are out of the game. In a two QB starting league, I will surely lose. By the end of the weekend, I’ll be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. Now I’ll just get to enjoy the games on TV and wait for the college bowl games.

Readers and viewers can look forward to a new workspace video, as I will be moving   again at work.

Inspired by Shane’s Video Blog, I have decided to post a short iMovie of my FSI workspace.

Here she goes: MyWorkspace

which is a good thing, because Tuesdays are great! Tuesdays are 10x better than Monday, so they have a built-in comparative advantage. Also, Tuesdays are Windows Update day in M$ land. The day has gone fast and it’s already lunch, even on the west coast. I’m blogging to you as I eat this wonderful spinach, sausage, and red pepper pizza from Mezza Luna, muy muy yummy. I also have a big salad with a nice balsamic vinaigrette, yummy.

This weekend was pretty uneventful. I had been super tired the week before and still didn’t catch up on all of my rest. Today though, all caught up! Friday was passable because of fun post by Reka, so I was able to comment up a storm with help from Kevlar and Houston. Unfortunately, Thorette did not win the name contest.

Saturday came and went. The only thing of memory was the LA Galaxy v. Chelsea match. Although David Beckham wasn’t replaced by Harry Potter, he did alright in the 20 minutes he played, only one corner. Since I’m an avid soccer fan, I tuned in more Chelsea than anything else. After all of their chances in the 1st half, it should have been 4-0 Chelsea, but they were rusty and the Galaxy had Xavier. There was a lot of media hoopla, did you hear? Apparently Beckham likes to cry a lot, or at least that’s what he says. Given that, I don’t think he’ll help soccer into the mainstream. What will dad’s scream at their kids? “Oh, you’re crying, why don’t you play soccer then? Get off the diamond (or shed)!”

The lunch break is almost over. Time to catch up on some Desktop Tower Defense, the most addictive game EVAR!

I said that I’d write about backups yesterday, but the backup saga continues into today, so I’ll give you updates on that and fantasy baseball, maybe some movies…

Work, the backup:

Like a good, responsible IT department, we have a backup system in place. Backup the servers and few peoples shared folders. We were using Veritas Backup Exec 9.1. Our old tape drive was an Ultrium LTO-1 , which has a 100GB/200GB, only getting 200GB if the data is completely compressed. Our company has added three new servers since I’ve been here and there will probably be more, in addition to 6 existing servers.

So, to accommodate all of the new data, we got an LTO-2 tape drive 200GB/400GB of storage. Now I had to get this to work with the old software. Background: Symantec bought Veritas in late 2004. I tried the handy dandy steps of turning off the OS and the backup tape enclosure, switching cables and turning things. Voila! (I thought) Windows Server 03 recognizes the new hardware and the Backup Exec software can see it too. Problems arose, as I assumed they would, when I had to write to new tapes in the new drive. It wouldn’t work, and gave no hints in the error message.

So, call support, which is now done by Symantec. I get routed through the phone tree to ‘legacy’ Veritas support, leave my info and wait. Problem is, backups run every night, as they should. Now I get to switch the hardware back right before I leave and hope that it works, and it does. In the mornings, I switch things over to the new hardware and wait for support, when no comes, repeat the process.

It takes THREE days for ‘legacy’ software support guy to call, and then I have to boot people from the server so that I can reboot the server at will. We try some steps: 1) uninstall drivers 2) shut down hardware 3) switch hardware 4) reboot 5) install drivers 6) reboot Doesn’t work. I email application and event logs, wait for his call back. Takes two more days, that means more switching to the old hardware for the backups to run. During the wait for his call back, I suggest upgrading to the newest, fully supported version of Backup Exec, version 11d.

We get the software, install it, switch hardware, reboot, now the hardware doesn’t show up, hmm. Was it the new software that isn’t working or the hardware? I investigate on late Friday night and Saturday and discover that with all of the cable switching, a pin has bent. Try to repair the pin, it breaks. Now I have to find a 6 ‘, external SCSI cable with 68 pins to 50 pins. There are none in Eugene, or Salem, so I drive to Fry’s in Portland, 2 hrs away, buy two cables, drive two hours back, replace the cable, the hardware shows up again.

The new tape drive still won’t write to the new tapes, so I wait for more Symantec support. Support tells me to try the same steps as before and change the backup jobs’ configuration, it works! Well, sort of… I can now back up the local server and some shared folders, but not other server’s drivers. Hmmm. I call support again, they tell me that you have to have a ‘Windows Systems Agent’ to backup remote server drives!?!!? With the Veritas version, there was an unlimited remote agent license, but now each server needs a license, and there are specific licenses for Exchange Sever, SQL, etc. This means that the backup saga will continue until we shell more money.

Fantasy Baseball:

This week I play Blernsball All-starts and go head-to-head with MAN Morton Dexter Beals, aka Oculon. Last week I barely lost to the place team, but still moved up to 7th place. The Blernsballers are in first, but statistical evidence (Joe Morgan’s most-hated words) shows that I should have done than I have- see dsjoonation. Let’s make it one for the ages and meet again in the playoffs Oculon!

Movies:

I haven’t been watching much of the Netflix with the long hours and new episodes of Entourage, but I finally got Pan’s Labyrinth in the mail and was I glad. Guillermo del Toro directs this Spanish civil-war fairy tale and it is easily my second favorite movie of last year, only beating out Cuaron’s Children of Men. Cuaron and del Toro are two of three famous Mexican directors, along with Alejandro González Iñárritu, making movies today.  del Toro seamlessly blends Ofelia’s fairy-tale world of fascist escapism with the brutal reality of Franco’s dictatorship.

Set in a mountain village, Ofelia and her pregnant mother come to live with Captain Vidal, her mother’s new husband.  Resistance fighters are living around the village and Captain Vidal is trying to starve them out with a strict rationing policy.  Ofelia is about 12 years old and is still full of curiosity of fanciful thinking.  As she wanders into the woods and the labyrinth behind the barn, her imagination takes over and she sees fairies, a faun named Pan, a magical toad and a pale monster.  As the movie progresses, Ofelia’s fantasy world feels more and more real and the resistance fighters come to a head with Vidal.  Multiple times I heard myself saying, why doesn’t she does do X.  But, the story is true to the characters and doesn’t change their actions or thoughts just because it might be more logical to a grown-up.  On top of the great story, direction and acting, the special effects feel perfectly in place.  Overall, 4.5 out of 5

It’s Monday morning and things are relatively slow on the IT front, so I’ll get you up to speed on the technologies I’ve been working on/at.

Team Foundation Server:

This little gem is an MS server application that acts as a companion to Visual Studio desktop applications. The TFS allows developers to store and share code on the server with a TFS plugin in Visual Studio. Our developers are spread out between England and the US, so this was a logical upgrade from Visual Source Safe, where outside developers had to VPN in order to share code. TFS has a SQL back-end and Sharepoint Services reports and document storing area, which means you have install about 4 programs and 5 upgrades before actually installing TFS.

The problems:

1) The application had to be set up before a consultant got, but the dedicated hardware for the application hadn’t arrived yet. So, I had to set up the TFS on a server with another SQL back-end application already running. This other application was not production yet, thank goodness, so I could back it up and run TFS.

2) Day one of transfer: Once the consultant left and the new hardware arrived, it was time to back up the TFS and move it to the new server. Let me tell you, it’s not as easy as you would think. The MSDN forums were fairly helpful, in that other people had the same problems as me, but were unable to solve them.

3) Day two of transfer: MS documentation has faltered and I end up calling MS TFS support. They responded fairly quickly and were very helpful. Three days, two remote assistance sessions and nine hours on the phone later, it was fixed and ready to roll. Oddly enough, the application that ‘had to be ready’ a week before, could be down for three day without any complaint.

4) Now that everything was working we still had the problem of VPNing for outside users. The main reason that TFS is pretty good is the HTTP(s) access works and there are instructions, but it still had to be setup. Having never set up an SSL certificate website for IIS, I had our friendly ISP walk me through it. The MS instructions for HTTPS/SSL setup were pretty darn good, so once I had the certificate, it went smoothly. Now all I had to do was open up ports in the firewall for the new SSL ports.

5) Now that TFS is working, I have to get the old application, an Incident Management application, working. While it’s not nearly as complex as TFS, I still had to call support. This was solved within a day.

Tomorrow: The on-going backup exec server saga…

Things are churning along nicely at work. Let’s just say that Windows Updates are interesting. Oh, Outlook and Daylight Savings Time, DARN YOU!

Music Updates:

Bloc Party - A Weekend in the City - I’m giving the album 3.5 out of 5, so far. The album is growing on me. Highlights: ‘Waiting for the 7:18′, ‘Hunting for Witches’, ‘I Still Remember’

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible - I stole this album, just because it hasn’t been officially released. Don’t worry, I’ll be buying the album, DELUXE edition, on March 5. The whole album is great and will definitely make the year-end top 10. The only question is, do I go to the Portland show this May, or do I wait for the second go around in teh fall. Highlights: ‘Black Wave/Bad Vibrations’, ‘Ocean of Noise’, ‘Intervention’, ‘No Cars Go’. 4.5 out of 5 stars

In other Arcade Fire news, they’ll be on NPR this Sunday Night and SNL 2/24

Still waiting on the new Radiohead, Modest Mouse (with Johnny Marr of THE SMITHS) and Wilco albums.

I definitely have found my TV show sweet shop:

Monday: Heroes, Studio 60
Tuesday: Gilmore Girls
Wednesday: Nothing Good I know of
Thursday: Scrubs, 30Rock
Friday: Monk, Numb3rs, Real Time w/Bill Maher — starts up again this Friday
Saturday: Not consistently SNL, except for 2/24
Sunday: Extras, Rome

The Daily Show is on now. Time to get my satire on/embolden some terrorists OR NOT!

This week has been very busy and now the sleeping-in begins. We finally got Qwest (#@$%^&ers) to come and hook up our T1 line, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut our T1 line still doesn’t work. Hmmmmmm. Sounds like Qwest still has more work to do, more than a month after the scheduled delivery date.

Onto more fun stuff. The week was topped off by leaving early on Friday. It was nice to catch-up on my favorite comedies: 30 Rock and Scrubs and jam out to the Flaming Lips and CYHSY. (Music selections inspired by this blog post) I also got a PS2 slim from eBay, madden 07 and a memory card. The plan is play madden online with a friend from Iowa. This is two years after I sold my original Ps2 to buy a dvd player, since I never played games. Even though I’m usually quite tired after work, I’m still less busy and stressed-out compared to school. So, I’ve been working on my console Football skillz and have chosen the Bengals as my team. Once my game gets up to snuff, I’ll be ready to take on all comers.

Keep your ears open this spring:

4 albums are either out or coming out that will keep indie-rockers quite busy. 1. Radiohead 2. Arcade Fire 3. Bloc Party 4. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah . I’ve seen all of these bands live and have rated them based upon lived performances and album quality. We’ll see if the order shakes after their albums come out in the coming few months. Also, Radiohead fans should look for the Live at Bonnaroo DVD that Thom Yorke promised this fall. I was at that performance and it was the best musical experience I’ve ever had, EVAR!

NetFlix: With the full time job I’ve also got to consistently watch my NetFlix rentals. I’ve hitting up the standup comedy section lately. I recommend Louie C.K., Patton Oswalt, Zach Galifiniakis and the rest of the Comedians of Comedy gang.