various stuff Marty's Weblog

I recently bundled all of my service with Verizon FiOS.  I'm probably saving about $20 a month now with their new 4-pack bundle (TV,Phone,Internet,Wireless).  It's really more of a simplicity thing for them, to put everything on one bill. No complaints here though.

The install took quite a while, about 5 to 6 hours.  Not having had High-Def before, the upgrade was well worth it.  The only thing I do not like so far is the router.  All of the devices installed (router, set top, DVR, ONI) are monitored by Verizon, which made me a little uneasy about leaving my computers out there unprotected.  I fiddled with the router configuration for about an hour, but ended up choosing to disable the wireless on the Verizon router and connect my old Linksys Router to the new router, leaving the new Verizon network as a DMZ.

Yesterday was a tough day.  One of my dogs, Lola, who we've had for about 10 years had become very ill and needed the "final trip to the vet".

Lola was 17 years old (thats 119 in human years) and up until about 10 days ago she was in great health.  We took her in to get caught up on her vaccines and to get a general check up.  She had always had these fatty nodules on her chest that from time to time we would have checked to make sure they weren't something bad.  This time around, one of the lumps came back as suspicious.

We'll never know if it was her age, the recent cocktail of vaccines, or something to do with the suspicious lump, but her health declined very rapidly over the past few days.  She had lost the use of her hind legs and needed to be carried in and out, and held up while outside.  Samples we were finally able to get indicated there were probably kidney problems as well.

When let out in the front yard, our other dog, Patrick(also 17), always stays nearby.  Lola was the explorer.  If we turned our eyes away for 5 seconds, she would be two blocks away, happily sniffing every shrub in the neighborhood.  Yesterday she started a new exploration.  Goodbye Lola.  We love you and will miss you.

Lola

A good friend of mine just got his first book published.  It is entitled "Nagios 3 Enterprise Network Monitoring".  I'm meeting him for lunch tomorrow to get my signed copy.  If you are in to network monitoring, check out the book.

If you are a history buff (civil war / buffalo soldiers, etc...) Check out his fathers work.

It's very frustrating when you send an email looking for some info and the response comes back saying something like “I don't know, ask George”. But George wasn't cc:'d on the reply. Now I have to forward that reply on to George and spend more time to get a response to my initial question.  What if I was out of the office for a while.  Simply adding the cc: to your response can save alot of time...

Gripe #2: Asking a question and getting a “Clintonesque” reply that leads me to believe that maybe I just didn't phrase my question properly. So I try again with some wording changes... If I wanted to go on a fishing expedition, I wouldn't do it here at work!

Too often people just see a question, vs. seeing the problem. Personally, I don't just fire off questions to clog the email system, there is usually a purpose...

Time for a beer... Doing all this fishing has made me thirsty. 

My Son's school had a huge White Oak tree taken down this weekend.  To save money, they just had the tree company leave it in "manageable pieces" in the parking lot, and they invited the community, and the parents of the kids in the school to come help themselves.  I guess the tree company has a different view on what is a "manageable piece"...

Anyway, while splitting some of the smaller pieces (that truely WERE manageable), I broke my axe.  I've had this axe as long as I can remember, I think it was one of my grandfathers.  This was not your typical break either.  I've broken handles before, but today I broke the axe head itself.  No misuse or anything, it just broke when it hit the top of a log.  Fortunately, it was a Craftsmen.  I had to go to Sears to look at Fridges later in the day, so I brought the axe to test the Craftsmen guarantee.  No problems... I walked right out with a brand new axe!  It was also alot of fun to walk through the mall carrying an axe.  I got a couple of funny looks.