Thursday December 27, 2007

Been a while. Bit of fun with snowy roads and bent cars.

Let's see. Gas is at 2.87 as of noon today. Had a very white Christmas and not too cold either, temps in the upper teens/low 20's, which, added all together, made for some slippery roads which Jon & Patty and Evan found out much to their sorrow. At least the cars are all still drivable, but they will need some more attention and a bit of work to make them presentable once again.

Got some nice pics of the snowy roads. The roads in these pics are actually fairly clear, but there has been no wind to knock the snow from the tree branches yet, which makes the landscape look like a Winter Wonderland. Took these thru the windshield while driving, most didn't turn out but a few don't look too bad.

Have a Happy New Year!

Wednesday December 19, 2007

We won. The new network is up and running smoothly. The worst problems were those on Saturday, and by the end of Tuesday they were fixed and behind us.

I have a huge stack of network switches in 24 and 48, copper and fiber, gig and 10/100 ports, Intel, Avaya Cajun, and Extreme Summit, sitting around my desk. Still have more to fetch from the closets and still need to inventory them all for the trade-in. Next up: the Wireless Lan. We were going to start work on it this week, but after working approx 90 hours last week everyone decided to push that back until after Jan 1. I'm still working with the design engineers discussing options, but we won't get serious until Jan 3.

Gas. On 12/12 2.719, on 12/15 2.749, 12/18 (noon) 2.799, 12/19 (noon) 2.889. Must put gas in Gladiator on way home tonight, hoping that it drops back a little by then.

Hear there has been a bit of car trouble in Bemidji. RumJohn lost a window to vandalism and Cricky got a big door ding from a car sliding into it. All relatively minor PITA problems.

Just got back from paying my Electric bill. The Co-op isn't going to raise the rates for 2008, no, not at all. Instead, they are adding a "power cost rider" surcharge of .0064 to the bill. Means my bill will go up about $8 a month, but no, they are not going to have any price increases. The increase doesn't piss me off, well, I'm not happy about it, but what really pisses me off is that they say they are not increasing the cost of power. BULLSHIT!! They are, but they are just calling it by a different name, I suspect to avoid some regulation or maybe to make us feel good.

I can understand and accept that the cost of power in general is rising. I can accept that the cost of gasoline is rising. I can accept that that cost of electricity is rising. What I refuse to accept is the mind games they are trying to play with us. If you need to raise the price of the electricity, then say so and do it. If you are going to raise the price of gas, then do it. This bit about raising the price on Tuesday by .10 then drop it on Wednesday by .05 is ridiculous. Raise it by .10 and leave it there for a month or two.

Forgot to mention that Matt's tractor and plow are working pretty good now. We put a new (homemade) gasket on the pump and it leaks less. The pump casing has a crack and it weeps there, but in one hour plus of plowing it lost less than a gallon of oil. At $6 per gallon it's still cheaper than paying someone else to plow, and we can look at rebuilding one of the other two hydraulic pumps we have when the weather warms up. Besides, Matt's having a lot of fun with it.

I'm buying the neighbors tractor. When Roger got his tractor a couple of years ago I told him that if he decided to sell it I wanted a shot at it. It just looks like a tractor should look (in my mind). I don't even know what it is (I suspect that it is a McCormick W-6), but I like the way it looks. He has finally decided to sell, and I made my first payment on it last week. It is buried in the barn, all winterized and stored away, and I can't get it out until Spring, but I should have it paid for by then. Going to go look at it this weekend. When I heard that it was for sale I jumped first, didn't want to give him a chance to change his mind or let someone else have a shot at it.

Well, gotta get busy. Conference call coming up in a few moments on the SAN design we are working on.

Sunday December 9, 2007

So far, so bad.

This is the big weekend. We are migrating the network at the hospital from Extreme data switches to Cisco Data switches. We figured that it would take an hour to migrate the first location. 2 hours later we were still struggling to get the phone system to boot up. After about 6 restarts, it finally came up almost three hours into the project. So, then we started on the main building.

We have an Avaya S8500 system with an ESS that is supposed to provide failover capability. We moved our entire server room over onto the Cisco network with very minor bobbles and then went to move the phone system over. Not only did it NOT fail over to the ESS, when the server came up it couldn't find its IPSI or MedPro or CLAN cards. After 3 hours on the phone with non-english-speaking Avaya techs (from India, I presume) at $180/30 minutes and NO progress, we finally moved the phone system back to an Extreme standalone switch and then jumpered that into the new network, and the system finally came up. Got home at 4 AM this morning.

We are going to move on to other phases of the project and leave the phone system jumpered thru the Extreme switch for now, and then try Monday to get in touch with support engineers that speak english and know Cisco Networks and Avaya Phones and see if we can come up with a solution. One good point: The network is NOTICEABLY faster on the Cisco switches. One other point: we know that the Avaya phone system does NOT fail over under all circumstances. We paid lots of money for a new phone system that was supposed to be better and more reliable and more flexible than our old Definity G3 duplicated xsystem, and we have none of the above.

Maybe our next upgrade will be to a Cisco phone system.

Gas: 2.73 this morning. Temp: -24F when I got home at 4 AM. Don't talk to me about global warming unless you are willing to stand outside in t-shirt and shorts for 30 minutes. After that I might listen.

Tuesday December 4, 2007

Gas: all but one station at 2.77. So we are back where we were at the end of October.

Got about 8 inches of snow Saturday and Saturday nite, the roads still are not clean and neither is my driveway. Matt worked most of Sunday and part of Monday afternoon on installing his loader on his tractor. It's works good EXCEPT that apparently the rear shaft seal is leaking on the pump. Looks like he made about three passes before he ran thru 2 gallons of oil. So this afternoon he is going to see if another pump will fit or if he can replace the seal.

Saturday December 1, 2007

Gas: back at 2.89 - 2.93, although I've seen a few stations like Twin Lakes and Shallow Lake at 2.99.

Snowing pretty good, since noon. Maybe 4 inches so far? Drifts in the yard well over a foot now. Don't think we will be going anywhere for a while. Might get another 6 inches overnight.

Good thing we're not working today/tonight on the network migration as originally planned. We decided yesterday to push it back a week to allow more prep time to get it right.

Watching a video tape "The Best of Stars on Ice." Just seemed appropriate tonight.