The beginning..

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Thank you for all the thoughts and prayer during the last couple of months. ​As of yesterday afternoon my search is over. I'm officially employed once again. My first day is the 22nd, next monday. 

I first interviewed for this position back in March. I had three interviews and I felt like I'd nailed it. Which I did. They offered me the position and then realized they did not know my salary requirements. We were a long way apart. Even with me coming down, and them coming up we couldn't get anywhere near close. ​ I had to decline. 

​Flash forward to a couple of weeks ago. I'd been doing some consulting work and while I was out I heard a rumor that they still didn't have anyone in that permanent position. I reached out to them, sending them an email. Basically just my "Hows things going", "Just touching base", "Know anybody that needs IT staff" kinda email. Ten minutes later they called me. 

​They had just the day before, put an ad out and were receiving resumes. I was told they would see if they could now meet my requirements and I'd get a call back on Monday. Monday came and went, no call. The next monday came and went, no call. Then yesterday, I was heading to the doctor and driving my their building, I thought to myself "Well, that one is gone".  Less than 30 minutes later, I got an email from them.  :)

​They had two other candidates but before they sent them an offer they wanted to check with me. They came with their very best offer. It was just enough. With that and all the benefits it made it worth it. I start Monday. 

The Guy, and the Things...

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So this morning I had a meeting with the guy. He was all about saying the things. I know more about the things then he knew. He talked for a while, and said a lot of other things, but didn't really say anything at the same time. Now the meeting with the guy about the things is over, everything is pretty much about the same. Silly me for thinking things could change.

Birddog lives...

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I know, it even surprises me. You'd think the 3rd time a 10 year old server disappered from the network, it would be down for the count. Nope, it was just lost. I think it had gone blind for a while and when it could see again it didn't know where it was. Well I've pointed it in the right direction and now it's all better. Least until next time. He now had a buddy, Tornado, just in case he get's lost again. Maybe Tornado will be helpfull in regaining contact. 

Work...

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Today I contacted Dell about our HDD. Evidently we have the "Keep your hard drive" warrenty. I've never even heard of anything like that but I like it. I didn't really want to send back an operational or partially operational hard drive with sensitive data on it.

I asked if i could drill it or disable it any manor other than a simple wipe. They just said keep it. I don't know what they would do with it anyway.

Work....

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This morning I've been installing software on the new citrix server. I guess i'll need to install all this stuff on the backup server as well, but that'll wait till another day. Right now the app of the hour is Visual Fox Pro 9. As much as I hate VFP our company refuses to see the light and continues to use it.

I'm also attempting to recover data from a failed hard drive of one of our programmers. It's been running about 15 hours now and it's just at 1%. It has recovered quite a bit of data so far and looks like it's moving again. Hopefully it'll finish soon. Gotta get the data off and then go to Dell to get a replacement drive.

Work sucks...

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So last night I was up until nearly 1am working to get their damn firewall working. Then this morning I get a call they want me to come in and babysit the a/c guys while they pit in a new unit. Who scheduled this and can I get some of what ever they are smoking. I guess I'll just take some time off next week. Maybe half the week.

Btw. This is my first post using the iPhone wordpress app. So far so good.

Do da math...

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Here is my spam filter stats over the last year or so. If you do the math on the total received vs the total allowed it's pretty impressive. Out of nearly 3.9 million emails received it allowed just over 2.5% of all email through. That's over 97% of all inbound email is spam. And that's with it not cranked down as tight as it could be. I'm sure I could get over 98% out of it if needed. Yes, I'm know I'm a geek...

Long time no type...

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So I got this new laptop this past week. I got an Apple Macbook Pro 17" 2.4GHz laptop. Let's just say it's just awesome. I pretty much haven't touched my iMac since I got it. Yeah, it's for work, but what does that really mean. Well it means I have The Sims2 and World of Warcraft on it. That's what it means. :) Anyway, here's a quick peek at it.... 
 screenshot.jpg

Factory reset a Cisco 7640 or 7960...

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I've been using the Cisco 7940 and 7960 phones for a while now. That's why I was so surprised the other day to find a handy way to do a factory reset on them. I don't know how I could have missed it all this time...

Simply hold down the # key while you power-cycle the phone. (If you already have the SIP firmware loaded, simply press * and 6 and Settings at the same time, and the phone will reboot. Then press and hold the # key while it boots.)

After a second or two, the phone display will say:

Reset key sequence detected

The headset, mute, and speakerphone lights will cycle. Now, simply press the following keys:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 * 0 #

Now, the phone will ask you whether or not you want to save your network configuration. I usually press 2 for no.

Save network cfg? 1=yes 2=no

The display will then say:

Factory reset initiated

and the phone will continue to boot. There you have it -- a quick and easy way to do a factory reset.

WARNING, Work Stuff: Panasonic KV-S2045c/Kofax Out of Paper error...

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Issue: I have a Windows XP SP1 machine. It has a Kofax Adrenaline 650i scsi card and a Panasonic KV-S2045c scanner attached. After upgrading to SP2 all scanning stops. Home grown scan software has weird random crash. Panasonic RTIV scan software has a divide by zero crash. Kofax vcdemo and vbdemo report Out of paper error. Reinstalling, removing, upgrading, or downgrading and all combonations of those do not fix it. Uninstalling SP2 does fix this issue.

Fix: Downloaded ASPI drivers from adaptec at http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/speed/software_pc/aspi/aspi_471a2_exe.htm . Ran aspiinst.exe and then aspichk.exe and verified that updated drivers were installed. Rebooted and attempted to scan. Same error. Removed scanner from device manager and attempted a scan. This time it worked as normal. Made a few scans just to be sure. Scanned for new hardware, reinstalled scanner drivers when asked.

All is well...

New PHP Toys

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I'm made some changes to my word famous backup tape management app. They were mostly internal changes, error checking and such. I added a memo field that follows the actual tape in order to track tape errors and things like that. Other notable changes are the addition of a jobstatus, jobtype and backup date fields. I have some other error checks I wanna put in, and to clean up some of the other maintenance features which aren't all that great just yet. Anyway, here's a link. Feel free to play with it...