AGAIN!

I'm moving! Again!

Please follow me to my new home at

http://brazilliangeek.wordpress.com

My new home is much nicer, I'm excited!

Find reasons and stuff all in there, so get clicking!

doin' it again

So it's 1am, and I'm up again doing work. Last night's work failed, and after a full day of things going wrong, I'm up here again. The good news is that by now I exactly what went wrong last night, so now I can be sure that the operation will actually work. The even better news is that my lovely lovely wife is sitting here next to me practicing the guitar and singing, and it sound great! Who says that late night admin work can't be fun?

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How many hats?

It's 2AM right now, I'm as tired as it gets, and hoping like crazy that the export won't fail again... and that's ok!

I've been through a few changes on my work stuff, and now I'm back in the realm of network management. Can't say I'm too wild about the idea, as my real passion is pure sql server stuff, but it's been an interesting ride. I'm becoming a mad hatter of sorts, swaping my many new and shinny hats several times throughout the day. Some of my daily stuff includes

• Creating and removing users


• Managing email


• Managing tickets


• Managing the password manager program


• Managing the intranet

And a few more things... Like I said, I'm not really upset at anything, it's really really stretching my abilities of organizing and prioritizing my activities.

So back to right now, why am I still up? I need to create a copy of one of our intranet sites to a third party, and it's not a complicated process (well, ok, it is), but it's very time consuming! My sweet, sweet wife stayed up with me reading for as long as she could, but now she's down for the count. I plow along, patiently waiting for the export to complete. Once it's complete, I can do a few more things and then get some sweet, blissfull slumber.

I'm also writing this from my mac. Gotta thank Rick for that one. They were going to throw it away, and Rick knew that I wanted one, so he saved it for me. So now I have a mac at home, connected remotely to some of my servers at work, and writing on my blog. In a few minutes, I'll probably pull out my psp and play some more Final Fantasy Tactics.

It's 2AM and I'm tired. But you know what? My life is awesome.

Expanding the house

I don’t know how many of you access my blog by using its other address, http://blog.brazilliangeek.com. I purchased the domain about a year ago, and have been using it for a number of things, including directing to this blog.

Well, over the weekend I decided to use the rest of my domain name, so go take a look at my new website, http://www.brazilliangeek.com. It’s very fancy looking for a home site (I host it at home on a rather old machine, though it is a very nice machine for its time). It’s an extension of what I do at work, so you’ll get to see a bit of what I deal with day-to-day. When you get there, don’t forget to take a look at the FAQ. Also, if you get prompted to install any activeX objects or anything, it’s safe (it’s from me!!!), so don’t worry about it.

Have fun!

Thanks honey!

My wife has the gift of knowing what I would like to have, even when I don’t know it myself. For christmas (I know, it’s late, but I haven’t blogged for a while!) I got a copy of Little Big Planet for the PSP. So excited! So much stuff to do! But I didn’t just “get it”, she also setup a whole treasure hunt with little pieces of paper I had to chase around the house until I found my present… So it was a double-present! My wife is just awesome, I LOVE YOU HONEY!

Adventures on Windows 98, part Final

Ok, so here’s the quick breakdown of how things went during last week, as I toyed around with windows 98 on a laptop. Quick recap, the laptop is generations ahead of what windows 98 was created for, so it should give us a much faster and responsive experience. Or so I thought!

• Speed: Yes, it was very, very fast. IE would crash (more on that later) and restart so fast you wouldn’t even notice it just died.
• Responsiveness: Very responsive. Things just happened when you clicked on them. Very enjoyable.
• Stability: Bad. When it was first installed, it didn’t crash. Now it crashes all the time! I didn’t even install much of anything on it, just the hardware drivers (more on that later), and Opera (a very good internet browser).
• Software & Hardware support: Pretty much dead. Let’s face it, hardware makers have moved on, and it’s not cost-effective to keep on supporting old hardware. I had to jump through very long hoops to get video and networking going, specially since this laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive and it doesn’t support thumbdrives (windows 98 came before that stuff even existed)

So, I’d finally gotten to the point where it was pretty useable… But  then after a few days I could not browse the internet! Internet Explorer (6, since 7 and 8 are not available for win98) would crash just by opening it. Firefox is not available either, so that left me with Opera, which, while great, wouldn’t work very well, crashing every other session.

Well, maybe I could use it for playing movies! Oddly enough, even though the sound driver installed, no sound would play… That kinda ruined the fun of playing games too. I couldn’t even take screenshots to do some kinda of “then and now” comparison.

So, no internet, no games, no music, no video. What am I gonna do? Easy, I’m gonna ditch the whole thing and install windows XP. I’ve just finished the XP install, and it runs like a champ, everything is in there. The moral of the story is, as much as we complain about how unstable, slow, etc our computers get, we’ve come a reaaaaly long way, even from what we thought was pretty good.

Back from the dead!

Cute zombie!

I've recently inherited a laptop from my brother in law.... It's not super old, it's actually fairly decent, and also fairly dead... After bringing it back to life, I had an insight of pure genius... I'm gonna run windows 98 on it!

Without delving too much into the technobabble, this laptop was new when windows 98 was pretty old... Meaning, windows 98 would run fastest than ever imagined! I was excited at the prospect of a windows 98 that ran, well, fast! And this laptop is the perfect candidate for that.

So expect my next posts to chronicle my adventures in windows 98. Pure nostalgia! I've already ran into a few hitches here and there, and if you feel anywhere as giddy as I do right now about this, then I bet you'll enjoy this, hopefully as much as I will!