andersonfam.org

It’s a bummer that my first post in a long time has to be a rant, but oh well…it is what it is.

I’m going to be implementing a Blackberry Enterprise Server at work soon to let my blackberry-wielding co-workers get the most out of their phones. As such, I decided that I should probably switch over from my Treo 650 to a blackberry so I have some idea what I’m talking about when I have to troubleshoot for them. So…I received my new blackberry on Wednesday and then yesterday actually ported my sprint phone number over to the new device. Soon after, I started trying to get my email accounts integrated with the phone…I worked at it for several hours last night and an hour or so during the day today and couldn’t make it work. I finally gave in and called Sprint tech support today. I called them around 1:30 (on my drive home). I had a sneaking suspicion that the data services I had on my Treo hadn’t transferred over correctly to the Blackberry, so that was the first thing I asked. The first girl I talked to said yah – data services are turned on for my account and everything looks good. I kept pressing her that it wasn’t working right and she eventually transferred me to the tech support department. I talked with this guy for a while (explained the whole situation again) and after 15 minutes or so, he decided that he’d transfer me to their Blackberry support department. I talked to this guy for 5 minutesor so, explained my situation and suggested that there might be something awry with the data services. He apparrently didn’t like that solution and proceeded to put me on and off hold for the next 30 minutes. Finally, after all this time, he comes back on and says, “Hmm – sir it doesn’t appear that you have data services turned on for this account. Would you like me to turn it on?”.

!$!#@!#$$!

Seriously…tech support people and their stupid scripts.

Ugh.

Well we successfully got our datacenter at work moved. No one got hurt, and we didn’t lose any hardware in the process. I took a bunch of pictures of the process which I’ll post sometime when it’s not three in the morning.

I find it quite interesting to see lists of what friends are currently reading (blogs/podcasts/books/etc). Here’s my list for your enjoyment, organized into semi-coherant categories. Except for the books and podcasts, this is basically a dump of the RSS feeds I subscribe to.

Read more…

Yesterday we received, at work, a new server which will soon be tasked with running a high-load, SQL query intensive application. It’s a Quad-Intel Dual Core 2.66 GHz machine w/ 8GB of RAM and two 280GB RAID10 arrays. Since each of the 4 CPUs are dual-core, there are a total of 8 cpu cores to crunch through data. The catch, though, is that each of the cores are hyperthreading-enabled, so each of them shows up as two processors to the operating system. You do the math…the operating system thinks that it’s running on a 16-way system. I’d love to be running linux on this beast, as I believe you could squeeze quite a bit more raw processing power out of it…unfortunately, the application destined to run on this server is windows-only (for the time being). Nevertheless, geeks like myself seldom get to play with hardware as powerful as this, so I enjoyed myself immensely.

See this picture for a graphic illustration of the 16 CPUs.

The debate over the origin of the word “blog” is a constant source of comedy at work, so I was glad to see that Kottke picked this up:

You’re Safired! (kottke.org)