travis' brain dump

Not too shabby… about 2 weeks turn around time during the holiday season at that!

I think Amanda was a bit more stoked than I was about having it back to be honest… To quote her text messages today:

“The xbox just got here!” and “Yay we finally have it back. I have missed it.”

Now how many other women do you know that would say that!? Gotta love her!

I think she digs it mainly for the DDR, Scene-It and it’s ability to play any media we have in the house, lol.

With that being said we’ve run into a little snag with how things work with that. While the Xbox was gone we did an upgrade which is causing me some grief. I installed Small Business Server 2003 into the house and placed all the drive arrays on the main server instead of the desktop…. *sigh* Now the Xbox can’t see any of the music, pictures or video…. I will figure it out but it’s a bit disappointing to say the least. I’m not going to move the drive arrays as there has to be some solution out there. For now at least we can play games and watch DVD’s again, lol.

The nice thing about SBS in the house is having the Exchange server. I know, it’s “geeky” to have one in your house, but all the functionality it gives for email and the ability to archive and back it up properly is awesome. That and the file server is actually stable again. So all in all it’s nice.

We finished up the spare room downstairs… I’ll have to post up some pictures later though when I have some time. It turned out really nice in the end despite some electrical issues that had to be worked out. (read: travis was being stupid). The desktop has been moved in there to keep it safe while I cause havoc in the family room over the next couple of months… *grin* I can’t wait to get that room done.

Anyway, things to do.

Wow… has this ever been (and still going to be) a busy week!

I started off this week preparing for a quick trip out to Rock Springs Wyoming.. yay the fun. I had to do some work out there for the company I’ve been working for so I was out of town Tuesday night and Wednesday. oh! On that note, the coolest phone call came in the night I was leaving… the official offer call. 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 So somewhere in the next couple of weeks I shall leave this horrible contracting nonsense and join QMR permanently. 🙂 YAY!

The best part about this? getting rid of SRC as an insurance company… I’m telling you, SRC is the elbow skin of Aetna…. They have got to be the ABSOLUTE WORST insurance company aI have every come in contact with… to this day they still haven’t reimbursed me for the prescriptions I’ve had to fill out of pocket since I got them. I’m still fighting with them but the minute my new benefits kick in you can bet I’m going to get really nasty with them. I can’t wait for the new benefits… wooo… so much better. This company really is a great company and they take care of their employees too. It will be a very nice change from the way things have been for sure. So, now I wait for all the results from my background check and drug screening to make it back to HR so they can finish up the paperwork to get me hired in. 🙂

The rest of this week is going to be pretty busy too… we’re moving about 60 people from areas on 3 floors down to floor 4 this weekend and the comes the followup as we move shuffle people around after that… At least we’re still only using 3 1/2 floors of the building. It should be interesting.

Speaking of the moves… it’s time to get ready for them. 🙂

a busy one for sure…

i’m glad we get every other friday off here… i don’t know how i could have fit everything into a 2 day weekend. out of it all i’d have to say friday/saturday were the busiest. friday i got up pretty early to get some snow tires on amanda’s car… did that just in the nick of time as we picked up quite a snowdump from friday afternoon through sunday morning. amanda also got her first experience driving in the snow, lol… she did really good actually.

most of friday was committed to an install at a client’s site where they were doing a full server upgrade/replacement. pretty awesome to see them up and running with current hardware and software though… it’ll make the support job easier for sure. a big thanks to Myke for hooking me up with a good reseller for the hardware and software, it saved quite a bit. after the install, speaking of Myke, we went over and met up with him and his wife to go head out for some dinner. we had a great time and i know amanda enjoyed the adult company outside of the house and away from kids, poor woman has been stuck making conversation with a 4 yr old and a 2 yr old who doesn’t say a word during the days… i think Andy and I have probably become stale being the only other two adults she sees on a regular basis… lol we had a blast though… amanda made a comment to me about how scary it is how alike Myke and I are… (ridiculing bad drivers and the general same thought process) she said things along the line like it was like watching us both have a conversation with ourselves…. LOL

saturday was way busy… I was finishing up some things on our home network and then we headed out into the snow to run errands and go pick up our Christmas Tree. (you absolutely rock Andy!) after doing that it was back on the errands again with the usual Costco/Wal-Mart run to pick up odds and ends. then there was the 4-5 hours of decorating for Christmas… we decorated the tree, setup some lights, the usual gig… it was fun and Amanda had a blast with that as well. I think she’s happy it finally feels like Christmas around the house as we’ve been too busy to really do anything with decorating the last couple of weeks… have fun keeping those kids away from the tree though babe! hehe 🙂

today you can tell is a monday though… glad we’re having the christmas lunch for the company today… i’m starving. other than that, its oddly quiet here today… almost eerie. anyway… enough blogging… time to go do something production for 30 minutes till lunch. 🙂

later

well if you haven’t noticed… the references for the site are now referencing travis.sarbin.net …

story behind this…  godaddy rocks. 🙂

i was setting in motion some transfers to start getting all my domains listed and managed in one location… i’m so sick of going to several sites to manage my domains so why not? well… while i was there i pondered the thought of purchasing a couple domains and there ya have it… so the new blogsite address is http://travis.sarbin.net (amanda’s is http://amanda.sarbin.net) and we’ve also got her another domain name for working on her new website she’ll be posting up and publishing to within the next month or so… smandy.net… hehe she’ silly but ya gotta love her.

also with the addition of some domains, we’ve done some computer upgrades around the house too… aside from the new 22″ widescreen we use for the desktop now, we’ve upgraded the main computer and the server… now running SBS 2003 so we’re using exchange for all our email now. it’s actually quite nice … point-click management although we’re still using the FreeBSD servers for the main mail filtering/relaying. (you didn’t really think I’d leave my favorite OS behind now did you?)

with that said… we’ll also be moving the FreeBSD servers sometime in the next couple of months to a new co-location facility here in the Denver area. during that time email will still work fine but the websites/blogsites will be down for a few hours. nothing major, but fun none the less.

anyway… duty calls. 🙂