Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. We are very spread out this year.

There is no snow this year for Christmas in Buffalo.

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Sept - 41 visits, 65 page views
Oct - 87 visits 222 Page views
Nov - 31 visits 37 page views

Browser info
Sep - Internet Explorer 73% Firefox 27%
Oct - IE 53% Firefox 47% (4% Firefox 2)
Nov - IE 70% Firefox 30% (3% Firefox 2)

IE was all the same version (IE 6) and there were several different versions of Firefox.

Its back

Power just came back on. 62 and a half hours in the dark. Hopefully this is not a teaser taste of power. The smoke detector beeped once when the power came on and the dog went to bed.

You got to do what you got to do sometimes.

No power means no high speed internet. We are able to use the dialup to connect to the hospital. This only works so long as we have power to the laptops. At some point the battery on Dad's laptop died. He needed to connect to the Hospital. We have a car adapter, so it was a matter of getting the laptop charged in the van and have a phone line at the same time.

The Clean up

Trip to the store

Dad and I went to Tops on Friday. There was nothing on the shelves. This photo was taken with my phone. It is the bread isle.

The Sky and Trees are falling

The Sky is Falling Part 2

So much for it not sticking. I guess it is time to find the scrapper and put it in the truck.

The Sky is falling

I have been getting to work early, because they are taking one of the buildings down and we lost some parking until they are done. I have to get there early to get a spot. The building was coming down fast but they are having problems with this last part.

I have been sitting in my truck until it gets closer to the time I should be at work. This morning it was raining, and then I noticed some solid stuff coming down in the rain. It was not much. The ground is too warm for anything to stick, but they are already talking about lake effect.

You can see in this photo some of this solid precipitation that was on the cover of my truck this morning.

Back to Work

Today was my first day back. Everyone seemed glade to have me back. They have gotten a little behind. As I was headed in this morning, someone in administration asked how I was and said they heard I had surgery and was glade to see that I was doing better. I am not sure how they found out. It was kind of a long day but I made it through. I am ready for a nap.

How ironic

When I got out of work today, I went to my truck and it would not start. I thought it was funny. I just paid it off and not it would not start. I sat in the parking lot for an hour and then Dad was able to give me a jump. hopefully there will not be any more issues anytime soon, but I will take it in tomorrow to have it checked out.

Paid in Full!

Isn't that a wonderful statement? Well, I have been working at Children's Hospital this week and I stopped by the credit union to see what is left on my truck. I saw what was left, though hmm... then came back to my office and did a web transfer from my savings to my checking, grabbed my checkbook and payed it off. Only eight months early. So, I now own my truck free and clear.

Excitement at the General

I got to work today and I noticed some smoke from the other side of one of the buildings across from the main building. When I was crossing the street to the main building I saw a bunch of people running across to that area. I decided to just head up to my office... I would be able to see that area from one of the offices up on my floor. When I got in the build I notice there were not many lights on but really did not think twice about that. I got to the elevators and they were out, so I ran up the stairs to the fifth floor. There was no power in my area and the data center was on generator power. I looked out the windows on the one side and there was smoke coming from the power house. The fire trucks started showing up shortly after that. The A building, the tower, was mostly on normal power and the rest of the site was all on generator power. Well, the hospital was now at a code orange status(disaster). I got a page from the code orange command center that they were not able to get the phones working, so I headed down there. Come to find out someone had decided to move the command center to an unused area in the A building, because there was no power in the boardroom, where the command center is suppose to be. They should have stayed in the board room and opened the curtains. Well, I got a couple of phones working for them and they pulled out the emergency cell phones. Because I was there, I became the IST person for this disaster. So, there were Administrators, managers and then me in the command center. I ended up stay there for most of the morning, relaying information. A little before 11 o'clock, the COO came in and briefed us on what the electric company was saying at that point. They were still in the process of seeing what damage there was, and that we were likely not going to be back to full power most of the day. At this point it was decided that I could be pulled out of the command center and head over to Children's Hospital, where I was suppose to help out this afternoon and all next week.

Book Review: Alone Together by Jack Weyland

This was a good book. It was quite the change of pace from the last book I read.

When I read, I put a lot of effort, well a lot of emotion into the book. I loose myself in the book, and I loose track of time. Since I read slow I could loose a lot of time. I put myself in the shoes of the different charactors and in a way share in their pains and their accomplishments. This book was no different. I really got into it. The main charater is very much like me. Parts of it really hit close to home for me. The end was a happy ending. I am glade. I love happy endings.

Great Escape

I have been doing a little kayaking lately. I would like to get out a few times a week. It is nice to escape from everything for a little while. I am able to the kayak and head over to this nice little launch area. They have a nice sign there that gives the distances on the different lengths of the creek. I usually take this kayak, but I do have a second. The other one is just an inflatable one. This one is a little bit easier to use, and you don't need to take five minutes or so to inflate it, just pull it out and go. I take the a-c routes, up one way and back the other. According to the sign it is about 3.1 miles. It is just a creek so no white water or any thing like that. It takes me about an hour and ten minutes. It is a nice little trip. There are all kinds of animals along the way. i usually see several turtles, and groundhogs. There are always lots of birds( lots of ducks, seaguls, cranes, pigeons, I have seen hawks, redwing black birds, robins, and many I do not know what they are). I will see butterflies. Once in a while I will see deer, I saw two deer today - a buck and a doe. I want to find someone to go with me. I have been able to get missy out there... as amazing as that may seem. It took a little while to convince her, because of something that happened during the whitewater trip. She will take James out there every once in a while. I have been trying to figure out who in the ward would join me out there... maybe I can convince someone at some point. Of course I will take it easy with who ever goes, and I may go more often.

Back to Buffalo General

I had spent the past two weeks helping out other sites and finally got back to the general today. It was nice to be back in my office, but there is a lot of work piled up there. they really got behind while I was gone. Joyce, the team lead, was really glade that I was back. It is kind of interesting to see how much she relies on me.

Problems with Analytics and RSS Readers

First of all, that rss reader leads you to a feeling of having read everything, but does not let you know about the comments. sometimes the comments are a lot better then the original post. Then this RSSreader I have every once in a while will pop up and say I have new feeds and show some old post. It looks like the Analytics software does not recognize if somene views the site through the a RSS Reader, or feed.

Book Review: Out of My Later Years by A. Einstein

This was an interesting book. It is made up of several essays and letters by Einstein. It was very interesting to read his views and thought process in several different areas. Only a part of this book deals with math, and that part is really neat to see how conclusions were arrived at. It seems like he put a lot of effort into trying to prevent war. He seemed like a very humble person. In a couple of places he stated that what he was writing was just his views based upon his experiences, and he invites all to think for themselfs. At some point I will reread this book. I think this may be the type of book you will get new things out of each time it is read.

When it rains it Pours

We had a nice little down pour last night. I have been helping out at Suburban hospital, and when I got to work today none of the computers worked and the phones only partly worked. They have been working on expanding suburban, and they have a 15 foot deep hole for the footings of the expansion. That was completely filled with rain water this morning and water was finding its way into the basement through a cracked phoneline conduit in the bottom of it. The amout of water was too much for the sumppump they had for the basement and that burned out and started to backfill. I guess that was happening since 3 then at about 4 the halon was shorted and went off, this is when they noticed something was wrong. IST was called about 5 when the firemarshel was ready to kill the power on everything in the computer room. Someone from IST got there around 6, there was 8 inches of water in the computer room. One of the server guys was able to shut down most of the stuff from home before he got there so there was not much he needed to take down. At this point everything but voicemail is up. Voice mail is completely waterlogged and will not be up until next week sometime. There is no standing water, but there is a layer of mud. The hole for the footing is pretty much empty too. That is a really big hole. Could have left it as is and had a nice swimming pool.

Oncall part 2

So, I am at the end of the second week on call. I am hoping that I will not have to do two weeks in a row again any time soon. The second week was not too bad. I only had to go in once, and I had to walk only two or three people through their problems over the phone, and none of that was in the middle of the night. Someone at church said I looked more perky this week. It seems like when I am on call, the weather is nice... then the following week it is not nice. It is suppose to rain all this week. I am hoping that the rain will hold off until I am able to get some kayaking in.

Electronic Post-it note?

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/15055928.htm

I saw this artical and my first though was are they serious. I read through the artical and wouldn't it be interesting to have all of these chips stuck to everything, and be able to read them just by waving your phone or PDA by them. I wonder what the interface will be like to load the information to these chips. I could see it being on drivers licenses and the police have a pda with wireless technology and get peoples record instantly, or it being on a person going in the ER and the doctor being able to bring up all their infor mation instantly... which would be very useful if the person is unconsious. It will be interesting to see how stable they will be... Will they be erased when you walk by them with a magnet, or will an EMP destroy them. The artical said they are about 5 years away, so we will just have to wait. I just thought about Minority Report, where the charitor was walking and all the signs were reading his iris and changing based on his profile, and then people were able to track him based on that. Could these chips become a tracking device?

On call

There are three of us that trade off the oncall at Buffalo General, so I am usually only on it every third week. I got talked into taking this weeks oncall... then I realized that next week is my week. Normally we only get called in two or three times in a week. So far this week I have been called in four times. It should prove to be a busy weekend, because it is suppose to be hot and hummid. The printers all jam up when it is like that. I came home today and crashed. I am so hoping that next week will be a light one.

Rumples

Rumples has been afraid of the Fire alarm. I hear it has something to do with Tom. This morning around two the Alarm went of in a couple of short bursts. We think it was from low batteries in one of the alarms. When it went off, Rumples went and hid, like he always does. He gets so scared he shakes. Today he went to his bed to hide. Missy got him out of there and he took off again. When I went to bed I found him under the table beside my bed with his head under the bed. It kind of reminded me of an ostredge. There he stayed for most of the rest of the night. I had to run into work around 4 and he was still there. He got up sometime after I got back and before I came back to work. What a brave dog, eh?

Indiana Changes time

One thing that I did not mention in my previous post was that while I was in Indiana I noticed that the time was the same as it was in New York. At first it did not seem strange, usually do not know if they are on the same time or not. Some of our reletaves did mention about their dislike for changing the time now. I am not so sure this is progress. It seems to me that this day in age there should not be that much need in saving daylight. And if there is, why not save it the whole year? Someone must be making money on it somehow. http://www.mccsc.edu/time.html

Indiana Visit

I had talked to Grandma and at first she did not think that this weekend was a good time for me to come. Then about 1 oclock on Friday she called back and told me to head out there. Jerry and EC were at Grandma's when I got there. They were up for a reunion, and after the reunion on Saturday they went to Larry's to stay. Grandma has a nice little house. While I was there she asked what it would take to get her a computer and to get connected to the internet. That should be fun somewhere down the line. On Saturday, I made the rounds. The first place me and Grandma went to was Brent and Linda's place. Laura was there in their pool. After spending some time with them we headed out to a swim party that Richard and Dawn were having for Reese. Grandma said this is the third birthday party he has had this year and his birthday is two weeks away. After that Grandma went home and then I headed over to Randy and Peggy's. Peggy wanted me to tell everyone hi for her. "Hi." I finished up the night by visiting Grandpa. Spent some time over there. He is growing some hair. He thinks that is pretty cool. I drove back today. It was a short trip, but I have not had a chance to visit in a while.

Dinner at Friendly's

We had dinner at Friendly's tonight.














Ruth had fun with the menu...


Missy and the girls had
fun with the Crayons



Then came the Ice Cream

Ruth

I came home from work today and Ruth wanted me to pick her up. She then did not want me to put her down for sometime. It is quite the change from when she and John where at Amy's.

Slow Day at work

holidays are normally slow at the hospital. Today was no different. Most of the non-nessicary personel do not work, and I have a feeling that so of the staff that work on holidays don't know much about the computers so they don't do too much on them. The only eventfl thing that happened during work is that our link to the internet was disrupted twice. And that I have no control over, so it was nothing I was able to fix. I normally try not to take the holidays off so that those with families are able to spend them with them.

IE vrs Firefox

It is interesting how different pages act in the different browsers. It takes more effort to keep everything working in the two main browsers. Now I updated to IE 7, and some things I like about it and others I don't. I don't think that all of the active X controls work with this verson of IE. At times I think about reverting back, but I never do. I have been playing with this counter and it works good in firefox, but not so good in IE. More tweaking is needed.

Annual review

I had my review yesterday, and I am getting a good raise and promotion. Today I looked at the progress of the goals that was set for me as part of this review. As of today I have meet all three of my goals for this year. My manager is fine with this, it allows him to rate me higher in next years review. It sounds like they may try to give me some bigger more complicated projects to try to slow me down.

Goals

We are suppose to submit our self review and goals for this year by the end of the week. I talked to my manager today to get some imput from him before I submitted my goals. the first goal I talked to him about was to get 208 request done this year... I thought it was a easy goal to set and earlier he had said that most of our group should have a goal of 156 for the year. Well, when I talked to him he wanted me to change it back to 156, by the way I should be able to have done by the end of the month. The next goal I said I was going to complete 6 online training courses, and he had me cut it down to 4, that also I should have by the end of the month. It sounds like he has to grade the goals against the rest of the group, and does not want my goals to be ahead of everyone else. Personal goals should be personal goals. They should also be something that takes effort to complete, yet are still attainable. Oh, well I guess I will have a good review next year based on these goals.

Side Bar

I thought the sidebar was kind of boring, so I added some content to it(three items). Let me know if you have trouble viewing any of it or if it slows the loading of the site too much. oh, yeah you may want to check the footer as well. enjoy

COWs

At work we have these "Computer on Wheels." We were calling them cows, but I guess someone took that the wrong way and IST is not suppose to call them cows. The users have no problem continuing to call the cows. I had a couple of them that had problems today. One someone had a paper on it that said do not use - Mad Cow and that it was called in to IST. Another said that it was a sick cow. When I took them back to my office to work on them, we all got a laugh out of it, then we were reminded that we still are not alowed to call them cows.

Sitting at the car shop

I brought my truck in to get it safty inspected today. He said that it passed, but the back breaks just bearly pass. He also said that they look like they are the origianal breaks. So I figure 101,000 miles isn't too bad for breaks and might as well have them replaced while I am here. They said that the front breaks are half worn so they are fine. They said that these trucks go through front breaks twice as fast as the back. Now I have not done anything with the front breaks since I got the truck ( it had 48,000 miles on it when I got it), so they must have replaced the front at the dealership.

This is a nice idea, providing wireless access to those who are waiting. Wish I had known about it before. All I need now is VPN access to work and I would be all set.

Yes, I take bribs

I got a page today as I was trying to run out the door for lunch. Someone in one of the conference rooms was trying to get the projector working with her laptop. She said that she knows that it is not Kaleida equipement, but if I can look at it she will give me a cookie or I could grab a plate and share their lunch. It was a real easy fix and I got a cookie out of it. It was a very good and big cookie. I have gotten other hings in they past like free lunch and that kind of stuff. I was joking with my team lead after that, and she was like yeah the departments that gives us treats are the ones we try to get to their request fastest.

Good or Bad - maybe both

I got a page today from someone on the helpdesk... The COO of the hospital had his secratary call and have me paged. He wanted to set up an appointment for me to come to his office to move some data to his new laptop. It was not my week to be on problem tickets, but you can't say no to administration. It is probably god that those people are inpressed with me to ask for me by name, but it increases the workload on me if I am getting problem tickets when I am not suppose to. Oh well, thats the way it goes sometimes.

Skillport

They have is program at work called skillport. It is a bunch of online courses. I signed up for it on Friday. They did not give any outline for what courses should be taken. I have done a couple already. I tried to find some basic ones to start off with. I think I was successful finding the easy ones. The ones I have done so far I have gone so fa with them and get bored and just take the test. I scored a 99 and a 100 so far. One was a basic programming course, and I found some errors in the examples, I think I will try to find who to complain to tomorrow.

tuned piano

I got the piano tuned yesterday. It was kinda cool to see him take it apart. there is alot going on in a piano. I didn't think to grab the camera. oh, well.

Piano

I got a piano and it was delivered yesterday. Here it is.

Mouse in a maze

I had luch over at Roswell Park today. Every time I go over ther for lunch I think it is kind of like a mouse in a maze. From my office I take an elevator down three floors then take a bunch of turns, go across the bridge between BGH and Roswell, then take another elevator down two floors, then another bunch of turns and wind up at the food.

It's an epidemic

It looks like everyone is joining in on this blog thing. I was remarking to dad yesterday, that we were getting quite a few blogs in this family. At what point would it be a good idea to have a Family blog with a bunch of team members, so that we don't have to cycle through a bunch to see what every one is up to? We still probably would want the individual blogs, but the family one would be a nice way to quickly share info between the fam. Just an idea.

Just being a Payne

I think it is interesting how my coworkers come to me when they get a problem that they don't recognize. I am the youngest and one of the newest on the team. I am not sure if it is just because I am Dad's son and therefore should know everything about computers, or if it just that I often have an answer for them. It happens at church too. Bishop directs anyone with a computer problem to me. I have only been the Finance clerk for about a month and the bishop directed the Elders quorum presidency to me to be trained on MLS.

There is a couple of openings on Dad's team and some of my team think I should apply for it. I am not qualified nor have the knowledge base to be on it yet. They say dad will not let me blow anything up

Vacation 2006?

Any ideas for a vacation this year? It sounds like Christmas will be in Utah this year. I pan on being there for that, but am looking to take time off before that.