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.