I am still working on the Vegas trip post.. But here is something I stumbled upon. A very unique way of using the collective power of the web.
www.stumbleupon.com. This is a site, where you can tag interesting sites based on your interest, you can “stumble” on it. You can install a plugin for Firefox for it too. BTW.. Firefox 1.5 is out. If you haven’t tried it out yet.. Highly reccomend it. Fast, Small, Easy to use broswer as an alternate to MSFT’ Internet Explorer.
What a day!! :).Highlights of the day.
Airport : Sucks!! I guess I just had a lot of expectations for the airport. It was dingy, smoky and dark. And I got the first glimpse of the “addicted” gamblers. The ones with the weary, worn out look on them. At least that is my theory :). Naveed thinks that I am crazy..
The Strip : One of the most magnificient creations of the human race!! Regardless of what one is told, I don’t think anyone is prepared for the “garishness” of the strip. It is bright, it is loud, it is large and it is addicting :).
The Hotel : I think this was one of our (or the only!!) bad decision for the trip. We decided to skimp on the money a bit and decided to stay at CirusCircus. As soon as we dropped off at the hotel, we were surprised at the lenght of the line for registration. It took me ~40 minutes to get to the counter. And then, we were offered a “smoking room”!!! because they didn’t have any non-smoking left. Me being the “take-whatever-you-get” type, just took the keys. When we went to the room, Naveed was like “Hell no!!!, we are not staying here”. He called the frontdesk and gave them a piece of his mind (him being smoke allergic and all!! 🙂 ). Surprise-Surprise-Surprise, the hotel suddenly found a non-smoking room for us. The rooms are still not something one would be excited about… I would not reccomend “CircusCircus” to anyone going to Vegas. Unless, you are there just for “gambling” :)..
Breakfast : We had breakfast at the “Bagel Store” in Circus Circus. Made plans for the day and had some bagels.. Hmm.. creamcheese. Shailah wanted to go the Spa and the rest of us decided to run some errands and get tickets for some shows. We planned on meeting up at noon.
Morning Fiasco : So, my IPod Nano decided to take a crap recently. It just wouldn’t start up. A “www.apple.com/support” error message shows up when booting it. Formatting it or restoring it, didn’t help. Hearing about Apple’slegendary support, I decided to take it to the apple store in Vegas. We had to wait for ~1.5 hours, but they swapped my Nano without any questions. Kudos to the apple support team.
Afternoon : Went to Wal Mart to get a camera for the trip.. here is one of my most memorable shots from the trip..
I know..I know!! It is crazy… Don’t ask, why we have to have the anonymous shot :).
Am going to Vegas for the first time to celebrate a friends 30th birthday.. Am very excited and looking forward to what Vegas can offer :). Am sure that there will be a few pictures to post.
Cacti is a great tool to graph network utilization. I discovered it during my previous job to create some utilization graphs of satelite links. I highly admire the talent of the kid maintaining this software… Cacti can be used by any organization wanting to graph network utilization. It is also flexible enough to graph other stats (disk utilization, CPU utilization.. etc.)
I used Linux for all of my previous installs of Cacti. The whole install is very well documented. My team is still not very Linux savvy and wanted to try Cacti out in a Windows environment. There is adequate documentation for installing Cacti on Windows, but I ran into several issues when following this guide. If I was starting all over again, I would rather try this documentation. It is more up-to-date and detailed. The author missed mentioning that you have to change the “DocumentRoot” value in the Apache conf file.. But that is a minor issue.
Am still having issues with the scheduler tool in Windows to run the poller every 5 minutes. The scheduled job is only running when someone is logged into the server. As soon as you log off the server, the scheduler seems to be stopping. I will post an update as soon as I fix this.
It was a rather lazy weekend.. but got to attend two parties at some friends houses. Today afternoon, went to Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba to try out some tapas. Highly reccomend the Chicken Paella at this restaurant. It was a bit on the pricey end, but the atmosphere was rather casual and laid back. Love places like this.
Here is a shot of me enjoying a good pint of english ale with my friend Sri.
And the Chicago Bears are on a rampage :). Looks like 2005 is going to be a good year for the Chicago sports fans..
Go BEARS!!!!
My team uses the “Remote Assistance” functionality offered in Windows XP pretty extensively. One of the problems with the tool for the tech support personnel is that there is no easy shortcut to “offer” remote assistance. One has to launch remote assistance, search for “offer assistance” and then click on the link that shows up. Sounds easy, but if you are doing it 20 times a day, gets rather irritating :)..
Here is a trick to bypass the search.. Right click on your desktop and go to “New” –> “Shortcut”. Enter “hcp://CN=Microsoft%20Corporation,L=Redmond,S=Washington,C=US/Remote%20Assistance/Escalation/Unsolicited/Unsolicitedrcui.htm” (without qoutes “”) into the location of the item box and hit next. Choose a name for the shortcut and click on Finish.
Double click on the shortcut and voila.. instant access to offering remote assistance :).
All of us had to take a passport picture, sometime or the other. Usually you would go into a general pharmacy and get a picture taken for ~$8. The stores usually take a digital picture, print out 6 pictures and give you only 2!!!. Instead you can take your own digital picture, use the photo kiosks and print out 6 passport pictures for $0.29 :).. Kudos to cheapness!!
I had to do a presentation today at work in front of a relatively large group (~50). It was received relatively well, but this is one area I would really like to improve on. No matter what you do, one is never prepared for the anxiety and excitement for public speeches. Couple of notes that helped me
1) Prepare for the meeting. Unless you are a Bill Clinton, you need to have some notes :).
2) Run a practise session. Helps to review the first step and also time your presentation.
3) Don’t go into details!!!
4) And speak LOUDLY and c-l-e-a-r-l-y. The first part is an issue for me :).
Looks like today is going to be a day of “Cool Sites” posts :). Here is a site maintained by Daniel Petri containing all sorts of MSFT articles. Daniel writes a lot of articles about issues that admins run into on a daily basis and he has some great practicle advice. Highly recommend visiting it regulary.
