Can you believe that May is almost over? Boy has this month flown by. It seems like it didn’t even happen at all. Today was an interesting day. I spent the morning working down at Lifestyle Properties again and got them set up with a new laser printer to ease the cost and effort of maintaining three seperate crappy printers (for those of you who are considering purchasing a new printer, consider investing in an HP 1300 LaserJet because it prints great, last a long time and cost far less to refill than conventional desk and bubble jets.) That took an hour or so and now they need me to completely reinstall one of their desktops too. Never is anything simple.
Min and I went down and had lunch at Ned’s Pizzeria in the Centre Ithaca. We also purchased our wedding bands down at Schooley’s on the Commons. My ring is already there but we had to order Min’s. Her’s should be in in a week or so. It is nice to have one more thing taken care of and not have to worry about it.
I got a lot of work done today on the business side of things and have pretty much sealed up a new contract with a national recruiting company for us to be a point of presence for them here in central and western New York with an eye towards covering all of their needs state wide. It is a small contract right now but has potential to grow in the future.
Eric’s laptop died and so he is coming down tonight to drop it off so that I can reinstall it with Linux (SuSE 8.2.) He is giving up on Windows 2000, it is just too much of a pain, I guess 😉 SuSE 8.2 is so nice that he will be much happier with that. Especially now that he has a nice computer at home that he can play video games on so he doesn’t need to use his laptop nearly as often as he used to for that.
Andy has to work tomorrow because he got Monday off for the holiday (funny how that works.) And first thing in the morning, I have to drop off my car at Bell’s in Varna to have my brakes looked at before I take a drive down to DC. Speaking of which, I am driving to DC on Monday after a meeting here in Ithaca and I will be gone all week. The week after that, I will be working in Rochester for a bit of the week at least. John is coming up from DC to work in Rochester so I will be there some of the time. Maybe I will be able to convince Josh to go out and try some selling with me. Our new Managed IT Services division seems to be a much easier thing to sell than our ASP services (maybe because the sticker shock isn’t so dramatic!)
Andy and I both got UPS shipments today. I love getting new stuff delivered to me, it is so much fun (this is how people end up getting addicted to eBay!) Andy got new books from Amazon and I got a new RAID controller from eBay. I find amazing computer parts deals on there. You really have to look around a lot for them but you can find some great stuff cheap.
I was hoping to be able to do some testing on Brainbench this evening but they were down for maintanence so that wasn’t going to happen. Eric and Amanda made it down with just enough time to drop off the laptop that needed work done to it and grab a quick dinner at the State St. Diner before driving back to Groveland Station. They are planning on moving into their house tomorrow although they have not yet closed so they are still panicking about that. Speaking of panicking, I need to talk to MY mortgage agent and see what is going on there. One more thing to add to my super long To-Do list. Eric needs his latop reinstalled because Windows 2000 doesn’t start up anymore. The laptop had been dual booting Win2K and SuSE 8.0 which is also really showing its age. So Eric opted to have the machine just totally converted over to SuSE 8.2. Boy is he going to be in for a shock when he sees how nice 8.2 is. SuSE really made some good strides over the last two versions of their product. Of course, laptop installs are always a pain, at best, but an Internet based install without a CD to load from will be even more interesting.
Lifestyle Properties needed me to repair a desktop for them this evening so I have had to spend a considerable amount of time working on that as well. I was thinking that I was going to have to totally reinstall the machine that was having a problem but I think that I was able to repair the damage and I think that it will work fine when I take it back tomorrow. After getting that machine back into good shape, I did a disk cleanup (boy did it need that, at least 500MB of extra junk) and then a defrag (every bit of the disk was totally fragged.) So, that should help them out a bit. I have to take my car into Bell’s tomorrow to have them look at my brake that is dragging. I am pretty sure that I have a caliper that is seizing up on me. It is a real problem and I really can’t drive my car at all right now. So hopefully they can do something with it tomorrow or I am going to be in tough shape come Monday and I have to drive all over town and then to Washington.