Author: heather

Started a new page, halfway through the year and all… So, tonight’s ramblings are not only brought to you by the ubiquitous Maxwell House but also tonight by Tylenol Allergy Sinus 🙂 I was sneezing so much I looked like Rudolph so now I’m not sneezing but I am floating. It does that to me, so usually I just try to put up with sinus issues…

Ah, what topic to ramble on tonight? Coffee and its wonderfulness? I drink mud, thick, toxic, spoon-melting mud… no decaf here please! Amazingly enough, I sleep like a rock. I can drain half a cup at 11 and be sleeping at 11:30. But, coffee and sinus medicine together makes for an interesting evening… weee 😉

Another topic… e-mailing… I am the world’s worst correspondent. I have many, many relatives’ e-mail addresses… do they get letters? Um… No. I shall seek to rectify this here soon. (HI to my relations that may be reading this at some later date!)

And to wrap up this evening’s mini-rant… Webpage updating… hmm, just see e-mail blurb above 🙂 Tonight I’m adding a few more pictures of the house and maybe do some general work on the blahness of that page… possibly not though, as I haven’t started that yet and it is 10pm and I do have to work tomorrow.

WooHoo to work… would you believe… I’m NOT on-call at the moment??? It’s a new experience, quite. No, no… relax peoples, I’m still gainfully employed 🙂 it’s just that work has instituted true rotational on-call! This is a good thing 🙂 Now… I do my first week as tier 1 starting July 15th so we’ll see if I’m still as enthused after a week of being the first touchpoint for all of our North American network issues for a week hehehe. Was tier 2/backup last week and only got 4 pages, have been off call this past week and only got 1. Coolness.

Signing off with one more cup of coffee to drink tonight. Cheers!

Amazing how much time can pass and you just don’t notice…

I took one of those quick web personality tests tonight. It’s called Colorgenics, which apparently tries to diagnose your personality based on the order you pick colors…

My results 😉

So, the obvious PMS of my last post is gone (yah, yah… too much information 🙂

Anyway, as a result, work is going well again… Plus, got a bunch of changes/projects coming up rapidly and it’s always a learning experience. hehehe That’s it, that’s the root of it all 🙂 I think if I weren’t in technology I’d end up being a perpetual night student. (aack, bad flashbacks there of my graduate classes in accounting… I think it was the “Governmental Accounting” course that drove me to find a totally new career!)

I’m quite the happy camper! We have a sales agreement on our old house. So, we should be closing with the buyers sometime in April… now I’m glad we signed with another realtor (we were very realtor-shy after the first horrid experience trying to sell the house! – I’ll save that story for another braindump.)

We’re getting a lot done on the addition!! We’re up to wiring and insulation in the walls… That’s the schedule for this weekend. I have to post some interior pictures on the house-stages page! Soon! We went to Home Depot and Lowe’s this week… looking at lights, flooring, etc… I don’t have a lot of patience in stores when I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for… but, got a few ideas for what Montey and I both like, and now… it’s back to online shopping!

And, I got another new (well, ok, slightly worn, new to ME) router 🙂 2500 series, dual token ring, dual serial!! Buying equipment for my study lab piece by piece as I find parts I want on the web is working well. So next I believe is a switch… :))) If you’re reading this and understand why I’m building a lab 😉 feel free to e-mail me with suggestions on what else I might want to get?

For right now, I’m trying to not let the presence of toys to play with distract me from studying all the bits of theory for the written…

Well, off to read for a bit… I have two changes scheduled for 3am so, I’ll be up for a while yet.

Have I mentioned how much I love coffee?

/me prays to the coffee gods… fill me with your caffeine essence!

— another rambling bunch of text brought to you by Maxwell House and the number 0x3e3e

I hate not knowing what is going on… So, at work, I hear rumors of another reorg in technology, but of course… it’s all hush, hush… That really bothers me…

So.. it seems something is going on and my personality can’t stand the waiting game… I’d like to think my job is not in jeopardy… but hey… nobody’s safe, ever.

To make myself feel better I updated my resume 🙂 Just in case…

So, if you know anybody looking for a network engineer, well skilled in Cisco Routers and Switches (CCNP & CCDP)… pretty good with Checkpoint Firewalls… located in Southwestern Pennsylvania (not relocating)… They can write to me here or here.

Obviously however… web design is not a developed talent. 😉

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We are more social on IRC than generally we are IRL…

…which made it even more surreal when we actually met some of the people we chat with… (Dalnet) and ended up talking for hours (um, and, there may have been drinking going on…)

Lisa… liese^

Tom… Burt

Kenn… WolfPlex

James… raVeneyes

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How to Tell if You’re an IRC Addict…

https://web.archive.org/web/20020207230809/http://www.rotfl.com/irc-addict

Okay, how many of these apply to you? (yah, some of these are corny and old… some are rather applicable though!)

Saturday night… where are Montey and I? We are so pathetic >:}

Let’s see… I’m in the living room on my Linux box, on two IRC networks, and consoled into the sole router I have at home to “practice” on…

Montey’s in at the computer station in the kitchen… flipping between two computers… he’s just installed XP… so he’s got two keyboards… we both talk in some of the same channels…

Some people find our lives weird… Ask Montey’s sister and her husband 🙂 they stopped over tonight for a bit. I fear we are rather bad about boring our guests…

So… I’m getting back into my studying… ah yes, the steam comes out of the ears… I’d gotten rather lackadaisical about learning… I finished my CCNP in August 2000 and my CCDP in May 2001 (yes, it took me nine months to take ONE more test… did I mention I get sidetracked easily…) and haven’t really been keeping up a learning pace… and technology is NOT a field you can get lazy in!

Work has wound up again and it’s great! I love being busy again… my job constantly evolves… from the one site I took care of in ’99 when I started (incidentally back then we had one network engineer at each site) and now, I’m based out of that site but I work with our corporate network team and take care of many sites… way cool. 😉

So, lately I’ve been immersed in BGP, which, if you know what it means, you’ll understand why it’s been most fun and educational… and if you don’t know what it means (HI Dad and family!) trust me, it’s one of those topics I babble about and your eyes glaze over 🙂

Oh, and in late December I decided that I needed to learn about Linux… so now my box is RedHat 7.2, I upgraded my kernel though… to 2.4.17, my printer works, so does my USB web cam… sound card doesn’t… it did with the RedHat install but after I recompiled it didn’t and I don’t care for sound on my computer that much anyway 🙂

Last night I hooked my router up to it… and stared at the screen stupidly…

Windows… I use Tera Term, works for telnet or console, but how in the hell do you get to the serial port in Linux? Well, happy to say, I got it… installed minicom and played around with the settings… bingo. Big Smiles!

Enough rambling for the moment….

I have a lot to say… eventually I’ll say it…

Me…

Um…

Well…

Now…

Geez…

I don’t know what to say…

Let’s see… I’m in networking (routers and switches and cat5, oh my.)

My husband is also in IT, he works with CTI stuff… (CTI – computer telephony integration)

I first signed online in June of ’94… with Compuserve.. then I switched to AOL… then Nauticom…

Then…

In April of 1996…

I found the world’s best ISP… The NetConnection…

www.dp.net

And here we’ve been for almost six years…

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Oh… and I reasonably suck at HTML… so what you see is about as fancy as it gets.

E-mail complaints here…

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Okay… the first thing people want to know…

…does she have a nice rack?

Very funny comic strip…
www.userfriendly.org

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About Me

So… me… you want details?

Ah well and good…

Married.

00011101 years old.

No kids, not now, not ever.

Two cats though 🙂

Cats make excellent substitute children and the best part is… you can leave them home alone for a weekend and that’s okay… you can’t do that with human children.

Jamaica – Dec 2001