Good Friday

I hope that you enjoy your day off IF you are one of the fortunate ones that get a day off on Good Friday. Our employer MIGHT let us go home early today if we are extremely LUCKY..... Then again, the motto around here is if you do not work you do not get paid so I suppose that I would rather just stay all day so I can get paid. I remember the days of working for a company that actually had benefits that included so many sick days per year or personal days just in case your life demanded that you get something done during normal business hours. I remember the days of getting paid /medical/vision/life insurance. Well, for me and for now those days are a thing of the past. I am thankful that I have a full time job and I get a pay check every two weeks. Thank you Jesus for my jobs. It takes a full time job and part time job for me and Katy works a full time job for us to make ends meet.
I just paid $2.01 per gallon to fill up my Pontiac Grand Prix SE. The total for that bill was 28.00 which is not anywhere near as bad as the lady that was filling up the Yukon which requires 80.00 worth of gasoline. OMG people, can you imagine filling up your vehicle and putting 80.00 worth of gas in it. Whew....... Can we say highway robbery folks?
Lets NOT forget that today is Good Friday. We will be showing the Passion of the Christ movie tonight at church at 7pm so that we can be "In Rememberance of Him". I am sure that there will be a lot of kleenex being passed around the sanctuary as we watch the portrayal of our Lord and Savior being stripped, beaten, mocked and then hung on a cruel Roman Cross for all the world to see. I can not even imagine the Love that is required to take upon the sins of the world past , present and future. For God so loved the world that He gave his ONLY begotten son that whosoever believeth in Him will have eternal life. A very familiar verse to most of us but unfortunately we seem to lose sight of it on a daily basis.
Sunday is the day that we will celebrate Easter and folks , let me remind you, it has nothing to do with the Easter bunny nor does it have to do with wearing your newest clothes to church. Easter has to do with the resurrection of Jesus Christ where the prophecies of old are proven to be correct and Christ defeats sin and death once and for all.
I hope and pray that your mind and heart and spirit is focused on what is important this weekend as we walk down the road of life in the next three days. How significant and important these days are is all up to us.
God bless

Propellerhead Spinoff

Gosh, I just LOVE to blog. Do you know what I mean? I suppose some folks go to a psychiatrist for therapy , I just peck away at my keyboard and let the thoughts flow. I hope that whatever you do provides you with just as much theraputic release as blogging does for me. KWIM??
My day started out at 6:30 am just as it always does. I packed my bag, hopped in my Pontiac Grand Prix SE and headed off for Ashley Frustrate road. At 9 am I headed to a client site where I spent 4 hours playing around with Backupexec and Microsoft Exchange. The backups are working however BE (backupexec) is showing the backups as failed. The backup is backing up all the SHARES on the server (C,D,E drives) as well as Microsoft Exchange Information Store and mailboxes as well as the NT Server downstairs. Backupexec from Veritas provides you with a server edition of their software and then you install agents for backing up application services like Microsoft Exchange and allows you to connect to other servers and backup its resources. The only problem with BE is that if it runs into one tiny problem with the backup it shows it as failed. The only successful backup is one that has 100% success with no errors. So, there you have it, the customer would like to see their backup STATUS show as successful. I can hardly blame them for that.
I finally got Veritas Tech support online and I worked with one of their engineers back and forth via e-mail and a webex remote control session so they could see what I was looking at. I wound up having to install BE service pack 2 and one hotfix that is supposed to fix the problem. Come to find out my customer has some corrupt e-mail in some of the mailboxes that is causing BE to have a hissy fit and fail the status of the backup.
In the morning I will check the backup again and HOPEFULLY the service pack and hotfix will have worked miracles. I am not holding my breath though. We need to get into several of the mailboxes on the server and delete all the junk email that is causing problems. KWIM ?? Until that happens the backup is probably going to show failed. The good thing is that while the corrupt email is not being backed up all of their other data is being backed up without a problem. So, if there is a problem and they need something restored I feel confident that I can restore it from the backup.
I headed back to the office on Ahley Frustrate around 2:30 pm where I indulged in a LATE lunch consisting of a ham and cheese sandwich on rye bread with chips and chili con queso sauce and cranberry apple juice. Of course right when I am making my sandwich and hoping to sink my teeth into it in walks a customer that has a problem with his PC and wants to stand at the customer service area and chat about it for about 20 minutes. I am glad that something did not drag my sandwich off the counter and eat it before I could get back. LOL... I guess that means that we dont have anything crawling around in the kitchen huh??
My perspective customer has a Compaq computer that is under warranty. He bought it and it came with a trial version of Mickeysoft Office. Try it for 90 days and then register it online (pay for it). If you do not then you can not access any of the data that you just created. Neat trick huh?? Mr. customer got smart and said "to heck with that folks" not me, not gonna play that game. I will just pull this sucker out of here by the tail and continue to use Mickeysoft Works instead. Lo and behold when he ripped Office out by the roots Works went belly up. Actually Works worked just had problems with the word processor working properly. I wound up telling the customer that the hardware warranty does not cover software and that if he wanted a custom configuration with regards to OS and only the apps he wants that he would have to go buy XP , install it and then install the apps he wants with nothing else. I told him if he did that and ran into driver problems then he could bring it to me to finish it up. The computer is only 2 months old and so I would imagine that XP will find almost all of the drivers needed.
Gosh, I can not tell you how happy I was to reaquaint myself with my sandwich which was lying right where I left it. I finished off lunch, checked e-mail and then grabbed some parts that had come in for another client who has a HP 4550 color laserjet printer. It took me approximately 30 min to replace the ETB (electronic transfer belt), Image Drum (also known as toner cartridge that has a built in display drum) , Fuser Assembly, two filters and assorted paper pick up rollers. I got everything put back together in short order and went to plug in the printer. As soon as I put the power cord into the power receptacle guess what. The power receptacle for the printer pushed right back into the body of the printer. Oh well, so much for a simple maintenance kit job. LOL...
I spent the next 30 EXTRA minutes for the customer trying to make a path into the area where the power receptacle is so I could fix the problem right. I pulled about 25 screws out of this beast and I was no closer to getting inside the printer than a man on the moon would have been to getting cheese off the surface. I was able to put my finger up into an access hold at the bottom and push the power receptacle towards the back so I could plug in the power cord. I told the customer that they have two options. Pay me 85.00 per hour (hourly rate) to gut the machine and fix it right OR they could put the printer in place and just not unplug it EVER. The customer opted for the cheaper mode of handling this so they signed my invoice and off the the races I went. That is right, back to Ashley Frustrate again. I get to the office and find out that at 1 minute after 5pm everyone has left and guess what? My office key right along with my car keys were locked in the office with the alarm on. DOH....
I dialed up my friend Erica who was kind enough to drive all the way back to the office and let me in so I could end my day. Whew, thanks Erica...
The only other exciting thing that I did today was to lay in my recliner and snore until it was time to go to church for potluck dinner. Yummy yummy for the tummy!!

My pastor sent me this knowing how I feel about the Easter Bunny and the true meaning of Easter. LOL... 

The new Cooper River Bridge nears completion

If you go to http://www.cooperriverbridge.org/ you will see more information and pictures about this bridge. I can not wait for it to be completed. I do not feel safe driving across either of the older bridges that are currently in place. The new bridge is supposed to handle 8 lanes of traffic which will be very nice.

The New Cooper River Bridge nears completion here in Charleston SC.  

What an interesting day!!

It is 7:31 pm and I am holed up at church with my family. The church is a refuge in many ways for us. One way that it is a refuge is that we come here during bad weather events. Currently we have a string of thunderstorms heading up the East Coast so we are playing it safe and hanging out at the church. We are under a tornado watch and there could be hail and high wind. The reason we are hanging out at church is because I refuse to be in the double wide trailer that we call home when bad weather hits. How many videos have you seen where tornados have touched down and there were no trailers that got hit during the storm? I rest my case, there is almost always a trailer park that gets nailed. Call me chicken little or whatever, I am going to error on the side of caution. LOL....

My son Jeremy has a blog and you can find that at the following URL. http://germe.blogspot.com/ I really enjoyed reading what Jeremy had to say so give him a visit and say something if you want. I am so proud that he is in Junior College and doing so well. I am also proud that he is taking steps to taking off some extra pounds. Jeremy and I have that in common. I too need to watch what I eat, eat less of it and get more exercise. In the last couple of months I have really struggled in that area. I just have not had the mental energy or will power to get on the elliptical trainer. I am happy to say that I have been able to maintain the same weight within about 10 lbs. One week it comes off and I will leave it off and then two weeks later if I am not careful about what I stick in my head it is back. Grrrrrr
Anyway, lets see, what did I do today. This morning was pretty routine at the office. Our admin lady was out having outpatient surgery so the guys were pretty much on their own. Dave (sales dude) got to the office around 8 am this morning. We ate breakfast, chatted and generally had a pretty easy morning. For the last several months I have been working in the shop area since we had our senior engineer on site. However, Jerry has moved to the Greenville area and his office is now vacant. For the last couple of days I have been using his old office so that I could be closer to the other folks that work there. I get tired of having to walk from the front of the office to the back of the office multiple times per day especially when I am the only person there and the front door opens. Anyway, I decided that I did not like sitting in Jerry's old office so I went into the other side office near the front, cleaned it out, moved the desk and brought my stuff out of Jerry's office into it making it my own. I still have some things to do in order to get it where I want it but it is much cosier than sitting in the shop area where the desk is so darn small.
I went to lunch with a dear friend in Mt Pleasant and then went back to the Town of Summerville to check on a back up and talk to the town administrator about up coming tasks on their network. The weather started to get bad this afternoon around 4pm so when I got off of work around 4:30 pm I headed back to Mt Pleasant and had an early supper with my friend. I made it back to Duck Ditch USA around 7pm and the weather was about the same as it was in Mt Pleasant. Lots and lots of rain. So, here we are sitting at church waiting for the weather to settle down so we can go home.

On HOLD again....

I am sitting here on HOLD waiting for someone at Laptop Parts to help me with the price for a DVD writer for an IBM Thinkpad 2652. I have been on the phone for the last hour with both IBM and Laptop Parts and I am not getting anywhere. I want to pick up the phone and throw it out into Ashley Phosphate Rd and watch the traffic destroy the phone. Do I have PHONE RAGE or what? LOL... Then there is the MUZAK you get to listen to and the female voice that originates from phone hell that tells you that they appreciate your patience and to please continue to GROW OLD while you wait for a human to show up on the line. My question is this. When the human does show up will they give me the information I NEED or will they just send me on another worthless wild goose chase again.
Lets see, what have I done today thus far. I had someone bring in a Compaq Presario computer with video problems which I fixed by going into SAFE MODE and then System Tools and the restore function. I restored the pc to last Wednesday , rebooted and walaa the video was fixed. Imagine how easy that was... The customer picked up the machine and said that he tried that and it did not work for him. Hummmmm Maybe he was not holding his mouth just right?
Oh goodie Laptopparts sales is now on the line, maybe I will get lucky this time. hahahahahaha

The Jury is still out

if you go to http://moffittjc.myblogsite.com/blog you will see that i am playing around with the following new blogsite.

I am currently deliberating IF I want to really use this web site for my blogging needs. There are pro's and con's I suppose. One of the things that I like about this website interface is that it gives you a LOT of bells and whistles which in turn allows you to have a more interactive experience with your readers. That could be good or bad depending on how much WORK you want to put into your site. The nice thing about Blogger is that you use your bloggar application to post a simple message to your Blogspot.com website and you are done. No fuss , no muss. One application does it all. If you want to post pictures however you have to use an application by Piscea called Hello. You use that app to upload your pictures to your blog and it takes care of all the formatting etc. Presto, it is done in a snap which is pretty nice.
The downside to all the bells , whistles and options is that you find yourself doing way more WORK than you wanted to in the first place JUST to have the ability to notify people that you have posted a message to your blog. The flip side to this problem is for me to BEG people to embrace RSS and the appropriate RSS feed reader applications and just have them plug in my RSS syndicated feed and then they could get notice of new posts that way. The problem with the RSS reader app is that you need to use an RSS service or application that will put an app in your system tray that will notify you of new posts. Bloglines.com does just that.
This interface does allow you to import all of your past blogs into your new one here. However, it will take me about 30 minutes to completely reconfigure my blogger blog to make this happen and then I have to change everything back the way it was when I am done. I have over 400 messages so that would take me forever. NOT....
Well, there ya have it in a tiny cracked little nut shell. Bells and whistles and lots of work just for the ability of someone getting notified that I have driveled one more time in my blog. As I said in the article title here, the jury is still out on this....

ok, so here is the deal pickle. Yes, i am talking to YOU. You are the one that reads what I babble about so I am going to want to hear your input or feedback. Please look at the new blogsite and let me know what ou think. Do you like it better than Blogger because of the photo album, ability to subscribe and be notified via email etc. if only one person gives me feedback about this then I will not really know what you think so PLEASE take the time to reveiw both my main blogger here and the new blogsite at the url above and then leave me a comment either here or at the new site. Thanks so much for your assistance in this matter.