Jan23

Quick post to show what the “Tall Boy” looks like in use…

by Chuck on January 23rd, 2012 at 5:11 am
Posted In: News
Tall Boy with equipment installed

Tall Boy with Equipment

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Jan16

Hard work and changes to home furniture

by Chuck on January 16th, 2012 at 6:23 am
Posted In: News

I’ve finally decided to replace the open entertainment stand that I’ve had for a few years. It’s been great and will continue to be used, just no longer for what it was intended. I’ve purchased the following from Amazon and it should be delivered on Tuesday:

Tall Boy media component cabinet

Tall Boy media component cabinet

This will be a good weekend project unless I decided to get put together sooner than a few days from now.

I’ve decided to continue to simplify the components that are going into the cabinet too. This past weekend I finally got around to replacing the Bose 3-2-1 Series II system with a Sony sound bar system. That also replaced an HDMI switch that I may still need to hook back up. This sound bar system was a lot less expensive than the Bose, but I was not prepared to spend the money on the Bose to upgrade. At least for now, perhaps in the future. This was inexpensive enough that I can still update within a few months and not have lost a lot of money.

Other home office related changes include an actual office chair and a desk that goes along with the style of furniture in my bedroom (where my home office is located). The desk is a bit smaller than the table I had there, which I kind of like because it’s taking up less room. However, it’s not provided the space needed with my current setup so I needed to extend the surface just a bit. I have a place just for the work laptop dock and that’s the only extra space I needed. The desk has a full length keyboard tray, and that free’s up space on the surface for other things, but cannot hold both my work and personal keyboards. And because of our VPN, I cannot easily use something like Synergy to share a single keyboard and mouse. It works as is though.

Work continues to keep me very busy, hence why I updated my home office. I’m spending about 10 to 12 hours every day if not more. Some days are 14 hours, but it’s a temporary thing. I’m hoping to let the SQL guy go on his own. I’ll introduce him to various people today so he can ask questions and I can focus on the other tasks at hand. We only have a few weeks and I know of various system that will not work unless we get some data exchange going on with SAP. The only thing I have asked for so far is for updating the pricing in the Price Exceptions system and that feeds into our web stores.

 

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Jan02

Goodbye 2011, hello 2012!

by Chuck on January 2nd, 2012 at 11:22 am
Posted In: News

December of 2011 was a pretty busy month. In fact the last 4 months of the year were really busy travel wise. It was a good year overall I think. I learned a lot and was rewarded for my work endeavors with recognition and a trip to The Bahamas. I hope to be saying similar things next year at this time.

I was able to make it home for the holidays, first Thanksgiving (a rare circumstance these days) and then a short 5 day trip at Christmas. I must say, I think I’ve finally lost that Christmas magic that I used to feel, as recent  as a few years ago. I do enjoy the gift giving much more than the receiving, but all in all, I feel the magic is gone.

Though this is a New Year’s Resolution cliche, I think that this year, I’m going to refocus on my health again. I pretty much wrote 2011 off from working out and even dieting and the scales show it. I’m not as heavy as I was a few years ago, but I’ve put on about 25 pounds – closer to 30 I think. I never got back into the old habits, but mostly lost the new ones that I’d gained (exercising for example). I’m going to start the year off right and see if I can’t drop back down to my ideal weight. I’d like to drop about 10 pounds over the next month and another 10 after that. In 3 months time I’ll be back down to my ending weight and then I’ll head on to my best weight. If I can keep this up, I may join the gym again or at least start taking advantage of the workout room the office complex has to offer.

Other goals for this year is to learn a bit more German language and get into the iOS development that I’ve been wanting to  get into. If nothing else, take my current Demo iPad web app and wrap it up in PhoneGap so I can take advantage of various phone functions such as GPS, Camera and barcode scanning. I have to rework a lot to make that happen. Of course over the next 3 months or so I’ll be heavily involved in the BIRD project where the company is migrating over to SAP to align ourselves with the Mothership. Challenges lie ahead, but there are no walls to block me.

Best of luck to all my readers for this new year. Here’s hoping that 2012 will be the best year yet in our lives (and it won’t end in some disaster that those stupid idiots predict based on the Mayan calendar).

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Dec08

While waiting on some processes, here is a short recap of recent trip to Munich

by Chuck on December 8th, 2011 at 4:15 am
Posted In: News

Today, as I write, I’m still working in Munich. I’m mostly applying some changes to a system that is recapping the orders that will need to be transferred from the old system into the new one. There is a lot of time waiting on processes to finish which locks up my primary mail client (Lotus Notes) , so I’m taking the moment to write this short summary post.

We arrived on Sunday morning after an all night flight. The flight was late taking off, but had good tail winds to push us along and we arrived earlier than scheduled. It was about 8 hours in the air. I got no sleep on the plane, so I was very tired when I arrived having gotten up about 20 hours before. I made my way to the hotel with a few other people from work, including the President and CEO. Because our rooms were not ready, we decided to go out for some breakfast and headed down to Marienplatz.

After having a pretty decent breakfast (except for the eggs), we walked around the Marienplatz for a while and was there just in time to see the Glockenspiel do its thing. It wasn’t all that impressive, but I’d never seen it in action, so I can check that off my bucket list.

We walked back to the hotel and when we arrived, my room was ready so I headed upstairs. I worked for about an hour before taking a short 3 hour nap. We met up once again for supper at the Wirsthaus en der Au. I had some spinach dumplings and shared a huge dessert tray with the table. Though it said it would feed two or more, it was more like it could serve 5 or 6. Very good none the less.

Sunday night was a late night as I couldn’t fall asleep. I was up until around 1 AM before sleep took over and I had the clock wake me up around 5:30 AM. I was able to put in a couple of hours in the room before heading over to the office. Breakfast was a danish and coffee in the hotel lobby. I elected to not pay for the restaurant breakfast (20 Euro per day).

Monday and Tuesday I spent with Martha, primary customer master data extraordinaire, working on what customers needed to be migrated and such. Those were my favorite two days of the trip. Monday night I had a hamburger and fries in the room, hoping to have a restful evening. Of course I continued working a couple of hours.

Wednesday, was a day of meetings, that started in the afternoon. In the morning I continued working on the order data to be transferred, tweaking and refreshing the snapshot I created.  In the meetings, we fine tuned the information that needed to be displayed in my system and clarified how the system works. Because the orders have to be manually entered into the new system, we need to make sure the list is as accurate as possible and provides as much of the information as possible.

Today, my meetings will start around 2 PM, so I will spend that time working on the order data requests and changes from yesterday’s meetings. It’s rough mostly because I have to reset the data and pull it over again. The system I have is a “snapshot” of the orders at the time it is run and it takes several processes to narrow the list down from around 4,000 to 1,200 – which may still be too many.

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Nov28

Posting this instead of preparing for work…

by Chuck on November 28th, 2011 at 6:54 am
Posted In: News

This past week was Thanksgiving and I was home in SC for the holiday. It’s been a while since I was able to go down for Thanksgiving. Usually I spend it with Cary’s family in Hagerstown, MD. This was a nice visit, but I was anxious to get home so I could have a few hours to rest up for this week. I was going to drive straight home, but around 11 PM I decided to pull over and get some rest and finish the trip on Sunday morning.

This trip was very enjoyable as I was able to see all of my sisters and a few of my nieces and nephews. I took a car load (and I mean a car load!) of clothes from a coworker and the young girls in the family had a blast finding things to wear. I then picked up more clothes from my Aunt’s house for an older nephew and he found some things to wear too. I hauled a lot of clothes around with me.

On Thursday, I went over to my oldest sisters house for Thanksgiving dinner. Lots and lots of good food (Joy cooks way too much!). Joy’s daughter, her husband and two kids, and my Aunt and Uncle joined us. It was a nice ride over as I had some time to spend with my Aunt Ann. I stayed the night with Joy on Thursday night. Though we spent a good bit of that night at Ashley and Derrick’s watching the kids and HUGE and lovable dog.

On Friday, we ran a couple of errands and then went to pick up my sister Rhonda to head over to my Aunt and Uncle’s place at the beach. We got there a bit later and tried to eat at the Chinese place across the street, but it was closed. So we headed up north a bit and found another Chinese place we’d been to before. It was also very good and as usual I ate too much. It was a bit late as we headed home, though we got to Joy’s place around 9:45 PM.

Saturday, Jessica came over and we had a wonderful visit. I was able to get on the road around 5:30 PM but headed over to my sister Karen’s place because I wanted to spend a few minutes with them as they had been in the mountains for the week. I’m glad we were able to meet up, even though it was only for about an hour. I left there around 7:30 PM and drove until I reached exit 171 on 95 in North Carolina. That’s where I pulled over to stay in a Holiday Inn Express. I got up and got on the road about 8:45 AM and was home by 12:30 PM. I had the afternoon to rest up.

This week I’m having to put in as much work as I can because I head over to Munich, Germany on Saturday. I arrive Sunday morning and I’m hoping to get plenty of rest before heading into the office on Monday. I’m going to alone this time, but there will be others from the office there all week so I won’t be there alone. I’m returning on Friday so I’ll have the weekend to recover and get my self somewhat acclimated to “home” time.

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