Chuck’s Home World

Worked in the AM on this past Friday in order to have the afternoon off. My car was due for a maintenance visit so I decided to do that. Things took so long that the guy didn’t charge me and said he wouldn’t charge me for my next visit either.

Weekend project to update the server failure…

I tried to upgrade my storage to some new 3TB drives and come to find out that my hardware is too old to see those as what they are. I thought it was the old version of windows home server that was the cause and couldn’t get that to install at all. I couldn’t get that to install. The whole upgrade project this past weekend was a bust. Now I’m back to where I started, but with some drives moved around.

Busing week coming up with German guests in town to work with me.

Manfred Metz from Munich is visiting all this week to work with me on mobile application develpment with the Worklight platform. I’m looking forward to learning about it, but at the same time I’m not sure when I’ll have time to develop anything. We’ll see how the week progresses.

We have a project at work called BIRD which is the rollout of the mothership’s systems for our Sales, Accounting and Service department. It was supposed to be going live on Friday March 5, but we decided a couple of weeks ago that we were not ready. So the US go live is April 2, with the cut over beginning on March 22. Our Canadian subsidiary is going live now on the original schedule, but they are much smaller than we are so it’s a good trial run for what the US may face during the process. I’ll be glad when this cutover is done so that I can move on to all the things that have been lagging due to lack of time. The project has been making me work 12 to 14 hours days except for weekends when I only put int 4 or 5 hours in. I’m not complaining though, it’s mostly fun work, but can be rather challenging too.

Most of my time has been dealing with master data such as customers and vendors. We are trying to ensure that all the customers and their addresses are mapped into the SAP system and have an SAP# associated in the current US accounting system. That will help us to determine which ones need to be added and or mapped when there is no number associated. Every time we think the list is dropping, we either identify more or I find an error in my code that was preventing the records from being pulled into my system. It’s really putting a strain on the SAP master data team (we have one person focusing on the data matching). She is doing a great job, but is really being worked hard. Since I have very little front end and no back end access to the SAP system in Munich, there is very little that I can do to help. David does have more access to customer information so he is helping as much as he can, but he has tons of things to do too.

On the non job related front: It looks like Apple will be releasing a new iPad this week. I’m not sure if I’ll get one or not. I may and then sell my iPad 2. I may not as I’m not sure if it will be worth it. Overall I’ve been very happy with the work iPhone other than the constant battery drain. Since I cancelled my home phone and the company is paying for the cell phone, it’s been nice not having to pay those bills.

Looks like my “cat sitter” and upstairs neighbor is moving. He is selling his place to get the equity out. I hope it works out, but I’ll miss having him around. It’s been great to have someone feed and water the cats while I’m out on vacation or business trips. Looks like I may have to find alternate neighbors or start using the pets hotel again – which means I need to take the cats in to the vets as they are a couple of years past due their regular visits.

I’ve been simplifying the home entertainment system a bit. Since my projector has not been working for a while and because I need to transmit the HDMI signal across the room, I’ve decided to take it all down. I think what I’m going to do it update the TV monitor in the next few months to a really large (55 – 60 inch) 3D capable smart TV and take down the screen and fill in the holes where the monitor is hung in the ceiling. It is simplifying the controls and components a bit too. When I do that, I may go ahead and update the remote control to a higher end model of what I currently use (Logitech’s Harmony line).

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

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.