Jon's Notes
“Your brain does not use
RPC to talk to your pancreas.” –Werner Vogels,
E-Commerce at Interplanetary Scale.
A day in the life of Jon
Yesterday 1:00 pm: Take care of some domain trouble tickets that can't wait for me to get to work.
Yesterday 2:30 pm: Arrive at work in Hartford.
Yesterday at 6:30 pm: Grab sub from
CousinsYesterday 11:30 pm: Arrive at Whitewater
PoP to do hardware maintenance on a
Windows 2003 Domain Controller.
Today at 4:?? am: Get gas for car and a beefstick and energy drink for me. Loudly play
The White Stripes to stay awake on the drive back.
Today at 5:00 am: Watch sunrise while driving.
Today 5:30 am: Arrive at home (promptly take nap.)
Today 11:15 am: Arrive at work in Hartford.
Today 12:45 am: Arrive at PoP in Jefferson to fix branch
VoIP phones (
Cisco CM.)
Today 2:30 pm: Arrive at Madison PoP to install 3Com
TC (modem bank.)
Today 3:57 pm: Writing this and drinking
Dr. Pepper while waiting for
TDS to show up and finish installing the T1s (3 of them) that feed the TC.
This sort of day happens once every two-three weeks. Is it any wonder that I can't wait for school to start?
My new cell phone is costing more than my old one. I think that is because Nextel charges more than T-Mobile for data. Anyway, I needed a way to talk with my parents and brother that did not chew through my cell phone minutes. Enter
Asterisk.
I compiled and installed Asterisk on my local file server, a Celeron 400 system running Ubuntu. After much research and poking, I was able to talk with my brother for a few hours without draining my cellphone account or battery.
The Celeron is too slow to reliably transcode MP3s for music on hold, so I manually converted some songs to µlaw. That helped performance a bit, but I can still hear a stutter every time Asterisk writes debug info to the screen.
Current setup:
X-Lite for softphone
TRX Telecom for inbound calls
TelaSIP for outbound calls
Inbound calls go into a queue (just for fun) and ring the softphone when it is not on
DnD.
Inbound calls work fairly well. I still need to tweak preferred codecs and
QoS on my router.
Outbound calls don't work so well. I must not have
NAT traversal working properly in my softphone.
From what I've done so far, I much prefer Asterisk to the CallManager 3.2 install that I babysit at work. Asterisk is easier to configure and more flexible.
Last.fm updated released a new site design the other day, and I'm still not sure what to make of it.
I like the new layout and the album photos to go with the recent track list. Unfortunately, I can feel a speed difference in the site. Pages seem to take longer to download and render.
The new player for windows is most excellent.
Well, that was a interesting
D&D session.
Our
gaming group has been having scheduling difficulties this summer, so we have been working on individual quests and such. My turn came this morning. Well, yesterday really, but my character sheet went missing.
Nathan wrote a nice mission for my character. I'm playing a Ranger, so naturally the mission involved scouting and some military work. It went roughly as follows:
First I sought out a large Orc army that was camping in the forrest. Then I followed part of the army to a town. The army surrounded the town. So I snuck into the town to warn the populace. The populace goes, woe is us, you have experience, here, you are in charge of defending the town. Now the town only had 100 or so trained fighters to go against a 2000-strong Orc army, so naturally I didn't want a fair fight.
The town was surrounded by fields of grain. The village had plenty of oil. So I do the obvious thing, wait until the army attacks and burn the fields. Mass roast Orc anyone?
Now Paul is calling me
Josef because I used a defensive scorched earth strategy. I think technically it was Alexander who started
that policy, but Josef is far more infamous.
And now, I leave to drive four hours south to visit my parents. One of my brothers has a birthday party this weekend. Plus there is plenty of room to work at my parents house. I still have a CompSci project to finish and a server to configure for a church forum.