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October 14, 2005

Happy 6th

Today is Amanda and my 6th anniversary together.

Officially, we met on October 7th, 1999. I remember the day well.

Amanda had e-mailed me to say that she was coming in to town for the weekend. I gave her my home phone number (I didn't have a cell at the time) and told her to call me when she got in from Murray, where she was going to school.

That day, which I believe was a Friday, my mother went to the dentist. She had some work done that required her to receive some kind of medicine. This medicine, whatever it was, caused her to have a severe allergic reaction. I found her in her bathroom on the floor unable to move. I called 911 and she was rushed to the hospital. I spent the rest of the day at her bedside until she could come home. The doctors were able to get her system stabilized and she was sent home that evening ... although still feeling quite sick.

During the day, I was thinking about my promise to meet with Amanda and was frustrated that I couldn't call her to let her know what had happened. I left a message with my cousin, who was hanging out at the house for a little bit after the paramedics left, to answer the phone and if someone were to call for me to leave a number that I coudl reach them at. Sure enough, Amanda called and he took a message, but didn't get a number. The only number that I had for her was the one for her room in Murray. After getting home that evening, it was around 10pm, I decided to just call it a day and fixed myself a bowl of cereal and head to bed.

Just as I layed in the bed, the phone rang. It was Amanda. She told me that she had gotten my message and was hoping that everything was OK. I told her that it was and that mom was doing much better. She asked if I could still meet her and her friends at her mom's place. After debating on it for a little bit, I told her that I would. After checking in on mom, I got dressed and headed to a little gas station where we said we would meet up.

I remember pulling up and seeing a van parked in the back of the parking lot with alot of people in it. At this point, I had no clue what Amanda looked like and decided to park and yell out her name. I got out of my car and said "Who's Amanda?!"

The next thing I saw was this heavenly creature approaching me. If you've never believed in love at first sight ... well I can definately tell you that it really does exist. Amanda introduced me to everyone in the van: her friends, her sister and her nephew. She asked if I was ready to head back to her place, and I said "yes". I took advantage of the situation and asked her to ride with me in my car.

She got in and we went into the downtown area where her mom and sisters lived. I didn't get to meet Susanne at this point, but I was told that she was there and didn't want too much noise. At this point, I was trying my best not to stare too much at Amanda, trying to play things cool and casual. I couldn't help but to look at her, however, as she was just simply stunning. Her friends annoyed me and her sister was asking all kinds of questions, but I tried to be friendly and make conversation with all of them. But when Amanda sat down next to me, I could feel my pulse racing and my body temp rising.

I decided only to have a beer that night as I didn't want to get myself into a situation where I couldn't drive. I didn't, and still don't, like to sleep in places that aren't familiar to me. I told Amanda that I had a great time and that I would love to see her the next day. I gave her directions to my home and asked her to come and see me when she had time the next day.

I went home that night and went to bed ... glad that a long day was over but even more glad that I got to meet Amanda for the first time.

Now, there's more to the story ... but that'll have to do for a future blog entry.

Happy anniversary, Amanda!! I nub ya!

~out...

Posted by ed at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)

October 07, 2005

A truely great week

I've completed my first week as a member of the Solarity Group. It's been a rather interesting week, with me going to different places and meeting different people. In all, I can honestly say that this has been a fantastic first week for me.

I never realized until the past few days how much my days at WHAS would come to help me in my future endevours. A perfect example of this happened on Wednesday. I received a call from Marc around noon. A client's Exchange 5.5 server went down and didn't know what to do. I called the client and asked them if they had rebooted the server, to which they responded that they had. I asked if they had rebooted the desktop which Outlook was running, to which they replied that they had done that as well.

In a previous experience with an Exchange server at WHAS, it had crashed one afternoon right as I was going home. I checked the logs and tried to figure out what had happened. Eventually, I got Brenda from corporate on the phone and had her help me figure it out, as the log files weren't telling me anything. After many hours of going through items trying to find the exact problem, I stumbled on a support tech note on the Microsoft site that mentioned something about the log files of an Exchange 5.5 server either filling up the drive or running out of Hex numbers to replicate itself.

Well, since this was a 200GB HD I was dealing with, I doubted that it was a space issue. I checked the HD anyhow and found that I had plenty of space on the machine. I checked the log files under the mbddata directory, and sure enough there were a TON of log files. Each file was roughly 5MB in size. The second recommendation of the tech note was correct, I had hit the ceiling in Hex numbers and needed to remove all of the log files from the directory and restart the server. Once I did this, everything worked perfectly once again.

Based on the converstation that I had with the client, it reminded me exactly of this issue. Either he ran out of space or had too many log files in his directory. I drove to his location, only minutes down the road, and started looking at his Event viewer. Sure enough, he had run out of disk space on one of his hard drives where his Exchange data was stored. I checked the directory and there was 5.8 GB of log files. I highlighted all of the logs, deleted them and restarted the server. Sure enough, Exchange came up without any issues what-so-ever. The client was able to send and receive e-mails once again.

If I wasn't at WHAS, I wouldn't have known about this issue and it would've taken me a long time to figure out the problem. I guess this holds true for anyone in the field of IT ... it really is experience that makes you a good technician. No matter how much training that you have or how much "book smarts", nothing beats having the real world knowledge on your side.

Anyhow, I believe that I have shown what I am capable of to my new bosses this first week. Granted, I've had alot of information thrown at me and I've been asking alot of questions, but I think that goes to show that I'm here to take on the challenge ... to grab the bull by the horns so to speak.

I can't wait to see what lies ahead of me in the next few weeks.

~out...

Posted by ed at 09:31 PM | Comments (1)