Well I honestly can say that I do not miss taking the train to work.  I took a train into work today because my wife is going to pick me up at 1 pm to take me to my parents house in NJ.  Here is how the commute went this morning.

1. Wake up at 5 :30 AM

2. Leave the house at 6:05 AM

3. Walk to train station arrival at 6:17 AM

4. Board Train 6:23 AM

5. Get off at Stanford 7:20 AM

6. Find out I missed transfer train to Greenwich 7:23 AM

7. Drank warm soda from vending machine 7:30 AM

8. Boarded transfer train at 7:42 AM

9. Arrived at Greenwich 7:59 AM

10. Walked 1.5 miles to office 8:17 AM

11. Do nothing until 8:49 AM (writting blog….pay attention)

That is my commute with the train….for fun, compare it to the commute with driving.

1. Wake up at 6 AM

2. Watch TV from 6:20 AM to 7 AM

3. Get breakfast 7:08 AM

4. Enjoy traffic….lots of traffic 7:20-8:25 AM

5. Arrive at office 8:35 AM

Now here are the pros and cons of taking the train.

Pros – cheaper.  It cost me 5 dollars one way.  A monthly pass would be 94 dollars.  Driving you have the cost of gas (38 dollars twice a week)  maintenance on the car – oil change and what not…

Cons – it takes too long and I need the flexibility of having a car to make it to my other offices.  If there is an emergency, I have to be able to get to office B or office C and so on.  I also get home too late.  I would get home the same time if I got home working in NYC.  I might as well work in NYC then and make an extra 10k to cover the difference….

(I took a 6k price cut to work in CT as opposed to NYC…)

Just to give a heads up, I have changed my alias from wvenezia to Koopa.  I do not really like my alias as wvenezia and while playing around, I found out how to change it.  Koopa has been my online handle for many years on IRC so it is fitting that it will be my alias on here.  Feel free to complain if you have any problems with this…

That is all

Well I must bow down to the features that wordpress has….I have just dound the ability to post entries on my blackberry…

WOOT!

This has a lot of potential for me since I am not really in front of a computer on the weekends…being in front of one during the week is enough right?

Right?

RIGHT?

Regardless, this opens up a new world for me…

Viva la blackberry!

So anyways, first off, I wish misery on the Red Socks…I love the yankees and hate to see their rivals do well.  I am also not stupid or idiotic…

My wife has a little fun pool going on at her job and I have said that I think that the Bosox will win it in 5….

Here are the rules of the game…

Pick the winning team and how many games it will take.  It is the best of seven series.

 

Example: Colorado in 7

Also for a tie breaker pick the total number of runs in the final game  – example – 7

Winner take all.

Rules – you must pick the team, the number of games it will take and if need be the tie breaker will be the total number of runs in the final game.

Tie Breaker Criteria:  If the Red Sox win in six games and no body picked them in 6.  But someone picked them in 5 and another picked them in 7 – the winner will be whomever picked the closest to the correct number of runs in the final game.

Here is what everyone who is playing has picked….

Player A - Rockies in 4 games 3 runs

http://www.silicon.com/ciojury/0,3800003161,39168320,00.htm?r=1

 Now I have just read this article but the premise is that for certain people, facebook is more addicting than cocaine.

Let me repeat this….Facebook is more addicting than drugs that cause chemical imbalances that makes your brain crave them to survive…

WHAT?!?!?!

Now granted, there is no true reference to support this and they are trying to say that cocaine users don’t generally snort up during working hours while facebook addicts are constantly trying to get their fix…what is next…..Blogs?  I don’t know how I will survive….

The article mentions a few solutions to remedy the problem.

“Paul Broome, CTO at 192.com, said Facebook has been banned completely after it was discovered the add-on applications used by those on Facebook were taking 40 per cent of the company’s available internet connection.”

That is right…company A bans it all together.  No surprise.  The article mentions that facebook took up 40% of the bandwidth.  Seems like a reasonable thing to do…

“Another option some employers are looking at is to ban Facebook on the corporate network but provide some internet access in communal staff areas for use on breaks and during lunchtime.”

I kind of like this option.  It makes people stay at their computers during their lunch break and make them stay late.  In a way, it is a solution that exploits their addiction.  It is like putting a line of coke at your desk and saying…snort up bitch, your lunch hour is mine…take the hit…take the hit and perform more work…while you are taking your hit. EXCELLENT…

“He said: “Our view is that Facebook, and other social uses of the web, are legitimate in moderation and specifically out of core working hours. But their control is properly achieved by management, not by IT restrictions.”

Let us not forget about option three…do nothing and hope for the best.  Oh you are snorting up some facebook at your desk….no problem!  If you cannot control your cravings…YOUR FIRED!  Screw monitoring what you do!  If you don’t perform your out!

Now personally, I am the fan of to just block the site.  If you want to monitor traffic and control it, do it full force.  Do not try to placate people…just protect your interest.  It is facebook after all…it is not like it is banning CNN or wordpress

I dunno…I suppose I just don’t see how facebooking is more addicting than snorting coke…but since I do neither, I guess I cannot make an opinion on the subject.

I got my first chance to recover a file from tape backup today.  I have only done this one other time in the past.  Being a consultant in my former job and had to work with hundreds of tape drive configurations, you would think I would of had to recover more data from tape.

Nope!

I am very timid to recover the data since I do it so little.  I am glad that it worked out.  Trivial stuff really makes IT look good while complicated things people take for granted.  Things like server configuration, DHCP, DNS, firewalls, internet connection…

The second you recover a file that was deleted, they love you forever.  I suppose you can compare IT to baseball of the yankees.  When things are bad, they blame the manager.  They curse him out and say he is doing a lousy job but when things are good, there is not a lot of praise.  In all these sports talk shows, I rarely hear anyone saying that a manager is going a great job when they get their team in the playoffs.  You only hear about how they suck.  Even if they get into the playoffs.  They still suck….

I digress…

The recovery was completed and the user only lost a weeks worth of data on the file.  All in all, I say that it is a job well done!

So I am going to apply for federal aid for Grad school.  After college, I thought I would be done with student loans but alas, I am wrong…

Ideally I want to become Dr. William Venezia in Information Systems so perhaps I will have to run into this issue again.  The first time I applied for federal aide, my father did all the work.  I didn’t have to worry about it.  Now I understand the frustration.  You need to have all your financial background and life story to apply and that doesn’t mean you actually get money!

My company is paying for grad school (assuming that I get As in all of my classes) and of course not all the classes are in my strong suit.  Accounting and other business courses historically I did not get As in.  Bs yes. the occasional C, yes…but not an A.  I am assuming that the masters program is going to be harder than my under-grad (but hopefully not:)) so As will be hard to come by.  This is why I am getting the federal aide…if I don’t get the A, I get the cushion of knowing that I will increase my debt

I am already 60k in the hole from undergrad…why not increase this number

Well I must say that this blog is not failing as much as I thought it would be.  I figured I would generate maybe 5 hits a year.  It is a great way to kill some time at work and my daily hit count just increases 10fold every week.  Yesterday I hit an all-time high of 38 hits and was very impressed with myself.  I was hoping to get somewhere in the 30s again today.  Something lit a fire up everyone’s asses because I have generated 42 hits so far today!

I even got a comment on a post about coffee….it had nothing to do with my post but it was kinda cool and interesting to read.  I suggest you check it out…it refers to a book that doesn’t sound like a horrible read either!

Well here is the To Do list to make Project Failure not fail so much…

1. Generate at least 50 hits a day. 

2. Generate comments…and ideally REAL comments as well.  I am tolerating with all this fluff because it is better than nothing.  I would like to be a little more selective with what gets through the Failure Filter

3. Increase my overall word count.  I have never been a very good writer so this project may be good for me.  So far I am doing about 100 to 200 words per post and ideally I would like to increase this to 500-1000.  I am starting a masters program and word count is a must!  The masters may also give me more topics to write about which means more posts

3. Figure out a way to generate more hits on the weekend.  I would be happy with 20-30 hits a day as opposed to the 5-15 hits I have been getting. 

4. Create return traffic.  As far as I can tell, I am good at getting people to my site, but no one is returning (that I know of) Return customers means more traffic (and that I am writing about something that is entertaining for the Internet folks…you know who you are!)

5. More KBs.  This one is kind of hard since I don’t really run into HARD issues at work.  At my old job, there used to be something I didn’t know and needed to research at least once a week.  At this job, it may be once a month…

 I think if I stick with those 5 points, I can have hits and comments and just make this site a lot more fun!  Time will tell….oh time will tell…

 PS: counting this PS, I have 435 words on this post…

So not only did I not sleep well but due to lack of sleep, I have spilled coffee all over myself.  How irritating!  Thankfully, people have known for the ages that people spill coffee on themselves and have designed pants to protect against coffee.  That is right, coffee but no stain. 

Thank God!

I also managed not to get it on my shirt based on some act of god and thus the spillage is not as bad as it could be!  I blame traffic and lack of sleep for this one!