The Howerter Blog

Well, the sellers of the house we like refused our offers. I guess it is back on the hunt.

Last night we got the final copies of our contract to sell and put a bid on another house. The sellers have until 5:00 pm tonight to counter or accept. We really like this house, so I hope they like our offer.

Yesterday, we officially accepted a bid from a buyer on our house. The closing date is set for August 15. It is a kind of wierd feeling selling your first house. I was excited and then a little sad. We are ready to move, but it is starting a new chapter in our lives. Tonight we are putting a bid on a house. If we get the bid, I will post pictures.

I purchased one Media Center Extender for our bedroom that we use quite a bit. I am wanting to put one in the living room so that I don’t have to connect the Media Center directly to the TV. While researching this I realized that I couldn’t add my music or pictures to the extender upstairs because they are on my file server. The extender creates a user account on the Media Center and logs in to have access to all the content. Since my music and pictures weren’t on the Media Center, I had a problem. Luckly, someone else has a not-so-simple network configuration like mine. It turns out that if you create a login script for the extender user mapping the drives you need with other credentials, the extender will allow you to add those folders to the library. It works very nicely. I believe I will be purchasing at least one other Media Center Extender. Here is the link to the original article.

It really brightens my day when I read about Apple’s iTunes servers crashing and people having to wait hours to get their beloved iPhones. It also appears that you can’t download iTunes right now since the download link on Apple’s website isn’t working. It is funny to me that people are standing in line for hours waiting for a 3G phone since they have been widely available from other manufactures for at least a year. I wonder how this activation problem fits into Apple’s mantra of “It just works”?

Today was the first day I rode my bike to work. It was really fun. Ryan and I rode from his house and it took us about 30 minutes. We got lost in 2 neighborhoods. We should be able to do it quicker next time.

So NASA announced its plans to retire the space shuttle four years before the next generation of space vehicles are ready. After watching the recent Discovery documentary on the beginings of the space race and one of my favorite mini-series, From the Earth to the Moon, it is a little strange that America will not be able to orbit the Earth for at least four years. Once the new vehicles are ready, I hope that we will go back to the moon. I want to see TV from the moon with my own eyes.

This year I started my first big project at work. It was decided to convert our old PBX to Cisco IP telephony. Over the last couple of years, we have been slowly converting all of our remote offices to centralized Cisco IP telephony. Those were easy projects due to the users not knowing anything different. The Cisco IP telephony solution is pretty user friendly, but we all know that users don’t like change. So, I started the daunghting task of making the new phone system as much like the old system as possible. I found it difficult to start on a task this big. The current phone system had been up for 16 years. In 16 years, there were a lot of customizations performed that I had to figure out. Of course, there was no way to get them all, but I did my best. It seemed like every week, I would find something that I had forgotten.

Since I started this job in 2005, I had been taking notes on what would need to be done for this conversion. This served as a decent starting place. First thing up was the infrastructure. Our network infrastructure was mostly configured for IP telephony already, due to our remote offices. We had purchased PoE switches and replaced every non-PoE switch in the main campus. QoS was configured on every switch port and every router interface. We decided that we wanted some features that were included in the newest version of Cisco Communication Manager (CallManager). Since I had upgraded to a version of CallManger that Cisco was pushing (aparentley to early), there was no upgrade path to the newest version. This means there was no upgrade program to copy all my settings and install them on the new system. This meant I had to do this manually, which took me about a week. This was definitely not a fun task, but it was one that had to be done. After this was complete, we moved on to rolling out the phones to users…

Ryan bought a bike today, so we are going to start riding to work a couple days a week. Finally, I will use my bike on a regular basis. Since we bought our bikes last year, I have used mine probably 6 times. Hopefully we can make it the entire way to work.

I was looking through some old pictures and came across this beauty.