Jimmy Brancaccio

FSCK!

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:45:53 GMT

Had a really nice day at work. Lance bought a new car, a Lexus IS350 I believe he said. It definitely sounds awesome and I can't wait to see it. So work was good, went by pretty quickly. When there's work to be done, it really makes me love my job even more so. As nice as it is to see a an empty queue it usually means boredom and sitting around which sucks. I did another server FSCK tonight. I am pretty sure I've got those down now. I upgraded a few Apache/PHP installs on some server and then did the usual fixing WordPress' and such ha.

I am getting quite excited about moving in with Lance and Matt. That's going to be a lot of fun as well as let me pay some debts off and save some money. I wish these next 60ish days would go by as quick as possible. I have no idea where I am going to put all my stuff. A bunch of things can stay in boxes and such and can go in storage or something.

Well, it's about 6am here. I'll be sleeping until probably 2pm, then up to get lunch. I'd really like to go get some pizza rolls, but depending on how lazy I am that may or may not happen haha. Then it's back to HostGator for some good times.

Oh yeah, I ordered this cute little Totoro the other day and it's already shipped. I can't wait to get it!

Life.

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:35:07 GMT

It's been a crazy last 24 hours. I took in this stray dog to help out Matt and Lance. It was fun. it was hard though cause we basically had to sneak around the whole time. It would have been a lot more enjoyable had I not had to do that. This morning I brought her to SPCA, however they couldn't take her in and the place they sent me was closed on Mondays. I did however meet this funny lady there. She had basically walked like 20 miles from her home to the SPCA to drop off her dogs. She definitely did the right thing. She knew that she was no longer able to care for all 4 of them. I am glad she made the journey. She said she had started at like 2pm yesterday, finally made it to the SPCA around 12am and ended up sleeping outside the SPCA until the morning. It was really funny chatting with her. She referred to the Lancer as a spider (I assume because the Mitsubishi logo sort of looks like a spider?!) and told me it was up there between the Mercedes Benzes, Lexus' and Ferraris. If only...haha. Anyways, I did have fun with the dog, it's been crazy.

Work is going well. Actually very well. I am pretty psyched to see what the next 2 months have to bring. I really hope I can save up some money again cause I really need to move to a dog friendly apartment complex. I found out it may not be as expensive as I thought it would be to make the move with renting a U-Haul and all. I think the most pain in the ass part will be getting my bed and this computer desk into it (from the 3rd floor where I live now). I am really hoping they have an apartment studio at the time I need to move. I really really need this to work out.

I should also mention I went to Vermont the other week for my best friends wedding. It was really good seeing Greg and Jess and Keatz. The wedding....well it was a wedding. I've never been a fan of them, but it was good to see my friends. I also hung out with Sam, we went on a hike which was really fun. I hung out with Abby, we went horseback riding which was awesome. I love my horse so much. The horse show at Towne Ayer was also amazing and fun!

At the moment, everything is Moretown is offline because of a failed modem. It's really annoying because nothing is backing up and I can't do any work on websites because all the SVN repositories are there. I am hoping to have it all back online by the end of this week. Tomorrow I need to contact GMA and get directions on how to setup the new modem in bridge mode. Then hopefully Morgan can make it over there and get that done for me. I am going to see if he can boot Percheron into the old kernel so I can copy over the new kernel with ext2 support so I can then use that new kernel haha. I mean, right now I can't even access the box since it's all down, blah!

Work tonight was good. It was a bit slow, but then it picked up and the last bit of the night flew by. It was good seeing Christman and Simsic, funny peepz! I wanted a baby kitty so badly haha.

Well I should get to bed. I am exhausted!

Life Is Short, Enjoy It...

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:22:53 GMT

Life is far to short to be miserable. I know life can really suck sometimes, but when it's good, please try to enjoy it as much as you can. It so sad to see someone who is so beautiful destroy it all and not care about it at all or anyone else. Unfortunately sometimes, you just have to cut your losses and move on. We certainly had fun and I will not deny that, but there were time where I wanted nothing but to run away and never look back. You just have to enjoy what you have an not let other people bring you down.

That said, I've been really good besides the above. Work has been really amazing! I've been getting a bunch of Level 2 things to work on which is really awesome. I've been doing some server fscks as well as an OS Reload or two. I've also been shadowing a new guy at work which is going well. The other night Lance, Vince, Katie, David and I went out for a 3am breakfast at the Denny's across the street. I love hanging out with those peepz outside of work. It's nice. I would however lean towards becoming a shift lead over a Level 2. Level 2 is HARD! Hell, Level 1 is hard lol. I do enjoy a good challenge though.

Last weekend, I pretty much hung out with DaveC all weekend haha. We haxxed his xBox which may have inadvertently broke his fan-set. I have a hunch it might have been my PSU that did that, but he seems to have hacked together a new fan and gotten that works. We also hacked my Wii (in-which nothing broke). It's BEEN AMAZING. I've never used my Wii so much since I've gotten it (which was like 4 years ago or something haha). I just beat The New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I really enjoyed the game, a lot of fun. There was definitely a few frustrating spots but I managed to suck it up. I do wish Yoshi could have been there in every level! My next game will likely be Resident Evil 4 (Wii).

I've been trying to keep up with my new blogs and sites. morgan and I are also trying to refresh our movie rental application. I've tasked her with moving most of the code into the new theme/design we've built. She's doing pretty good so far. I think it gives her something to do, since she doesn't do much of anything anymore :P Poor girl. She also mentioned she wanted to start work back up on Confessh.us as well. That would definitely be cool. I know we've got a few bugs and tickets that could be completed. It'll definitely be a lot of work though.

Not sure much else is going on. I feel like I have a million things going on, but I am glad I got the chance to just spew out whatever was in my mind now. I really want to get a German Shepherd, so I have a feeling, come October I will be moving into a new apartment. I visited this one place the other day, Providence at Champions and it looks okay. They confirmed they would let me have a German Shepherd. The one thing I didn't like was how it's farther from work :( There's also one other place which is actually closer to work which allows large breed dogs, but they haven't gotten back to me yet. This all reminds me I need to go refresh the Houston SPCA Dog pages as well as look at CraigsList.

Tonight we're planning on seeing Toy Story 3, that should be awesome. I gotta tell Dave how well the Wii is working out (considering he came over at like 2am and helped me to get it working). This weekend should be fun! I've got the HAAUG meeting tomorrow as well with Matt. I hope I'll be able to stay away :P

woof woof

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:09:49 GMT

I've been pretty busy lately with work and my new weekend activity, working at the Houston SPCA. It's really great and it gives me time to be outside and getting exercise. My plan was to work in their barn just mucking stalls or grooming horses or whatever. However, you need to complete 20 hours in another area within the place and then you're on a wait list to work in the barn. I guess that's okay, they make you work with large dogs, which is fine by me, but I guess I'm not seeing the correlation between large dogs and horses. The largest dog they have there was a German Shepard, which...is probably no bigger then a Shetland pony haha. Oh well, I think I'll enjoy the dog walking and the time being spent outside with some fun dogs.

Work is work. Last week was decent, got to do some IS work...which makes the time go by rather quickly cause you're always working on something...however tickets have definitely been flowing in, I don't think there was a slow point in tickets at all last week. We've started the HG's Biggest Loser contest at work, I've got Chef in my group so that's awesome. I did a bit of working out today actually while watching Jackass. I also finished up another movie, GO which was pretty funny/weird/awesome. I'm also in the process of watching through Bamboo Blade which is actually a lot more fun then I thought it was going to be.

Hung out with my friends the last 2 nights, Matt and Markita. On Friday we got eatz and watched some Top Gear eps at the apartment. Also watched a couple episodes of The Office which I'd never seen, pretty funny though. On Saturday we had chicken pot pie which was amazing, and then watched The Hangover which is amazing. Then we played clue, Matt cheated :) Hahaha.

Today, nothing much going on...I've been having less to do since all these servers are running unusually well lol. Not having to fix shit all the time, Scribbld has been real good on the new server. I need to figure out what we're going to do with the servers in Vermont. I could definitely use Friesian as a media server, buy those 6x1TB drives. Put them in RAID5 probably...whatever will give me the most space with at least 1 okay to fail drive lol.

Been loving the Lancer, I really need to clean her up, hopefully sometime this week it'll be warm enough to do so. Not much else going on this week, I think Chef and I might go out biking one night after work, but depending on the temperature we'll see how that goes. I've gotta get myself into work in about 30 minutes. I can't wait to just come home and relax :P

Crazyness.

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:50:37 GMT

Life's been nothing short of busy lately. Still trying to figure out which car I want, I mean I know which car I want, but which car I can honestly afford haha. I could probably afford the Evo, but it's a matter of getting someone to co-sign for me for it. My parents likely won't and I doubt anyone else will. My parents said they would probably co-sign for a car $25,000 or so. There's definitely some decent rides out there for that much, so we'll see where that whole thing goes. They'll be down in a couple weeks so that'll be cool.

Works work, nothing really new, been trying to kick as much ass as I can without breaking to many things in the process. Been learning a whole lot of new things which is really great. It sucks, but like 12am or so each night I am pretty much done with tickets and I have no motivation to do more, so I try helping other people with their tickets. I wish I could concentrate on the hard tickets so I could learn more without having to worry about my count.

So apparently this girl on my Facebook who I never really knew how I knew her, well I hosted her pictures and maybe a couple web files back when we were like 13 lol. It's so funny, cause now she's into like web design and computers and stuff, we talked a bit yesterday, she's definitely pretty awesome. She's also from Texas about 8 hours south of me which is pretty awesome too.

I also started talking to this other girl from Scribbld, she's pretty cool, minus having a boyfriend haha. No, just kidding...but it's nice to meet new people.

I am hoping to get out to the range either today or sometime this week to fire off a couple rounds. I am sure it'll relieve some sort of stress. I can't wait to go out with my Dad when they come down, that'll be fun. Pay day is this Thursday/Friday so that'll be great, until it pretty much all goes out to rent...X___x ugh!

Not much else to say...I've gotta figure out what I should do about DeathNote...pain in my ass....I'd love to just get all servers out of Vermont except for maybe 1 or 2...an SSH box and then one web server for local shiz. I've got like $3000 worth of servers sitting there doing nothing which annoys me haha.

Oh Lazy Days!

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 07:18:48 GMT

Work has been good. It was nice to finally have yesterday and now the weekend! :) Chef and I went out the rnage I think on Wednesday. So much fun. I think I would like to go tomorrow, hopefully I can get Lance and Chef to come out. That would be awesome. Today I was super lazy. Pretty much just napped, ate food, played Xbox. I tried to get my PS3 working, but it wouldn't launch the game I wanted to play so I just played some more Xbox haha. Dunno what to do now. I messaged Lance and I told him I was still awake, so maybe we can do an SNS run or something. I got a couple new games for my NIntendo DS< Kingdom Hearts 385/2 and that new Mario and Luigi game. I might play them a bit tonight. I also really need to finish Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core. Maybe I can work on that a bit during my breaks at work LOL.

I also shouldn't forget to mention that AFI's new album is pretty good :)

So yeah, that's about all from me.

I Love My Job

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:46:04 GMT

I think I can officially say that I am madly in love with my job already. We've started actually doing some real work and it sure is fun. I really enjoy the problem solving aspect of it and I've already learned a few new tricks. A lot of the stuff is custom so learning about it all is really cool. The custom stuff tends to spend things up too since they're special script written to do that :P

I've been really enjoying my work hours too which are 6pm to 3am. It sure beats any 9 to 5 job hehe. I like working later and I tend to be able to focus and get a lot more done.

We have some really cool stuff to use while on break to like an air hockey table, ping pong, pool, Xbox 360 and you can just watch normal TV (which I've done a couple times). I actually played Rock Band with a co-worker the other night, tons of fun.

Besides work, I've been dealing with a dead/broken server of mine all week. I managed to kill it on the middle of workiong on it so that slowed me down. I forgot when you run the Gateway Setup Assistant, it'll give your Ethernet port an internal IP address which obviously breaks everything (for me at least and anyone who has set their IP to a public one). BUt yeah, I believe the machine is back up and should be running normally.

Hrmm, I am hoping to break out my AR15 soon...I went to one of the Apple Stores yesterday to snag a copy of Snow Leopard. I ended up getting the Family Pack so for once I can own some legal software haha. I just installed it on my MacBook this morning, haven't done much else with it. I did notice it removed my Server Admin Tools and put them who knows where. I guess I'll need to either download them again...hopefully they're on the Apple downloads website.

Last weekend I went to see GI Joe. If there's anything good playing now maybe I'll go see another movie this afternoon or evening. Movies here are so much cheaper then VT, it was like $4 haha

Other then that not much else has been happening. I just finished a nice Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty 4 session with Morgan and Keith. I love those guys!

I think I might hit up Steak n' Shake tonight. I'm kind of craving that, also might hit up the pool around 9 or so, swim for an hour and then get eats. Also might go to the gym and workout a bit but I can do that whenever.

Internet is a Go!

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:54:50 GMT

I've finally gotten Internet down here. I'm running at about 20/5 which is awesome. I've been catching up on some things now that I finally have a stable connection. Added myself to all the servers so I can login to them without being blocked haha. Not much else is going on. I got all the Airports setup and all too. I might go out for a swim later since I've been inside all day.

It looks like LoudTwitter is working again which is great. I think I might go play some PS3 or watch a movie now.

Moved In...

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:20:08 GMT

Well, it's been a bit since I last updated. I've been extremely busy down in TX, getting all settled in and everything. The journey started last Wednesday. My Dad and I started out 2000 mile journey from Vermont to Texas. At the end of the day we had made it down to Virginia. Nothing to eventful, just a ton of driving haha.

On Day #2 we made it down to Louisiana. Again nothing to eventful. One car accident that held us up for an hour but since we gained an extra hour by switching time zones, it had no real effect.

By the third day, Friday, I was definitely ready to be done with the drive. Of course we had like 250 miles left to go, but it went relatively quickly and we actually got to the apartments before I thought we would.

So we checked out the place, I said yes, I love it, did some paperwork and finally moved into my apartment. Boy was it a bitch to carry all my stuff up three flights of stairs haha. After we got all my boxes and stuff into the apartment, we did some food shopping. Then my Dad went back to his hotel and I just kind of chilled out. There was a little community get-together that night and I met up with a couple cool people who are living in the complex as well. One of the guys is the president of one of the local Mac user groups. I told him I was definitely in and am pretty excited to attend one of the meetings. He said it does consist of a bunch of old people, but hey, anyone who is Mac-minded is awesome in my mind. After that little thing, I just headed back into my apartment and passed out.

Saturday and Sunday consisted of spending a ton of money shopping for things for the apartment. I went to Ikea, Best Buy, etc...I did all this with my Dad, we had a ton of fun!

Today, Ikea delivered my bed and all, so I spent a bunch of time setting that all up. Once the bed was setup I promptly fell asleep on it for a few hours. It was nice to get some real good sleep in haha. Last night I just couldn't sleep well, I ended up going to the business center at like 3am haha.

There's a Vietnamese restaurant like right behind my apartment. They make a really good chicken fried rice and they have bubble tea!! I've never had bubble tea but since about 2003 I've been wanting to try it. So I got some strawberry flavored one and I LOVE IT! I'll definitely be heading back there soon, maybe tomorrow for lunch. There's so much close by. Apparently there's 6 Apple stores, tons of Best Buys, Super Walmarts, Targets, Ikea, work is only like 15 minutes away, food of every type, 3 grocery stores. It's really fantastic and I know I am going to love living here. Heat, hurricanes and all.

I also setup my new Garmin GPS today. It's definitely VERY COOL! I got my new Motorola SB6120 modem from Amazon today as well. Hopefully I get my stuff from Small Dog soon as well (new Airport Extreme 802.11n and Airport Express 802.11n). I also ordered up my best friends birthday present and a new card for Xbox LIVE. Was like $40 for a year, so why not hahaha.

I've also been working with my other best friend on Macintosh-Admin.com - it's coming along. Hopefully I got him all setup for SVN/Trac access and web server.

I purchased a license to cPanel this morning since our free trial finally ran out. I am definitely in love with it all and I am glad we're finally using it for web hosting (note it's for a very small customer base - maybe 5-10 users, all from back home).

Looks like our movie rental application is really coming along well. I would like to think we could at least say we're at version 1.0. Client is pretty happy with it too as well and I haven't gotten any issue reports in a while now. In 5 days they will be off support and it'll be 100% live.

All in all, I'm very excited to be making this change. I've uploaded some pics of the new apartment to Facebook. Tomorrow I will take some more and upload them, now that I've actually got some furniture and all setup :) I hope everyone is well!

Apartment Hunting!

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:49:16 GMT

I've been super busy lately. We've been trying to complete as much of that movie rental application as we can before I move out to Texas. It's coming along very well. I think we made a really great break-through in terms of not allowing non-in-stock movies to be rented. We just don't allow the rental to go through haha.

I've been searching for apartments, I think I've got one figured out. The place has a 100% rating on some trustworthy apartment rating website. It's also about $200 more then I want to be paying but you know what, if it's a good place, then I don't mind paying a bit extra. I am really hoping this place works out cause it looks really great. Basically I'll know if I am going there as soon as I get some pictures from the people. And hopefully that's today.

I finally moved my buddy over from our old web server to the new managed one. I'll probably be getting a cPanel license within the next week or so, I'll probably do a month to month for the time being. It's working out really great though, although it's coming up with some odd usernames for the actual web box, I'll try to figure it out soon enough.

Not much else is going on...I might go for a bike ride later this afternoon. There's a horse show at the barn on Sunday and I am very excited to see Nippet in it :D That's as long as he gets his feet done today...

That's about it for now. :)

Weddings and Love...

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 03:58:15 GMT

Yesterday I attended my first Jewish wedding. It was for one of my cousins who actually converted. It was pretty normal...and short for the most of it. After that we just partied it up and stuff. Met this wicked cute girl, who had kind of a southern accent, definitely awesome. Danced it up with her for a bit. Dinner was eh, portions were so small. Alcohol was flowing though which was excellent. Caught up with my cousins and shit. One of them has really grow up, last time I saw her might have been when she was like 10 or something, she's like 15 now but she definitely looks like she could be 17 or something haha. Everything seems to be good with peepz. My other cousin has a WICKED cute wife now haha.

Other news, my friend was on the winning CTF DEFCON team. So badass. He's really quite leet.

I am hoping to be in Houston with the next week to start my job. I am so psyched for it. I just need to get out and leave this scene. I need to surround myself by complete strangers and start all over. New girls, new life, new friends, new home. I'm very excited.

I think when I get to Texas I am going to try to get into teas and stuff. Last week Chef took me too this tea place and we bought some tea, which was expensive! I got some Black Dragon tea and tonight I made my first cup. It was definitely wicked good. Chef explained it as the legal way to get like "high" haha and he was right sorta. I definitely felt a little something from it, not like sketchy or anything but I definitely felt like nice and relaxed and shit. I really want to get like some nice Chinese gear and all. But that stuff is expensive like $150-$200 for some cups and kettle and all. Worth it though, it's bad ass...

Not much else going on, got most my shit packed up. Will pull hard drives off the Xserve too take them down with me, so I can have movies for the AppleTV when I get a place in TX. That's about it. I hooked up Morgan with some logins for what I hope to use as our new system.

Tomorrow I might go riding, I should since I probably won't be able to go for a looooong time. I shall miss my horse a lot but I know he'll be in great hands with Rita and B-Towne.

I've really got to install some new moodthemes on SceneJournal haha.

Packing Up

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 20:54:46 GMT

Last night I worked on setting up cPanel and Plesk Billing, I spent probably 4 hours getting that all going. While it was doing it'sthing I worked on server backups and such. I've still got an outstanding issue where the MySQL database server will lockout the machine that's trying to back it up. It happens once a week or so if I don't flush the hosts from the SQL server. Weird, I'll definitely have to figure out why it's doing that. I was going to go to bed around 1am but I was just laying there. So I picked up Call of Duty 4 and played about an hour of that. After that I brought some boxes out and started getting all my stuff together. Currently I've got everything I want boxed up and ready to go. I have a feeling 90% of it will be shipped down after I find an apartment though. I'll probably just bring my MacBook, maybe my Nintendo DS and some clothing down initially. Probably my Xbox and my TV too. Finally at around 5:30am I went to bed. Woke up around 7am but was able to just go back to bed.

Today I spent like 6 hours working more on Plesk Billing, WHM and Kayako SupportSuite. Finally around 4:30pm I got it so when you register a new hosting package through the billing software and pay for it, it'll provision you an account on the server. Very cool. Looks like Kayako is also working integration-wise with the billing software so it'll pull accounts from that.

I was supposed to go for a bike ride with one of my buddies today, some crazy ass trails in Waterbury but I don't think I heard back from him, or I did and I was just so focused with other things that I missed it. I'm definitely like Google Voice though and I really hope Apple/AT&T quits being lame and just allows the app on the iPhone.

Tonight, nothing is really happening. My parents should be coming home from their vacation soon. not sure about dinner, might make some Philly Cheesesteaks :) Yummmmy. Tomorrow we're leaving for my cousins wedding and I'll be AFK for pretty much the entire time. Should return on Tuesday I believe, then it's crazy cause we're pretty much leaving for Texas then. Although maybe not since I'll need to get that relo check.

I bought Peggle and Minigore for my iPhone. Should give me something to do whilest being bored at the wedding. I played Peggle last night. I love that game so much! Maybe I'll go play some now.

Anyways, hope everyone is having a nice weekend!

Hello SceneJournal!

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:13:51 GMT

Today marks the official start to a whole new everything. A new job, a new home, new friends, new everything. While I can admit to it being relatively nerve-racking, I am embracing this change because it is a great opportunity for me.

Scribbld used to be my old home. I had originally wanted Scribbld to be SceneJournal, to bring it back, back in 2007. Unfortunately someone had already snagged up the domains so we were unable to do so. Fortunately, I was able to at least get the .net domain back so here we are. We're on a much faster Internet connection in a real datacenter (thanks CrystalTech). How cool is that!?

So this is now my new home. I'll still be checking in on DeathNote and Scribbld and we'll continue to support users on the sites. I don't think we'll continue development with Scribbld though. The core code base just isn't as good and doesn't seem to be updated as often. Enough about that though!

Currently I'm down in Houston, TX. I was supposed to just be here for Monday and Tuesday but then I got an extra day cause I was going to kick it with the COO or something, but I ended up missing my flight back home so I got to hangout that extra day haha. So I'll be home tomorrow late at night.

The whole point of me coming down here was to get a job at this web hosting company. morgan is friends with these guys so she put in the good word, they flew me down here, I did some preview stuff yesterday and today they offered me the job. I'll be moving down here on August 10th which is like REALLY CLOSE. Hahaha. So what will probably happen is, I might live with the CTO for a bit until I find an apartment. That'll be cool. They're all really awesome guys, so this is going to be amazing regardless.

I'm pretty amazed at how excellent this is. I really am excited to start this all. It's like 12am local time, but I am beat. I think I'll pass out, then do whatever in the morning until my flight at 3ish. I just can't wait to get my own apartment down here and get all my stuff down here. Will be nice to just be settled in.