Joe and Jamie's Blog

On Friday I was working for a new client in Albany. They are getting a brand new server, APC and network switch.

My job was to mount the new switch and connect the data cables from the punch down that was done by the telephone company.

The first picture is what was done by the phone company.

Here is what it looks like after I mounted the switch and 2 wall mount racks. These racks are really neat. They hug the wall saving space, especially good for this project since the closet is going to be used as a kitchen and storage area. They are pretty inexpensive too, only $200 for each. A 4 post 8 foot rack with shelves costs anywhere from $1,250 – $5,000 or more, depending on brand, number of shelves, accessories, etc, etc. You can check out these wall mount shelves on Dell’s page here.

The wires on my side are a bit of a mess, but that’s only because we didn’t receive 1/2 the cables we needed. We have small cables coming so we can make it look neat, had to use 15 foot cables in the meantime. Just waiting for the server and APC unit to finish their setup then it’s on to configuring the desktop machines on the new network.

I came across some crazy cool Mountain Dew cans at the Hometown Deli over in Fishkill today on the way home from working at Pamal. Got a yummy chicken salad wrap as well.

Even though I don’t collect cans, I think I’ll keep these laying around. They are like collector items, just like everyone who has the original Coke bottles.

I personally think glass is the best to drink anything from, glass doesn’t distort the taste, but cans would be my second choice. What’s yours?

Just figured I would show you them, the one with the old man is pretty cool. Saying on the bottle is “it’ll tickle your innards!”

In the past month I have purchased over 100 domain names.

I now step back and take a look at the ever-growing list and think it’s time I needed to kick these sites into gear before I continue.

Let me put this in $$ terms. That’s $1,000 next Feb/March that I need to spend to keep these sites active, and right now I only made $20 off of them…..

Time is my biggest enemy right now. Between work and school I have no time to develop all the sites. Check out the Websites page for a list of all the sites I am hoping to get going. They are mainly Amazon store fronts. It is going to take several months to get traffic to all these sites so I can start making money. Maybe I will hire someone to help with advertising and getting me high up on search results, but thats another added cost with little to no money coming it. But hey, that’s the business I guess and I can’t cop-out now, this is something I have always wanted to do, and I have never gave up on any project before.

Once I get the first site (my-market.us) up and running, I will be able to easily create the other sites off that template, just customize each one with different colors, images and categories. My goal is that before school starts in August I have all these sites up and running.

So for now I will have to slow down on grabbing every name I can think of and stop buying the less used extensions like .info and .biz to keep costs down.

I swear it’s like a crack addiction. I searched GoDaddy for a name that popped into my head and if it was available, I purchased it 30 seconds later.

Today we almost finished the project. Just a few odds and ends left.’

We have to just patch the drywall where the shelf used to be and buy the new dresser so we can bust up the old one.

For those of you who missed the first post on this, either click here to read it, or simply look at the previous post.

Here is the new wall/banister that we built in replace of the old shelf. Now I can’t push Jamie down the stairs over the edge, only the traditional way.

We used 2×4’s for the frame and just screwed and glued it together with liquid nails. Glue has become far greater than nails and screws lately, so it was the best bet along the drywall side since there wasn’t a stud where we where mounting it. The shelf that used to be there was a foot deep so we did have a stud to screw that into on the drywall side. It was pretty cheap to buy and was put together quicker than the trick to and back from Home Depot. Surprisingly they were open normal hours for a holiday.

Look how nicely the dresser’s fit in there. You can see to the left of it the hole in the drywall we have to repair. I’m saving that excitement for next weekend. Mounted the trusty fire extinguisher on the post. Every house should have one on each floor. You never know what may happen. Circuits can short, candles can burn, etc, etc.

You can see that we moved all of Jamie’s pig stuff to the shelf at the top of the stairs. She loves pigs so naturally we are up to our necks in pig stuff. Then there is my DVD collection, somewhere around 350, that shelf is only about 1/3 of them.

Look how nicely everything fit outside the room. There is plenty of walking space, every dresser drawer can open all the way without hitting anything now, and remember, all this was crammed inside the room!

I bought 2 foot long brackets that came with a hook on the end of them. From there I just cut a pole to size and screwed it to the bracket to keep it from sliding. Now I have a very sturdy clothing rack that not only looks nice, but won’t fall over on me every week. Its even longer than that cheap piece of crap too. It doesn’t block the outcoves at all. That small dresser is the one that is leaving shortly, just have to wait to get to a store to get the new one that will be in the room.

Look at all the space gained inside the room. That TV stand was used to hold the photo printer outside the room. It is temporary until my 50″ plasma gets fixed and I buy a nice new TV stand. This old one does the job for now. We can now access the laundry very easily. No more scraping it along the side of the dresser to get it out. The dresser we had there was so old and horrible. I was able to bust the thing up outside with no tools or effort. The top broke off while I was carrying it downstairs. We’re both glad to see it go. I have more space by my desk now that the DVD shelf and little glass stand are gone. Have more room to put useless crap, but hey, it’s room that I didn’t have before.

Now to you guys it may not seem like a lot more room was gained,  but if you were here you would be shocked like we were when we stepped back. Don’t mind Jamie, she’s just studying for a biology test. Sometimes I feel sorry for her. We work the same but at the end of the day I sit back and relax while she studies all night long about bones, muscles, systems, blah, blah, blah. Glad I learn a lot on the job so school is very easy. It’s much better to get paid to learn things.

So once again I sit back and relax and enjoy some Molson Tripple X.

After a few weeks of Jamie getting on my case about moving the attic redesign project I finally got off my keester and did some work.

Here’s some back story:

Jamie and I live at home with my parents. Yeah go ahead and laugh, but we are saving a lot of money in the long run while we both go to school. It also allows us to get into a better financial situation so that when we do move out it is to a nice area and not the ghetto. We have the entire third floor of the house to ourselves. It’s the attic, but completely finished and not like 3 foot ceilings or anything. The room is big enough for two people easily, just running out of room for dressers and desks. The outside of the room used to be a computer/workspace for my father, but we moved his computer stuff into the basement since he has a laptop now that he uses in the living room. We are going to move half the dressers outside the room, leaving more space for us to move around and allow us to get a bigger bed. Two people sleeping on a twin is NOT FUN AT ALL. Outside the room has two parts, divided by the stairs to the rest of the house. The other side not directly outside the room is smaller due to 2 slopes of the room. We are going to put storage bins and hang our jackets over there to utilize that space.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the before, but some of these pictures will show you what the layout was and where things were. I’ll explain along the way.

Here is our room currently. There are 4 dressers, 2 computer desks, a DVD shelf and a stand with photos and nick-nacks. Talk about cramped. On both sides of the room there are what we call outcoves (not sure if thats a p.c. term). Those are full of our storage bins and laundry, but we can barely get at them because of dressers in the way.

Here is a picture of the outcoves outside the room. They are a great use of space since the slope of the roof makes it impossible for the walls of the room to meet the outer walls. You would have to be 1 foot tall to fit in those, we have to crawl, but hey, storage bins fit great!

This is the spot outside the room next to the door. It used to be my father’s computer desk. I am going to make a clothing rack there now because closet space is very limited as well.

This shot is outside the room from the angle of the doorway. The dresser to the left is our new 5th one, but that was not always there. That was put there after some of today’s demolition of a fixed shelf I did. This is where I wish I had the before picture, but its not hard to imagine a shelf I guess. You can see the crappy clothing rack I have now; damn thing falls over like once a week.

Here is the left side of the upstairs outside the room. It’s the part where you have to cross the stairs to get to with the double sloped roof. You can see the desk I removed as well as all the pieces of the shelf (too lazy to bring them downstairs at midnight).

Here’s a closeup of the old shelf. My father builds things to last so it was pretty tough getting it apart.

This is where the old shelf was. It was also good to have there so you couldn’t fall right off and down the stairs. We are going to put in a small wall or backer of some sort behind the dresser to secure it or us from falling. You can see the old spot on the wall on the right where the shelf started and went across to the gray poll on the left.

Here’s a front shot of the new dresser and where the shelf used to be. See what I mean how you can just fall off down the stairs!

Now it’s time to kick back and relax with my Molson Canadian and trusty Peak bottle opener, courtesy of 107.1 The Peak (one of the radio stations I do work for). It’s the last one, so I bought myself some Molson XXX for next. If you can’t tell I am a fan of Canadian beer. Well that and Heineken.

Tomorrow I’m off to Home Depot to get some wood to create the backing to that empty spot as well as pick out paint colors with Jamie. She wants to go with a blue, chocolate brown, and some tanish color. It sounds bad, but it looks good.

It’s been a very busy week for me, haven’t had much time to post and further develop any of the other sites. I did notice I finally got my first comment, so at least 1 person is reading this every so often!

I just got a 40″ plasma TV for free…with one hitch; I have to repair it first. I was given all the necessary parts, but these things are like computers now. I have a box full of new circuit cards and chips that need replacing. I hope this isn’t too difficult, would be nice to have a 40″ TV for free.

Over the weekend I will be configuring a few more sites and getting them up and running. Hoping to have overstock-market.us and electronics-market.us at least configured and maybe even formatted correctly.

I added a few blog pages today. I am going to post a lot of computer/network troubleshooting tips to the Network Admin page. I will be useful for people searching google to maybe hit my blog and find the answer to some common problems I have come across in my line of work. I also have a websites page that lists all the sites I own and operate. Maybe I will get some hits off of that, and if not, at least its one place on the web that contains links to my sites.

Went a little crazy with more domain names, but it’s a hobby of mine. I bought out the rest of the personal ones that I own under the .info, .us, .org domains. Bought toy-market.us, beauty-market.us, and networkadmin.info. I am planning on turning networkadmin.info into a help forum with answers to error codes and tech questions I have dealt with in the past. Hopefully that will bring some people to the site, pretty easy name that explains it all…info for network admins…ain’t I just clever!?!? If I don’t wind up doing a forum I will look into pooling other tech help sites and just displaying their information. We’ll see how it goes, have to find some forum templates first.

My-Market.US is almost complete.

I was able to incorporate my Google Ads into the pages nicely.

Last night I also purchased an XML sitesmaps program from XML-sitemaps.com. It is a very useful tool and creates great xml, php, and html sitemaps to notify search engines. Thanks to Hostmonster for being such a good host, I was also able to create daily script jobs to run these each night to keep everything up to date. Not bad for $7 a month hosting package.

Well even though it was a horrible day (read previous post), it was still my birthday so I should at least post some pictures of the cake or something.

Here’s the dinky little thing they tried to give me at first, surprisingly good for a tiny cake!

And here is the real deal with the candles. You have to love ice cream cake!