Caroline Dianne Carter

Caroline Dianne Carter was born today at 7:44am. She was 8 pounds 4 ounces and 19.5  inches long.

Mother and Baby are doing just fine and should be home soon.

You can see the first pictures taken here

******Update 6/29/2008******

Not long after writing my first post Caroline had a problem with eating her food, it was making her choke and stop breathing. This problem happened twice yesterday and she was moved to the intensive care unit in the hospital. Earlier today after we thought Caroline was getting better she had a third incident and it was decided that she should be moved to a new hospital. Caroline has now been moved to Loyola hospital one of the best baby ICU’s in Chicago land. I will update people as and when I know more.

******Update 6/30/2008******

We have just got back from the hospital and Caroline is looking better today. She has managed to eat and so far has had no more episodes so this is good news. The specialists tell me that the test went well and they think they have found the problem. They still have test to do but so far so good.

My Mozy Problem

Over the last 8 weeks I have been having a problem with Mozy the company I use for my online backup’s. Even though the problem is still not fixed I deiced to blog about the problem so far.

About 8 weeks ago I noticed that I had started to have 2 problems with my Mozy Home client. The first problem was a MozyServerError6 problem, the second was I noticed that my client was send more data than was being encoded, this was a real problem for me.

OK the first problem was easy I emailed Mozy and they told me that this was an error with there server’s and would be fixed very soon. I was told that my client would reconnect and this would not be a problem. This may not be a problem to most people but when you have 1.3Tb backed up to Mozy it can take a good couple of hour to restart a backup. 8 Weeks later I am still having the same problems with this first error which makes me wounder just how good are the server’s back at Mozy or how good are there engineer’s.

The second issue has been a far worse problem to try and get fixed. After speaking with a number of Mozy engineer’s over a 2 week period it became clear to me that none of them had a clue what they were talking about. Over there chat option I was told that this is not a problem and my data was being encoded and being sent to Mozy, over the phone I was told that this was an issue and to upgrade to the latest version. When I told him I was at the latest version he didn’t know what to say (I would have asked for the version number first). After more investigation at my end I now know that the client is not sending any data and has crashed just saying that it is sending data, it just sticks on the same file, that is until it crashes out with a MozyServerError6 problem.

After 4 weeks of fighting with Mozy about this problem and getting nowhere fast I was leaving for Microsoft’s TechEd. Imagine how happy I was when I came across a Mozy stand at the EMC Booth. It was here that I met Tom Metge who told me he was a lead engineer for the Mozy client, great I thought. I told Tom of my problem and explained to him how I was getting no support, Tom told me he was fully aware of the problem and how the help desk didn’t really understand the problem. Tom told me that there was another version getting ready for release to fix this exact problem and asked if I would like to be a beta tester to be sure the problem was fixed, I agreed. I had a number of emails back and forth with Tom showing him my log files and the error’s I was getting he told me one of his engineers to email me with a link to the beta version and all would be good. I spoke to Tom a number of times during my week and TechEd and all looked good.

A week after returning from TechEd and I still had not received the beta software and so I emailed Tom and surprise, surprise no reply. I have now emailed Tom a number of times over the last two weeks and as yet no reply, another sinning example of Mozy’s great support.

Yesterday I received a follow up call from my time at TechEd from Mozy, so I told the poor girl just what I thought of the company and the support they have. She told me that she will arrange a call with Mozy corporate to get this issue fixed but so far I have herd nothing. I will update this post if anything happens.

As of today 8 weeks after my problems started I have managed to backup just 10Gb in that time (I used to backup about 7Gb a night) I am no further forward and still no fix insight. In the whole 8 weeks I have only had 1 good call to Mozy when and egineer called Josh extended my subscription by 3 months as I have been unable to backup my data, but still no fix.

I will keep this blog up dated as to when or if I get my problem fixed.

******Update******

Please see this blog post for the latest update http://delboycarter.wordpress.com/2008/07/03/mozy-redeem-themselves/

The Queens Birthday Pic

This has to be one of the coolest pictures that I have seen this year. I found it on the BBC website. “Corporal Scott Robertson snapped this view from the cockpit as military planes flew over Buckingham Palace to mark the Queen’s birthday.”

TechEd 2008 Review

Well I am back from TechEd and although I had a great time down in Orlando I have to say I feel a little disappointed with Microsoft. This was my first ever TechEd and due to the fact that I am working in the virtualization space I decided to go to as many Hyper-V sessions as I could. Now we all know that Microsoft are way behind VMware when it comes to virtualization but I think someone should inform Microsoft that it is just them that are behind. All week I found that I was attending different sessions and looking at the same slides. This became the running joke of the the week that Microsoft only have 2 slides on Hyper-V this was always followed up with, “We can’t say when this will be released as we are waiting for other’s in the company to release there code first.” Maybe the different parts of the same company should start talking to each other.

Although Microsoft had a number of different levels depending on how technical you are they still just showed you the same slides and give you the same information. Even when I went to speak to the engineers at the different booths I always felt that I was getting conflicting information depending on who I spoke to. When it comes to Hyper-V I really don’t think that I am any better off than I was a week ago, I will have to wait for the DVD’s to arrive and review more of the information that I was given and hope I never see the 2 slides again. As for Microsoft’s Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) I really can see a future for this tool especially in an environment that has a mixture of ESX and Hyper-V servers and hopefully XenServers in the future. There are a couple of things that I didn’t like about it and I still have a few unanswered questions but at least I managed to learn something in this space.

All in all I would hope that Microsoft will improve there content for Hyper-V for future events however I have a feeling that I will be attending TechEd next year for the same reasons as I did this year looking for more information on Microsoft’s plans for virtualization.

Away from the sessions TechEd was great, it was great to meet new friends and even better to meet up with old ones again. Who ever organize these events for Microsoft did a great job in moving so many people around Orlando and the event party at Universal studio’s was a fantastic evening.

Pictures from my TechEd week can be found here.

My New Internet Connection

OK so this week I decided to move my Internet connection back to Comcast. I did this when I herd that Comcast now have a 2Mb Up load version. The package I now have is 16Mb Down and 2Mb Up, or is it.

When the engineer turned up and tested my line he told me that he had never seen such a good connection and I should get some good speed from my line. As you can see from below I get far better than I am paying for. Thank you Comcast.

Oh yes that’s 25Mb Down and nearly 3Mb Up. Again thank you Comcast.

Wii Fit Review

OK so I have had my Wii Fit for a week now and I have to say I love it. First off let me tell you if you are fit and go to the gym on a regular basis then this is not for you, at least to get you fitter, but it could still be fun.

For me the Wii fit is great for getting the not so fit off the sofa and moving not only that but due to the graph’s and measurements it makes you want to do more. For me I have been out walking more and riding my bike more in the last week just to I can add more exercise into the Wii fit.

As for the Wii fit I never thought I would enjoy Yoga but I have really enjoyed it over the last week and I find that any free moment that I have I am reaching for the Wii fit to do Yoga. The aerobics to start with are basic but once you start to unlock some of the other ones it starts to get good the advance hoola hoops is very good fun and the advance step class is fun and tiresome that has to be doing me some good. The balance games are more games that for fitness but they are very good fun, being a snowboarder I never thought I would enjoy a skiing game but they are both good fun. I have not tried the strength training exercises yet but I will get round to them.

I can see that the board itself has a lot of potential and I can’t wait to see what games are released for the board in the future I am looking forward to some snowboarding game now that will be fun.

As for Nintendo and Wii fit games I can see that maybe the next one will be a training bike and a Wii fit bike game now that would be fun.

I think the one big plus with the Wii fit is that it is really good fun to exercise and try and get your Mii to loose the fat as well as yourself. A big plus for the Wii fit so lets see if I can loose some of the weight over the summer and prove that it works.