Patrick's BLOG

Almost perfect dogs... 

Otis in Blue, Sophie in Red... 

So I took the plunge and started working from home...Sure, I still go in the office once a week to pick up mail and attend a weekly meeting. Other than that my friends, I am a telecommuter. My home office is all decked out with convenience only a chair roll away - stocked with pens, notebooks, reference materials, plenty of work surfaces (thanks to my girlfriend), laptop and other necessary technology.

So how does the day start...Lousy!!

The VPN was not working, my new office mobile phone does not reception in this neighborhood nor cannot figure out voicemail, NCEDD can't get to their VPN from the office, and a server - 2 hours and 30 minutes away - has two NICs which are unreachable by the OS, my fancy tablet was accidentally purchased with a serial connection and it will not work and wrote on the box, had not been able to reach my boss to check in due to cell issues...

Then there was lunch...Good lunch..Thai. (Note: mentioning what I ate is for my friend John who thinks blogs are stupid. " Who wants to read what someone had for lunch?" Actual Quote.)

Then things got better. The new guy, Scott, got the VPN working. Alltel says they are putting in new equipment in the neighborhood so the phone will work soon, devised a solution for the VPN issue for NCEDD, and the server with bad NICs will likely require a rebuild but it will not take much to do it, and I will fix the tablet in time...

Tough first day...But we will see what tomorrow brings.

I even added sconces. I hate the sconces. 

...but she wanted a red bedroom. 

It started out plain enough... 

Sick of your plain old desktop and icons but don't want spyware on your desktops or worse pay for it. Check out deviantART and Pixture

DeviantArt has great Multimonitor Wallpapers and user submitted art for icons, themes, and cellphones. Pixture has Mac Utils and icons from sushi to Star Wars.

Now go forth and spice up that cubical.

Renaissance Park has two major trails. We took the one at the end of the parking lot near the soccer fields. It featured some really nice fast downhills and one rocky stream crossing. Being weekend warriors, we took several breaks after blasting down a hill or spinning up one. My girlfriend was not so happy about the speed of the downhills so the trail got a thumbs down from her. My philosophy is that "For every downhill, there is an uphill." So I savor the speed in anticipation for climb back out. All in all, it was a good day had by one and a more-than-slightly-anxious day had by another. I will be back soon to check out the other trail. The jury is still out if I will have company.

So while you are curling up to book or your favorite show on a Tuesday or Thursday night, I am in class for my Oracle 9i certification at NC State . Something my mom can brag about at church, "My son is an OCP."

There so many ways to study for this certification and you need all of them. I chose to take the class because I job would pay for it. I purchased the Oracle Press study guides. And got the Troytec and TestKing test questions. If it seems like I overly preparing for these four exams, you are probably correct. But why pay money to fail an exam?

Looks like this will be a good season for mountian biking. The rain has not been nearly as bad as last year and thanks to the efforts of local clubs like Trailblazers in Charlotte. Francis Beatty Park in Weddington looked really good last week and enjoy it while it lasts since we are losing part of it to a 5k running trail. That is really sad too since it is a really good beginning trail with some nice technical inner and outer loop trails. Ride on...Hope to see you out there.

P. Alston