Oliver Hansen

I’ve been using VMware Player at work to run Groundwork which is a pretty neat network monitoring system — but more on that in another post. So one thing that was getting annoying was the guest OS (the one running on the virtual-ized system) had been losing time. I didn’t check how often but in the course of an hour it would be off by about 20 minutes at least. I knew of the vmware-tools package that was supposed to help the virtual OS run a little better and thought that would help it get the time as well. I also thought the tools were already installed but wasn’t sure. I tried looking in the Add/Remove programs but didn’t find it so I decided to move to the command line.

$ locate vmware

was enough to list quite a few files which was encouraging. I eventually found the vmware-tools in /usr/bin directory. I then ran the vmware-toolbox program and the first option I saw was “Time synchronization”. Exactly what I wanted. Now when i receive alerts about the network, the time will actually be correct. And my OCD is satiated as well.

Yesterday was my first day at my new job. I’m now working at the Seattle YWCA as the Network Administrator. I wasn’t sure how the first day would go really. Would I be sitting around waiting on paperwork? Would I be setting up my computer? Would I be thrown into the work supporting the network and staff? Well, it was more of actual work than just sitting around which was great. I got to see a bit of how things have normally been done in the past with setting up a new office. It’s going to be a challenge because the two people with most of the knowledge and experience in the IT department left at approximately the same time. Ed who is the outgoing Sys Admin was nice enough to come in on his last day and lend a hand setting up the new office space. (more…)

Automatic Urinal

Classic Manual Urinal

Can you tell the difference? I know I can. There are many other males who seem confused about this though. (more…)

I just decided to count how many languages we have here at work. No, not computer languages but spoken languages that people here can speak besides english. So far there are at least one person who speaks fluently the following languages:

• Chinese
• Japanese
• Korean
• Indonesian
• German
• Romanian (not 100% sure on this one at the moment)

And we have some limited competence in the following two:

• Spanish
• French

I was pretty impressed! This is just in my group at work which probably consists of 40-50 people. I’m just one of the ones who can speak a little Spanish. If we ever do any international shows I think we might have a good chance of having one person that can get around.

The rooms of The Venetian certainly were nice as I mentioned before. The service left me desiring a little however. I’m a bit tired of relating the story so I’ll give the short version.

After work on the second day my room key would not work. I went to my coworker’s room and used his phone to call and ask for another room key. After a few security-related questions they said they’d send one right up. About 30 minutes later a man came to the door and gave me the new keys. I went to try them and of course they didn’t work as well. I was tired of waiting around so I came back to my coworker’s room and called them again explaining I thought something was wrong with the door and asking them to send someone to look at the door. Again they said “right away” and so I figured it would be taken care of. Seeing how long it took them to send just a key, I went to another friend’s room who had an Xbox and some entertainment. I stayed there a couple hours then came back to my room to find the key still didn’t work — now it was really getting annoying. I went down to the front desk and explained exactly what had happened, including the fact that I had already tried different room keys. So they sent me up with another set of keys and told me to check in with the security to have them assist me. Basically, I ended up waiting another 30min after getting security to use their master lock and finally the engineers came up and had to reprogram my door before it worked. So it was about 3hrs from when I originally asked them to fix the door and I had to work early the next day. I expected an apology or something at least but I guess I was forgotten. I’m not one to complain loudly to the staff (that’s what my blog is for, right?) so I just stuck it out the rest of the week in my suite.

Sooooo, the entire time I was in Vegas I only got out of the hotel for about 3 or 4 hours total. I looked out to the bright morning sun every day before leaving my room and heading to the convention rooms, but that’s just the way it goes. It was still better than walking around in the rain in Washington to me. Oh, and one more good thing about the Venetian is their Internet price was reasonable at $4.98/24hrs when I’ve seen others as high as $17 for the same period. So yup, that’s enough Vegas for a while. On to L.A. this week!