Posted on

Moving Away?

I had to help out with the office move for my company the weekend in San Francisco.  In the time that I was there, I was thinking about how great San Francisco is.  I love my friends and family here, but there are times I wonder about the sacrifice Jaz had to make to come here.  Leaving all of her family and friends to move to Illinois with me.  At the time our deciding factor was because I had an established job where I was and she had just graduated college.  Of course it made the decision “easier” because logically it just made sense, and it would even make MORE sense now that we both have established careers.  But when I was in San Francisco this weekend, it felt like a place we could call home too.  If we were to move there, my friends and family would be sad and Jaz’s family and friends would be happy, just the opposite of what they were 5 years ago.  That is one of the difficulties of having a spouse’s family in another state.  It’s either one family or the other, or neither.  Not everyone is completely happy.  This is all just me thinking about it in my head and most likely, this will all pass when I get home and get to see my friends and family again.  But for a weekend I felt how it would be like if I lived and worked in San Francisco.  Although it was on the company dollar it still felt like it was somewhere we could belong.

I’ll be honest, the massive amount of asians that are there did make me feel that way.  Since I never really had that growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, it is just shocking and welcoming to see whenever I go there.  I think it’s just a cultural thing that I don’t want to lose.  I can see some of that slip away from me even now, and I want to make sure my kids (no announcement) can still have a sense of Filipino pride.  When I think about my parents and how they just up and decided to move to the USA I am truly inspired and humbled.  Here are people who had no real idea of America but knew that they wanted to come here and be successful and raise a family.  The courage and the drive it took for them to get that done is something that I do not know if I have in me.  This is the pride that I am talking about.  Maybe I don’t have the need to move to another country, but I have the confidence in myself to push limits (marathon/philanthropy) and try to inspire others to push themselves.  I think their history is what made me who I am today.

Whoa, I went on a huge tangent there.  Sorry sometimes those thoughts just flow and I need to just get it all out before it is gone.  So I think it’s that sense of community that I feel in San Francisco that really makes it so appealing.  Now, it may be unfair to compare it to where I currently live in the suburbs.  There is a good portion of culture there, just not my culture.  I have been trying to open myself up to it as well, but there are times when you just got it bring it home to what you are used to.  I am not sure how it would work if we were to try and move to San Francisco, but it’s just a nice possibility to have in our back pocket it we really need it.

Posted on

Live blog: Saturday 10/29/11

4:39pm – All the guys are pretty much gone.  I called my boss to tell him what was up and he said I was good to leave for the day! OH SO HAPPY!  Thanks for following along, and yeah, I’ll have another one tomorrow as well, hopefully will end much much sooner!

Photo on 10 29 11 at 6 42 PM 2

ENDLESS! haha

3:47pm – So remember those longer network cables I needed? I found some! After most of the old office has been cleared out, there are just the items that are being shipped off site to be destroyed or to Birmingham. And in the middle was a garbage can full of network cables. So of course I sifted through it and found some cables long enough for the server at the new office! I know it seems like a small win, but I was just happy to find them! Now if I could just find some zip ties or velcro rolls then we’d be in business!

20111029-155101.jpg

3:09pm – I am getting a TON of steps today. Haha. Went back to the new office to drop off a big shredder that was left back in the old office. It’s a shame that all of this stuff is just going to be sent away and possibly destroyed. I really hope that it is repurposed for other organizations, preferably non-profit ones. I want to look into what they do with all of this stuff. I mean in just this move alone there were dozens of printers and monitors and such that I’m sure someone could have used. It is so nice in San Francisco today. I wanted to go for a run this morning but damn, it is still dark by 7am! Might have to use the workout room this time. I’d love to go outside for a run up and down embarcadero, but it just becomes a safety issue at that point.

NewImage

“Ton” just got scared

2:33pm – I’m at the new office and the guys who are going to ship all the old hardware and destroy it has made good progress. They are putting everything on their pallets and are going to be ready to go and have everything out by tomorrow. The guy said he’d be done by 1pm tomorrow. That would be nice! Meanwhile, I really don’t like the cabling job we did on the server in the new office. I just need to get some longer network cables and zip ties and I should be good. I learned my cable management skills from Potter. Or is it my attention to detail? Ok…it’s more like OCD. haha

1:33pm – Had to head back to the new office first to check on some stuff and to get the blood pressure reader to send back to the home office. The program is called Virgin Healthmiles. It is a really cool wellness incentive program that my company has.

12:25pm – Don’t worry I’m still alive. Was at the new building trying to troubleshoot a couple of things. Apparently the blue-screened workstation isn’t going to be used by anyone. WHEW! So they will rebuild later. It’s nice to be there because no one is there except the construction guys in the hallway. Also had some thing come up with another project while I was here. Luckily I know the application enough to figure out what’s wrong in a reasonable amount of time. At lunch now at Subway. I actually just needed to pee because the bathrooms aren’t ready at the new building. But I knew I had to eat lunch too. Of course there was no bathroom at Subway, but I still have to pee. Is this TMI? Sorry, it’s all I got right now, unless you want me to talk more about servers and workstations. And even those topics i don’t know a ton about…how ironic. You just got hipstered. (I’m losing it…)

9:41pm – First fire to put out. Blue screen of death on one of the workstations in the new building.

9:15am – This would be one hell of a garage sale!

IMG 1868

 

8:59am – So my boss asked me to come to San Francisco and help out with an office move. It was sort of last minute but of course I wanted to show my team skills, and this would absolutely qualify as “taking one for the team”. I flew in yesterday, took a taxi to the hotel to check-in real quick, and then walked over to the old office. By the time I got there, everything was everywhere – printers, keyboards, computers, monitors, etc. They were separated into their own sections of cubes but man was it a mess! All of these “extra” hardware is planned to be shipped off to another company to be destroyed or repurposed or something, and obviously the newer hardware along with the users’ “desks” will be moved to the new location. Now where does the server admin work come into play? There is one server, one network device, and some other network appliance that needed to go from the old office to the new office. So I needed to wait until that made it over to the new office. It was literally 20 minutes of work, and that was it, and I had to wait 4 hours for it! Kill me!

So here we are today at the old office with the company that will be taking away all the old hardware. I’ll show a picture soon. And there are only 4 guys to do all of this. I asked the lead how long he thought it would take, he said he really thinks that this would be a 3 day job, and not 2. That isn’t good news…

In the meantime, before I take a server rail through my brain, I decided to start up a live blog so I can at least do something while just waiting here. If you don’t see an update from me every hour or so, check the server room, I may have hung myself with network cable.

Posted on

9 months and counting…

NO! It’s not what you are thinking! haha

Of course I am talking about the Chicago Marathon that will be on October 10th of this year. That’s right, it is on 10/10/10. Now the furthest I’ve actually run in an organized race is 10K. I was training for the 15K and actually got up to the distance, but then if you remember, I got the H1N1 flu…which SUCKED!! I’ve signed up for some races already to get me started out of the gate when it gets “warmer” this March. Here are the races I plan on running to get me ready for my ridiculous goal for 2010:

  • Shamrock Shuffle 8K – March 27 [registered]

  • Soldier Field 10mi – May 29 [registered]

  • North Shore Half Marathon – June 13 [not registered yet]

    • I hope writing and blogging about it will actually make me be more accountable this time around. Last year my goal was a 1/2 marathon, and I never got it done. I did make some good strides to get there for this year.

    Being that it is 9 months away, today on 1/10 I decided I had to start liking the treadmill. In my copy of Runner’s World this week it was talking about what kinds of different workouts you could do on the treadmill. Speed, tempo, random, and of course hill workouts. Of course I went after the most difficult and tackled the hill workout. Here’s what the magazine said to do:

    Try one minute runs up a 4% incline with two minutes of slow, flat jogging between. Build up to 10 repeats at 6% incline

    Instead of two minutes I only jogged for 1 minute, because I forgot and I kept it at 4% the whole time since I wasn’t sure if it meant that I should end this particular session at 6% or gradually work towards 6% in the next few hill workouts. It wasn’t terrible, although I thought for sure I was gonna give up after only 5 intervals. Luckily with the Cardinals/Packers game on [Sorry Coop] I was able to get through it all. It didn’t feel as bad as when I ran in the bay area a couple weeks ago. I didn’t go up and down those CRAZY hills in San Francisco, just the ones I like to call the “beginner” hills in the outskirts of the city.

    IMG00182-20100103-1012.jpg
    Me after running the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco

    So there you go, 1 step [actually over 13,000 steps according to my pedometer] closer to training for a marathon. I don’t know what struggles lay ahead of me, but I knew I better start now, because before you know it, October will be here as quickly as 2009 left.