…because someone needs to.
mass ignorance
File for a divorce online…sheesh.
Nov 12th
Should there be line drawn for “convenience”? Pay my bills online great. Shop for a present, nice (especially if you want an awesomeness motivational poster…sorry for the shameless plug). But now it appears Broward County in South Florida has made it even more convenient to get a divorce…online. Check this article for specifics.
Now I really don’t want to go on a political rant…mainly because there is way too much wrong, complaining would only get me frustrated and taking a look at pretty much any leader in this country tells me they won’t do anything to fix it… However, how stupid is this? Divorcerate.org shows that :
The divorce rate in America for first marriage, vs second or third marriage
50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce, according to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri.”
Is it just me or does it seem less and less people (especially those supposedly providing leadership) care at all about marriage? I digress from my small rant…. you can to back to being awesome now.
shut down the internet!
Aug 2nd
first of all…. sheesh..this:
Sir Elton John says we must close the internet
now this may be the dumbest things I have heard all day and yet another reason celebrities should keep their bloody mouths shut. I mean who honestly gives a damn about what Elston John thinks…but I digress… in fact…I’ll do better than digress..I will actually say he made a valid point with one argument:
“The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff.”
This I tend to agree with. The internet really does keep people from going out and being with other people. Such a shame. Does remind me of the game First Life
enjoy..and go outside…prolonged exposure to sunlight will not kill you…well.. that might be debatable.
no posts
Jun 1st
Sorry folks for not posting lately. With my partner in crime on maternity it’s been me vs. 300 in IT world.
I’ll be back soon.
Cheers,
aaron
Plant a tree…tech things that annoy me.
Apr 27th
Trendiness annoys me… the mac trend I can accept because they have a quality product and freaking awesome commercials (see my earlier post on mac ads.)
However… the whole “global warming” or now p.c. “climate change” (climate change… you mean seasons right?)thing is ridiculous…either way. now computer manufacturers like dell (who I really like by the way) are letting you plant a tree with each computer purchase to offset the carbon dioxide emissions generated to power you system.
and what a deal at only $6. Now this whole thing is absurd to me but let me ask you this… how much does it cost to plant a tree?
Taxes
Apr 11th
As Dave Barry Once said:
“We’ll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.”
You gotta love Dave. Enjoy tax time! Check out Dave’s blog as well: Dave Barrys blog
Adding a new hard drive…
Apr 10th
Often people will ask me what are some things I can do to upgrade my computer or improve performance on my pc? Well there are some simple software things you can do but I’ll not waste your time with that. This time, lets start by looking at your hardware. RAM is usually the best place to start especially if you have less than 256 MB. A new hard drive is another great improvement. Let me recommend this one:
Actually I carry a few of these in stock so if your interested just shoot me an email.
Misys, Citrix 4 and Windows 2003…the saga continues.
Feb 16th
please note… any use of sarcasm in this blog are completely intentional. Thank You
Well more today from our Support help at Misys Client Care. They called…actually they have only been calling back after our systems have been down for an hour or more. Either way, they called back to say…well let me try adding a regedit then and then reboot all your servers…joy.
Anyways…to hopefully save someone else the trouble here is what happened:
Users were complaining about one of two things. The first symptom I saw was annoying but kind of simple to notice. We use a published application and when users tried to connect using the published application it would seem to “hang” and never complete the connection or error out. Actually, it just sat there and looked like this:
The second issue, which actually became the more prevalent problem looked like this:
The message said simply: “Cannot connect to the Citrix MetaFrame server. Unable to contact the MetaFrame server browser. There may be network problems, or you may need to configure or correct the server address in the Server Location field.”
Let me cover a few basic things… This has happened several times since our migration to Windows 2003 and Citrix Presentation Server 4, this was a come and go sort of problem that did not seem to affect every user, I can verify that there are no network problems, and most importantly users can connect directly to single servers in the farm (however we have very few people set up to connect directly this way).
Since users could connect directly to servers and not through the published application the Citrix Knowledge base articles I found didn’t seem to help much. So we went to the Microsoft Knowledge base to so some searching and stumbled on this article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312362/EN-US/
At first glance it seemed strange but so far this registry edit has worked. It seems that the paged pool memory was getting depleted when the server was under heavy load. No we did not have the same errors in our log files, but the symptoms seemed like it could describe what what happening. Either way, I’m pretty confident in our solution and will keep track of related issues and report here to confirm this was in fact the solution.
Hope this helps.
Citrix Makes You Cry and Other Hazards of Misys
Feb 15th
Today was absolutely horrible. For those of you who don’t know there are 2 techs where I work. Myself and a lady who has been there for about 13,000 years or so… I might be exaggerating, but not by much… Let me back up.
I work at a medical practice in Tennessee, I have been here for about 7 months and before that I worked for TDOT and took care of the technical aspects of the ITS center in Nashville…..either way…. so now I work in the Medical/Technical field. We currently use a company called Misys for our practice management software (appointments, billing, medical records, etc..) and for the past few weeks we have been going through some upgrades. You see, we had been running an Citrix Presentation Server XP on a Windows 2000 server farm. The Citrix\W2K server farm interfaces with an AIX (UNIX) system that stores our medical database. The Misys upgrades have consisted of adding 1 server to the farm, taking the rest up to Windows 2003, upgrading Citrix to Presentation Server 4, upgrading the AIX server and adding a new server to help handle the load between the server farm and the AIX.
I tell you this to say that their support that we pay an ungodly amount for, is about worthless. I mean seriously, what has happened to customer service? We have been plagued with issues since the upgrade began. Now the good news for me is that I get plenty of technical fixes to blog about, which I plan to.
The bad news is that it is a huge pain in the ass to myself and the users I have to support. I mean my job is to make technology helpful to my doctors/nurses/users but when some of the support is done by other, well what else can you do but ask (more like beg & plead) for help? It’s honestly enough to make you hide under your desk and cry…lol.
The big issue today dealt with Citrix. It seems that users could not login using our Published Application within Citrix. One of about 3 different login errors since the upgrade to 2003 & the new Presentation server. The eventual solution after about 4 hours? Reboot your servers.
“All of them?” I ask
“Yep”
“During the middle of a work day?” I say
“Yep”
“You realize I still have people working on the systems, right?” (now I’m more frustrated)
“Yep, you should actually be rebooting all servers in your farm every night”
“Every night?…And this is better than what we had how?”
…and I’m not going to go on because what he said was nonsense. My futile salute for the day definitely goes to Misys Health Care… If anyone out there is considering them…shop a little longer. Don’t get me wrong, I thought they were great till this upgrade. Oh well, what they screw up will hopefully make me stronger.
Next blog I’ll try to be a little more technical… I’m just frustrated with BAD customer service & support.
Cheers,
aaron
