So, I’ve arrived! Yesterday actually. Everything went pretty smooth, no real issues. Even the Security in Puerto Rico wasn’t bad (with the broken passport and all). Some checking and questioning later, they taped up the thing, and I was off to go ;)

Since we (my colleague and I) had about a 2.5h layover, we didn’t feel like waiting at the airport. Grabbed a taxi to Plaza Las Americas to get lunch, which was great! Also bought an Airport Extreme for a friend, which I promised.
The flight from San Juan to Fort Lauderdale was a pleasant one. For just a few bucks more, we had upgraded our tickets to Businessclass. Nice seats, priority boarding, and an actual meal onboard (Never happens on AA flights under 3 hours, it seems). After the flight, we got a taxi to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Sunrise, and shortly after we took off for some food. We ended up in an all-you-can-eat restaurant, which served loads and loads of meat. Very good, and cheap too :)

Anyhow. Today we had the meeting (the actual purpose for the trip). Hopefully we’ll get things going now, else it’d probably take forever to start..

Then I switched hotels, one closer to Miami Airport, because of the morning flight to Curacao. And, now I’m waiting for the others to get back from another meeting, so we can have some food and fun :)

For a while now, my passport had a very small crack in it. Nothing too bad, and I was about to get it fixed (honest!). But, today I got a check to pay for the travel expenses is the US.. We went through the drive-in bank (nice concept by the way). The lady told us to put the passport in the tube, along with the check.

Everything came back, only my passport was broken. I now officially have a seperate booklet, and seperate plastic-picture-card. I wonder how US customs will look tomorrow morning. Oh well. We’ll see ;)

After just a few days here, I have to go to Ft. Lauderdale to have a meeting with $vendor. We’re about to make big changes to the IP network, and we basically need their help in actually doing that. Sounds fun and all, so we booked tickets today.
The fun started at the travel agency. I requested to fly to Ft. Lauderdale on Wednesday, have the meeting on Thursday, and fly back to Curacao on Friday. Since we don’t have a clue how long the meeting will take, this sounded like the best option. The lady had some suggestions. Fly to Haiti in the morning, and then on to Curacao. One stop, not too bad, and only slightly more expensive than a round-trip Tortola.

After she finished, I re-checked the ticket:
9:00 Ft. Lauderdale (US) – Port Au Prince (Haiti)
12:35 Port au Prince (Haiti) – Miami (US)
16:55 Miami (US) – Curacao (AN)

What. the. Hell. Keep in mind that Ft. Lauderdale and Miami airport are about 33 minutes by car (according to Google).
But oh well. Tickets have been changed. I’ll just grab a taxi to Miami, instead of the 4 hour detour through Haiti.

Finally, the ticket ended up being $4 more expensive. Yes. Leaving the trip to Haiti out actually made the ticket more expensive…

After a few days, we swapped hotels. Since they keep changing our flight dates, the hotel was booked at some point already. So, now we’re at Maria’s by the Sea, a very nice hotel directly at the ocean.

Check here for the View from the Balcony. Picture made with the new phone, by the way :)

A while back, I ordered a new Colo toy box, to play with. At the moment, it has seen a fair bit of the world. It started in Seattle, travelling (UPS ground..) to Miami, Florida. From there, on the boat to Curacao. And now I just received the confirmation that it has been sent to Amsterdam by airplane. Which is cool, hopefully a certain ex-colleague will be able to pick it up and put it in a rack soon :)

After that, we can start playing around, and start to move stuff over to the new box. It’s quite nice, for those who care, here is a link. I picked the 2.0GHz Dual Core CPU, 4Gb Memory and 2x 250Gb SATA disks.

So, I’m hooked up with a new phone. It’s a very nice toy, too bad it’s running Windows tho. At least it has working GPRS/Edge, and a very nice camera.. I’ll put the number online somewhere, those who need it will know where to find it, I guess. If not, just ask :)

Some already know, some don’t. I decided to quit my job, and took an offer for a job in Tortola, BVI. Tasks will be similar to what I’m doing now, but on a broader scale, hopefully :) I really looked forward to this, and I’m happy to be flying over there today. Too bad there’s a 5 hour layover in Sint Maarten, but hey, can’t complain on the first day right?

Last Friday we had a little goodbye-party at the office, followed by a nice BBQ at a colleagues house (thanks Felipe!) Had lots of fun, and talked till about 2 in the morning. Luckily I didn’t have to get the Saturday Flight, that would’ve been a pain I guess..

So, here we are, at the beginning of a new adventure!

For more than a year, I’m using my loyal NSLU2 as a fileserver. Recently I’ve added a 500Gb external disk to it, which is when the ‘issues’ started.. It formatted fine, booted fine, and I could transfer everything on it. However, after the first powerfailure, the second disk would not be available. Running fsck on it, and it usually worked.

Some powerfailures later (They’re common here :/), it started to annoy me. For no real reason, I had to reboot/scan a few times to get everything back to work. Shares showing up as “archive~2″, and being empty. Deleting and re-adding had no effect.. Furthermore, the shares on the -first- disk also broke down while the second disk was plugged in. The disk itself looks fine when connected to my laptop, so that shouldn’t be it..

I figured it might be a firmware issue. Unfortunately, Linksys does not offer a more recent version than 2.3R63 on their site. Google showed me rumors of newer firmwares in
existence. A little searching later, I found a 2.3R72 Beta release, which I flashed into the device. And instantly, both drives worked like a charm. Right. Lucky shot or not? I’ll know in a few weeks, hopefully :)

The new toys arrived! Thanks to the Steve Express we can now fit even more stuff on our file server! After hooking up the disk (and reformatting to EXT3), I could start moving stuff around, which had been piled up on my laptop and several other boxes ..
For some reason, though, I’m not able to get a transferrate higher than 2Mbyte/s. And that’s directly connected to the switch, using FTP. Oh well, it’ll do for now, just a long wait for 100Gb+ to transfer ;)

Anyhow, I really like the NSLU2 from linksys, it’s still a very easy way to just hook some harddrives, and share them on the network. Yay for 820G \o/

Yesterday we had an issue on one of the more important (and most difficult to access) sites.. At first, we thought we’d lost power. Then, we figured it might be the AC giving up. In the end, it was a combination of both. Because we use a closed system for the AC setup, inside the cabinets, we had to pull some ducts for the air. Unfortunately, one unit broke down for a bit, causing water to start dripping from the ducts. Eventually this reached one of the circuit breakers, and since water and electricity don’t go well together, the fusebox melted..

Got to get a picture of that thing, looks awful, smells even worse. But, “The switch still works, what are you complaining about?”, to quote a colleague. ;)