Modern art masterpiece

10-05-07_0758.jpg
Originally uploaded by BernieC

Awesome graffiti near work.

Huzzah?

I've been hired with the new company. I'm relieved and excited.

My trip to see my sister yesterday went well. I got to see my nephew whom I haven't seen in over two years. He's big and cute. I had a mini come-to-Jesus meeting with my sister. It probably won't change much, though, but I can hope.

I'm now a Sr. Tech Support Engineer at SonicWALL.

Episode 10,544

Family: Sister wants money. Wants it via Western Union. With a $20 fee for that, I instead offered to personally deliver it today, since she says it's for a prescription for my nephew. She responds by telling me she doesn't want me to go to all the effort to take it to her, but that she really needs it badly for him. I'm waiting to hear back about whether or not I have 250 miles of driving in store for this evening.

Update (16:39 PDT): I'm off to Kelso.

Update (23:00 PDT): I'm back home, safely.

Work: Tomorrow I'll find out if I still have a job.

This is how we do it in Ohio...

Yet another installment of Overheard In My Office:

"This is how we do it in Ohio. When it comes to Cornhole, we don't mess around."

I laugh EVERY SINGLE time I read emails like this, but alas, Cornhole is simply a game and not this.

Woo?

My company is getting bought by another company. Oh happy day.

Actually, I'm kinda excited. I like the company that's buying mine. I have experience with their product, and it was a fine one at that. I look forward to laboring in their underground sugar caves (Simpsons reference).

I don't want to be on this show anymore.

A coworker recently told me that my life has been quite the interesting reality TV show for a while now.

My response was, "I don't want to be on this show anymore."

[chuckle]

Busted!

A short while ago, I was caught air drumming by some of my coworkers.

The song I was air drumming to.

Wait for it...



"Don't You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds.

Rad.

Overheard in the office...

Ok, not overheard - this came to me in an email from our HR department. Do these people NOT read Urban Dictionary?! I still chuckle to myself when I read the statement. Happy Friday!

"Come warm up your Cornhole skills today before the Cinco de Mayo tournament and have a beer too!"

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cornhole

Coming Full Circle

It took me only 10 years, but I'm back nearly where I started. This past weekend the company I'm working for moved to the Darth Vader building. When I first moved to Seattle in January of 1997, I lived one block away at 4th and Bell in the Charlesgate Apartments. Belltown's changed quite a lot since I was last here.

It's oddly comforting to see how I've done in the past ten years. I've worked a lot, went to school, been in (and got out of) a long term relationship, lived in a few places, taken a few trips around the world, etc. And things are continuing to go well for me. My circle of friends is as strong as it's ever been, I'm seeing a woman who I'm starting to realize means a lot to me, and I'm financially stable. There are issues in my life that, of course, need resolution, but those will get taken care of in due time.

Even though there are the usual day-to-day bumps, I'm feeling comfortable in my life, and quite contented. Happy first day of spring!

I love Mondays

It's 10:07 and my left eye is already twitching. Ah, work related stress. I love it that I'm running the show today and the boss and the account manager (the guy who handles customer escalations) are both out.

It's just one fire after the next. Happy Monday, y'all.

It gonna (did) snow!!

Much like another friend last night, I got a call from a friend who needed some help. Seems her bus couldn't make it all the way back into Renton last night due to a nasty snow and ice storm. From the news reports, for some people it turned their 30 minute commute into a multi-hour nightmare. So she and I met up near my office and I took her back to my house where she stayed the night. In addition, I picked up another friend of mine at her apartment and she came and visited. By the time it would've been time for her to head home, the ice had started forming and I was not feeling too comfortable with going down the long, steep hill to her place. She stayed the night, too.

At about 2pm today, I left the house to take both of them home. In addition, I picked up my ex-girlfriend and took her into SeaTac. So I was playing chauffeur for a few hours, on many patches of ice. Fun stuff.

I can see why a bus couldn't do much for making it into Renton - the roads were just coated in compact snow and ice. Luckily, they'd been sanded, which improved traction a bit, but overall they were very messy.

Needless to say, I didn't make it to work today. And I'm going to try my darnedest to make to work tomorrow as I've got some stuff going on there that requires my attendance.

Please let my commute go smoothly tomorrow :-|

NJ and CT

I guess I really only write JEs when I go on trips now. Hrm.

I'm in Somerset, NJ until Friday for training on a new product my company will be selling sometime in late January. After the training, I'll be taking a train up to CT to visit my Dad and family until Tuesday when I fly back home. Needless to say - it's December, and it's cold as usual, a lot colder than I'm used to.

What is there to say about NJ? Well, the NJ scowl I've noticed in previous visits still exists. It took a little work but we finally got our waitress to smile tonight. Ahh, the sports bar at the Holiday Inn. What good times it is to narrate all of the interesting people there - the spikey-haired sales guy who displaced the college age guy to hit on a large chested woman. The thin, balding guy, in a black top sitting alone at a table, with a glass of wine, stealing glances at the pretty brunette across the room. The young girl who looks like she's not old enough to drink who comes in and sits next to some guy who's reading a book at the bar. We named her volleyball girl. Oh, good times.

Training so far is going well. I think the product has potential, but there are a lot of rough edges that MUST be smoothed out in order to really make me feel more comfortable about supporting it. I'll be going back to Seattle to train my group on this.

I called my dad today. I told him where the train was dropping me off and his response was, "Couldn't you take a bus that takes you all the way here?" I hate the bus. A 30 mile trip to pick me up isn't that hard. Even if it is at midnight.

Anyway, this is the most I've written here in months. We'll see if there's more to write soon, but today was a pretty decent day.

Kickin' it in Bangalore

How do you say "Awwws Yeah" in Hindi? No matter...

Last week it was Kansas City for an onsite install. From yesterday until the 30th, I'm in Bangalore, India, to do some technical and procedural training.

The trip here was a killer. Seattle to Amsterdam (10 hours), 2.5hr layover in Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Mumbai (10 hours), 6 hour layover in Mumbai, and finally Mumbai to Bangalore (1.5hrs). At one point, I felt like I was a contestant in the Amazing Race. I hear Northwest is going to add direct service from Amsterdam to Bangalore. That'll be nice. Let's just hope their bankruptcy doesn't screw that up.

A couple other Americans and I all hung out in Mumbai. One was here to see her spiritual advisor, and the other was a missionary from NC. Cool people, and they both had some helpful hints for me.

Yesterday was all about sleep. I got into the hotel at 6am, had breakfast, then slept from 8am to 5pm. Then I just got caught up on emails. Today a bit of sightseeing, and a chance to see if I can buy a bottle of Patron tequila for our office manager here. And who knows what else.

Woo, off to MPLS again, and other stuff.

Well, I'm off to Minneapolis next week to go do some install work at a very large corporate customer of ours that is headquartered there. Should be interesting, and it'll be a new experience for me -- I've never really been on point for an install like this before, but the customer seems to like me so they asked for me specifically.

More importantly, I got some news today that an old friend from high school was in a boating accident while on vacation in Alaska. Sadly, he did not survive. It still hasn't quite hit me yet. We stayed in contact after high school and we visited each other several times over the past few years whenever our paths crossed.

I think back to high school, and I remember how much of an uptight little perfectionist I was. I was so angry at my personal situation that I couldn't take a joke. Some of that remains with me today, but I have mellowed a lot over the years. And he was the one person who flat out told me - stop taking everything so seriously. After he did that, sometime around 10th grade, I was finally able to start coming out of my asshole shell and start socializing more without feeling like everybody hated me or was making fun of me behind my back. Oh, I was still an asshole through the rest of high school, but I think it was his encouragement, and encouragement from others that started to change me.

It still hasn't quite hit me yet. It probably will when I go to the funeral or memorial service back home. I just hope I don't miss it due to being in MN.

So I'm back...

Got back on the 16th. And it's been insanely busy at work. They want my technical workload to decrease and me to start moving more towards managing the team. It'll be nice when we get to that and it looks like we'll be hiring more headcount to help distribute the load more evenly.

In other news, I may be making a trip to India to train our Indian support group (no, they aren't replacing us, just covering their 12 hours of the clock). No firm details, and if one of the other guys steps up to do it, they might end up going. I'm not sure how I feel about flying to Bangalore. It's a 36 hour trip (!!!!!!).

The TiVo got updated on Friday - finally I have TiVoToGo. And I managed to get the .tivo decryption document working so I can watch the files on my Mac. Pretty neat. Now to see what 802.11g adapters work with the TiVo. 802.11b for huge files just ain't cuttin' it.

Hrm, what else is new - worked a 14 hour day on Friday. On purpose. I managed to get a major document done, much to the benefit of the group. Got some testing done, too. It was pretty nice but I got home at the same time Nicole did (around 10).

Watched Dakar and Monte Carlo rallies this weekend, played around with iMovie HD and iDVD 5, and relaxed. Got quite a bit done.

Yay for me, and eek for me.

So the workload hasn't decreased. In fact, it's gotten a little worse. That's the eek part. The yay part is I got a promotion to team lead, which has put more pressure on me to try to reduce the workload. So now I'm moving more towards management, which I guess is the better place for me, as my technical skills don't really compare with some of the other people on my team. But I'm highly organized, and I would like to think I set a good example for the rest of the team.

In any case, that's where things are for me right now. This is the first pseudo-management role I've been in, and it's a bit different, to say the least.

Argh.

Work. Too much of it. Not enough people. Can't catch up. I can only do so much in 8 hours. I'll do my best not to work more than I have to, but while I'm there I won't slack. Argh. Argh. Argh.

It was so nice last week when everybody was at work, and then this week and we're down by 3 (out of 7). And the work piles up, and customers get pissed. Argh.

But hey, I'm going to Hawaii in January, but only for a weekend. Wooo. Something to look forward to.

Windows NT's Infernal Filesystem

Here be dragons.

This is the t-shirt I wore to work today. By the end of the day, it was a painful reminder of just how wrong a service pack install can go. So - I've installed SP2 on two XP boxes. One at home, and my test box at work. I waited until today during lunch to upgrade my normal workstation. And, oh how it did break. Sigh.

During the backing up of files, it complained about not being able to read one file. I skipped that file. Then, after the upgrade, RPC wouldn't start. Well now - considering how much on a Windows box depends on RPC, I was pretty well fucked. In task manager, my username did not show up for processes I had started. I couldn't view individual events in event viewer. I couldn't move icons on the desktop. New windows I opened were not showing up on the taskbar. I couldn't resize the taskbar unless Quick Launch was enabled, and even if it was I still sometimes couldn't resize it. I couldn't add a new local user to the local administrators group. I couldn't start RPC (access denied).

I exported my entire system log to a text file so I could see what happened. Bad block on the hard drive. Run chkdsk. Reboot. It finds errors. RPC still won't start!

Had to get one of the IT guys come by and change all of these services to start as the local system account rather than a network account. That got me back up and running, but I still had a bad hard drive to contend with. And these services are *supposed* to run with a network account. This breaks several things in a computer that's joined to a domain.

As it ends up, I got little work done this afternoon. I did, on the other hand, get a new computer. But then I spent 3 extra hours after work getting the apps I use on it. Oh wait, I forgot Ethereal. Dang it. I did not reinstall SP2 on the new machine. I'll sit tight and wait for IT's blessing. So much for being on top of Windows security.

But hey, the old machine was a 800MHz Pentium III w/512MB RAM and the new one's a 2.8GHz P4 w/1GB RAM. I'll live.

Windows 2000 Certificate Authority and Apple Safari

Windows Servers can act as a certificate authority. (More info: http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/1473961) I have Windows 2000 Server running at home in a VirtualPC machine on my Mac. I fire it up, turn on the certificate authority, and then try to browse to http://servername/certsrv so that I can request and download a user certificate. Doesn't work in Safari. I can't log in to the site. Works fine in Firefox.

So, I mess around with settings. Perhaps Safari's trying to use some braindead version of NTLM authentication rather than basic authentication. Nope.... the tcpdump output I captured shows it isn't. Hrm... well, what if I use the Safari debug menu (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030110063041629) to change my User-Agent so that IIS thinks I'm using Mozilla, or IE6 on Windows? Nope, still doesn't work.

Finally, I go into the event log and see this gem:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W3SVC
Event Category: None
Event ID: 100
Date: 8/2/2004
Time: 9:30:50 PM
User: N/A
Computer: WIN2KSERVER
Description:
The server was unable to logon the Windows NT account 'bernielab\berniec' due to the following error: Logon failure: the user has not been granted the requested logon type at this computer. The data is the error code.

Safari's truly doing something wacky. I have no clue why IIS thinks Safari is trying to log on to the server (which happens to be the domain controller). Firefox doesn't pull this kind of tomfoolery!

I eventually had to go into Domain Controller Security Policy -> Local Policies -> User Rights Assignment -> Log on locally. In there, I added the "berniec" account to the list of users that are allowed to log in locally to the domain controller. I shouldn't have had to do this - ordinary users should have no rights to log into a domain controller. Hrm, stupid Apple.

So, after that, I finally was able to request and download a certificate. You can't directly import user certificates into Safari, but you can import them into a user's Keychain for future use by Safari. That part worked great. Keychain had zero problems importing the cert that was issued by the Windows CA. Hoorah.

The drags

The drag races at Pacific Raceways yesterday were pretty dang good. I get really bored with Pro Stock cars, and some of the sportsman cars. I go for the top fuel cars. 300+ mph man. Pretty incredible to watch in person. There's nothing like feeling the concussion of one of those suckers blowing by you at full bore.

I've got a horrible sunburn on my face and neck from yesterday (yes, I have a red neck now; how appropriate) but I'll survive. The raccoon eyes are pretty bad, which got me a lot of negative attention at work this morning. Add to that, I have to go get my driver's license renewed before the 13th, which makes it all even worse. It should be better by the 13th, but I was hoping to get it taken care of this week while I was on the 5am to 2pm shift.

Speaking of which, I can't wait to get off that shift. Something about going to sleep (trying to go to sleep) at 9pm in the middle of the summer just isn't right.

Nicole and I think we've got someone trying to get an idea of what they could swipe from our house. A removable screen we keep on a window in the living room was, er, removed from the window, collapsed, and left on the ground. Of course, this means the cat got out, and when I went out to get her, the other cat got out. Ugh. The window will remain closed from now on. I'm starting to dislike this part of the neighborhood. Ah, the joys of living behind a liquor store. It's time to move. I'm seriously considering buying a house, but that's a level of stress I'm not really up for right now. Argh.

Hot in Herre, yo.

The spelling is intentional, for those of you hip kids who are up to date with the "lingo."

It's currently 93.5 degrees F in my living room. Yup, that's hot. It was so hot today that I didn't say no when Nicole asked for a ride to work. It's worth it to be in the air conditioned car for an hour or so. The heat's good for ya, right? Helps ya sweat out all the bad stuff? Hrm, I hope so. About an hour ago, I was very close to breaking down and purchasing an A/C unit.

Work's kicking my ass. This job is pretty tough, but I'm learning, and slowly but surely getting the hang of things. A co-worker of mine has mentioned a few times how just when he thought he was getting the hang of things, something hit him upside the head and put him back into a state of confusion. This is happening quite frequently with me. The amount of knowledge I'm gaining is good, though. It feels like when I first started at N2H2 - learning Linux administration, TCP/IP networking, Web technologies. Now, it's RADIUS, SSL, and Windows administration. I did some Windows administration in a lab environment over at N2H2, but now I'm doing a lot more and needing to know a lot more..

It's gotten to the point where I broke down and bought a PC for the house. It'll eventually do double-duty in Nicole's MAME cabinet, but for now it's my XP client for a Win2K domain I set up with 2K Server and Virtual PC for Mac. Gonna have to bone up on group policy, Dfs, ADSIedit, and a whole lot more.

So there you have it. It's hot in Seattle, and will be tomorrow, too. Sunday it'll cool down, which is good, because I'm going to be heading to the drag races in Auburn. Last time I went it rained and I think I only saw 4 or 5 races. It was a waste.

System administration 101

1. Never perform a major system upgrade on a Friday afternoon (or Friday, for that matter). If it goes wrong, it is unlikely (unless your SLA says otherwise) that your vendor will be able to provide a fix for you by the end of the weekend.
2. Know your support contract. Again, if your SLA (service level agreement) says support is only to be provided at specific hours, don't expect it otherwise.
3. If you're performing an upgrade, make sure you back up your configuration beforehand.
4. Never tell the support agent that you're "really good at [insert Unix system here]" if you didn't perform #3 above. You'll be put on mute as your support analyst goes to laugh his ass off.
5. Realize that if your upgrade fails and requires a hardware replacement, you will not get it until Tuesday because your vendor won't be able to ship it until Monday.
6. Your vendor's developers are people. If it's a gorgeous 75+ degree day in Seattle, they'll do whatever they can be out of the office at 3pm.

Yes, I ran into a customer yesterday who must've not been paying attention during his sysadmin course. He, as a result, will not have a working server until Tuesday at the earliest. Should the upgrade have failed? Of course not. Should he have been performing an upgrade on a Friday? Of course not. A bad situation all around.

I wish developers would build in a time check in their upgrade tools (that'd be run against a server in their timezone). It should prevent upgrades on Fridays after noon. It should only allow upgrades Monday thru Thursday, realistically...

So anyway, the first month and a half at the new job has been going well. I'm still working hard to learn the products, and I think I'm making progress. It doesn't hurt that I have a good background in Linux support, so there's been less of a learning curve. I'm feeling good so far. Yay me.

Favorite ads, old/new job stuff

Alaska Airlines has the BEST commercials on the TV right now. Evar! Check them out!

My favorite is Banjo, with Voucher and Polite-a-Prompter close behind.

Now if I could only find the Citibank "Girl Robot" commercial somewhere on the web. That's ha-larious!!!

In other news, this week is my last at my current employer. My boss called me last Wednesday to let me know that I have to work swing shift this week... he told me I was scheduled for it. Wonderful... it would've been nice if I'd been shown that schedule at least a week beforehand. Everybody else in the main office (in Minnesota) knew the schedule. Why didn't I?!?! Argh!

4 more days left (I have Monday off; floating holiday). Hooray.

Oh yeah, my new employer sent me a gift basket and stuff for me to sign before I start. First time I've ever had a gift basket delivered to my house. Pretty damn sweet if you ask me.

Today I resigned.

Today I resigned from my current job, and accepted another offer at another company here in Seattle. The work will be very similar, but I'll have the benefit of having coworkers around me rather than 1400 miles away. Readers of my journal might recall my concern over the job situation. Well, I'm glad it's all going to change in about 2 weeks.

Support from a remote office - useless or useful?

I'm back in Roseville, MN for a week's worth of training, so I can (hopefully) go back to Seattle and start supporting this hugely complex product. My friend in the UK, also my coworker, has basically been doing what I'm about to start doing - supporting a product from many many many miles away from the larger organization without the benefit of someone in a cube next to him he could pester when problems inevitably arise. I'm pretty sure he had my desk phone number on speed dial.... and man I would have hated to have seen that phone bill :-)

Since my previous employer was acquired, I've been tasked with integrating myself into the acquirer's organization while at the same time continuing to support the products that I've been supporting for almost four years. Being thrown in the fire this week (aka, taking phone calls) has reminded me greatly of what it was like when I first started in phone support those years ago. It's a nerve-wracking experience to learn all the little gotchas and features of a version 6 product. Luckily, it seems that most customers are using either v5 or v6, and the two are similar enough for me to barely get by. At the same time, the training I had three weeks ago was for v6, so sometimes it's a bit of a shock to see the differences between the two versions. There's still a lot of "please hang on as I ask a co-worker" in my phone calls. It's going to be worse when I leave from here.

I wonder how successful this remote tech support thing is going to be. Am I constantly going to be phoning the home office for help, or will I eventually learn enough to get by. Will I be kept up-to-date as well as the people in Minnesota, or will I be one (or a few) steps behind?

Seattle's a good place to find support talent, and part of me hopes that they'll try to expand the support organization out there. But Minneapolis is, as Nicole told me this week, the most literate city in the country so I know Seattle's got some competition.

Any other support monkeys with remote support experience? Any suggestions?

Back to Roseville for a week...

Yep, more training. I leave Sunday and will be done on Friday. Hopefully this'll be the last of the training for a while.

So, anybody in the Twin Cities wanna show me around a little? Please? Anybody?

Back home now...

Yep, so Minnesota was cold. Very cold. It's funny how at first, it doesn't feel that cold, but then the cold just kinda sneaks up on ya and tightens your skin. It's uncomfortable.

Minneapolis was pretty boring. I drove around looking for things to see/do but didn't find much. I did see Lost in Translation, watched a lot of Scrubs episodes, and read through most of the periodicals I brought with me.

Training went very well. Now comes the hard part - supporting the product from 1400 miles away from the main support group. It's going to be a challenge to say the least. I still have much to learn about the product before I'll be really any good at supporting it. And, it looks like I'll be going back to Minnesota in a couple weeks for more training, and actual call center experience.

So, back to the old schedule - 5am to 2pm. It's a schedule I can't stand and I'm going to do everything I can to get on a more normal schedule. 7am to 4pm wouldn't be so bad.

So hooray, back in Seattle, where people don't talk nearly as funny as they do in the midwest. Ya sure, you betcha.

Brrr....

I'm in Roseville, Minnesota right now for training for my new employer. It's nice to get to sit down and learn BIND, DNS, Sendmail, the TCP/IP suite, stateful packet inspection, BSD, and all the rest of the alphabet soup that embodies firewalls these days. I'm not a big fan of lecturing, though, and I can't wait to get hands-on with the products. Sitting through a refresher course in IP addressing while important for job skills is, at the end of a 9 hour day, taxing.

Yeah, Roseville's cold, go figure. Everybody here has gone on and on about how it was in the 60s to 80s last week. Yeah, now it's in the 30s-40s. Welcome to Minnesota.

So, I need some ideas of things to do around Minneapolis - I've been to the Mall of America, so that's not really an option. Any good weekend goings-on this time of year?

Thank goodness for iChat AV, iSight, and free high-speed Internet at the hotel. Without, I'm afraid my relationship with Nicole would be even more strained. It's certainly better than running up a gigantic phone bill on my cell.

Now playing on my iPod: Suite-Judy Blue Eyes by Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

Rain

My first full fall in Seattle, we had 100 straight days of precipitation. That was 6 years ago. So, coming out of a very dry, and extremely beautiful summer, it's always good to get October off to a wet start. We've had over 3 inches of rain, I believe, in October alone. This more than doubles the previous record. Very lovely.

On Sunday, a co-worker and I are off to Minneapolis for two weeks of training by the new company we both work for, as a result of the acquisition of our previous employer. I'm looking forward to the trip, as it can be fun to learn new things, but I'm a bit nervous.

When my previous employer acquired an Australian firm, one of our support people was sent to Brisbane to train their support people on our products. The project failed horribly, and the person in Australia was fired from 8000 miles away, coming back to the states with no job. Of course, he screwed up badly and deserved to be fired, but that still worries me that our little office here in Seattle could end up somewhat as screwed up as the office in Australia. At least we're going back to the mothership for training instead of having one of their goofballs coming to us. Even still, it's a challenge to have 6 people doing support in Seattle whilst the mothership has 20+ doing support out of Minneapolis. I just have a bad feeling we'll always be behind on information, training, knowledge, etc. We could end up being hated by the support people in Minnesota, if we can't integrate well into their organization.

So anyway, lots of reading, studying, and cramm^H^H^Hlearning is ahead of me. Not to mention being thrown into the fire, a.k.a. the phone queue. Can't wait :-P

Today: Thank you, insect overlords.

I was hired. No job-hunting for me this winter. Hoorah.

I do feel bad for all of the people that are getting laid off, as it will mean even more work for me and those of us left. And, yeah, they're out of work, and I really do feel bad for them for that. Some good people are going to be let go.

Tomorrow: D-Day.

"And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves." - Kent Brockman (The Simpsons - Deep Space Homer)

Well, tomorrow I learn my fate at my hopefully new employer. Part of me is glad my old company's legacy is finally being put to rest. But at the same time, I'm sad to see it go, as I've worked there now for over 6.5 years. Man, it's hard to believe it's been that long. I've been then there since I was 18.

Oh the experiences - I've had work crushes, made an ass of myself repeatedly, learned a helluva lot (not just about my job), and met some really freaking cool people. Oh yeah, and then there was my 21st birthday, a trip to Australia, and numerous bouts of infighting with other co-workers over ridiculous things about our products. Good times.

I have no idea what the future will hold if I'm hired, or if I'm laid off, but I'm trying to be optimistic about the whole thing. I'm not too freaked out right now about the prospect of being laid off, but I don't look forward to trying to find a job. Looks like I'll be wrapping x-mas gifts this year, if need be.

So, wish me luck tomorrow. I know a bunch of people are going to get the ax. I hope it's not me.

Hooray for users

I work at a company that isn't loved by its users, particularly because they're forced to use our product by their administrators. Here's a bit of feedback we got today:

It makes me happy to say that .... is a Bi-otch.
In addition to being a Bi-otch its also a gestapo Nazi
Communist Whore Pig Dog Shitblasted Wangsucker in direct
violation of My RIGHTS

Ok, so now I've got my own BFAA - CWPDSW (Communist Whore Pig Dog Shitblasted Wangsucker). Every time I read that out loud, I just die laughing at "Shitblasted." It's hi-larious.

Ignorance

I take my job seriously. I've worked this tech support job for almost four years now and I've worked very hard at helping my colleagues out with their problems.

In that time I've been responsible for some initiatives to try to organize some knowledge we have in our department. We don't have a true knowledge base, per se (too expensive), but we do have an internal email archive, a customer facing web message board, a laboratory environment where people can go to test customer configurations, and lots of documentation on an internal site. I've been responsible for either setting up or maintaining on a day-to-day basis all of these.

Sadly, the only thing that gets used frequently is the laboratory and the customer-facing messageboard. The documentation I've written, or the emails archived hardly ever get looked at. It's just easier to ask people for information rather than do a quick search in the archive. This frustrates me to no end.

I've put a lot of work into all of those initiatives and instead of them being used, people complain about them. Now, not everybody complains, just certain people. But these are the same people who constantly ask me questions instead of taking some initiative and checking the database first. These are the people that would rather bitch about procedures and tools we have to use instead of working with the tool designers to fix them.

So today, after one of the whiners got thru cracking a couple jokes about the email archive, and proceeded to ask me for help with something, I told them I didn't know and referred them to the email archive.

Well, guess what. I probably did know the answer to the question, but I was too pissed off to help them. And I still am.

Update: I'm not pissed off anymore. I explained the situation with my co-worker and we're cool now.

Pics and coming of age...

The company I work for is being bought. I found this out during the cross-country trip in Menomonie, Wisconsin at an overnight hotel stop. A little nerve-wracking, to say the least.

Oh, what else is going on - Here are some photos from the trip. Enjoy. Comments are very welcome.

Tomorrow I turn 25, and according to a long-since laid-off co-worker, I'll finally be an adult. Of course, he told me this when I was 18 or 19, so I can understand his point. Of course, he was a bitter and jaded old man, so perhaps I shouldn't have read too much into what he had to say. No big plans for tonight or tomorrow... I'm still recovering from 7221 miles of road tripping. Happy Birthday to me!

Buh bye, Spam, buh bye.

I get a LOT of spam at work. I've had my work email address for six years, and it's pretty easy to guess, based on my first name. Our IS department, who I've loathed in the past, turned me on to Spamnet by Cloudmark yesterday, and so far it's managed to catch most of my spam. Spamnet is a plugin for Outlook (Outlook Express not supported... yet) that watches incoming mail for spam.

To give you an idea of how much spam I get - since I installed it about noon yesterday (it's 5:30am here right now), I've received 102 emails, and 73 were spam that were caught.

Spamnet allows you to block spam that it doesn't catch, and then it'll send the contents of the spam up to Spamnet's servers to be added to a database so that all of the 330,000+ users of Spamnet will have better coverage.

The installation went flawlessly, the integration with Outlook is great, and it's very good at its job. Finally, I don't have to use my own half-assed Outlook filter. Hoo ray!