Work

Busy but good day, and good food Too.

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I was so packed with meetings today, and I still missed 2 because it was so busy.

Gus invited me to lunch with Howard Morgan. Howard is an investor in our company and one of the smartest people I have ever met. Besides being super smart, he reads almost everything and knows tons of people in the technology field. It was cool that he invited me to lunch with them. Never get enough of talking to Dr. Morgan. We ended up going out with his assistant Tori, and our CEO Glenn. We ended up at a Greek restaurant near our office. Gus wanted to take Howard to a authentic Greek place. Turns out it wasn’t authentic enough for Gus, but the food was awesome! I had some octopus, shrimp, steak, and this really good tasting cheese thing. We all just tried different entries. it was fun. I found it interesting to watch two really smart tech guys (howard and Gus) explain what a blog was to Glenn. Now glenn is not a tech guy but he does keep up on some aspects of the technology field. Internet culture such as blogging was not one of those fields!

I also got 2 tentative dates for some of my T-1 installs. That made me happy also. Still one more date to go. I also interviewed a guy to do some linux admin work for us. More on that later.

I am hoping I don’t get sick. everyone at the office is coming down with or recovering from something. I was glad I was away last week! The AC not working in the office very well can’t help either.

Dinner was good too. I defrosted a steak last night so I george forman’ed it up tonight. That is an kick ass little device. I need to order more steaks and stuff from freshdirect. They are a great food delivery service in NYC. The fresh meats and stuff are freaking great.

OK, time for bed. More tomorrow when my hands don’t hurt anymore (i hope).

Back into the routine

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Yesterday gave me the opportunity to get back into the work routine. I got a reasonable amount of work done. When I say that I mean I got some work done off my list of tasks. The downside of my job is the ever present list of daily requests by people that need to be done right away. that slows down any planned projects.

I ordered a new Wireless 3G PCMCIA card yesterday. It is a data card that fits into your laptop that allows you to browse the internet wherever Verizon Wireless provides Data services. It is a great concept, but in practice I have not seen any solution that works well. We need one for a demonstration next week.

I also got a list of quotes for our new desktop computer standard we are designing for our new call center. Once selected all new computers will be exactly the same type of machine. This makes management easy, but the problem is selecting the dam unit.

I have a ton of meetings today. I meet with our CEO about my budget for the new office project. I also have a conference call about desktop computer management options with an HP rep. I think I am sitting in on an interview for our Development team, and I also need to update Gus on all the things going on. Oh, I almost forgot I speak with AT&T about our Long Distance T-1 install dates also today.

Back to work, and then off again…

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So I had a semi normal day at work monday. I was trying to catch up with all the craziness that went on while I was away. I still haven’t caught up. I sat through a demo of phone call recording software. it was cool, but I don’t know what our Call Center QA people really want. I like that you can search people’s calls by keywords and pull up a audio file on the computer of that call. It is crazy what they can do these days.

I found out late monday that I needed to be in Kingston NY today. Construction started on our new facility yesterday and they will be having weekly meetings on the status of everything. I needed to go because I have some outstanding construction issues. I won’t do that trip every week for those meetings but I will probably need to do a few of them as this project moves along. Things are taking longer than anyone thought, but it is construction and not internet sites.

Being out got crazier on monday when I found out Gus was going to Minnesota today to demo some software. He needed a wireless intent connection on his laptop. I couldn’t get the PCMCIA card he wanted quick enough so I stole Keith’s phone and put Verizon’s high speed internet access on it.

While I was out today they did a bunch of user moves. That means that people’s desk’s got moved around. Generally in my company if you get moved you are getting crammed in with someone else and you won’t be happy. We are not popular people when that happens. We are Technology guy’s but somewhere along the line we got roped into doing space allocation and moves. We had someone almost in tears once when we doubled them up. Not pretty.

I am back in the office tomorrow and hopefully I can bang out some more work. My list of work keeps getting bigger. I guess that is a good thing, but stuff gets overwhelming sometimes. I just take a deep breath, and get by on star-bucks mocha frapachino’s (cannot spell) and snickers bars! They have a calming affect on me during the summer months.

The boss man Gus is out till thursday so tomorrow’s staff meeting might be a 3 ring circus. Our project manager Mark is good to keep things on track in those things. I think he and I are the only one’s that try to push aside the BS to smaller group chats. Of course Gus is the king at cutting through the bull, and keeping things on track. We will miss him tomorrow.

Vacation is over:(

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As I said in the last blog, the vacation is over. I am home now and I just uploaded all the blog entries from this week. I actually wrote all of them on the plane. that is why some are so short. I didn’t take any time during the week to write. It was great!!! I proved I can go computer free for a bit.

At first I was going to post date all the blog posts to their corresponding days they represent, but I decided against it. I am just going to leave them. I uploaded them in order.

Turns out the airport (JFK) actually sucked tonight. We sat on the tarmac for almost an hour because our gate was not empty. We were early and then the flight before us was late. Then I got stuck on a huge line at immigration. I was the first person from my plane to the line (thanks for being in biz class and only having a book bag to carry on) but we got behind a flight from the UK. Baggage claim took the usually amount of time, forever. After that I breezed through customs, or was immigration first then custom’s, who knows. All I remember is they check the passport twice, but stamp it once. I got a cab quick. that is no small feat at JFK at night.

It is 2am sunday and I am not tired at all. I was tired all vacation due to the heat and now that I am home and in a comfy temperature I don’t want to sleep. I hope I can get onto a normal sleep schedule for work on monday.

Speaking of work I got 187 emails and 6 voice mail’s while I was away. At least everyone but a few moron’s listened to my voice mail message and called someone else while I was out. BTW, 3 of those messages were from the same sales guy. People have to listen. As far as email, that is not allot, so I am not upset. Most of them were automated alerts that I get. Turns out the office had some problems while I was away. Keith gave me a quick run down a few hours ago. I will get more of an update tomorrow or monday from Gus & Mark.

get ready for vacation!

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It is time to wrap up all my outstanding work and take a week off! I am hoping to get everything I need done completed by the end of today. I just got an email with the DID (phone numbers) list for our new office, so one major check box gets filled.

Also to do is get Gus my project plan for Kingston. I did it last night but wanted to wait on giving it to him in case I think of something to add.

I have to make a bunch of calls before I go to keep our vendors on schedule while I am away. I also have to fill out paper work for our Data Center. We are getting another rack in our cage, and I need to fill out the request form. Hopefully it will be done by the time I get back. Stranger things have happened.

Computer security in the office, I am a hypocrite

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I got an email from my friend Sean today. He is a good friend from college. He does GIS database work out in Las Vegas. I haven’t spoken to him in a while so it was good to here from him. He is online less now a days because they are monitoring web habits and frown on IM use. I of course gave him some tips on getting around the web police. As far as non IT guys go, he is very computer savvy, so I hope he can get on the internet at work without the corporate police getting on his back. Come on sean, IM me. Remember when you are at work, I am home. Gotta love that time difference!

I admit that I am a hypocrite. Things that Sean tells me that his company is doing are things I am either implementing or talking about deploying at my company. Yet I will tell him how to get around the system, while I am forcing it on others! Oddly I don’t seem to care. He is a friend, and I have a job to do!!!

My company is currently looking at proxy server software that will monitor web habits. We also deployed Jabber to all our employee’s. Jabber is an open source standard for IM. We purchased a windows based server from Tipic. Their are plenty of free distributions on linux/unix, but when we did our deployment I was not (still not) a linux expert so we stuck with a windows based product. With jabber we can limit IM access to internal use only. For some of our corporate staff we allow AIM to talk with people outside, but our call center is locked down. I actually love jabber. I think it is awesome and I use it all the time for talking to people in my company, but it is restrictive to some.

So for my friends not working with me I feel compelled to give them advise to get around security blocks a corporate IT staff may impose. For people in my company, I AM the corporate IT police. And yes it is kind of fun to lock stuff down. Not because you screw over people, but because it is a challenge. Restricting access to something always spawns people trying to break your restrictions. That cat and mouse game can be very interesting. Thankfully (or not) the users at my company are not much of a challenge, except for our development staff. And those guys don’t have many restrictions on web use, so they don’t count.

Robocopy works, well sort of

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I tested robocopy across our WAN link today. I need to build into the script a net send command to force a login on the remote server. The machines I am robocopying to/from are on different domains. Other than that the script sent the files just fine. The only problem is that it broke the web site we were testing in the process.

Turns out that currently our sites have connection information to our DB’s built into files in the web folders. If I am syncing these files between multiple servers this information will be different on all of them. If I do a sync now, it will break that file and thus kill the site. Miguel one of our ASP developers is working on a fix for it. We will meet to discuss tomorrow. We also want to see if we have issues with files being in use, and file locks. That is another test we will run. More information after we meet and discuss tomorrow.

FTP concept finalized

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My selection of vsftpd as our FTP server of choice for our new production system is now complete. We will use it for just passing information onto vendors. We will have another one we use for internal use.

The next step of this project is to configure RSYNC. I am looking into that now. I hope to have some information before I go on vacation, but work is piling up so I am not sure.

I need to coordinate with Keith to verify the configuration for the Local Director’s we will use to load balance the FTP site is almost ready.

Floor plans and other work related stuff

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I saw the final blue prints for our new kingston office. It looks nice. I am waiting for the CAD of the blue prints so I can import into Visio and manipulate it. It will take me tons of time, but I enjoy doing it. I just have to find the time to do it.

Gus is also getting a new laptop. We both just got IBM Thinkpad T30’s in march, but we need to get someone a laptop and he wants a T40. As with any company, the laptops move down hill once you buy them. I have no problem with that, since I take advantage of that corporate phenomenon when I get the chance.

Other flavors of linux

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I am a newbie to linux, even if I have “looked” at it for almost 2 years. I have not done much with it but install it to look at. Well that all changed recently when I was tasked to actually “do” stuff with it. So in the past year I have built a DNS server. it just slaves zones from a windows box, but it is a start. I have built an apache server, and am playing with FTP now. I have done this all with different versions of the Red Hat distribution of linux. I have used version 6 – 9. Since I am new I want to stick with one distribution, and at work we will continue to use Red Hat, but I wanted to try something different.

I downloaded last night the mandrake 9.1 version of linux. I want to put it on a desktop and play with it. I also might put it in vmware and see if it is any good. I don’t want to use it as a server or anything, but to use as a desktop for a while may be cool. I want to see what they do similar and different to red hat. I will let you know.

This may be successful or it may fail terribly like my attempt to install BSD 5.0.