Move Day 2 Complate, Now On Day 3

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I lived through day 2 of our move of space. The cube guys did an awesome job. Now people have to realize I am not an interior decorator and stop asking me for filling cabinets and shelves. I really don’t care about them, or if you get them. You should all know me by now!

We had some minor electrical and cabling issues. The electrical is all better now. The cabling we came up with a creative way to solve the problem.

Today is the day we move everyone to their new spots. I want to get computers moved and phones working. I just have to get 15+ people where they are supposed to be. At least the portable AC’s are now up and ready for use. they should be on today if it is humid.

Day One Of Move Completed

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We have completed the first of 3 days of planned moves and changes at work. It was done with still no AC. The units are sitting there, but not plugged in.

Jayson, Nelson & I were able to move 10 users from their current spots in our call center area, to the new smaller call center area. We also displaced about 5 other users that were current occupants of the new space. they will be in limbo for about a day and a half until we can get the construction of the new cubes done.

John, Nelson and a few others were also cleaning up all the non-computer crap in the old call center area. They accumulated allot of it over 2 years in that space. It was so messy, Dan even vacuumed for a bit.

All in all, things went smoothly. Tomorrow is the big work though. This was just leading up to the major job. Hopefully the cube guys can get this done in a day.

After we finished, Dan, Nelson, Gus, Alyssa, Jayson, & I went to Pete’s tavern for dinner. it was cool. I had the fish and chips.

I am on the train home now. It is kind of late, for a work night. I should be home by 10PM if all goes well. I just hope I can get some sleep tonight.

Remote Agents And Terminal Server

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While I was awake and not sleeping last night, I thought about my remote agent design issues. Currently we have schematics of different electronic and home appliance parts on CD’s we use to look up stuff. The problem is they take up a huge amount of drive space. We get updates every month that need to be added to the existing data. This is fine when a computer is on our network, we just run the update from our file server. What do you do when you have remote computers over a VPN WAN link trying to get the same update? Pushing out 500 megs to 2 users is possible, but what about 20, or 200? It becomes unfeasible due to bandwidth limitations.

One option is to not give the remote agents this software, but they rely on it. My thoughts then turned to Terminal Services. What if all the updates are on the central server, and users just connected to the server via terminal services. That way I don’t have to worry about anything on the local machine except for an IP address and terminal client working.

This is contingent on our phone control software working with Terminal Services. I believe it does, but an answer to that question is easy enough to get.

The next problem is cisco soft phone. I doubt it would work through terminal services. We may need to go with a physical cisco IP phone at a person’s house. It adds cost per user, but it may be necessary. Also going with a hardware VPN solution is looking better than a software solution. If anything goes wrong with the remote computer we would be responsible to manage it. We cannot troubleshoot software issues like vpn over the phone, and we are not equipped to send someone onsite to fix problems like that.

A hardware VPN device that we can remote into and verify it is working, along with terminal services is looking like a good solution. it is not the cheapest but maybe the most feasible. We would require someone to have their own computer, and all they would need to put on it is terminal client. That takes 5 minutes to setup. Wire up a VPN router from cisco or linksys plug in a phone and they are up and running.

Now all I have to do is sell everyone on the solution and make sure it works from a technical standpoint.

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Insomnia

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Not sure what stress factor in my life caused it, but I woke up last night and could not fall back to sleep. I don’t know when I got up, only that after what felt like ages I checked my clock and it was 3:30AM. It was several hours before I was able to go back to sleep.

I wasn’t nervous or anxious or anything, sleep just would not come to me. ironic since I may need to be up late tonight moving desks.

Once I cannot sleep I just lie in bed and my mind races I mile a minute. Then I can’t fall back to sleep. I don’t know what happened, but eventually I tired out and fell back to bed.

Some people have suggested that I get up and actually do something when I can’t sleep like that. I always thing if I do that I won’t go back to bed at all, and my sleep pattern will be screwed up. I did think about getting up this morning, but I stuck it out and eventually went back to bed.

I just hope it doesn’t happen again this week.

The Mundane

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Recently I have been talking about mundane topics. It is what is comming to my mind when I sit down to write. I have read that these topics are not necissarily what makes a good blog. They are probibly correct. I just don’t really care. This is more for me to write about what is going on in my life, for me. If I have a good story or two to tell about what is going on, I will. If not my mundane rambling will continue.

I find it kind of theraputic to write out bits of what happened durring the day like this. It helps me relax. If I repeat topics, it is because I am thinking about htem and they are important to me or I am very opinionated about them.

Allot Of Treo’s

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For a device that has only sold a few hundred thousand units, I have seen many Treo 600’s today. I saw 3 different people besides myself on the subway with them today. They are popular but not ubiquitous yet. It is funny to see so many people with them.

One lady saw mine and was asking me if I liked it. it was funny to be approached about tech like that on the NYC subway.

Maybe one day they will be as common as the iPod is today? Well, maybe not.

Wrinkle free

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The wrinkle free dress paints actually live up to their name. Or they do after 1 wash. I followed the directions on how to wash them (a first for me) and they came out perfect. I will see if they survive the 30 washes they claim they will. So far I am a huge fan of the Dockers Pro Style paints. Thanks for the heads up on them Jayson.

I think it is time to get rid of some of my aging (not so gracefully) Khakis.

It Is So Hot

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Actually it is not so bad outside. It is just so hot in the office. It sucks in the heat and doesn’t let go. I was sitting at my computer and I could not concentrate. I said screw this, and decided to leave early. I am not staying if it is so hot, and I will be up really late in that heat tomorrow moving desks around.

Thank goodness I didn’t get a head ache, but my allergies are killing me. Not as bad as all last week, but still not good. I may hit the pool just so I don’t feel so sticky when I get home.

Mozilla Vs. I.E.

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Over a year ago I saw a few articles about Mozilla.org.. Then I saw Gus using it, and all he could do was rave about it. I gave it a try, and I haven’t looked back since. I now use it on my Mac’s, PC’s and any Linux machine I use. Switching is like switching to a Mac from a PC. You always see everyone else using Internet Explorer and I try to convert them. Being the software and hardware standards maker at my company also allowed me to attempt to push it out to everyone.

When we built out our new Call Center, I put in the computer image a setup for Mozilla. No one really used it, but I wanted it there. A few months ago we had an issue with I.E. for a day and we got some people to try it out. Guess what, they liked it. That fateful day also got me to develop a way to push out favorates to our Rep’s. That was the final technical reason for not using Mozilla.

Kai then began a campaign, some would say religous crusade to get people to addopt Mozilla. He touted the huge memory advantage of using tabbed browsing, and how cool pop up blocker was, etc. People slowly started to see what we were saying for a year, that Mozilla is good.

Now we have well over half of our call center using the software. That number is increasing every week, since we are also encourperating its use in the training sessions for all new hires.

The only down side was I never realized how many people were using the software. Our developers never wrote our internal application to run on Mozilla. For a year I used it and it worked fine, but last week we had a new release go out that caused issues with Mozilla. The problem is all sorted out now, and all our dev guy’s know to write code to work with it.

I am happy that I was able to get such so many people to addopt using Mozilla. Maybe they will start using it at home also? You never know. Thanks to Kai, Brian, Keith, & Gus for their parts in getting the system out their over the past year and change. Thanks to Nelson for being my first Beta Tester (as always).

Final Move Plan

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I have mentioned our construction plans for this week. What we are going to do is break apart cube walls that were moved when we originally occupied our NYC office. We built a large open area out of what was once 12 cubes. Now we are partially rebuilding the cubes so we can put people in them.

The first thing we need to do is move anyone out of the existing area. We have like 10 people sitting there now. They will be put in their new homes Wednesday night. Thursday the cube guys come and make all the changes.

Friday we (Jayson, Nelson, & I, with Dan supervising since he cannot lift anything) will make a number of cube moves to get everyone where they need to be post redesign. This means that at least a dozen people need to have their desks. moved. It will be interesting how this plays out. Most people have not complained about this, but their is bound to be a few as the move gets closer, or as they realize exactly where they are going.