Call Center

A Good Steak

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Wednesday night I went to a meet and greet for Cisco people interested in (or using) IPCC. I met some cool high level tech guys on the team from Cisco, the product manager, etc. I also had some important questions answered for me.

I met up with Pankaj, and we cut out of the meet and greet and hit Morton’s for dinner. I love a good steak. I also love a good steak 2 nights in a row. We had a few drinks waiting for some other people we were meeting up with. It was a good time. I even got to try the Godiva desert I missed the last time I was at Morton’s with Alison. It was fantastic.

I ended up back at the Paris and met up with Joe, Karen and Joe’s folks for drinks at the lounge. I didn’t drink more (i was pretty well off from the Morton’s alcohol) but I hung out with them for a while.

Cisco Networkers 2005

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Today was the first full day of Cisco Networkers. Allot of cool stuff going on. Way too much for me to go into too much detail. In a recap yesterday I learned what will be happening in the new version of IPCC. Some cool stuff there. I ate not enough food at the expo Cisco threw. I wasn’t hungry for that kind of fare, but it was awesome stuff. I got some information on some products I was interested in. I got some follow up reading to do. Then I got some answers from some engineers at Cisco about some products. I also got some free software that I need to try out. I could have used it a few weeks ago, but what can you do?

After that I meet up with my friend Joe. he is also out in Vegas for the same conference. We met up with his girlfriend and parents (they all came out to hang while he did his conference thing). They wanted to do the Star Trek Experience in the Hilton, but thankfully we just browsed the gift shop. They ended up eating the buffet at the hilton instead of eating at the Star Trek Theme restaurant. I ended up at a little cafe in the Paris. I am not a Vegas buffet person. I NEVER get my moneys worth at one of those. I don’t eat enough. Money wasn’t the reason I didn’t go though. I just don’t like those things. Even the nicest ones seem skeevy to me. Maybe it is memories of the Circus Circus buffet when I was 14?

Today’s keynote by John Chambers was good. He is a really good speaker. This was the second time I got the opportunity to hear him speak.

The first session I went to was overkill for me. They were talking about really high end network design of Data Centers. Cool to be sure, but I won’t be needing to apply those theories for a while. The next 2 sessions were on IPCC. What you can do with VOIP is amazing. I already drank the cool-ade on that stuff a while ago, but it is truly amazing what you can do with VOIP. Video, Soft-phone, Call Routing, Etc.

Tomorrow hopefully I will learn some other cool network stuff. I get to do a class on SNMP. I use it a bit now, but a better understanding of it would be very helpful.

All Consuming Project

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The move downstairs is taking up allot more of my time than I would have liked. I am on my way home now. Kai and Co. will make sure the cubes are finished and the cable work is done right.

Now that the contracts are back, our data center wants to schedule the move of our gear to our new cage. I need to call them tomorrow. Hopefully we can do everything and have ourselves up in the new cage by mid June. Then all we have to worry about is IPCC.

On other notes I am working on getting a DC into VMware, still. I got side tracked since I had to goto Kingston. I will demote one of our DC’s tomorrow and bring it online as a virtual machine.

Still waiting to run the active directory upgrade at our data center. this will enable us to have 2003 domain controllers. This will be helpful for Biztalk 2004.

Cube Work

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The furniture guys are doing there thing today and tomorrow. I feel like the 3rd wheel, but it does look good that we are keeping tabs on what is going on. Don’t you love obligations? I did get some work done today, but since it is cramped in the IS office up here I was unable to get on a windows box and do some of the work I wanted to do. I have my powerbook only on this trip. I didn’t want to mess with my thinkpad until I get a new one, so I am on my mac only this trip. I have done it before on day trips. I can do most of what I need on it, but not everything.

Tomorrow I hope they finish moving the cubes downstairs. they haven’t started yet. They (furniture guys) setup the offices first today. The cubes are tomorrow.

More later…

Travel Day

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I don’t have many of them any more, but today was a travel day (sort of). I used to consider a “travel day” a day where most of what I did was travel from one place to another. Now that I don’t travel as much (and am much happier for it) I don’t have as many as I used to. Dam, the last time I was on a plane was September. Most of my travel is train travel now a days.

I am at the hotel now. I got hear relatively early. Normally when I stay here (my companies other office) I am usually at work late. Today was different. I needed to be here for 2 days while work went on during normal business hours. That means I got to keep normal hours, well sort of.

I learned that getting to the hotel at 6PM means dinner at 7, 7:30. After checking mail, making calls, etc, I am bored and it is only 8:30. So I sit here on the bed with my ipod listening to toons, while I write on my powerbook. I will try to goto bed early, but I don’t know if that will happen.

I had the surf and turf at the hotel restaurant again tonight. I had it the last time I was up with Jayson. it was good, and only $3 more than the normal steak I get. I had a drink and felt nice and relaxed. I didn’t have more, since it was really early and I didn’t want to be tired and out of it the rest of the night. that was just in case I decide to be productive later.

Construction (Still Going On)

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I am off to Kingston for 2 days of construction fun tomorrow. We are moving existing cubes downstairs, and putting in the remaining furniture. When I mean we, I mean the furniture guys are coming and I am going to “supervise”. I am going for 2 days since the furniture people think it will take that long. The cable guys are coming out the day after the furniture guys leave to finish up the cable. Once that is done we can move the remaining reps downstairs and be done with this long delayed project.

Fear not, the next 2 major projects is already underway. Turns out we are big enough and have the right people in place that I can run two major upgrades at the same time. My stress level is up there, but we can do it. I have NYC people (myself included) working on upgrades (now officially moving) of our cage to a new location in our data center. Kingston on the other hand is working on IPCC. I am still involved in that, but Kai will have to handle some of the day to day details since he will manage the product after it is deployed. Along the way the dev team has noted that they will be building an entirely new website environment to accommodate the next generation site they are building. That means in addition to what I just mentioned we need to find space for, design, quote, build and then manage new Dev, QA, & production environments. that means servers, databases, web servers, etc. All this while we maintain our existing equipment. It will be an interesting project.

Travel Day Complete

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I am done with my day of travel. Amtrak sucked. The trains were older and in worse shape than normal. When I asked the conductor he said that the normal trains are in use on Acela since those trains were down for maintenance. Something about the “elite” route gets the good trains! The train was late 20 minutes going up, and 45 minutes late coming home. I should be used to it by now, but I am not. On a plus note Amtrak’s automated IVR was awesome. I understand why they won all sorts of awards for the voice responce system. Hey I deal with telecom, network and VOIP gear most of my day, so hearing a good IVR actually interests me now. Some people look at nice cars, I admire IVR’s. No one ever said I was normal.

We got 10 users downstairs. Kai had issues with the other group of 10 they wanted to move. Turns out the electrical guys didn’t plug in a conduit so a bank of stations didn’t have power. that set us back enough that we didn’t have time to finish moving users today. They should still meet the deadline of friday to have half the users downstairs.

I also dealt with issues regarding our upgrading our cage at our data center, and canceling circuits in NYC. Also design woes about upgrading our circuits in our call center. I have been busy with our telecom provider to iron out all the issues. More meetings with them tomorrow!

A New Call Center, Well Almost

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Tomorrow (if all goes well) my company will open its new floor of its call center. We are moving our reps down to our new floor (with tons of space for expansion) and corporate people (those that are in that office), escalations groups, etc. will remain upstairs. Tuesday marks the first day we bring reps down. We are taking it slow with only 1 team of 10. By the end of the week we will ramp up half the call center or more down there. Then we move some existing furniture down that is currently in use. Cable, and bring the rest of the people down. It has been a logistics challenge. Not quite a nightmare, but challenging.

I don’t “have to” go tomorrow, but I wanted to see the end result of all that work that I (and others) took part in. I will most likely be back for a few days next week as the construction people do the cubes and cable for the second half of the center. Dan will be on vacation and even though I am a “technical guy” I am the next person who is aware of the entire project.

IPCC SOW

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We met our integrator about the statement of work for our IPCC deployment. They calmed our nerves about most issues but we came up with another one. Dan and I will talk about this tomorrow.

If that is done, we can sign the papers and in 90 (work filled, super stressful, and probably extremely interesting and fun) days we will have an IPCC call center.

More news as it develops…

IPCC Deployment

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I have been quiet on the work front recently. Not because I don’t have things to talk about but because I have been busy. We went over the statement of work for our IPCC deployment yesterday. We need to go over a few details to make sure we know what we are doing! More news as that LONG project progress’s.