Call Manager

Home At Last

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I finally made it home. I was in Kingston from Sunday to Wednesday night. I ran out of clean clothes and I was really low on the med’s so I came home. Keith is up there today (thursday) and friday. I go back next week again. I actually have 2 days in the office this week. It is weird. I haven’t worked a full day at the office since Monday the 11th. It is the 21 now. Wow.

I got a ride home from Kingston from one of our Integrators from Expanets. I know I used to hate that company but the tech guys we are working with are all awesome. Chad our Cisco expert fixed up all our switches and call manager. I learned allot of stuff from him, but would have liked to learn allot more.

Keith is working on the desktop security profile for Kingston while he is up there. I already did 99% of the desktop ghost image for the computers we are starting with. I figured out the problem with Ghost 7.5 and our Compaq (HP) Evo 510’s. I was able to modify the disk we use with the with our older Evo 310’s.

I also got the White (voice) patch panel done Wednesday. It looks good, or as good as we can get it with the time we have. Joe will do the blue cables next.

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.

Standards, Standards, Standards

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So today and tomorrow we deal with standards. Our hardware standard, the basis for how we buy and configure our Database Servers has been in place for just over a year. I have been getting complaints about no space, and some speed issues from others. I have called the brains together to get what is required for a standard over the next 12 months. That way I can buy them what they want and then tell them to shut up when they complain about it. Well, not exactly. But we need a blue print for how we do things for the next several months.

Also tomorrow I am meeting with our development people (well some of them anyway) to discuss our build standards for web servers. Same concept as hardware standards, but we talk about how to configure the OS on our web box’s. Once done we will refresh our web servers and set them up fresh.

As I left the office yesterday we had a problem with an apache web box we are using for a small project. turns out that this is considered important to our call center management. Now we need to fix the problem, and then take this applicaiton and make it redundant. We probibly will need to put it on 2 linux machines and place them behind our local directors. A local director is a device that splits the load of a web site amount multiple servers. Cool device.

On another front I have tons of outstanding quotes to get approved. Hardware requests just pile up. What is crazy is most of this stuff is not even related to our new office build. This is just normal office stuff that needs to be taken care of.

I haven’t yet found someone to run our new office’s helpdesk. Most applicants are not from the region. We need someone near by. Also most don’t have the skills. People do not read online job postings. They apply for jobs that don’t meat their qualifications at all. It is just a waste of time for everyone.

We spoke with our Project Manager and team for our phone system build out. The hardware is almost all in. We are sending them some network diagrams and stuff. Then we stage the system. I am excited. This will be awsome if it works out well. I think it will. Brand new systems can be designed without having to factor in old problems. We shall see… In the tunnel now. More later.

I get to go on my first buisness trip

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Well, actually I am going on my first business trip for my current company. My last job all I did was go on business trips. I haven’t been on the road for work for over 2 years. This will be a quick trip to Chicago for 2 days next week. Gus & I are getting taken to one of our big vendors for a conference. Unfortunately I have a 7-am flight Monday morning. That is really early. Gus is on a later flight but they said I couldn’t switch.

I still haven’t unpacked from my trip to my cousins from last week. I need to do that before I pack for this trip.

Our CEO is away on vacation in europe for a few weeks. With him goes any chance of getting approval for some hardware I need for our new office build out.

Gus is back today. We need to do something with our voice T-1 contracts outstanding. Not sure what we will do just yet. I also got an email from our Project Manager for our VOIP project. I will call him today and setup a time to meet on friday. Things are shapping up, just not as fast as I like. I move fast on stuff, but I am always held back by something.

I finished moving the QA mail system to the new server. I still need to do the anti-virus stuff on it.

Deal is done, so why am I still stressed?

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Can’t answer the title question just yet. Probably because there is still tons of work to be done, but I have no idea.

Today I got my hair cut. Hung out at home and fixed some stupid problems at work. I went out to dinner and a movie with Rich and Amanda. We drove around for a half an hour trying to find a place to eat. We didn’t want to get garbage food and didn’t want to spend much money. We ended up at Boston Market. I normally don’t eat there, but it was OK. I saved room for the mandatory popcorn at the movies. We saw Identity. It was pretty good. I like a good mind fuck movie. Not as good as a 12 monkeys or a sixth sense, but it was good.

I also downloaded Free BSD 5.0 again today. I brought it home a few weeks ago and make a copy but I can’t find it. I ended up taking it off the ftp site at work. I am burning a copy now. I am finally getting rid of my windows 2000 server. I have my website up on my red hat box. I also am no longer using exchange so the win2k server is not in use. it has actually been off for most of the past week or so. I want to try some stuff in linux, so instead of messing up my web server I will build bsd on another box and break that. I may also do a dual boot into red hat 9. Not sure yet.

I need to start reading up on voice over ip systems. Now that we own one I need to understand it more. Dam, I also need to figure out how to use Cisco’s layer 3 switches also. I know the foundry commands but Cisco is different. I have been slacking on the network commands recently. So much business stuff to do. Keith has been doing good, but I want be able to do, well everything. I know I can’t so I at least want to know the switches, and basic firewall commands. I have learned it is one thing to look at a configuration and know exactly what it means, compared to actually typing out all the commands.

Not sure what is in store for me tomorrow. I at least have to gas up my mom’s car. I used it a few times this week and want to leave her with a full tank when she gets back from her cruise. If I don’t I won’t hear the end of it.

Got a call from Glenn (the CEO of the company I work for). He thought their was a problem with our main website. I was on the way to dinner at the time and my cell phone was almost out of juice. I luckily was able to get in touch with mark and Keith in time to hand off the problem to them. It was weird. I have had Keith take trouble issues before, but this was the first time I called and told him to run with something. Actually mark was taking charge, but I usually am in on problem resolutions. It feels good that I can hand off some of that responsibility if even for a short while to someone else. Turned out there was no problem with the system. The person placing the order (in this case our president) put an incorrect address into the system and it kicked back an error because of it.

Well I am hopefully going to bed soon. I was up till 1:30am this morning for no good reason. I need to get a good night sleep one day this week. More tomorrow or monday.

VoIP Day T-Minus 1

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This year my company is trying out a softball leagure. It is a place where people with no athletic skill get together and compete in softball games with other out of shape people at other companies. Generally I am told this is done while consuming large amounts of alcohol. I got arm twisted into joining the team. I don’t like softball, and I am not very good at it. We will see how many games I actually make. Especially since we are in the middle of prepairing a new office. We got our tee shirts yesterday. I don’t even know if it will fit me, but I got the number I wanted. Lucky #3. I still have to fill out the release form to play, but don’t tell paula that or she will kill me. Guys from work went out yesterday and hit some balls at the batting cages. Today is their first official game. I am still working on hardware quotes so I don’t know if I will make it.

T-minus 1 day for our hardware decisions for the new office. We decided that papers need signitures by friday on our telecom purchases. We need to order T-1’s, and get a hardware intergrator picked. We are narrowing down things now, and hopefully will be putting the finishing touches deals friday. Of course we have said this before and things have slipped. This time feels different. I will know tomorrow.

I spent almost all day yesterday dealing with planning for kingston. We also had our weekly technology staff meetings. Those are always interesting.

I got some nice unexpected words from David yesterday. Dave is our call center manager, and an all around good guy. After our meeting with our CEO on our project plan he took me aside and said he was very impressed with how I know and explain correctly what I do to people. He was like he does not think that about most people. I was very touched. Dave is a hard guy to please, and to get those words from him was a welcome surprise. That goes to show you that I cannot read people, since I thought I fumbled a bit durring our planning meeting, but according to him it was well done. He said he has seen our CEO rip people appart for not having answers, but I got him to go along with almost all our proposals. Feels good, now all I have to do is make things actually happen.

On another note as I said in an earlier post this week, we were having problems with some database transfers throughout the night that killed our internet connection. Well, it is still happening. We are nowhere near close to stopping it in my opinion. Sometimes I get the felling that some people could not navigate themself’s out of a paper bag. Those are probibly the same people that would over engineer a wheel if you know what I mean?

Well I am train tunnel bound so I will close this entry out. Hopefully today brings most of these deals to a close, but I am not sure just yet.