- Entries : Category [ Work ]
- Work
17 June
2004
Trees Should Fear Me
Holy Monotony, Batman! I have been doing the most mundane task ever in all my years of working in technology. That is saying a lot for someone that used to unbox hundreds of computers per day and have to separate the remaining garbage from the cardboard. I was tasked with printing out every email in a former employee's inbox. I do not think that I could emphasize the word "every" enough to capture its essence for this situation. We are talking thousands of emails here. Each one nested in subdirectories of subdirectories. Some emails have documents or spreadsheets attached that exceed 2MB in size. (That equates to 100 pages) However, sometimes the attached documents are not required and sometimes the entire string of forwards need to be printed. Therein lies the game. No automation, no "select all". No, that would be too easy. I must comb through these thousands of emails to select what gets printed and what does not. I have been working on this for about a full day now, and the amount of paper I am wasting is astounding. At last count, I have gone through a box of copy paper or 10 reams! Despite all of this mind-numbing work, my HP Laserjet 5100 Network Laser Printer has not skipped a beat. What a workhorse!
Posted by
steve at
08:51
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Comments (1)
12 July
2004
Louisiana and a New Job
Sorry for the hiatus, but I have been out of town for the past week. Abby and I spent the past week in incredibly humid Louisiana. I used to think that North Carolina had high humidity, but they can't hold a candle to Louisiana (because it would most certainly melt first). It rained every day that we were in Louisiana, and when it was not raining I wished that it was. I certainly ate well while down near the bayou. However, I doubt that I will have a hankering for catfish or shrimp for quite a while.
This just in from the Eman news desk: I am currently in the middle of completing my final two weeks at SmartStart, my employer for the past year and a half. I found a new job, rather, a new job found me. One day out of the blue a former co-worker called me to see if I was interested in a new position. After hearing about more money, more challenges, and a shorter commute, I was sold. I start my new job on July 27th. I will give you more details about this job once I start.
Posted by
steve at
14:45
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Comments (2)
19 July
2004
Last Day of Old Job
Today marks my last day at SmartStart. The folks here have been great, and even gave me a pseudo-send off last Friday. I deemed it "pseudo" since it was more of an excuse for people to get up from their desks and consume sweet confections and less about a good bye for me. Granted, there were several people that were sincerely sad to see me go. Others did not know me well so I did not expect much of an emotional response from them. The strangest reaction came from a small group of people that met me with animosity. It was like they were angry with me for leaving. I could not help but assume they were thinking, "who does he think he is leaving us for a better job?". All in all I had a good run at SmartStart, and now I'm ready to leave.
I do not start my next job for another week, so I have some time to myself. I have planned some projects around the house this week. Hopefully, I will focus on the new house and less on COH. Then at the end of the week we make a trip to Seattle! We'll see how well I do on my first day after flying across the country the day before.
Posted by
steve at
09:09
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Comments (0)
03 January
2007
Crash!
Dead Hard Drive
Back up your hard drive, kids. You never know when tragedy will strike. It struck me today at work. My work computer decided not to boot up any more. Hopefully, I will have a replacement in the morning. Then I will get to spend the day getting the new hard drive to something resembling what I had before. We all know that no matter how hard you work at getting a new item to act like the old one, it is never quite the same. I backed up a lot of what I needed because there were signs of impending doom. However I have thought of about a dozen different things I should have backed up since. I hope I can get back to normal soon.
09 January
2007
Commute
Expansion is wonderful
I travel on Highway 55 to Research Triangle Park every morning. At the
beginning of my tenure with my current job, Hwy 55 was merely 2 lanes
of congestion from Cary to Durham. Then someone with clout decided
that this road needed to accommodate more travelers. A decision that I
fully supported. That was 3 years ago.
I wanted Highway 55 to function as an actual highway so badly, but it
was mired in construction. All in all the expansion project for this
road was tremendous, but as a commuter that saw the results day in and
day out, the rewards were fleeting. Years of construction have finally
paid off. Last week, Highway 55 has been upgraded to 4 fully
functional lanes. Hooray!
One would think that upgrading a 2 lane road to a 4 lane road would
reap benefits for everyone. My drive time was reduced from 25 minutes
to 20 minutes. A little disappointing, but at least the traffic moves
now, as opposed to several bogged down congested stoppages along my way.
02 February
2007
Work Schedule
9 to 5 is a better option
What a long day I had yesterday. We had some technical issues at work that could only be addressed during off-hours. My day began Wednesday night with a midnight call from my team lead, telling me to come in at 6am to monitor an important file server that was giving our team grief. I came in a little earlier at 5:30am to make sure I knew what I was going to see, plus that gave me enough time to make changes before 6am, which is the time people in our Enterprise network begen logging in across the country. No problems occurred during the day, although we were not running the file server at full capacity. We had dialed some things back to avoid any potential login issues. After 8 hours of monitoring, I decided to call it a day. However, that did not end my day. I had to come back in at 7:30pm to work with the software vendor to test thresholds. I will avoid boring you with details (too late!), but after another 8 hours I finished my work day. The result? An exhausted Steve who slept for 1.5 hours during a 24 hours span and a file server that is not much better than we started.
I hate computers.
04 May
2007
Wiki
Do it yourself
**WARNING - Geek Material Ahead**
I have a new boss at work, who is trying to facilitate communication among groups. He initially wanted to have a whiteboard of all existing projects and issues that everyone could read. That seemed a little archaic to me, so I suggested a Wiki: a web site where people can read, add and remove content. I recruited another member from my department to help me on my journey. He suggested TWiki, since he used it at another place he worked. Things did not go so well. TWiki is designed to run on Linux, which normally would not be a problem. However, we had to use this on an existing server and no Linux servers were available. Therefore, it had to run on Windows. We got the Apache and Perl to work, and installed TWiki, but for some reason we could not get everything to work together. I suggested we try MediaWiki, which is what Wikipedia uses. We downloaded a WAMP package (Windows, Apache, MySQL and PHP) which could not have been easier to install. Lo' and behold the WAMP package included MediaWiki. All we had to do was to set up some minor configuration options like IP addresses, database names and user accounts/privileges and we were up and running.
Now everyone in our group can document their projects and see the status of others. We envision using this Wiki as our one-stop-shop for all information in the department, including on-call schedules, documentation and log files. The few people that have been shown how to use this have fallen in love with the new Wiki. Hard to believe that something so easy to install is going to make me look like a hero.