Tag: Work

Holidaze

The end of another year. Christmas. Hanukkah. Year-end close at the office. Budget deadlines for next year at the office. Family in town. Leaving for vacation.

Stress.

Wow. There is approximately 43% more crap going on right now that I can process.

I was promoted to manager this year. This is the major reason I haven’t posted in a while – I’ve been too busy trying to identify and put out fires. I got promoted just in time for all the budgeting and arguing for next year. What fun it is! I don’t understand the numbers yet, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to defend them. It’s also the time of year that you get questions which demonstrate nobody is actually reading the contracts they are signing. This scares me. I read them and I correct the typos, because I assume my job is on the line. If that is a bad assumption, that is what is wrong with the company.

The other thing wrong with the company is that everyone expects 24×7 access to everyone else and instantaneous replies to requests, no matter how trivial – even though manager’s training specifically tells you not to do that. So, while on vacation, I’ll still be checking email at cruise line Internet prices. If my Internet bill is higher than my bar tab (again), it’s not a great vacation. It’s an office with sand and rum. At least there’s rum.

It’s funny – when I made the vacation plans, being out for two weeks was going to have very little consequence, since not much was going on in my old department at this time of year. Apparently, now the world will end prematurely if all my emails aren’t answered quickly and completely.

One of my goals before I die is to teach the people above me that not every problem is a severity one problem. This may be an impossible task.

My son is a PhD now. His family all came down for graduation, so the three grandkids are in residence. Every time my wife and I try to corral the two boys – even without watching their baby sister – I have more and more doubt on the sanity of people my age trying to have kids. We’re watching the kids because their parents are tired – and they’re in their twenties. There’s a reason old folks don’t have kids – kids are active and inquisitive and fearless. Sure, it sounds like good exercise, but a heart attack really doesn’t help you lose much weight, unless you count only getting fed what fits down a tube while you’re in the ICU.

At least we now know that nothing in our house or my Mom’s house is actually child-proof. Oops. On the other hand, I’ve virtually given up drinking Diet Dr Pepper at home, because I can’t get into the cabinet where the soda is kept. I guess I’ll have to get one of the grandkids to open it for me before they leave.

It’s sad that I have to stop and think if sending a “Merry Christmas” note to my team is going to offend anyone. It’s Christmas, whether you celebrate it or not. There are enough people who either are Christian or believe in the secular values of Christmas, that companies close for the day. It’s Christmas vacation whether you honor the day or not. It’s still vodka, even if you don’t drink. Call Christmas vacation what it is.

One more meeting to go.

Funding Experiments

I’m the President of the Board of Directors of Agape Broadcasting Foundation, Inc – which most people around here would know as KNON 89.3 FM – the Voice of the People. You can listen online at http://www.knon.org if you’re not in the DFW area. (You can also pledge online, and we’re in the middle of pledge drive. Yes, again.)

However, we’ve pretty much tapped out our core listener base, and we love them, and they are quite generous, but we need new pledgers. This is very difficult to accomplish – especially when there are two PBS stations down the dial with a lot more money to chase money.

It pains me that we have to have a budget to raise money. In the perfect world, people would simply fund us because they believe in the mission of the station (The mission of KNON is to be the Voice of The People in the Dallas area. We provide unique programming to reflect the diversity of the entire Metroplex community.), or they like one of our formats or DJs, or they’re just good people.

This is not a perfect world. 

So, this pledge drive, we’re trying two new ideas.

 

First, we need the de-icers on our tower replaced – when the tower froze last winter (yes, it gets cold in Dallas), we were off the air – our power was so limited, our transmission area was severely compromised. So, I’m running a campaign outside pledge drive to raise money for that specific project – http://www.gofundme.com/warm-tower – and we’re trying to see if people will actually donate just because it sounds like a good cause.

So far, almost all the donations have been from our volunteers. So, the concept of raising hundreds or thousands of dollars instantly may be overblown, or it may be people care about strangers who need a new kidney or a special night out but they don’t really care about a community radio station.

The irony of that campaign – which hit me after I created it – is that people outside Dallas who contribute could listen over the Internet and so they wouldn’t be impacted if the tower froze over. So it goes. Still, we’re a small operation, we’ll take anyone’s money.

The other new technology is Pledge By Text – since everyone has a cell phone these days (it seems), let them pledge with it.

Text “KNON” to 56512 from your mobile phone, and you’ll get a link back to let you pledge. Choose your favorite show, your favorite DJ or just send it to the general fund. 

We appreciate your support!

How to build a community

A lot of companies spend lots of money trying to get people to join their online community. To some, a community is a Facebook page (“Like us!”), or a Twitter feed (“Follow us!”) or an Instagram account (“Look at us!”)

When I moved demobox.org (an old domain I’ve had forever) off my Domino server at home and onto GoDaddy’s hosting, I put WordPress up so I could play with it. (I love wordpress.com but it’s not like you are in charge.)

I have four members.

WTF?

I’m still trying to determine how a backwater site with no apparent value or content has managed to get four members. So far.

I can’t wait to see if they try to post.

Maybe I should change my title to “Marketing Consultant.”

Sad Update (9 August 2014)

Well, it’s very easy to get multiple members, apparently. They’re all spam members. So, I’ve turned membership off on all my WordPress sites until I can get better protection from idiots. This may be impossible.

Monday

Damn.
Ugh.
Ah-choo!

Is it really already morning?
How much longer can I just snooze?
How bad could traffic be today?
What more do I have to lose?

I hate Mondays.
I’m always in some pain.
I wish I had another shirt.
Will someone see this stain?

Wow. Traffic. Lovely.
Looks like all the roads are blocked.
I should’ve worked at home today.
I should just go get crocked.

Only twenty minutes late.
That shouldn’t damage my career.
Especially after I walk the halls,
And see nobody else is here.

I need a quart of coffee.
Just stick it in a vein.
I need to keep it coming.
It helps to ease the pain.

Mornings are a torture.
Monday morning doubly so.
Let’s go and have a meeting.
It’s the only way to go.

Is it time to go home yet?

Oops

Apologies in advance for the technical speak after all the travelogue rambling, but this is what happened in the workshop this week. If you’re in tech support or you’ve ever tried to run a technical workshop, you will find much of this hilarious. For anyone else, just believe me – it’s funny now that it’s over.

The best thing about having a problem occur again is that you can instantly recognize it. Of course, if you didn’t find a decent solution the first time, then you’re stuck again, but at least you know why you’re stuck. You just don’t know how to fix it. Again.

So, we’re in lab in KL this week, getting ready to do some (very) basic exercises with SoftLayer. The students will log in to the portal, update their accounts and then create a virtual computer image in the cloud. All very high tech – all very cool technology, and all pretty simple to do. All the students have temporary accounts that I created in a guest cube or hotel or Admirals Club last week – I’m not really sure when I created them. I just know they were there before I arrived here. All the temporary accounts have the same password, since the way SoftLayer’s Customer Portal works, once you’ve created a user, you can just update the changed fields (like name and userid) and leave everything else the same to create an almost duplicate userid. So, if you’re setting up a workshop with a bunch of test users, it’s really easy to generate dozens of userids in a relatively short time.

Here’s the issue – and it’s a rather considerable issue – SoftLayer has what I think of as rather retarded password rules: a password must contain capital letters, lower-case letters, numbers and special characters. In other words, you have to generate a password you will never remember, and it’s one that will also be brutally difficult to type.

Apparently, when I created the first (of forty) userids last week, I spelled my own demo password wrong – and I spelled it wrong the same way twice because it got accepted. So, we found out today (after I tried to change the password – but I’m getting ahead of myself) that I had managed to put in the exact same wrong password for forty users, since once I created the first user, I never changed the password field again. So, now I had forty userids with an unknown password, so none of them could log in.

This would normally not be a big problem – you would just change the passwords. However, since you can’t change the password without knowing the old password, that gets difficult. So, in order to change the password, you would have to find the wrong original password once, and then change it forty times. Still, this is just an annoyance.

Here’s how we discovered that I had spelled the passwords incorrectly, and it wasn’t just that a couple of students couldn’t type. This is also where the problem that happened once, happened again.

A problem that occurred last week in the Chicago workshop occurred again today. If the SoftLayer Customer Portal detects five incorrect password attempts in a row, it locks your computer (well, your computer’s IP address) out for a half-hour. This is really good security, unless you’re in a workshop experimenting and not doing real work – but good security dictates everyone is treated the same way. There really is no such thing as a “demo” SoftLayer account.

Here’s the fun part.

If you’re on a local area network that uses network address translation, say, I don’t know, in a university computer lab that you’re using to hold a workshop, then all of the computers in the classroom look like they’re the same IP address. So, as soon as the fifth student gets the password wrong (and I had given all of them the wrong password!), the whole classroom is locked out. Boom! goes the dynamite.

So, we had just started the first lab forty-eight seconds ago, and now we all had to sit and wait a half-hour for anyone to try again.

Lunchtime, people!

This is why you should always schedule labs around lunch or breaks – so when something goes south, and it will, you just send everyone for a smoke or a Coke or a pee, and you fix it without them knowing while they’re gone.

Of course, if you tell them “Forget the userids and passwords we gave you this morning – use these instead”, they might suspect something has gone awry. Seeing the support team in the back snickering while the instructor is sweating is another giveaway.

There wasn’t a way to change the passwords, so while the students had lunch, I deleted forty accounts and created new ones, with a simpler password that still met all the requirements. We also tested the first one to make sure it worked before I created the rest. Not that I didn’t trust my typing. Hmm. Why didn’t I think of that the first time?

On the bright side, with the right spin, you can claim that you were just demonstrating SoftLayer’s intrinsic security and how your data must be safe in a system where an entire classroom can get locked out a half-hour at a time because some idiot creating userids while sleep-deprived can’t spell.

My new demo password will have to be “40UsersLockedOut!”. Then, I could remember it. It would still be difficult to type. Mainly, because I would be weeping.

Flashback

So, I’ve heard a lot of stories about my childhood from my Mom lately. I’ve been thinking about growing up and a lot of the activities of a young man. I even redid the Stagecoach 7 website yesterday evening.

But, I never thought I would flash back to the early 60’s this afternoon.

I did. I took a nap.

It’s been said that you become a grownup the day you start wondering why you didn’t want to take naps when you were younger. Sometimes, it’s just circumstance.

Last night, Murphy the Cocker Spaniel threw up. Four times. So, off to the vet. Luckily, Hillside Veterinary Clinic is open 24×7, and it’s just down the street, so we didn’t have to contend with the emergency clinic. There were a surprising number of people there for 10:30 PM on a Monday evening, but Murphy was whisked off to the back for tests, we talked to the vet, got him some meds, and were back home by just after midnight.

Midnight.

Well, at least I’m working at home today, so I don’t have to contend with traffic.

Did I mention I had a six-hour web conference call that started at 7:30 AM this morning?

So, I was going to double up on the coffee, and hope for the best. Maybe this would be an interesting meeting. You know, the exception to prove the rule.

Finally got to sleep about a quarter to one, because it takes extra time to fall asleep when you’re counting the minutes you have to actually sleep. So, I should have had a good six hours of sleep. Who needs more than that? No problems.

Four AM, the phone rings. I manage to answer it, and hear “This is ADT Security. We have an alarm.” Well, my house was quiet, so it was the Spousal Unit’s problem. We had an alarm going off in one of her late Aunt’s houses in Florida.

This is one of the stupid parts about naming an executor more than one State away – how are you going to get there if there’s a crisis?

Who could possibly be trying to get into a dead woman’s house? Oh, of course. The inheritor aka the new owner. Oops.

The Spousal Unit had given her cousin the code to the alarm. It just wasn’t the code to that alarm. Oops.

So, after finally getting him on the phone (via Facebook message) and talking politely to the police officer who had arrived, everything was back to normal.

At 5:20 AM.

So, not a lot of sleep.

It actually was a good conference call – a very good discussion. I managed to stay awake the whole time, and I only had three cups of coffee.

After the call ended, I crashed for an hour. Well, an hour and a half. The stuffed animals of my childhood were replaced by live dogs trying to push me out of the way, but it was still a nap. A glorious nap.

So, I’ll work late tonight to cover the missed time. At least, I’ll stay online until everyone on my team leaves.

We should all take naps.

Working At Home

Tomorrow is “Take Your Dog to Work Day’.
I worked at home today,
So my dogs were already here.

They could come visit me.
Over and over again.
I had multiple breeds snoring all day.

I still managed to get some work done.
Mainly, because they sleep so much.
(They would love conference calls.)
However, I had an interesting thought.

Dogs in an office could cause strange utterances.
Some of these would be actionable, if aimed at people, not dogs.

What if you were writing a report and heard:
“Stop scratching me!”
“Get down!”
“Get off of me!”

and, of course, the big one:

“Rocky! Stop humping her!”

HR would not be amused.

So, before you take your dogs to work,
Discuss it with your co-workers.
Make sure humping will be OK for one day.

Maybe it’s best to just work at home.

Monday

Monday.
It is a curse.
Yet, today, just Monday wasn’t good enough.

Rain.
It is a blessing.
Unless it’s in the city, during rush hour.

Traffic.
It is beyond a curse.
Especially in the rain, in a construction zone.

So, I started the week late.
And cranky.
(Some would say “cranky” was a given.)

Can’t we get Monday outlawed?
Or moved to the weekend?

Multitasking

We are completely wired these days.
You can’t escape the office, no matter where you go.
In fact, you have multiple pathways to the office.
This is a blessing and a curse.

I can answer my emails, Chat online with co-workers,
Watch baseball games (I could, I never would!),
Update Facebook (social networking)
And be on a conference call.

All at the same time.

It’s called multitasking.
Multitasking is great,
Since you get more done.
At least, it can seem that way.

This means, of course,
Not everything gets 100% attention.
So, sometimes, you can get confused.

Here’s some  good tips to help you  –

Re-read all your emails before you press “Send”.
This prevents typos.
Typos could be just misspellings,
Or could be sending “Love you, too, Magic Ass!”
To your customer instead of your wife.

If you answer a question late on a call,
Since you were writing email and chatting,
Always preface with “I’m sorry, I was on mute.”
If you weren’t listening, use the same excuse.

For some reason, if you can’t talk on the phone,
People assume you can’t hear, either.
If you can’t talk or hear, why are you on the phone?

That said –

When you’re on a conference call, go on mute.
This avoids having your dogs heard on the call.
It also avoids yelling “AirHogs WIN!”
When discussing next month’s financials.
Actually, you will still yell it,
If you were watching a game, which I am not,
But at least nobody would hear it.

AirHogs WIN!

After you do your victory dance,
Pick the phone back up, and
If you hear an awkward silence,
Say “I’m sorry, I was on mute.”