I am cautiously optimistic about the big good things that are coming up on the horizon at work.

Tomorrow's the big day for both.

Also, I've been there a year now. That itself leads to *unrelated to the above* good things next week.

Becky's sugar was down below 100 for all but one of the readings today. That means very good things for the 1+1=3 plans. It's not the end all be all, it's not even the last adjustment that needs to be made. But we're that much closer and that was honestly the hard part.

Today had more hilarity with AT&T/SBC/Michigan Bell but I don't even care. You can't take me down anymore.

PS: Friends, I'm currently making out bills for TTLLC long distance crap. FYI.

Just a day in the life…

3+ customer issues addressed today

first was a complaint that call waiting doesn't work while the phone is ringing inbound. No idea how they expected it to work.

second was a turnup where our installer plugged a t1 into the ethernet port, where a partner carrier used the same /30 on two circuits, and used the wrong encap type. And if the tech plugged in the power cord firmly, things would have been even better.

third, oh lord, where can I begin. "NI2? What's that?". "BZZS line encoding", and the endearing lesson where the tech tried to explain to me how E911 worked. Good times.

Plus the entire livejournalz is up in smoke about people getting banninated for listing interests like 'childlove' and 'incest'. It's hilarious to watch. Oh no, we're being repressed by a company who provides a service to us under terms we agreed to! Let's bitch and moan!

Of course people leading the movement such as This girl who has sexual relations with her father and occasional three ways between her, her dad, and her husband and is angry at her grandparents who tried to brainwash her into thinking it was child molestation. That's the person I'd want speaking up for my innocent writings being deleted, oh yea. Nothing gives more credibility than that.

I think the entire world in general is low on Clue today. Oh well.

PS: RIP dankaye. I don't know what else to say other than you have to be laughing at the people I talk to every day as much as I am.

Redacted of course

paul@mastershake:~$ ls -al dankaye.txt
-rw-r–r– 1 paul paul 173 May 29 2006 dankaye.txt
paul@mastershake:~$ cat dankaye.txt
6:46pm et – reply to SMS – Yahoo Mail

1:20am et – call, claiming 5-6 hours.

7-8pm et – badness (?)

Abby Cell: 404-xxx-xxxx
Abby Home: 770-xxx-xxxx

Serena: 585-xxx-xxxx

Making the pieces fit didn't help any better.

I have many interesting stories regarding turnups. Here is one more.

I should note that this is not the worst one. Not by far. Interesting, but I can live with interesting. The ones where there's pressure on and screaming customers with unreasonable demands (note "demands" rather than "requests"- if I can turn them down it's one thing.) I can do without those. These ones are more the "spice of life". I'm not even sure if that was eupemistic or not. I'm too tired to care.

So today, I've:

* Driven through rush hour traffic to go to Flint.

* Dealt with a dual T1 circuit that wasn't – AT&T dicked me somehow on this. I think they're doing something fucked up in their DACS. I see the circuit go up and down but it won't pass data. But there's two, and one works, so that's okay.

* Did the neatest backboard work in my life. It was otherwise beautifully done, new construction. It's just how you'd want it.

* Explained to a customer that the phones they INSISTED on using have two serious limitations beyond the ones that I warned them about previously. The first one is that they use cisco's power over ethernet. The second I'll mention later.
(Cisco's power over ethernet is based on an early draft of the PoE spec. Basically Cisco, and I think Foundry support it. Dell PowerConnect does not. That's what the customer had. My recommended/supported phones have a model that supports 802.3af PoE. The ones they insisted I use do not. They only support Cisco PoE. Guess what: The phones I spent the last 2 weeks configuring (my recommended models take about 5 minutes per phone or so to configure, their models take 20+ minutes) don't even power on. They don't have AC adapters, or any way to power it on. I'd just walk away and leave it at that, but it's an urgent care. And they're moving in to this newly constructed building TOMORROW. So we embark on a quest to try to find a cisco PoE switch in Flint starting at 8pm. He rattles his contacts. I rattle mine. Nada. He has a customer site nearby with a cisco aeronet AP. He yanks that to do my testing.)

* Somewhere during that nonsense, I end up stepping in carpet glue that was on the floor. I had to unglue myself from the customer's floor, and spend 20 minutes with mineral spirits and water cleaning my boots. Good times.

* Of course, the phones don't work right on his network. The firewall is eating my TFTP configuration. This is issue #2. The phones they want only support a TFTP configuration. My supported ones do HTTP. So we had to go and get one of his servers, and install tftpd on it. Small problem, it had kubuntu on it, but no monitor. So I go out to my car and get my projector. We use a projector as a monitor to set up the machine.

* I have to modify my configs so he's no longer on the redundant proxies, and is set specifically to a gateway. If it goes down, so do they. But I had no choice. Again, supported hardware works perfectly. His stuff, not so much. He's now got to manually go to all phones and change the TFTP server to something local on his LAN and we'll be all set.

Time I got there? 5:20pm
Time I left? 12:35am

But this isn't even a bad turnup. Seriously. It works and the customer's happy.

At least 3 people on the intarblags have dropped my name today. I think that is a sign that I should be saying something (maybe?).

+ I am looking forward to a relaxing weekend
– I am not looking forward to going to flint tomorrow. But that means the end of a huge time consuming launch for a customer.
– Fuck Cisco* IP phones in their whiny, bitchy, crappy little asshole.
+ Big things are happening at work. Can't talk about them.
– Aforementioned things are probably going to result in me being even busier than I am, if that's even possible.
+ Minion #2 (my full time minion rather than #1, who is supposed to be my part time minion but due to staffing issues spends 99.999% of his time in the call center instead of learning cool shit from me) may be starting soon. That will alleviate a lot of this crazy busy shit. And if they can resolve those staffing issues I get more time with #1 too. I want him to spend his time on IT. Monitoring free space on the fileserver is crucial but not something I should be spending time doing. (not that I am, which is half the problem anyway) If you can keep track of all that crap I just said, bravo. If not, comment for clarification.
+ It appears my rental passed inspection finally. I still have somewhere to stay until I buy a place. Yay!

+ This weekend I will be mostly lounging around and enjoying life. Time off, sweet, glorious time off.
– Unnamed provider is doing crazy upgrades of their switch on Saturday morning. Maybe it won't be so glorious and so off afterall. Who knows?

* when I say Cisco, I mean the original Cisco. Not the legacy sipura stuff. I loves me some sipura.

This weekend

It was okay.

– Missed an appointment with a customer in Ludington due to immense traffic and bad information on access hours.
– Didn't get much sleep/didn't sleep well. Allergies yay.
+ Got to see every family member possible this weekend. Yay!
+ Slept well last night, albeit not long.
+ Father in law gave us a really badass 440mhz yagi for our eventual new house. Yay! There's also a rotator too but it's not known if it works.

Work is going quite well.

WTF

You know traffic is bad when you can post to livejournal from traffic using a laptop. I've been using livejournal, reading email, etc. Ugh.

696/96 intersection sucks right now.