The Startup Geek

Your 9/11 IT Headquarters

2011-09-11T01:56:00.000-07:00

All the technology in the world did not stop 9/11. It will not stop the next '9/11', either. Technology is only as gentle or as brutal as the person who uses it. I won't bore you with the tale of my 9/11 experience (we showed up to work, 9/11 happened, we went home) because it's about as dramatic as that single scuffed gray floor tile on Aisle 6 of your local supermarket.

You know the one I am talking about.

Data Center Design and Disaster Recovery still remain the red-headed stepchildren of IT. Then disaster strikes and those unsung individuals who have been quietly working nights and weekends to keep everything together suddenly become the most important people in the company.

Weird how that works.

Let's Stick a Fork In, Shall We?

2008-11-05T19:40:00.000-08:00

Congratulations and "I'm sorry" to the persons who kept up with reading my consistently-inconsistent posts about working in IT. I'm not keeping this place up - I know it and now it's time for me to clean house.

The big news - for me at least - is that I've accepted a new position in a new location that begins two weeks from today. I'll be putting "IT Manager" on my resume for the first time and the circumstances which got me here are so weird that they defy description.

After several months of weekly posts to Valleywag, I've decided to take a mentor's advice and kill this blog. Even though the real reason I haven't been posting over here is that the soon-to-be-previous day job takes 110% of my attention 110% of the time and slicing out pieces of wisdom I've gained is getting more difficult all the time, I realize that there's a deeper truth and it's time for me to face it.

So the future of this place will pretty much become a repository of processed information - a place to put the gestalt of what I have learned about IT - as I write it, which will not be daily. I think I might have some things to say going forward as little bits and pieces of my last 6 months start wending back through my head but I'm putting a placeholder in right now that says "(Not that it's a surprise to anyone but) I won't be publishing here on a regular basis." I'll still maintain the space as mine if I ever get to a point where I'm back in the game and a soap box is welcome.

Thanks for reading - I will be posting more regularly on my personal blog - http://www.timwoolery.net but that will be of interest to a much smaller community, I am sure.

Cheers!

Close Your Incoming Help Desk Calls in 1/2 the Time

2008-10-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

Even as an engineer - the day job will have me support the Help Desk a day out of the week or more, depending on staffing. What I remember about working the Help Desk on a daily basis has convinced me that you can close maybe 90-95% of your calls in half the time by covering these points in the first minute: complete contact info, a ten-word version of the problem and a decision from you as to whether you have the resources to fulfill the call completely.

Complete Contact Info - the user's full name (correct spelling, please), their direct phone number and a backup and finally, their email address [it works, right?].
Ten-Word Version of the Problem - If this turns out to be a problem you'll escalate, how long will it take for the next guy to decipher the problem because you took two paragraphs to explain what you could in one sentence. Learn to edit your notes down to "THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG" first and then write whatever comes after it as context.
Decision: Can You Fix This Right Now? - You know the answer to this question better than anyone else? Are you fixing the issue or are you farting around? When it comes to phone support - nothing's worse than sitting there trying to troubleshoot a problem with no clear resolution. "Try that...did that work?" "No..." "Okay, try that...how was that?" "No...". Get a remote access solution for your users like Go2Assist or GoToMeeting from Citrix. Connect, troubleshoot and put together a clear picture of the problem. Do you have the tools and resources to move forward now? No? Get off the phone, then, please and call back when you do.

Use the fact that you hate doing phone support as a means, not to get out of work by ignoring it but get out of work by creating less of it for yourself. Watch what happens!

Achieving "Jerk-Proof" Customer Service

2008-10-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

Consumerist.com had a great exchange from a reader over the weekend who evidently assumed the blog editors would side with him, the consumer, against a company he was having a disagreement with. He thought wrong. The 10-word version is: Jerk has a problem - everyone knows he's a jerk now.

I am still in search for the jerk-free customer service business model. Although I take comfort in knowing that no one else has found it - we can find amusement in the ways the system outs those who seek to abuse our quest.

Consumerist.com - The Worst Tip We Have Ever Received.

Stop Panicking about the Stock Market and Get Back to Work

2008-10-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

We pause the current economic pants-wetting to remind you that IT will continue to be a valuable assset to whatever company you happen to work for regardless of the current national economic climate. We also remind you that you are an intelligent individual who will continue to find ways to keep the clothes on your back, the roof over your head and food on the table.

The US economy is nowhere near the record-setting unemployment numbers that it experienced during the Great Depression. Nor are people likely to be living in the streets, starving or going from riches-to-rags in a heartbreaking montage filmed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe. You were fine yesterday...you are fine today...you will be fine tomorrow. Calm down, get back to work and continue to maintain the value you have.

Reload Your Citrix Web Plug-in for Fun and Profit

2008-10-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

(*** Note*** - This fixes Citrix / launch.ica issues for individual desktops. I didn't see much material on this in my Google searches and am documenting it for any other support person who doesn't troubleshoot Citrix regularly.)

So...Citrix clients...

Citrix being one of the foremost shared-app providers gives your Windows, Mac or Linux clients a browser-driven option to access your business applications rather than having to install the fat client on every conceivable laptop or workstation they might try to do business from. Very innovative - but what do you do when it fouls up? The application itself can be disabled in IE or Mozilla by disabling add-ons (see screenshot) but if the Citrix server, which normally pushes the web client, refuses to push the client - you really might be up the proverbial creek. What we found is, despite rebooting and removing the directory, the plug-in refused to push and Citrix kept pushing the launch.ica file and with nothing associated to that file extension, we couldn't open any published application.

Here's one of those times where Google didn't help - all my searches that included 'launch.ica' came back with a server-related solution and in this case, it was only one workstation. Am I stuck?

Not necessarily. You can visit Citrix and get the web client by going to the Client Downloads section. Don't be confused - XenApp is Citrix, download the XenApp Plugin and run the installer. When there, select the web installer only to install and allow it to load. Once all that was completed, the user was able to launch his published apps.

Advice for the job and for life...

2008-09-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

VMWare stock dropped 15%...Wall St. is guzzling Maalox waiting to see if they will be bailed out. Your job security is evaporating. Your living costs are skyrocketing. Everything is quickly going to crap!

So slow down...and take a moment to breathe.

11 Ways to Bring Out the Awesome - from Zenhabits.org

How Long Do You Stick It Out?

2008-09-29T07:20:00.001-07:00

Despite the gloom and doom about the economy, every IT professional has reason to be optimistic about keeping their job or getting a better one. Every IT professional should be a brazen careerist and should be adroit about how to find their next job or career path. Aside from that, though, let's say you take the new job: how do you know it that it was a right move? What if you find that you've leaped from the frying pan to the fire?

Identifying a job you hate isn't difficult - you already know that you are unhappy there. You might be asking yourself, though, "Is it me? Do I need to stick it out, grow up and learn something about myself?" A handy ten-point list was provided for CEO consultants (keep the snarky comments to a minimum...) and you may find one or two points that are helpful to you, even if you are not a CEO consultant. Sometimes you may find yourself in a difficult job that does require you to stick it out, grow up and learn something about yourself. If that is the case, great - we'll discuss what you'll be doing in a different post.

Although no one wants to admit that they made a bad choice, you should never let that be the reason you've put a permanent dent in your career path. If you feel that this job is wrong for you, chances are, your employer knows it, too. They may be looking for a way to rectify the situation and if you do not present a graceful solution, guess who's first in line when a RIF occurs? It's difficult to be in any specific job, much less one you feel you are not suited for. Think of it like a professional bull-rider.

In the PBR, you'll be riding a 1200-lb bull with a rope around his gonads and an ancient desire to throw you to the ground, stomp you or crush you. Nobody expects that you'll stay on one bull for the rest of your life - your ride is done in 8 seconds. It's about how well you ride in those 8 seconds no matter what bull you are on. You'll find a way to leap to the ground and make for the boards before the bull knows you're gone.

Then you find another bull to ride.

Some other posts by other people on the same topic:
Free yourself from the delusion that safe paths are possible. - Point #3 in this post by Penelope Trunk 3 Things to learn from the crashing careers of the super-rich

Get a New Job in 3 Easy Steps

2008-09-24T13:55:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine just scored a new gig not long after being given the heave-ho as a contractor for the Google Help Desk. It's been said before but bears repeating: Google's like any other company if you aren't in the executive stratosphere and is capable of the same type of pointy-haired-boss maneuvers any other large company does. It's not really surprising, but I'm just saying...shouldn't "Don't Be Evil" apply to your contractors, too, guys? I had lunch with him and gave him a few pointers, a few smacks and ended it with "now get out there and do it!"

That was last Monday. He has a job now...he starts next Monday.

What worked for him can work for you, regardless of your current job search activity or however difficult you might think it is to get a job 'in this economy'. Let me clue you in: there are always tons of IT jobs out there. Always. Go out and find one or stay home...but never tell me you 'can't find a job because it's too hard'. I'll tell you what I told him: If you think it's too hard then it will be. In a war where your attitude counts, you can't afford to limit yourself. Get that through your skull and then read on for a few pointers on scoring your next gig:

1. Carpet Bomb - use every avenue available to get your resume out. Every job board, every headhunter, every social networking website...leverage them all; there is no such thing as having your resume in too many places. I recommend working with the good people over at Boylston Group, Atlantis Partners, Remington International and Macarthur Associates along with Robert Half, Teksystems and Net Polarity.

2. Believe - You must be your own greatest supporter. You must believe that you are right for the job. If you can't do those things, your lack of confidence will come through in the interview process and you'll find yourself losing lay-up opportunities because you're projecting yourself as a sad-sack. Don't do that.

3. It's a Numbers Game - It breaks down like this: x amount of resume's equal a first-round interview. X amount of first-rounds equal a second-round. X amount of seconds equal a third and/or a job offer. So on and so forth. Don't get bent out of shape when an opportunity falls through, the right one will come along eventually.

My friend starts Monday and he's very happy...he's giving his friend over on the East Coast the same pep talk/butt-kicking I gave him. I wish them well...I wish you well, too.

Since I Opened My Mouth...

2008-09-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

...about finding a job in IT, you might want to back-check some of the other posts I made on the topic:

Finding a job in IT - Part I
Finding a job in IT - Part II

and...
"What To Do If You're Laid Off" by Getrichslowly.org

"Microsoft Sucks" - And Yet...

2008-09-15T13:08:00.000-07:00

I'd like every 'nix proponent to stop and have a gander at the following article before continuing forward.

Everyone got that? Thank you.

Here's the thing I want to say to everyone who can't stop screaming about how superior Unix is to Microsoft: Shut up. Sun was the biggest provider of Unix-based server systems and their future is in doubt. Want to talk about how they got screwed? Want to say 'HP undersold them'? Fine, whatever. But at the end of the day, please take your commentary over to a corner, wad it all up in a ball and then drop it in the recycle bin. Just shut up. I can't think of a better way to say "You outsmarted yourself" than to hand people a copy of this article.

At the end of the day, we need systems that work well and are maintainable. If I'm going point-A-to-point-B and I have the choice between a Lamborghini and a Saturn, all things being equal I'll take the Lambo. If I have to pay for the ride and in the end I will not get there any faster or slower or in better comfort, I'll have to stop and grab the Saturn. At the end of the day, I need to get from point A to point B and no one cares how I did it. So please take this as an opportunity to realize that 'technically superior' does not equal 'best solution' and get back to that Internet Argument over on Slashdot that you've been ignoring.

Microsoft may suck, but they just beat you.

Hurricane Season is Here - Are Your Computers Ready?

2008-09-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

By now you've seen that video of the guy who kite-surfed right into a building during Hurricane Fay.

IT is sometimes like that, you think you're okay and then all of a sudden the wind changes or grows in strength and you're heading straight for the wall. Unfair, perhaps, but that's how it is. Considering the potential impact of the loss of your IT infrastructure if the unforeseen (or underforeseen - those things that can happen but no one really considers it to be likely) can have serious consequences.

Take a few moments to think about your infrastructure - is it prone to fire, flood or quake? Maybe Acts of God aren't your problem, maybe it's a malfunctioning fire sprinkler that goes off and floods your data closet. It's usually not the big 9/11, Hurricane Katrinia stuff that gets you, it's the boring, one-off problems that nobody really thought would happen (construction guys cut your fiber lines, a drunk hits the transformer right when your backup generator is down for maintenance). The possibilities for things to go wrong are endless and you can't address everthing. Maybe you can just come up with a plan to cover most of the issues without a huge amount of budget or planning.

Previous Thoughts on Disaster Recovery

What Happens When You Fail

2008-09-02T19:43:00.001-07:00

I kept repeating to myself, "I don't know what I'm so upset about." The server migration project had gone poorly, I lost my weekend and now the project would pass to another tech to [hopefully] bring it home without any more embarrassing issues. Clearly, I had fouled up and now what remains is the licking of wounds and rueful reflection on what should have gone better, will go better in the future.

I guess I'm feeling like a bit of a loser tonight and having no better place to throw it, I offer it up here as a bit of introspection. Doing IT for money isn't a simple process and there are clearly more knowledgeable, more experienced techs out there. I happen to work with some of them and it's a constant process of amazement to watch them go through the paces and cheerfully correct some glaring issue that I should have caught. The mind-devils go mad inside my head, poking me with sporks and saying "See? See! We knew there was someone better at this than you!"

Awright - enough of that.

The point of IT, of life in general, is to live with your mistakes and learn from them. What I would learn from this server migration project is the following:

1) Always, always update the drivers.
2) File Server Migrations have joined the twenty-first century. We don't use Robocopy anymore - we use the File Server Migration Toolkit.
3) Never package two major changes to an environment in one day - deploying antivirus and cutting over to a new file server in one evening was just asking for trouble.

I'm going to get some rest and get some perspective. It's a process and sometimes it's about realizing that you aren't as far along as you thought you were. Just realizing that there's a place you need to get to is the first step in getting there.

Racking a Server for Dummies

2008-08-21T11:24:00.001-07:00

If you don’t want to read the whole post – please just take this one piece of advice and then move on with the rest of your day:

Effective Logistics Make Or Break Your IT Project

To make your project work, you must have the tools and the equipment and the knowledge in the right place at the right time. Forget any three of these and you’re on the floor trying to screw a 2-post rack adapter kit in with a Leatherman while your PDU doesn’t have the proper pigtail adapter to plug into the client’s UPS. You’ll do what I did and go to Fry’s I’m sure but let’s take a second to talk about how you can do it with one trip and minimal wasted time.

1. Get the Shopping List – think absite and do a quick inventory. Do they have what you need? Assume nothing out everything a server needs and write the checklist down. Power, LAN, KVM adapters, rack equipment. Tools to install said devices (those special star bolts that HP is shipping now…they need a special screwdriver bit). Give yourself 5 minutes to come up with that.

2. Survey – Get to the client – if you don’t see a 25’ LAN cable, buy one, you’re saving money in the long run instead of spending billable hours searching their dusty inventory boxes.

3. Buy – Save your receipts for reimbursement. I’m sure you know why.

I’m sure you’re aware that sometimes you can’t think of everything and I’m not saying you should. Just give it a 10-15 minute think and you might be saving yourself 2-3 days of wasted time. If you need to order parts, keep the customer posted but whatever you do – DON’T SHOW UP AND THEN HAVE TO RETURN IN 3 DAYS BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T ORDER A PART. That’s what surly construction contractors do and this is why they’re competing with the day laborers in the parking lot of Home Depot.

We’ll talk more about this later – right now I need to reboot.

Quick Plug: VLC

2008-08-11T15:18:00.001-07:00

Lifehacker and others have talked about VLC and I ended up giving it to a law firm who was unable to view a DVD-recorded deposition using Windows Media 11. Reason why we went this route: time and simplicity. Whereas Windows Media gives you no easy answer as to what codec is missing [and I’m not so sure it’s their job to tell you – you want to watch the thing] – VLC just launches and runs. VLC isn’t as people-friendly, you’ll need to use the force to figure things out if they aren’t immediately intuitive (playlists, etc.) but it’s a great little app. I put it on every new laptop I set up.

You can download VLC here

Going to Silent Mode

2008-08-08T20:11:00.000-07:00

Hello sportsfans - the gig I have at Valleywag has been eventful; I've been published here, here and here in the past week or so. With other personal projects going on, it's been difficult to have something to say but I didn't want you to think I was ignoring you. Well, I am - who are we kidding - but maybe you'll understand that it was for a decent reason and not "I stopped caring".

Oracle Kills Its Nephew

2008-07-28T14:32:00.001-07:00

There’s no common derivative of homicide to discuss the murder of one’s nephew. Good news for Oracle, since it killed the child company of SAP AG, TomorrowNow via lawsuit and we have no snappy way to say ‘company-cide’. SAP and Oracle have been on friendly terms for years and SAP acquired TomorrowNow, who provided Oracle application support at half the price the Big O normally charged.

When you’re a small software or IT company and you have competitors, you have to learn to get along with them or get ahead simply by being better at the job you do. The game is completely different for large companies, who can afford to acquire their competition or remove it if it happens to be snooping in secure areas of your website. You don’t have this option if you’re running a 50-person support company, even if you find out your competition is snooping – you pay employees, not lawyers.

There are other ramifications, too, from this mess but I talked about them over at Valleywag – link to article is here.

How to Remove “XP Antivirus 2008”

2008-07-25T14:05:00.001-07:00

This is something I’ve run into maybe 3 times with 3 different people last week. You might as well hear it here; if you run into this you can kill it rather than having to pay for someone come out.

“XP Antivirus 2008” – is a malware application discussed in this article. It isn’t a true antivirus program but is pushed like malware; users are then repeatedly reminded by the app to purchase the ‘full version’ for $50 to remove viruses the program has found. To remove this application [since it doesn’t come with an uninstall…nice…] follow these steps:

1. Follow the removal instructions for the application located here. Reboot as instructed.

2. Backup and edit the Registry to remove keys or subkeys associated with “XP Antivirus 2008” – reboot when complete.

3. XP Antivirus 2008 also deposits an entry under “Custom Notifications” that isn’t found in the registry. To remove it – follow the instructions in this article.

This is the first time I’ve seen this occur – in case you see the same, it goes away pretty easily.

Smoke, Winedogs and Tech

2008-07-25T14:01:00.001-07:00

2 hours ago, I was winding up a single-lane blacktop through the redwoods, smelling dust and smoke and thinking I was on my way to a campsite in the Sierras rather than an IT gig. The day job has a winery for a client, the client has a virus-infected whitebox workstation and here’s me, on my way to them.

The unincorporated area of Gilroy has a ton of wineries – if you pull off Bear Creek Road on the 17 and look high up to the top of the hills, you can see a vineyard just kind of hanging in space at the top of the hill shimmering in the heat.

The client has a year-old rescue dog; a mutt that’s part blue healer and something else. She’s petrified of me and this depresses me a little bit – I hate it when animals are afraid. The client doesn’t want to spend too much money fixing this old clunker, they say. They have a price limit and it’s obvious we’ll burn through that just trying to scan the viruses and get it clean. We agree on a course of action [new workstation] and I’m off down the road again.

Trading Secrets – the Military Version!

2008-07-23T13:30:00.001-07:00

I guess we’re all pretty dysfunctional when it comes to keeping our mouth shut. The nonsense with Terry Childs is still going on and now a cop in Hayward is facing some problems of his own. Since when has it been so difficult to maintain trust or at the very least, not get caught?

Maybe we’re just paying more attention to it, these days, but I remember a simpler time when people who stole secrets or illicitly shared information had the good taste to keep it to themselves. That’s the whole purpose of the exercise, right? Trading of information with people who would otherwise have no access to it? Nobody’s excited when you bring gossip they can read on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News.

Julius and Ethel Have a Garage Sale...

2008-07-18T19:14:00.001-07:00

I discussed how to sell company secrets over at Valleywag today. I like having this blog to act as a companion to VW, since I had at least one person immediately tell me "It looks suspicious to say that." I replied back to that person, and I'm telling YOU, that I wouldn't sell intellectual property. As I said in the following post, IT has a responsibility to handle the trust it's been given wisely.

As long as we're on the topic - I put it to you: what's more dangerous - knowing how to steal or not knowing why theft is wrong? One's a practical question - the other requires a specific view point. Think about it and let me know.

Trusted Domain

2008-07-16T10:27:00.001-07:00

Terry Childs - A network engineer/admin with the City of San Francisco - has been jailed on $5 Million bail after being accused of hijacking the city’s network, affecting everything from law enforcement to payroll to email. So far, Mr. Childs has not released any information that would resolve the outages being experienced and his lawyer is screaming about the unusually-high bail that was set. It almost sounds like a bad movie but this is real and the guy is sitting in a jail cell in SF as we speak. Details are available here courtesy the San Francisco Chronicle.

A correctly managed network would have caught this long before it was a problem – auditing and flags for when accounts are locked that shouldn’t be, passwords changed that shouldn’t, etc. Your average company network is rarely managed that well and so it is easy to be caught with your pants down, especially by someone who knows where and how to do it.

Is it easy for any of us to do the same? Of course. Have we ever considered getting even with a boss or a company by locking a service account, reading the CEO’s mailbox or peering into the payroll files? Sure…we’re human. But the difference between good IT and bad IT, between the Terry Childs of the world and the rest of us is that we do not do it. We Never Take Advantage of Their Trust. For every guy like Terry Childs [if he’s guilty – I’m not saying that he is] there’s 10,000 IT guys who have the opportunity to snoop or wreak havoc and never execute it. It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that we never do it. That’s something that the people who cross that line [and there are many examples] have forgotten.

So now you know…

2008-07-14T15:23:00.001-07:00

I was offered a chance to regularly contribute to a major Silicon Valley / IT blog called Valleywag last week. I accepted the opportunity and have been hammering out the first major contribution for the last few days. This is a completely different discipline from IT and so the learning curve has been fairly sharp. The first story went out today and I wanted to share that with you:

http://valleywag.com/5025012/what-apple-can-learn-from-mcdonalds

As some of you might now – I’m professionally passionate about two things: IT and writing. I’ve been turning a buck at the first one and doing the other one for fun. Now writing has taken a long step into the spotlight and I’m struggling to catch up. You can’t see it but I’ve got a grin on my face a mile wide…

Post Burn and Back to Normal

2008-07-11T15:35:00.001-07:00

The ride down Highway 17 is foggy and cool; I’m kicking on the wipers and slowing down to 10 past some construction on the Southbound side. You’d never know we were in a heat wave; the roads are wet and the air is moist. Farther and farther down the 1, I’m passing black patches of earth and dead yellow trees. Was the fire this bad? Wait, was that a burned-out house…Right next to the freeway?

I feel like a tourist rolling through New Orleans – I didn’t know it was this bad and I feel awful for not being more aware. You get numb to the news about ‘bad forest fires’ and it isn’t something you think too much about until you see bare cinder-block foundations and burned-out hulks of cars. I cruise into the lot and look across the road. The fire was right there and you can still smell the smoke – like the way an old campfire ring still smells faintly of woodsmoke. They left the servers in place but took the backups – would it have been enough? I’m glad they didn’t have to find out. It was business-as-usual on a Friday morning. Blind chance was the only reason why.

Yes…still breathing

2008-07-11T15:22:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the lack of news; stand by for a big ol’ announcement at which point it will make a lot more sense as to why I’ve been so quiet. Tim’s taking a big step forward in terms of non-amateur writing.

Ugh...

2008-07-07T20:40:00.001-07:00

The body of Nina Reiser has been found.

I wanted to post this follow-up since I mentioned Hans Reiser a few months ago when I talked about how making software user-friendly assumes that you yourself are, in fact, user friendly. Geek is people+tech and you can't get away from that.

I express my condolences to his children and his family for their loss.

Adventures in Geek

2008-07-07T11:56:00.001-07:00

I haven’t had an issue in the past 10 days that would lend itself to a ‘This is a problem – this is how I solved it’ type of post but I thought I would list the different issues I’ve worked:

1. Set up a Xerox Print/Scan/Fax station for fun and profit! Sometimes the calls run to a pattern. I had a week where three different companies had network switch issues and it drove me crazy wondering why they all had Netgear switches and they all died right at the same time. I got over it and this last week I had three different ‘setup a network printer’ calls for three different companies.

Setting up a Windows network printer is simple enough – it gets more involved when they’re using those Toshiba or Xerox scan/fax/print/copy workstations. Setting them up as a network printer is fine, patching one of the LAN drops as an analog port [see #2] is also simple enough. The scan function is more involved because it wants to scan to a network folder location OR do scan-to-email, meaning that it needs a live SMTP server.

In the second instance, they had an SBS server with an open SMTP port on the internal network, no problem to set up scan-to-mail beyond creating an Exchange account. The first one has hosted Exchange; how do you get port 25 opened on both sides to allow scan-to-mail to take place? I was thinking of setting up an SMTP relay internal to the LAN but it would still require a trusted connection to the Hosted Exchange service (hours of phone support). In the end, we went the other route: set up an FTP server inside that stored all scanned docs to a folder that we also shared through Windows Networking.

A couple of notes on that process: Toshiba has Xerox beat in that they allow for simple Windows File Sharing on scan-to-mail. The Xerox 7655 I worked with didn’t have this although they had FTP and this was simple enough to create. But why wouldn’t Xerox cover this with the customer when they purchased the copy center? “By the way, to use Scan-to-file, you’ll need an FTP server set up." I keep seeing a recurring trend among vendors to not close the loop for setting things or telling the customer what is involved to successfully set up their product. I guess this is why I get paid the big bucks but really, shouldn’t it be part of the service? A to Z? Alpha and Omega? Help me out here, guys.

3. Standards are a thing of beauty – I don’t know why I didn’t think of it ahead of time, but fortunately someone did. Our usual cabling and telco vendor Talisman Networks has embraced the concept that CAT6 and RJ45 jacks are good for both LAN and telco. Because of this, we were able to quickly and easily transform a LAN port to an analog telco line – 35 seconds or less. How does it work? Simple:

As you can see, an RJ45 connector has 8 wires wired in 1 of 2 configurations [straight-through or crossover]. It’s simply an extension of the smaller RJ11 connector (a simple telephone plug) which uses 2-6 wires. So if you have an RJ45 port wired to 2-6 telco wires, all you do is run a CAT6 patch cable from that port to another RJ45 port on your patch panel and presto – your LAN port now dials out. You don’t have to install separate RJ11 jacks in your little LAN biscuit that’s installed at each desk.

Sweet, no?

My Beef with Vista

2008-06-30T08:10:00.001-07:00

Yes, yes…everyone hates Vista. Yes, yes – you have a horror story. I try to be positive, even in the face of overwhelming evidence and here even, I’m trying to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness. I think I’m too optimistic for my own good sometimes. Here follows a quick vignette and some thoughts about Microsoft Vista Enterprise. May you use it wisely to determine Vista’s appropriateness in your organization.

I’m working a laptop recovery for a Vista-loaded Lenovo T61 and have been recovering the user’s 177 Gb of data using that dandy USB-based laptop SATA tool that they sell down at Fry’s for $30. Had to find 180Gb of free data but that’s fine. I’m into the 3rd major attempt to back up this user’s data prior to reimage using Windows Deployment Services and it’s still not a foregone conclusion that this process will be successful. Here’s what I’ve experienced when backing up data on a Windows Vista laptop:

1. I’d love to do a byte-for-byte backup of this device, but A) Windows backup doesn’t work with this device; you can’t just backup a single folder or drive like you used to [correct me if I’m wrong] and B) Robocopy /MIR on this laptop seems to get wiggy and by wiggy I mean, ‘starts reporting that it’s copying things from the C: of my laptop’ who wants to put his personal MP3 collection on a users’ workstation?

2. A straight copy-and-paste of the files hung all weekend, I killed it and noted that it hung around 27 Gbs and never made any progress beyond that point.

3. Retrying the robocopy [hey, I might get lucky], I get the same personal file reporting problem. I got around that by moving all files to a single ‘new’ folder on the root of the source drive and re-firing the robocopy. It’s still going as we speak.

The beef comes in the fact that simple tasks like copying files don’t work easily. Lots of workarounds and alternatives must be explored before the process of migrating A LOT of data across USB 2.0 can commence. That sound like a fun way to spend Monday morning? I didn’t think so. Random hardwaer driver issues and functionality problems are still an issue; I’m still screaming about how my Broadcom wired-LAN driver randomly fails when you disconnect and reconnect a LAN cable. The user interface, wit the extra step of killing the User Acceptance pane every time you execute a system task – it ‘s just annoying. It’s like they put the training wheels back on the bike because some people still haven’t put the time in to learn how ride and we’re all paying the price. Hopefully, maybe three or service packs from now, Vista will work as seamlessly as XP. I don’t want to sound like an old curmudgeon here, boys, but stuff like this didn’t happen in Vista. A word to the wise…

Where the Hardware and the Wetware Meet - Part 3

2008-06-26T10:05:00.001-07:00

Wow – take the wind out my sails, why don’t you? I happened upon this link and since it says anything I might have said and better – I present the following in lieu of a ‘Part 3’ post. If I can’t improve upon the silence…well, you get the idea.

[[ Link – Guy Kawasaki – The Art of Customer Service ]]

What I would add to this info is, this is a collective process, customer service. In large, bloated organizations, it's easy for the TOP to hand out some chunky memo to satisfy accounting but slaughters whatever intangible asset they have in their customer relationships. Don't do that. Remember that human beings are on both ends of that line or website portal or email - make either side miserable and you suffer.

How do you quantify your customer service? In other words - do you have real numbers for how well you are doing? Do you collect them and review them regularly? I'm not just talking about taking polls, do your CSRs get to poll your customers and do you have a way to weed out the Jerks? I mentioned the Sprint thing where they fired their worst customers and the reason they knew who was good and who was bad was because they had the empirical data to back it up. Do you?

I was thinking about this - tell me how it smells to you: take this data and use it to identify your top 5 worst customers. Create a project and team to go after those 5 and 'kill them with kindness'. Sit down with them, talk about what bothers them about you and then see if you can fix it. Make a genuine attempt to satisfy these people and then, if that doesn't work, fire them. Practice the art of differentiation for both your bottom-of-the-barrel employees and your bottom-of-the-barrel customers.

In a lot of ways, your CS experience is a mirror for your corporate experience. If you have a great product and a management team that is trusted and liked, that will come through in how your company is being presented by your representatives. If your environment is dysfunctional and policies make it look like the lunatics are running the asylum, there's only so much your CSRs can do to hide that from the public. We aren't Superman...when your policies make us crazy, we do our best to soldier on and that is all we can do.

Customer Service in IT will always be with us and there is never a truly valuable IT position that does not involve dealing with a customer. All that being said, I'd like to do it well and help other people do the same. I'm not necessarily passionate about it - I just want to do it right.

Where the Hardware and the Wetware Meet - Part 2

2008-06-21T21:42:00.001-07:00

Having been in the business of IT for 13 years, I can say with confidence that there was never a situation where the problem was only technical in scope. There was always a human factor, always a business factor - there was always a customer service facet to the project, the job, the trouble ticket, the phone call. When I ignored that, I got into trouble.

Customer Service - how to do it right - has always interested me, if only from a perspective of self-preservation. I don't really care for it, if you asked me then or now, I yearn for the day that we can just take the toy out of the box and play with the toy and not have to worry about how others will find it, work with it, break it, whatever. I think it's the seeking after simplicity -- just fix the thing and don't worry about anything else. I already know that life doesn't work that way and so, I don't think that way either.

But, how do you DO customer service well? How do you ensure you're taking care of your customers and your CSRs at the same time? How do you maximize customer satisfaction and profit margins at the same time? How do you emphasize quality without sacrificing time or cost? Clearly, this is a balancing act and there are many people who are interested in finding the perfect equation - I am one of those people.

The Problem of Customer Service

CSRs experience the joy of living between rocks and hard places. The rock of the company that wants them to maximize profit by 'instituting a quality process' in every interaction they undertake and the hard place of customers that want to whine, wheedle or bullyrag privileges out of the CSR that they have no business asking for.

Everyone has a point, of course. The business needs to maximize profit and maintain reasonable customer service expectations (nobody gets rich by writing checks, right?) and the customer knows that he can get something for nothing maybe 7 times out of 10 by behaving rude, unreasonable, unpleasant or all of the above. Why shouldn't the customer try to get something for free if the company is willing to offer it? Why shouldn't the company insist on paying as little overhead as possible? In the space between the business and the customer lives your Customer Service Reps. They're the civilians caught in the crossfire between two armies trying to claim as much real estate as possible.

The constant push and pull from both sides - constantly negotiating with both to make them as happy as possible - it wears you down after a while. Trying to mate customer expectations with the recent "All call documentation will be completed prior to next call and within your 2 minute wrap-up time" memo that circulated down...there's no way that you can't get dragged down by it.

Looking at the problem from a pop-rocks-psychology standpoint, it's not hard to understand the basic rule: you are what you're surrounded by. This is why we tell people to surround themselves with successful people to be successful. If that be the case, why is it so hard to understand that your CSR or phone support reps are unhelpful and/or unhelpful? They're surrounded by unpleasant and/or unhelpful people all day long! That guy who insisted his keyboard came from the factory with spilled Coke stuck under the keys and the lady who didn't realize her computer had to be plugged in to work - is it really that hard to understand that keeping your cool when dealing with jerks [or other, unpolite descriptors] takes a toll on you? All the mantras, all the silly jargon acronyms (Remember Together Everyone Achieves More?) - their effectiveness gets eroded like a cliff constantly pounded by waves. Coffee mugs, corporate events that do indoor go-kart racing and paintball - that stuff does only so much to counteract the mental hoodoo that gets put on you by people who treat you like a punching bag for hours in a day.

Does any of this sound like ground-breaking information? I doubt it. I put it out here to bring up the biggest problem of all, the one that stands in the way of making life better as a customer service representative for your company: Your company already knows how hard it is to be a customer service representative - they just don't care. Yes, I said it! Let the kingdom know that the Emperor wears no clothes! Let the sky fall, let the bears catch Goldilocks and let the wolf forever escape from the Woodsman! Yes, I said it...the problem with customer service is that the company is only willing to solve the problems of customer service if they manifest a clear and present danger to the profit margin. Since those problems are difficult to quantify in terms of bottom line impact (most of the time) companies will focus on the things that do have a direct effect on their bottom line. This is why people write "[Company Name] Horror Story" blog entries - they know that companies are afraid of "Bad press" (whatever that is, anymore) and will respond more rapidly than someone saying "I'll never shop here again!" Bad press can and does affect a bottom line...so do a lot of other retaliatory tactics that jerks, CSR and customer alike, have learned to execute. Getting a company's attention through outrageous behavior has been quietly condoned, mostly because the company hadn't addressed the problem and created a process for it.

As companies are becoming more aware of the cost of jerks as customers, they're beginning to do more about them. Case in point, Sprint fired a number of their 'problem customers' and the boost in morale to their CSRs was significant. Is firing customers the answer? Is there a way that we can all get together, sing Kumbaya and eat s'mores in the business world? Do you have to be Sprint to fire a customer? Let's take a station break and consider the possibilities in Part 3.

Technorati Tags: Technology,IT,Business

Where Hardware and the Wetware Meet - Intermezzo

2008-06-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

I have [a lot] more to say about customer service and I'll get to it momentarily. In the meantime, Consumerist has discovered a GREAT piece of data on Comcast's efforts to balance tech, customer service and profit margins. No surprise to anyone, it's failing miserably - read more in the jump:

[Consumerist.com - Comcast Knows They Suck]

Where the Hardware and the Wetware Meet

2008-06-12T20:48:00.001-07:00

I talked about this earlier, creating a customer service department with great retention of both customers and employees is the dream of every service company. I don’t know anyone who enjoys the reputation of ‘perfect customer service’ or even ‘consistently good’. IT isn’t directly concerned with ‘customer service’ – it’s ancillary to the core service of providing technical services but still very important.

I've heard a lot of talk on the subject of building great service organizations, usually by management consultants, managers and business owners. I've rarely read anything written from the trenches, by people who did it for a living and not just as 'research' for more than 3 months. I thought I'd offer a few points from that perspective to help explain why customer service / tech support organizations have a high burn rate and why you occasionally hear a 'horror story' about a rep that lost it and took it all out on you.

What’s weird about IT is how the mating of ‘people’ and ‘tech’ is different depending on your job role. For instance, doing phone support is a difficult job – you must understand the technology to where you can describe it blindfolded to someone who may be seeing it for the first time. It requires people and communication skills. So does being a consulting systems engineer. As anyone will tell you, though, doing phone support is usually considered* the bottom rung of a support organization whereas being a consulting systems engineer is considered to be a career target. What is the difference between the two? The difference is in two things: The perception of value that the solution has to the client and how integral you are to everything working correctly. That's challenge #1.

Let's look deeper, IT is not only concerned with the public's perception of value - we've learned by experience that people will sometimes take a while to understand what we're advocating. We have our own perception of value, based on the geek factor of the solution we're implementing. That's challenge #2.

The wetware manifests itself again for challenge #3: People freely translate 'professional courtesy' to mean 'punching bag'. Every service organization, no matter what service they provide, experiences this: You can have 100 great customers who treat you politely and thank you for your help - Customer 101 will be rude, snarky, petty, condescending and unpleasant. Guess which one we will take with us? Actually, we might not if we were only treated rudely 1% of the time - the actual numbers are probably in the 15-30% range.

Challenge #4? Your management. Management has to not only provide consistently positive customer service, they have to do it without sacrificing their profit margins. They're in the business of providing goods and services at a profit - you can't do that by driving away customers or by driving away customer service reps, which also happens to drive away customers. They're in the proverbial space between rock and hard place and so, by extension, are their employees. Business has taught us the value of following a process to ensure quality, but human interactions consistently challenge that logic.

So, these are [some of] the challenges being faced by IT. My question to you is: what do we do about them?

More DNS Fun

2008-06-10T13:27:00.001-07:00

Got spanked on a DNS problem again today. As much as it makes my cheeks burn, problems like this are always instructive. Good judgement comes from experience – Experience comes from poor judgement. As with every other technical issue, the first step is Don’t Panic.

Moving on – we look to see whether the IP address of the server you can’t reach responds. F’rinstance – you can’t get to host.domain.com – can you get to the IP of host.domain.com? You do know the IP, right? (That’s a hint, kids…get in the habit of knowing the DNS and IP address of your host servers). That aside, assuming the IP responds, we move onto troubleshooting the DNS. Your own workstation can become a DNS troubleshooting command center. It all begins with NSLOOKUP. If you’re like me, you previously left the use of NSLOOKUP to finding out if your DNS server could resolve a DNS name to an IP or vice-versa. NSLOOKUP is capable of so much more.

Need to see what a DNS server thinks your A records are? Need to know what MX records you’re using? NSLOOKUP has you covered. You can set an alternate DNS server as your own, helpful when you think your IPs are set one way but everyone else thinks differently. You can also see what type of A records are set up for your domain, according to that DNS server and that has its own set of benefits.

Using the Help guide of NSLOOKUP (Pasted below) – see if some of these tools can help make your next DNS problem easier to solve. 10 or 15 minutes here can save you countless hours elsewhere.

Commands:   (identifiers are shown in uppercase, [] means optional)

NAME            - print info about the host/domain NAME using default
                server
NAME1 NAME2     - as above, but use NAME2 as server
help or ?       - print info on common commands
set OPTION      - set an option

 all                 - print options, current server and host
 [no]debug           - print debugging information
 [no]d2              - print exhaustive debugging information
 [no]defname         - append domain name to each query
 [no]recurse         - ask for recursive answer to query
 [no]search          - use domain search list
 [no]vc              - always use a virtual circuit
 domain=NAME         - set default domain name to NAME
 srchlist=N1[/N2/.../N6] - set domain to N1 and search list to N1, N2,
                       and so on
 root=NAME           - set root server to NAME
 retry=X             - set number of retries to X
 timeout=X           - set initial time-out interval to X seconds
 type=X              - set query type (for example, A, ANY, CNAME, MX,
                       NS, PTR, SOA, SRV)
 querytype=X         - same as type
 class=X             - set query class (for example, IN (Internet), ANY)
 [no]msxfr           - use MS fast zone transfer
 ixfrver=X           - current version to use in IXFR transfer request

server NAME     - set default server to NAME, using current default server
lserver NAME    - set default server to NAME, using initial server
finger [USER]   - finger the optional NAME at the current default host
root            - set current default server to the root
ls [opt] DOMAIN [> FILE] - list addresses in DOMAIN (optional: output to
               FILE)

 -a          -  list canonical names and aliases
 -d          -  list all records
 -t TYPE     -  list records of the given type (for example, A, CNAME,
                MX, NS, PTR, and so on)

view FILE       - sort an 'ls' output file and view it with pg
exit            - exit the program

Some Weekend Fun

2008-06-07T19:27:00.000-07:00

An old clip of an old favorite - the robots of MST3k argue the Mac vs. PC war.

Microsoft Kicks Butt...Again - Task Market

2008-06-03T10:47:00.000-07:00

The reason Microsoft owns you is simple; they're big but they're agile. It isn't just desktop operating systems, it isn't just servers, it isn't just mail, it isn't just SQL, or Office apps or instant messaging or internet servers or any of the several thousand software titles they've created or bought in the last 20 years. They're the company everyone loves to hate, but every once in a while, whatever hate or vitriol you might be collecting has to fall away when confronted with the awesomeness of a simple tool backed by a huge infrastructure.

Behold Task Market. Outsource your simple, one-off jobs to the Internet and sell your spare time and unique talents to the same place! Get paid via Paypal...what else is there? Amazon Mechanical Turk is roughly the same idea, but here the idea is to get serious work for serious money. It's stunning.

Why so? When my wife was attempting to earn extra cash as a stay-at-home mom, I was surprised at how difficult it was to line up gigs doing simple one-off jobs. She'd cruise the day gigs at Craigslist and anyone who's done it will tell you trying to line up a steady source of income with the child care needs of a toddler and no regular babysitting is difficult. In the middle of all that, I was reading about other stay-at-home moms, professionals who took a couple of years off to have a child. They were also suffering from the 1-5 year lag time in their careers; it's hard to get back on this merry-go-round once you've spent a significant amount of time off of it.

I was thinking at the time, 'Wouldn't it be great to have a website where moms could go, get jobs that you could do with your broadband and computer access at home (which is almost anything a business does these days) and get paid?' I toyed with the idea - even came up with a catchy name: mompower.com. Nothing came of it - the more immediate needs of getting cash and personal issues meant that I had yet another back-burner idea that I wouldn't get to for a while, if at all.

Additionally - I owned a small-business IT company for a few years. At the time, I was dreaming of a way to have a stable of IT techs that would bid on available jobs, complete them and get paid - all virtually. No office space, no unnecessary overhead. Again, never got off the ground and for much the same reason: I didn't have the time or commitment to make it happen. The idea about virtualization still stuck with me; businesses that run on making virtualization at some point had to embrace the same type of thinking for themselves.

Well darn it if MS wasn't thinking the same thing. Taskmarket is almost exactly what I was thinking of, but with the wider market space of anyone who has a talent that can be virtually outsourced - most knowledge workers fall under this umbrella. It's stunning. It's like what Ebay did for garage sales. As I told a friend (MR) - this is stunning, this is revolutionary. This is interesting and this is worth watching.

Stupid Question? Why Can't You Think of an Answer, Then?

2008-06-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

Is it still a stupid question when you realize you have no articulate answer? A client asked me a question that should have been simple: When running CAT-5 lines, why do you use a punch-down rack?

You've seen how network hardware is usually wired - LAN drops in your cube run up into the wall or drop-ceiling and over to a network rack where 12 - 72 RJ45 connectors are punched down - you can see what I'm talking about by going to this link. The way your network lines run, you're running across maybe 4 or 5 different connected CAT-5 lines to actually get to the server or network connection. Since it's all CAT5 line, why would you terminate this line at different punchdowns (which cost around $200 a piece, by the way) instead of simply terminating that CAT5 line into the switch?

So the client asks me and I start explaining, but right in the middle of explaining it, it hits the both of us: I really don't know why you would do that. I have a general idea, but it all boils down to: this is the way I've always seen it done and you should know by know that you never, ever say that to a fellow engineer.

So I called Travis over at Talisman Networks and put it to him - I thought I'd share it with you: Breaking up the LAN connection into smaller, discrete elements makes it easier to troubleshoot. It's why your house isn't wired directly to the city power grid or to the Hetch Hetchy water mains. Putting the different parts of the link to smaller pieces means less hassle to figure out what is wrong, less hassle to replace. It's simple - I know - but it's something I hadn't thought of and since it took that much for me to figure out, I thought I'd save you a bit of time.

Sick Days - When a Geek Turns to Nyquil

2008-05-30T08:18:00.000-07:00

I hate being sick. The whole idea of getting sick and calling off work sounds great on the surface but always manages to turn into a black hole of angst by the end of the day. Here's how it works:

5:30am - Wake up, realize you won't make it. Call or send an email in saying 'I'm sick'.
5:30 - 7:30am - Try to sleep more, because of the Nyquil or whatever you get maybe another hour of sleep but your body clock ain't havin' it.
7:30 - 10am - Get up and stumble around, eventually you make a pot of coffee and eat some corn flakes.
10am - 11am - Try to sleep more but the 4 cups of coffee you drank because you made to much is interrupting any sleep you might get. You're too wired to sleep but too loopy to do anything.
11 - 12pm - Eat some more, try to watch an old movie you've been meaning to get around to.
12-3pm - Look around at the house at all those 'honey-do' projects you've been thinking about and realize that you have some time to get to them. Attempt them for 45 minutes before realizing that you're too tired, too sick, too whatever to do them effectively. Leave a leaking container of 'Liquid Nails' on your porch.
3-5pm - Get depressed when you realize that you tried to everything but ended up doing nothing, not even resting.

I despise sick days; our being-is-doing lifestyle flies in the face of illness! How dare our weak bodies fall to infinetesimal bugs - don't they know we have a schedule to keep? I'm being silly of course; easy to do when you mix your cold meds and the combined ingredients leave you with a floaty-head-Steven-Wright-Jack-Handey kind of reality.

I think daytime TV plays a part in us wanting to feel better so as to resume our regularly scheduled lives. Have you tried to sit through an episode of Jerry Springer or The View? I've never felt time so completely wasted as I've felt after spending 30 or 60 minutes watching those programs. When the credits roll and you've watched 20 commercials for check-cashing places and correspondence schools - you just feel unemployable. You feel useless and you feel like you should be sent to prison for wasting your life like this. Why do I get like this every time I get sick?

The short answer is that we're human, we get sick and we should take the opportunity to stop and let the world pass us by for one day. Spend that day in quiet reflection that our sickness is just one day, compared to the sufferers of chronic illness the world over. Realize that our lives are so jam-packed with tasks that we risk losing sight of the larger picture. Balance the overarching desire to produce, to accomplish with the desire to reflect on what it is we are producing and accomplishing for.

But then, I'm not sure I've achieved a sufficient level of Zen to realize that. I just know I'm glad to be back at work.

A Little More About Gas Prices

2008-05-27T18:45:00.001-07:00

I've been saying that, as gas prices go up, we're going to start seeing a resurgence of stories about gas siphoning and that great urban legend about the kid who mistakes the septic tank for the gas tank on an RV will be trotted out once again. I'm surprised to note that I was wrong - you don't hear about gas siphoning, but gas is being stolen anyway. Read.

DNS and You - Part II

2008-05-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

In our last episode, we discussed how DNS weirdness can make your life miserable. I advocate everyone getting to know DNS at least on a basic level, so you know what to look at or who to call when things are going awry. Just as before, remember that behavior of your Internet experience depends on who is providing it. They have their own DHCP servers, DNS, firewalls, switches, etc. Since they have their own DNS servers and you're using them, problems with those servers will pretty much take you out at the knees. You're working on a very complex telephone that suddenly lost it's own telephone book. If your system is configured, or can be configured, to look to alternate DNS servers, this wouldn't affect you, but most internal computers are forced to use whatever DNS servers exist on that network. Still, there's light at the end of the tunnel. Let's start the process by discussing several common DNS-related issues and what they look like:

Everyone Can Get to Your Website Except For You - Your corporate website may be hosted by someone like GoDaddy; this is becoming increasingly common. What might end up happening is that you stop seeing your corporate website and in a panic, you think the server is out. Then you find out from a friend who works/lives elsewhere that he can see your website just fine. What gives? The answer is to do an NSLOOKUP (see below) and see what IP address your website returns. Then use the NSLOOKUP tool below to see if they agree. If not, chances are your webhosting company made a change to your IP address without telling you. Update your Internal DNS server to point to the correct IP and check it again; chances are, you'll be fine.

You Can Get to Your Website, but No One Else Can (outside of your network) - Another panic-inducer. The server is obviously not down, you're browsing your web site, but no one is able to. Here, we quickly ping the server and discover that it's alive. If you can see the server but no one else can, chances are the server is no longer responding to the IP address that is assigned it in External DNS. Confirm this by running the web-based NSLOOKUP tool below. If someone has changed this IP address and pointed it somewhere the server is not listening, guess what? No content. Fix this and get back on the road to up-time.

E-mail Randomly Disappears or Gets Rejected from Your Mail Server - Ran into this last week, a client's mail server was not delivering mail to Comcast or SBC. We arrived at the conclusion pretty quickly, so here it is: your mail domain needs to have a reserve-lookup PTR record. Large mail domains will regularly perform a reverse-lookup on your mail to confirm that you are, in fact, not a spammer. Spammers usually do not have a reverse-lookup PTR record, it makes them easier to track down. Put 2 and 2 together and the mail domains started to refuse mail that didn't have a reverse-PTR record for their mail domain. If you have a mail domain, make sure a PTR record is created for your mail.domain.com address to point back to the IP address of mail.domain.com.

My Website is Slow! - Surprisingly, DNS doesn't directly solve this but can put you on the right path. Running a TRACERT command helps show how your Internet traffic is routed and can help identify places where traffic slows down.

C:\> TRACERT 10.11.95.1
1 1 ms 1 ms <1>
2 <1>
3 3 ms 3 ms 3 ms 10.11.96.254
4 6 ms 14 ms 6 ms 10.11.95.1

As you can see from the example above, the time between hops was in the 3-6ms range. If you see hops that suddenly jump from 10-15ms up to 100-150ms, this can help identify a point where your network traffic is slowing down and therefore affecting the performance of your website.

Those are four common problems and some great Internet websites have saved my bacon from time to time. Here's a few of them to get you started:

Great DNS and Network Troubleshooting Tools

NSLOOKUP - Imagine this tool like directory assistance. It'll tell you what an IP address belongs to, or what IP a domain name directs to. The beginning of every successful DNS troubleshooting is knowing where stuff is located. NSLOOKUP helps make that happen.

PING - This tool is the virtual ping-pong ball of the Internet. It sends packets of data at an IP or domain name and listens for replies. This confirms that a server or IP or domain name is alive and responding - something else that you need to troubleshoot successfully.

TRACERT - See how your Internet traffic gets routed; the time it takes to run from one hop to the next can help you understand where things slow down if you're troubleshooting Internet slowness.

Is it Down For Everyone or Just Me - This is a great tool because I got tired of IM'ing my friends to ask if a corporate website was visible for them. We were hosting on Earthlink and Earthlink Hosting, the $99 version, died about 4 times in 12 months for a variety of reasons. The point is, this site will tell you rather quickly if it's a problem with the site, with your internal DNS or something else entirely. It's a great first stop on the road to DNS wellness.

Kloth.Net - Dig / NSLookup / WHOIS / DNSBL-Check - This is a great grab-bag of stuff; look up your IP, do a ping, see if your IP address has put on an Internet no-fly list for some reason.

Internet Ping is Here and Here - Sometimes you want to ping your external IP from the outside and verify that it is alive. Use these tools to make that happen.

Worst Laptop Support Visit. Ever.

2008-05-20T07:50:00.000-07:00

Think you're having a bad day? Try being this guy - he had a Dell hardware tech plug in his external hard drive, the back up to the laptop being worked on by the tech, and then format it for some reason. Whenever you have someone lose a hard drive come to you, almost in tears because they've now lost pictures, letters, financial data and are facing either total loss or a $1-5K bill for data recovery - your first response usually is 'well didn't you back it up?' But when someone does back up, diligently performs the daily or weekly task - can you blame them for going a little postal?

I've accidentally killed hard drives before - it's a aw-shucks, no-one-to-blame-but-myself kind of thing. I don't do it now but every technician has had that 'whoops...oh, no..." moment happen to them. Good judgment comes from experience - experience comes from poor judgment. It'll be an expensive lesson for the customer, an expensive lesson for Dell (they're probably losing not a few sales over this fiasco) and it'll be the most expensive lesson this tech has ever experienced. I'm sure Dell will find a reason to let that tech go and maybe his contracting company as well.

Ouch.

Internet Tough Guy to the Rescue

2008-05-16T07:25:00.001-07:00

I got in an internet argument over on Valleywag - I wanted to post the big post I sent there since it relates to a frustration I have about software development.

"As our friend above notes, after pushing his own product via Comment Space, this open-source OS is 'still in alpha stage, meaning it is not feature complete and is not recommended for everyday use.'

What the heck is the point of EVEN recommending something if you already know it's in Alpha? That's a Marketing department talking - guys who are just trying to make the sale and not thinking about the ramifications of deploying a product to tens of thousands of users that's not even ready yet.

I'm not a fan of GM or of CTOs in general, but at least I respect a guy who is not afraid to back off when he sees a problem bigger than he wants to tackle. What I don't respect are people who don't think about the real-world users of software and therefore, think it's all about opening their mouth to recommend something without thinking of what it might cost to execute.

I've run Operations in small and large companies for several years, it's exhausting to cope with the issues around Enterprise applications and hardware and then have someone who *should* know what they're talking about run up and go "I don't understand...why don't we use more open source tools?"

I always want to say, "Just stop at the part where you said you didn't understand. You're right, you don't...go learn and then understand and then come back into the room. Then you'll have something to contribute."

It's like listening to good ol' boys wax poetic about Chevy when they see a broken-down Ford. I thought IT and software dev and open-source was made up of people who were more intelligent than that. I'd love to think so - but it's hard to believe it when I see people take every opportunity to present a straw-man, inch-deep argument to a problem that takes so much more to solve."

The Crash Run

2008-05-14T15:07:00.000-07:00

Got an email Thursday, got a ticket a few minutes afterward. I was in Tempe on Monday morning. The job was simple: set up a new office for a client. Get them running with phones, Internet, new server and network infrastructure. Handle the problems, make the client happy - make the office productive by the time you leave.

Some thoughts about doing a job like this, and then a few notes about how to take a bare-wall, bare-floor office to "Go" with as few headaches as possible.

First - doing this for your boss means that he trusts you. Ergo, don't use the company travel as an excuse to get blitzed or act like an idiot in a remote location. You're wearing a company shirt and the world is smaller than you think. Second - don't treat it like an 8-5 gig; you're going to work harder on location than you do when you're in the office. Don't whine. Third - Do your best to make everyone happy...if you like this kind of brightwork, don't annoy people or they won't ask you to do it again. You'll have to charge expenses to your credit card, you'll face more inconvenience than you expected - this is all part and parcel of this type of business. I said it before, I'll say it again: Don't whine.

There are ways to make your stay comfortable - I like to start with my hotel location and use Google maps to map food, a movie house, the local branch of my gym (Nationwide gym memberships help) and a few other amenities that you'll usually need without knowing you'll need it (drug store, anyone?). Take the opportunity to cruise the town - walk the grid and see what you can see. You go from being a commuter to being a tourist - take advantage of that and enjoy being out of your comfort zone.

As to how to make a bare-wall office into a breathing remote location, start simple and then work your way out. The major pieces of any office are: real estate, telco, power, ISP, AC, security, furniture and local IT hardware. You'll be directly or indirectly involved with all of this. Starting from the real estate, you'll be working with the landlord organization. They might be able to handle renting, power, AC, telco and sometimes ISP. Figure out quickly what they won't be doing for you and then start making your plans to provide those services.

The landlord, even if they aren't providing the extra services, will know the best local people to work with; work with them to get in touch with these people. The landlord I worked with had a telco wiring installer there in 90 minutes - it would have taken me that long to find the right person in the Yellow Pages. Identify your local ISP options, get them into a fast matrix for speed, cost and quality. Do the same for your telco provider.

Here's a pro-tip that I had to learn the hard way. It's helpful to learn telco jargon when setting up an office. The phone company installs wires to an office at the Minimum Point of Entry (MPOE aka DMARC) but it's up to you to get them wired into the walls in your suite and ensure that your phone jacks actually can dial out from there. When the phone company is setting up your account, make sure you have that conversation: "Is this going to the MPOE ("Em-PO") or will you be bringing it all the way to the office?" They'll typically do that for a fee or you can get a local telco installer to do that for you.

Start making a quick Gantt chart for what you're doing; your ISP install will usually be your longest project in terms of days. They typically go 14-30 days out to get a T1 or DSL circuit installed. Work with that as your drop-dead date and try to fit as many other move-in tasks within that window...don't get the DSL installed and then talk furniture. If it's a remote office and you'll be onsite for a 'go-live' period, try and pack those deliveries as tightly as possible - at the bottom of it all, you have to get it done - you don't go home until it's done...you don't make the customer happy by leaving some loose ends.

Keep in mind that with every project, there's always the unforeseen cost. There's the ISP that doesn't reveal the limitations of their service, the telco engineer that doesn't bring the wiring all the way to the suite. Learn to deal, learn to plan around these things and know that these things are just part of the adventure. It's not an inconvenience if you can find a way to enjoy the journey.

IT Job Survival Tip #1

2008-05-07T20:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a silly question: How do you get run over by a steam roller?

Maybe you've caught that outtake from "Austin Powers" where the evil henchman guard stood in place and let a steam roller run over him. Here it is again if you didn't:

You might crack up at the sillyness of it - where else but a spoof comedy would anyone be dumb enough to stand there and let something moving 3 mph run you over? The weird thing is, sometimes we can catch ourselves pulling this exact same mistake. Not a real steam roller, sure - but have you ever found yourself on the wrong side of a layoff, wrong side of a year-end review and wondered 'how did we get here?' Sometimes this is a genuine slap-upside-the-head type of deal, but other times, we could see this coming.

That whole scene is a great metaphor for working corporate IT. Large corporations don't corner on a dime - they often remind me of a large ship that needs several square miles to execute a right turn or a full stop. It takes a while to get them going and it takes a while to stop them - that's the nature of business momentum. Knowing how this operates is important because you need to know when it's time to help the big ship start, help it stop or help it corner. All of this takes talent and experience.

The signs for what is needed and when are pretty clear if you know what you're looking for. For one, your boss should be providing feedback as to how well you're fitting into the organization. S/he should be doing this on a regular basis, even if all you get is what they're saying in an email from 12,000 miles away. How to get valuable feedback from a superior is also a skill worth having and we'll discuss that in more detail later. You can also listen to how your co-workers are treating you - if you're all doing the same dance, it'll be obvious, just as it would be obvious if they were all doing the Robot while you were doing the Safety Dance.

What you want to learn to do is listen to what people are saying AND figure out what you should be doing if the feedback suggests a course change is necessary. To go back to our steam roller, all the guard had to do is walk out of the way. He didn't want to try and stop the steam roller and he also didn't want to wait until his feet were going under the steel to start executing his escape. In the same way, you don't want to wait until your boss is suggesting a 5-minute meeting on Friday afternoon to ask 'how can I do my job better?'

So here's the survival tip I promised: Get in the habit of soliciting feedback from your boss, his boss and your co-workers. Listen to what they tell you and if they give you advice, follow it.

Having a regular dialog with these folks will prove invaluable because it'll keep the bad surprises to a minimum. Believe it or not, no boss wants to write a bad review. He'd much rather 'have a word with you' than put something to paper. If you make that easy for him AND follow his/her suggestions - that'll go a long way with them. Even if you're not actively seeking their feedback - LISTEN TO WHAT THEY'RE SAYING. Sometimes you'll hear the distant hoot of a steam roller heading in your general direction.

Losing your job is rarely a surprise in this day and age. Often, there were a lot of signals you were ignoring or didn't care about. These were your clues that you needed to change something. In IT, as with steam rollers, if you're dumb enough to stand there when danger is approaching, you deserve whatever happens to you.

The Start of It All ...

2008-05-05T13:39:00.000-07:00

So like other developments that are a little weird and waay too far ahead of the curve, the Difference Engine was one of the first attempts to build a mechanical calculator. Charles Babbage developed this in the 1850s and the major pieces of his work are on display in the British Science Museum.

My wife and I had the privilege to see those pieces and this modern construction of Babbage's Difference engine last year. They said at the time that it was for 'an American museum' and it was a modest surprise to learn where it'll be on display: The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. The reason I mention all of this is - I used another picture I took of this piece as the logo of StartupGeek that you can see above (slightly modified, that is).

The Difference Engine and other pieces of technology reflect the spirit of geeks everywhere and I heartily recommend seeing this up close and in person.

DNS and You - Part I

2008-05-01T07:42:00.000-07:00

Everyone should get to know DNS - Domain Name System - even if it's on a beginner level. It's what will help you from panicking when you suddenly lose visibility with your mail server or people stop seeing your website. DNS acts like a multiple-entry phone book listing. Imagine your phone book and then imagine that it gives your phone, fax, cell, physical address and/or your earth coordinates. However I want to interact with you - this multiple-listing phone book tells me how to do it. DNS is what translates your www.domain.com address into a xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx IP address that your computer understands. DNS is the phone book of the Internet, and like regional yellow books, what you get will vary based on when or where you ask the question.

When your public internet website is separate from the rest of your organization - as in, you don't host your own content, you pay someone like Godaddy to do it for you - this creates its own little problem. For instance, you own domain.com and this covers all kinds of stuff, www.domain.com, mail.domain.com and, oh yeah, any of your devices that exist on your internal network will also be called workstation.domain.com or printer.domain.com. Domain.com has a lot of disparate parts that are probably not on the same server or even in the same location. How do we pull it all together? The answer is DNS. DNS will store all of this information and then provide it to your workstation or laptop when it is asking where it can go to get a specific thing - mail, printing, files, etc.

Now let's add a new wrinkle - Not every workstation in your organization has a public IP address, not every DNS request is asking for a public Internet address. This is the difference between external and internal DNS. Rather than making every workstation go out to the Internet when it wants something on the internal network and making every device on your internal network visible on the external, Internet-based, space - we use internal DNS. We handle that by making a server responsible for looking up IP addresses in your internal network - printers, servers, other workstations - this internal DNS server will manage where they are, not an external one. Additionally, this internal DNS server will be responsible for getting public IP addresses from external DNS servers - rather than 100 workstations making DNS requests, one server handles this job. This not only cuts down on traffic on your WAN link, the internal DNS server can store frequently-looked up addresses and make getting Internet traffic faster for you.

The differences between external and internal DNS can cause a lot of havoc. When these two address books disagree, the usual result is that some people will see your website and others won't. Some people can send email and others can't. We'll talk about some basic problems and solutions to DNS-related issues in Part II.

Geeks Are People, Too (And Sometimes, Not Very Nice)

2008-04-25T14:32:00.000-07:00

I didn't want to say anything about the Hans Reiser murder trial currently in progress. But then, this other thing happened and it means it's something that we should be talking about. Kip Macy is a FreeBSD developer - not that I really knew that - but he's also an erstwhile real estate developer who has just recently found himself in the news accepting the award for Worst Landlord Ever. That made me think about the influence of tech on these persons' lives (and vice-versa). I've seen the behavior of many geeks, developers and engineers over the years that show a fascinating level of focus and attention to detail as they resolve a problem. Nothing else matters except the solution; all other considerations are ancillary. This frequently leads to conflict and frustration because who wants to be around someone who can arbitrarily tell you that you don't matter, just because what you represent isn't the goal he is focused on?

It's important to note that tech doesn't exist in a vacuum. These applications, machines and gadgets being invented and used worldwide are still being designed, built and used by people. People are messy, complicated and occasionally stinky biological organisms. From a machine perspective, we're impossibly complex (we still can't effectively articulate what 'love' is) - humanity doesn't conform to logical process flow. As thousands of companies and bosses have found - all the HR process in the world can't counteract a fully functional Jerkbag who happens to work with or for you. A lot of the recent management books have been talking about augmenting your formal process with common sense (get the jerks out, no matter how 'valuable' they seem at the moment...they bring down the performance of your org) demonstrating the necessity of admitting that logic does not solve everything.

You can't design an effective application or process without being aware of this. The most logical programs I've ever seen are also often the most un-sellable pieces of software. People intuitively find them uncomfortable, find reasons not to use them and recommend they not be updated or maintained in an enterprise environment. Other companies (who shall remain nameless) are often forgiven for their less-than-technically-superior applications or products simply because they're just so darn easy to use. I often think of it as providing a channel for an overflowing stream to flow into. Build a path the water wishes to follow - it will follow. Try to insist that the water slow itself down to fit into a pipe that's much to small for it, it will simply overflow and find an alternate route. New 'killer apps' are often not very ingenious - they simply take a number of problems that have been around for years, with solutions that work even if they aren't very effective, and make a solution that is both effective and comfortable to use. It might sound stupid, but they're doing it and they're making a pile of money at it (I'm writing this post on Google Docs...'nuff said).

The point of IT is mating the technical with the biological; when the biological aspect of it is, shall we say, twisted - what does that do to the product you are creating? If you're able to terrorize people in an apartment building because you want to force them out so you can re-develop it, should you be allowed to arbitrate what constitutes 'people-friendly' software? If you're prone to bizarre behavior and are accused of killing your wife, that's essentially stamping 'Does not work and play well with others' on your forehead and then sets you up for a career that's kept well back of the general public. If you're able to become such a jerk (for lack of a better family-friendly word) to accomplish something that is important to you, doesn't that signal that your ability to participate in large people-intensive activities is essentially zero?

Valleywag and other people like to zero in on the sex n' drugs aspect of the Valley; it's entertaining to some but it also signals something that we shouldn't be ignoring. The tech is as only good as the people who make it. Stop thinking 'epicureanism' and start thinking 'secular humanism'. Don't pay lip service to "Our software helps people" - make sure it does. And make sure your user community agrees. Make sure you know what 'helping people' involves - don't try to just be able to say that you tried...do it.

Then there's nothing else to say.

Great Moments in IT – A Visit to the DMV Does Not Inspire Attempted Suicide

2008-04-22T11:10:00.001-07:00

14 Minutes. That’s how long it took me to renew my driver’s license.

I like to give credit where credit is due – not much point in only pointing out the bad example…what not to do. I got my renewal slip in the mail and, with a lot of whining and moaning, I made an appointment to get my CDL renewed.

The DMV and I have a special relationship – among my mother’s many different jobs, she was the official ‘Paperwork person’ at a local junkyard. That means all the paperwork associated with the 1000s of junkers that passed through that place – my mom was the person who would take that paperwork to the DMV and stand in line for hours while they processed every single ‘Salvage’ title. Imagine spending hours of your summer vacation inside the DMV…When you’re 9.

No – I do not like those green eggs and ham.

I just expect the DMV to be both boring, painful and involving an argument with some angry civil servant because no matter how much you prepare, you never get everything correct. I expected it to be bad…I was very surprised to find it the opposite. Yes – I thought ahead and made an appointment. Then, I also visited the ATM and also cajoled my SO to bring the forgotten DMV renewal slip. That was the length and breadth of my prep. After that, walking inside – I was struck by something peculiar: no lines. No lines at the DMV!? Is that even legal? Still bewildered, I walked to the Info line that was only 3 people deep and was given a number to be served by. Then I went and had a seat. 4 ½, 5 minutes later – I was at the front desk processing my renewal and parting with $28. Three minutes after that, my picture was taken and I was out the door.

I was shocked…how long had this been going on? A government office that actually got you out the door on time? I think the DMV, in the time I hadn’t been visiting, has gone through a pretty serious overhaul in terms of process management and information management. They have a system to route you to the right window with a minimum of confusion. The biometric scanning and camera are updated – no muss, no fuss.

Like I said – going to the DMV did not make me miserable. That says so much on its own – all you really have to do to make your customers happy is keep the misery-inducing processes to a minimum. I’m just surprised and pleased to see that philosophy flourishing in a place where you automatically assume it will never occur. I don’t know under who’s keister the match was lit, but the DMV wasn’t horrible to me today and for that – I credit the updated IT and process management that I saw.

IT is supposed to make people’s lives better. In the case of the Department of Motor Vehicles, that has been accomplished. I got what I needed, in record time, and I came out the experience going “Wow – that went better than I could have imagined.”

Nice going.

The Snake Eats Its Tail

2008-04-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

Blogging, like any other media genre, is subject to imploding under its own weight. New media or new mediums have this half-life in which they're born, are fresh for a while and then slowly become everything they claimed to be different from. This has been happening for decades: print journo, radio, television, satellite radio, the Internet.

I think I'm starting to see the beginnings of such (or maybe I'm just catching on) when I see entries like this one over at Scobleizer. Blogging about blogging (he references this page) reminds me of that Louis Black routine on 'the end of the universe':

It's sad to think that people can be both the early-adopter and the early-killer of the same technology. To be an early adopter requires courage and vision. To be an early-killer, you just have to lose courage and vision. The whole idea behind writing is that you have something to talk about. Just so we're all clear: blogging about blogging is not. At least, not if you're a place where people go to hear about things besides blogging. Blogging isn't a fad (unlike Twitter...I'm saying it's a fad - sue me!) but it's still susceptible to irrelevance, just like every other media. I can't say right now that this is something I'll never be guilty of or have never been guilty of - I'm just saying that if this is a medium to be taken seriously, it needs to be serious about what it wants to accomplish.

Especially if it happens to be your day job.

Setting up an SMTP relay server is easy and fun!

2008-04-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

I don't know why I didn't do this sooner.

I've been at several jobs where the lack of SMTP mail capture was a pain point. Exchange migrations, server disasters, spam...whatever. An SMTP mail relay server running on an IIS server is the simple solution to a lot of mail delivery problems.

Just got done with this - it's easy and fun; works with any Server 2003 install running IIS. Try it now!

Set up an SMTP mail relay

Where the Rubber Meets the Road

2008-04-14T08:06:00.001-07:00

It's after 5:30 on a Friday afternoon. We're sitting in a cramped closet space, one by one replacing a set of CAT-5 lines on a misbehaving Netgear switch. I'm hungry and tired, I want to get onto the social event I had lined up for after work.

It's at this point and time that I need to make a run to Fry's to buy a crossover cable for this switch and it gives me an opportunity to pause and reflect. In past jobs, I'd experience the frustration and not-quite-panic that comes from seeing your fun stuff slip away because of a last-minute technical issue. I found myself getting snappish - taking it out on people. I felt myself getting the same kind of 'oh no, my beautiful Friday night is ruined and we got a sitter, ohnoohnoohnoohno!' feeling...I stopped and took a breath.

It is true what they say when they say: "attitude is everything". How you approach the problem, how you approach a situation you don't want to be in - these things are core to the business of IT and the business of being you. Are you the guy they can rely on when it's a matter of life-or-death (literally or figuratively)? Are you the guy who can get the tough assignments and see them through - even when they involve a number of problems you didn't see at the start (the age-old "The resources have been cut in half but the requirements are the same" problem)?

What time and experience have revealed to me is that you don't get the cool job, cool gig or cool project up front. You get those opportunities after you've put the time in on a lot of jobs that prove your ability to handle the mundane, the difficult, the detail-oriented. It's suicide to keep saying "I didn't do my best because that project or job didn't matter. When it matters...then I'll do my best!"

If you can't handle the small stuff, why should they trust you with something big?

We saw the network problem through. It did involve some scheduling changes, but ultimately I had the after-work fun I was hoping to have. I checked back in with the client...they're sailing along. Seeing it through, making sure the client is 100% was worth more than being able to start my weekend on time. It sure makes Monday morning a lot easier.

The Geek in Me

2008-04-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

'Geek' isn't a term I really like - it reminds me of days when all I had to offer the world was a little bit of arcane technical knowledge. Being knowledge-based, it's funny how that tends to push people away rather then draw them closer, but I digress. I think "Geek" is a state of mind - Lifehacker understands this and includes projects that aren't just technical. You can catch up on new apps for Ubuntu or Windows or check out an el-cheapo way to water your backyard garden. 'Geek' isn't limited to your technical ability - it's related more to your ability to be curious about the world, your passion to do things yourself and your desire to fix those things that can be fixed in your life.

That doesn't end with gadgets or doo-dads. It's a way of life and I'm starting to wrap my head around that. I'm completely off the grid when it comes to consumer buying habits or picking up consumer electronics. I just bought my first video game console in years; actually ever - since I never officially bought the Atari 2600 we owned in the 90s. I feel all weird now with the new toys in my house - I didn't buy it for the games, I bought it because I wanted a new DVD player and I didn't want to have to re-buy a player in a few years with the upgrades in DVD formats. It's weird how my mind works - some part of me is saying "do without - you don't need it" and another is going "stop being Archie Bunker!"

Geek is beyond computing and beyond technology - I think that's another fact I'm waking up to. It's the DIY-spirit - the challenge to figure out something you didn't know before, the little voice in your head that says "Other people figured this out - there's no reason that you can't." It drives you forward - it's weird. A fellow geek, a guy I'll just refer to as 'Matt' (because that's his name), showed me a personally designed hydrogen fuel cell that he designed and was testing (by popping clouds of hydrogen off...always a party favorite). He's also completed a vegetable oil / biodiesel conversion on his Land Rover. It wasn't computer-related, but it was very, very technical. It reminded me of the line from the short story Johnny Mnemonic 'you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.'

I like solar power - have liked it for a long time now. The investment has always been cost-prohibitive (big investment up front that gets returned over 3-5 years) for me. I've been inspired by people like solarwarrior.com - I'd love to tell PG&E where to go. It's been one of those if-and-or-when projects that sit somewhere in the back of my head. Now - enter this:

Helium solar-power ballons

Imagine being able to tether some balloons and live 100% off of solar power. My geek sensor is tripping off the scale at the far end! It couldn't be for any other reason - I don't like balloons that much.

Proper Management / How do Deliver a Threat on the Internet

2008-04-04T09:55:00.001-07:00

I found myself chuckling after reading the following link - people like watching a fight and/or a skilled fighter. The internet is no different. After reading hundreds of lame, Internet-tough-guy exchanges over the years, it was refreshing to see a proper "Do what we're asking or we'll sue" notice. It was like watching someone deliver a proper right hook or a complex martial art kick.

You'll note that the CEO of Craigslist - Jim Buckmaster - is very polite, very direct and very professional. I'd like to think that I would respond the same way that he did throughout this exchange.

Craigslist.org and the Craigslistblog.org duke it out via email

Especially take note of the way he doesn't get dragged into the fight with the blogger. It'll be fun to watch how it ends up; I'm betting on Craigslist coming through this just fine.

Your April Fool's Prank Stinks

2008-04-01T14:51:00.001-07:00

Before you get all breathless telling me about the 100th cube to be filled with packing peanuts or the guy who pointed all of his wifi-sucking neighbors to Kittenwar.com, let's get one thing clear:
April Fool's Pranks Are Played Out

Like the 10,000th time you've heard 'Achey-breaky heart' or the Macarena...it's one of those traditions that refuses to die. It's like someone showing up to the baby shower with jello salad - everyone knows and hates jello salad. Even the guy who made the jello salad hates jello salad. So why are we doing this? "I dunno...we've always had jello salad on April 1st."

I love office pranks - don't get me wrong. I came back from vacation to find that everything in my office had been turned upside down. Chair, computer, docking station, printer, paper trays, pencil jars - everything was upside down. I laughed, they laughed and then they let me put it all back together. The knuckleheads who don't know when to give it a rest are the ones that make me crazy. They have all kinds of time and energy to fill a cube with those Chucky-Cheese plastic balls but they can't get their work done!

If you don't want to be on my personal layoff list - do yourself a favor: take that energy and put it to some good use. If I'm paying you by the hour - don't try to bills one or six hours to 'overhead' while you located 300 cubic feet of packing foam.

New Gig Starts In the Morning...

2008-03-30T20:33:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note - the new gig starts in the AM. There might be some delay in additional posts while I get the new schedule worked out.

Cheers...

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised...

2008-03-24T17:34:00.000-07:00

I get a bad taste in my mouth when I read stuff like this. Television and tech do not mix. Television is too slow, too uninformed to discuss real technology and certainly, not if it can't do so without stooping to the Simple Life / Bad Girl's Club level.

It's why television is getting the crap kicked out of itself by new applications like Tivo and Blu-Ray. It's why television still schedules like it's 1967, still refers to the hours between 6 and 10 as 'Prime Time' (as if we have time to sit still and watch your crummy shows for 4 hours at a stretch) and still wonders why it steadily loses to other, cheaper mediums like Youtube or Funnyordie. Why can a kid with a laptop and a $300 camcorder create content that's funnier than a roomful of writers down in Century City can come up with? Tech belongs to the forward thinkers - is there anything more backwards than 'American Idol'? Or 'Dancing With the Stars'? You know why these are popular shows? BECAUSE THERE'S NOTHING ELSE ON, YOU RETARDS! Yeah, I said 'retards'...deal with it.

That's not enough for you, is it? You don't understand technology, so therefore you don't create a way to bring tech to the masses - you just tell everyone that just underneath the surface, all female geeks look and act like Paris Hilton. Ooh, they 'blog'...how provocative! I've always wanted people of all walks of life to be sublimated into the showbiz lifestyle! Deep down...we all want a dog that can fit in a purse!

I hate showbiz. I hate television and I hate the people who define what it shows. I hate the fact that the technology I love gets pressed into a box that they can understand they haven't even bothered to try and understand what new technology is and what it means for the world at large. So keep your fake version of the tech revolution. Hope that pink iPhone suits you. Me, I'm gonna go get a box of junk and wire it all together JUST BECAUSE I CAN.

Choke on it.

Beware of False Prophets...

2008-03-23T08:47:00.000-07:00

Cliff Stoll is a hero of mine - in fact his book, The Cuckoo's Egg, is one of the major reasons I became interested in IT at all. Cliff was an astronomer at Berkeley before his highly-visible capture of a hacker working for the Russians. Becoming an instant techno-celebrity, Cliff rejected the glitzy projections that the Internet was going to change the world. He also rejected the way people were eschewing real relationships and real experiences for the digital equivalent offered by the computer industry.

It's an important statement to make, that the computer isn't a substitute for reality. Some of his grander predictions here shown are a little embarrassing, but the core truth is still there: there's nothing that can make up for the real.

The Internet? Bah!

Awesome Tool!

2008-03-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

This has happened to me several times, our corporate website would die and I'd have to IM a friend and ask them if it was down for them as well. Well, no more!

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Sorry...this is a really simple, useful tool and I love stuff like that.

More Advice on Job Hunting...

2008-03-18T17:54:00.000-07:00

"What To Do If You're Laid Off" by Getrichslowly.org

This is great advice for anyone - shaky job situation or not. Especially that part about getting your spending under control - no need to make a shaky job situation more stressful by a bunch of mounting debt that you have no idea how you'll pay off.

IT: Common Sense is a Plus

2008-03-18T15:24:00.000-07:00

I read with amusement the following article - Households face the unthinkable: budgeting. Drew Curtis of Fark.com has it pretty much clocked when he talks about news positioning the patently obvious as though it is revolutionary.

It's also interesting to note how many people are getting back to basics in their careers and personal life. For example, Steven Covey has made a pile of cash telling us what we already knew in "The 7 Habits..." series. We all intrinsically know that we need certain things to be successful - rest, resources, basic time management, etc. Guys like Covey kind of remind us of that and help us see the benefits to getting back to those basics.

Thus, what's really needed is not another self-help series to tell us the benefit of X, Y or Z (I'm waiting for the "Breathing! It's Good For You!" series) but rather we need to feel more confident in asking for what we need to be successful. In other words - we instinctively value common sense but we're afraid to trust it. We need a panel of researchers from Gallup or USA Today to provide an in-depth study on why it's okay to ask for what we need.

It works the same way in IT. The more experienced you are with troubleshooting or systems admin or project management or engineering, you build an internal knowledge base that helps you arrive at conclusions much faster than an inexperienced person might. Of course this doesn't give license to 'use the Force' - IT is like Algebra: check your work. But don't run from what you have learned from experience. Sometimes you will be troubleshooting an issue and it feels like a network card problem - you can smell it. Don't ignore your instinct - follow it and get used to using it. It will help you.

The Really Big News

2008-03-17T16:24:00.001-07:00

Would it surprise you if I told you that the reason I could speak with so much authority about looking for a job was because I was looking for one?

Well, I was…And now I have one.

For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to say anything about it beforehand. Now that I’m transitioning to the new gig, let’s talk about what that means for us: not much. For instance, I’m not talking about the new gig or the old gig except in very broad-stroke descriptions. This blog is to share about what I’ve learned technically and professionally, nothing more. I’m handling my exit pretty much the way that I described in “Looking for Love – Part II”. No big speeches, no dirt to dish. I’m simply ramping myself up for the next challenge.

I learned a lot about handling job exits from my previous job and this one – I hate to sound like a cliché but, keep it classy. Let everyone know how much you enjoyed working with them. There’s no such thing as “I’ll-never-see-you-again-so-let-me-tell-you-what-I-really-think”. It doesn’t work for reasons I’ve already described…but here’s another point: If that’s what you really think and it’s all you can do to exit cordially without busting, have you ever given it some thought as to why you feel that way? I guess what I’m saying is, not only should you NOT do the ‘let me tell you what I really think’ speech, you shouldn’t even be thinking like that in the first place.

We spend a third of our waking lives (If we’re lucky…) at the job. It’s easy to start thinking that our relationships at our job and relationships elsewhere are one and the same. It’s also easy to start putting negative meanings to everything that is happening to you. Trying to make sense of it all – you start thinking that everyone is out to get you. You shouldn’t do this.

Why not? Let me put it this way: Stop Thinking That the World is Out to Get You. You give yourself too much credit by assuming that anyone is thinking about you at all, more so by assuming people have the time and inclination to be executing some malicious plan against you. It’s close to the “to understand everything is to forgive everything” philosophy. I’m not suggesting that you forgive everything, but at least take the time to understand why it happened in the first place. You may just find that a bad situation happened simply because it happened and not out of personal pique.

Taking yourself out of the picture, sometimes – stepping back and looking at everything that’s going on – helps to regain perspective. You start to see that the business has challenges of its own, your boss has challenges of his or her own, your coworkers have their own problems and then on top of it all – it’s you, demanding to be paid attention to. Stop it!

It’s difficult, of course, to keep that kind of perspective when you’re relying on your job to make the mortgage and keep food on the table. It’s also difficult when you’re hearing gloomy news out of the economy and the 12^th potential employer has told you “You want how much?” Salary negotiation is an interesting topic for another time but don’t worry about hearing that kind of news – no matter how low you bid, there’s always someone to complain about how much you want. It’s a negotiation tactic.

So, I’m off to the next big thing and I am excited about it. New challenges and new opportunities – Let’s continue the journey together.

Yes, You Are Valuable

2008-03-11T14:54:00.000-07:00

Just in case you didn't get it the first time - I love Information Technology. It's interesting to note how unrequited that love has been at times. The WSJ just published this article, which helps mate IT back to the success of the business, something I've been cynically saying "They aren't going to feel the way you do - find a way to love your job anyway".

When someone comes along and suggests that we don't have to live that way, well, I want to know more about it and then share it with you. No one wants to feel 'just above the janitor' in terms of business value (my apologies to any evangelizers in the Maintenance field) - we all want to feel good about the job we do.

I thought this was worth sharing because it suggests a solution to a problem I didn't think would be solved anytime soon. I'd love to see it happen and maybe this is the way.

How to Tap IT's Hidden Potential

I thought this was worth sharing because it suggests a solution to a problem I didn't think would be solved anytime soon. I'd love to see it happen and maybe this is the way.

You Aren't Allowed to Hate Your Job

2008-03-07T11:18:00.000-08:00

Aahh...I can't stay away...I miss you guys too much.

Reading this article about weird tech support calls brought back some memories about doing phone support -- it's never pleasant. Tech support is the entry-level, bargain-basement, bread-and-butter section of IT and most of us started out that way. I think I've spent a lot of time thinking about the wrong end of the problem. Tech support is a miserable job, sure - but is the answer to say "People should be smarter!"? Probably not...we're still wrestling with the notion that an application can be feature-rich and intuitive. It's also fair to say that human perception is a tricky thing and therefore to create a common vision of what is 'intuitive' is an elusive goal.

This is why we hire UI architects...but I digress.

Beyond the whole question of 'why are the people who call tech support so dumb?' and the 'People should do more work to understand their systems' line - let's realize the truth: The real problem isn't that people are 'dumb' - it's that you hate doing tech support. It's frustrating to you - it's a thankless job with no future and no respect and you hate that job. You might lay awake at night wondering why Cindy, the lead rep, enjoys it so much when you don't and what that might say about you, personally. Stop it with the angst. Not everyone hates this job - but you do...admit the truth, at least to yourself. Now that you've done that, let's move on to the main purpose of the exercise…

STOP IT!

That's right, boys and girls, stop hating your job! Instead - move onto a job that you don't hate or, maybe even better a job that you love! That's what IT allows us to do - do what we love to do, and play with tech while doing it. Do you like working outdoors? You're a Field rep! Do you like public speaking? You're an IT Trainer! Do you love tech but also love another field, like medicine, law, real estate, groceries, food service? Become an IT consultant to those industries - they're all using some kind of tech and they need someone who can fix it! The field is unlimited.

Here is what no one likes to talk about: The openness of Information Technology asks us, demands of us, to do our best in our job roles. But to do that, we have to engage our heart as well as our brain. It is what allows us to put in the extra time, extra care and extra attention to detail that makes the job stand out. You can ‘work smarter not harder’ all you want, the people who love their jobs are motivated to go the extra mile to make it all come together. Your willingness to go that extra mile is what makes you valued in your organization. It is too difficult to do otherwise - the field is littered with people who can dedicate themselves to the task because they care about it. That goes for you, too, bucko! You can't do the job well unless you care about doing a good job and guess what? You can't force yourself to care about something – not even for money.

When you do what you love to do – it shows. You know it and your customers, clients, bosses, executive VPs…they know it, too. Being in a job that you love is a boost to your quality of life; you sleep better at night, you eat junk food and drink less often. It’s amazing how a shift in your job contributes to your general mental health – it’s even more amazing how much you don’t realize this until it happens.

You are the master of your own destiny. Complaining about your situation when there is so much opportunity for you to do better is unacceptable. Don’t hate your job – find a job you love! Just changing jobs or career paths isn’t an instant guarantee of success, however – I’ll talk more about this in Part II.

Ready, Set, Stop!

2008-03-06T16:52:00.000-08:00

Taking a mild sabbatical while I clean up some personal stuff. It makes no sense for me to waste your time writing about nothing, but it's not fair to say nothing at all, either.

Cheers, until next time.

Weird IT Story #1

2008-03-04T12:24:00.000-08:00

Every geek has a story about where the job went strange - where the senior sales guy's mailbox was found to be full of porn, where the love-triangle became an HR matter, where the senior VP's drug habit became public knowledge, whatever. IT is about tech and people - generally the tech is okay...but the people can get weird. I thought I would share a 'weird' IT story and invite everyone to put in some of the ones they've had.

Rule #1 - No names, no companies. This has to be completely anonymous.
Rule #2 - It has to have happened to you. No writing in a story about 'something you heard that happened to another guy'.

Persons who violate these terms will be condemned to edit /root while under the influence of alcohol or mood-altering, legally-prescribed medication. Here is my "Weird IT Story #1"...

I worked for a small-time IT contractor in San Jose about 7 years ago. Between me and 3 other guys, we did local government IT support and one of those jobs was to do PM (preventative maintenance) on the dozens of workstations they had at particular sites. Not very glamourous...lots of wiping and spraying of canned air into old workstations that had accumulated dust bunnies in their 9 months of operation.

This was during the summer - we broke for lunch to a local pizza place. While waiting for our order (I think it was barbequed chicken and BBQ sauce...on pizza...I digress) we noticed a strange pair of guys at the next table. It was some white guy, a contractor and a Mexican guy...probably a day laborer. The white guy was acting really strange, like he was half asleep - one of the other guys who had more experience with this matter said that he was 'sketched out' (on Speed, I found out). I didn't know many people like that, but it was clear that this guy was strange. Half asleep, he couldn't keep it together to take a bite of the pepperoni pizza he was eating...he kept trying to take a bite but missing.

The other guys at my table thought it was hilarious - imagine a drowsy white guy with a pepperoni on his cheek and an embarrassed Mexican guy - what would you have done? They started pouring salt on the table and cutting it into 'lines' - the white guy was oblivious. After they left, we noticed that the sleepy guy had left a bottle of Advil on the table. It was an old bottle, label was wearing off, and inside were about 30 different prescription pills...all legal, but strong stuff: Demoral, Vicodin, Percodan, etc.

The weirdest guy of our group palmed the bottle and left with it. I didn't think anything more of it until the following Monday. It turns out our guy had downed all 30 pills - to get high or commit suicide, I don't really know which. He'd passed out Friday, slept through the weekend and was barely functional on Monday morning when he dragged himself into work. The punchline? This wasn't the weirdest thing I'd heard of him doing, but I didn't witness any of it firsthand and so it's not my story to tell.

That's one to start with. Would you like to share one of your own? Comment below!

Because Everyone Loves Explosions

2008-02-29T17:39:00.000-08:00

I Hear Information Technology Singing

2008-02-27T12:01:00.000-08:00

Walt Whitman composed the poem “I Hear America Singing” and it is part of his “Leaves of Grass” collection that was published in 1910. Whitman heard a song that spawned in those people who work for a living and the vitality demonstrated by those who are good at their job is something that makes a poem spring to mind. But does Information Technology sing? If so, where could you hear that song? Is it in the boardrooms of a hundred VC-funded startups? Is it at the conventions where consumer electronics are introduced and hundreds of people drink and gamble on the corporate dime?

Where does IT sing? Where is the heart and soul of Information Technology? I’ve thought a lot about this being that I’m not around the VC-funded crowd. I’m in IT, but if I’m not at the center of a startup, does that make me irrelevant?

Information Technology, the guts of tech, is handled by a number of really talented guys who will normally never see their stories told. I was thinking of one guy in particular, I can’t even remember his name now and I feel bad about it. Mormon guy with 3 or 4 kids, he was an engineer for EDS and he maintained the network and mainframe for this real estate online service I worked for in the mid 90s.

The reason I think about him is because even he realized, somewhat ruefully, that the public face of IT was beyond him. We were sitting in the office of the firm, having just moved into our swank digs in downtown Campbell, CA. There was a new Internet café around the corner and he recognized that it was ‘too cool for him’. “I’d never go into a place like that,” he said sadly.

“But you realize, of course,” I said at the time, “that people like you make places like that possible.” I think he appreciated what I said – I heard back later on that he told a colleague that ‘I would go far in this business’. I wouldn’t know what he would make of my career so thankfully, I can’t locate him to ask. The point is, really, that the heart and soul of Information Technology is located within the people who engineer the solution and not just those who sell it, or fund the company. VCs, Marketing, Management all have their part to play in IT, but thousands of companies rely at the end of the day on pasty, Dilbert-like, engineering guys to make the tech a reality. Because they usually aren’t the most telegenic or extroverted, it’s easy to forget that they matter.

But they DO matter. The dot-bomb days led us to believe that all you needed was a slick-looking website that could be knocked together in a matter of weeks. Fool enough major companies or investors and cash out! Those days are behind us and something different is happening to start-ups these days. At the bottom of it all are tens of thousands of knowledge workers. These workers will never sit on a board, will never be on the face of Wired but will still be responsible for this century’s ‘Industrial Revolution’.

The genius of IT – the liberation of IT is that everyone matters. Little guys and giants are equally free to change the world. IT has leveled the playing field again and opened the way to move forward. Smart businesses, smart managers need never to forget the tremendous value that knowledge workers present. They are not resources and they are not overhead -- they are people and they are signing a very important song.

"Why, Yes, I Am an Idiot!" - The eBay Boycott

2008-02-26T11:45:00.000-08:00

The benefit of grassroot campaigns is their ability to focus attention on things you wouldn't necessarily be aware of. Medical issues, human interest issues, work and politics. If a problem is affecting a number of people and isn't being addressed by those who should, banding together to present a unified voice can have a powerful impact.

The downside of grassroot campaigns is their ability to focus attention on things that you wouldn't necessarily be aware of. I'm watching the still-running boycott of eBay by a group of power-sellers and perhaps you are, as well. While boycotts in the past have targeted companies or institutions that people have little sympathy for, I'm really confused at the hate for eBay. In truth - is there really any point at getting angry at eBay for altering their pricing structure...something that they are well within their right to do?

The details of the boycott can be read here – the group organizing the campaign only wants a boycott of eBay to extend for one week (2/18 – 2/25). Some news organizations have already pointed out that eBay listings dropped significantly but the MN reported this morning that eBay didn’t feel that much impact at all. The group organizing the strike may decide to continue the boycott, according to the MN article. Let this be a lesson to us all.

eBay is like any other web site or large Internet company. Some people like them and some people hate them. But a business is still just that: a business. It isn’t a malicious factory of moustache-twirling villans who plot to conquer the world on their lunch break. But you have people who don’t understand that concept. In minds of some, it seems – a protest is the answer to every problem. That philosophy is hitting a brick wall and to that I say: Bravo!

Let everyone who thinks more of themselves than they ought to experience a little virtual de-pantsing - That’s the lesson we learn from people organizing this campaign. People get weird ideas about how the world works, sometimes and that can prompt them to try and impose their will in places and ways that are completely inappropriate. Would you try doing this at your local grocery store? Rather than simply taking your business elsewhere, you organize a protest, go on a hunger strike, pass out flyers and put together a town hall discussion to try and explain to Safeway or Vons or Ralphs that not taking your coupon or carrying your favorite brand of cat litter harms you in some way?

Probably not – hopefully not. Because you first of all know that by acting unreasonable or crazy, you sacrifice any hope of proving your point. Like the lady who called into 911 because a Carl’s Jr. got her order wrong. Further, you know that in business, there is a limit to what recourse you have when you don’t like the way one business operates. You’re welcome to take your business elsewhere and you are welcome to set up a competing business that offers the benefits another business might not. Organizing boycotts over issues that simply don’t matter in this day and age, especially when you have numerous other alternatives, is cah-ray-zee!

I mean, doesn’t this just smack of blowhardism? Doesn’t it say “I have too much time on my hands”? People who can’t set up their own online store but have enough energy and talent to put together a national protest against the very business that makes their enterprise possible – does it get any more counterproductive? If I were eBay, I’d let this boycott run its course and then cancel every membership that was involved. I’d say “Thanks, but I would rather not do business with you – feel free to set up your own online store.” I’m being a little rambunctious – eBay’s handling the issue with much more poise than I would, in a similar situation.

Let’s review: eBay blew the doors off of online retail with its business model back in the mid-to-late 90s. I would suggest deserves quite a bit of credit for making selling items so simple to do. Anyone else out there who thinks they can do as much business, better than they can, is welcome to try. I don’t want to sound too much like an eBay shill – I’m very ambivalent toward them, myself – but I feel a certain distaste for the automatic assumption that a big company is necessarily a bad company. In this case, it definitely feels like the inmates are trying to take over the asylum, with predictable results.

There are other options for selling your crap on the Internet. Craiglist, Amazon and even XSBay.Net - an alternative to eBay started by a friend of mine – you can sell your stuff here if eBay makes you so angry. I’m not endorsing this site or any site – I’m not saying eBay is great or that XSBay is better than eBay – they are what they are. Finding yourself in a situation that you don’t like is just part of life – what you do after that is what defines you as a person.

Hopefully, after this debacle dies down, some of these organizers will take a hard look in the mirror and recognize that they made themselves look like fools. Showing this much ability to organize, plan and execute, but being unable to develop your own independent web business says so much more about you than it does about eBay. Publicly and repeatedly – you are biting the hand that feeds you and we all know how well that turns out. Work with eBay or take your business elsewhere – stop wasting my time by asking me to care about things that aren’t important.

Stop Reading This and Get Back to Work

2008-02-25T20:32:00.000-08:00

I'm not a huge fan of every blog site - Valleywag.com has its ups and downs. When I saw this post, however, I felt compelled to say something. I don't pretend that this site is an arbiter of IT - maybe one day, but not right now. At the very least, my mandate is to do something positive for the business of Information Technology. That said - one thing I feel compelled to say is, I will never help you waste time at your job. I won't help you screw around, goof off or goldbrick. I happen to believe in earning what you make.

Social apps like Facebook, Myspace and Second Life have an unproven value to society. They do serve as a vehicle for advertising, hence the interest by companies like Microsoft or Google. They're interested in breaking into new mediums of advertising - Facebook has, potentially, the same ability to market and advertise as television. But your boss isn't paying you to watch TV. If interacting on Facebook is so important to you - go get a job there.

Getting our job done may require some time doing research on the Internet. We may need stress breaks, we may need to interact with people because building those relationships makes us better at our job. Fine - good - great. If you must do so - it's on your head to do it responsibly. If you get caught playing around with Facebook or another social networking site - your boss is within his right to free you from your responsibilities so that you can pursue social interaction to your heart's content. Just don't expect to be paid for it.

The Future of IT is Heterogeneous

2008-02-21T12:20:00.000-08:00

There is a bit of baiting that goes on inside IT when it comes to discussing the merits of a particular operating system. It has been my experience that, the arguments put forth say much more about the particular person than they do about the position they advocate. I find it a bit dishonest to get into that type of discussion - information technology is just that: Information. Technology. To bog yourself down arguing for Linux, for Windows, for Ubuntu or Mac takes your focus away from the larger issue - how can information technology help someone do their job better? Persons who advocate a particular OS, I've found, are usually coming from a place of comfort - they know Windows, they know Mac, they know Linux and they know how those operating systems solve that particular problem. With a little bit of snark, they extol the virtues of one OS while decrying any others.

Pardon me for saying so, but it's crap. All major operating systems have a value of their own and have a part to play in Information Technology. Responsible IT professionals need to recognize the value of each OS.

I appreciate it when someone takes the time to collect the data on their own - this article discusses a CIO who spent about a month with different workstation operating systems. It's not exactly scientific, but he gave each laptop and OS a fair shake. His findings get right at the heart of what I think the future of IT will be: Heterogeneous.

In the heterogeneous environment, there's room for every laptop and operating system. Users pick out the OS they're comfortable with and use it. Companies no longer have to spend time culling out valuable job applicants who aren't comfortable with the operating system they've rolled out at the enterprise level. The tools available are so broad that companies can go back to hiring for talent ('casting for talent' is something they discuss in "First, Break All the Rules") and not hiring for knowledge of their office applications.

But another issue needs to be addressed: Where does that leave IT? Is it that simple? Of course not. Enterprise IT takes into account that minor changes can be big headaches in an environment of several thousand or several tens of thousands of people. Take everything you have when you bought your laptop and multiply that by 1,500 - that's a lot of owner's manuals and recovery CDs to store. Of 1,500 systems, how many will be lost, damaged or stolen? Enterprise workstation support is a headache unto itself - imagine adding three or four orders of magnitude to that headache by introducing alternate operating systems.

It takes a brave CIO or tech manager to embrace the problems presented and take it upon himself to do the homework. I doubt I'd ever work for the person interviewed in the article above, but I respect the heck out of him. From an straight tech perspective - there are a lot of reasons to embrace multiple operating systems. From an IT perspective (where we're doing tech for money) there are a lot of pitfalls.

Could you pay someone to do workstation support for multiple operating systems, knowing that to collect that knowledge base takes a tremendous amount of effort? Typically, the majority of people who would put forth that effort would not be keen on doing that job for very long. In regards to what was said before - IT is a discipline and takes time to become proficient at. Persons who are proficient wish to be seen as such by their employers...do you see where I'm going with this?

Another pitfall is software licensing and management. Keeping track of how many copies of an application software you own, how many are being used in the environment and publishing those metrics so that a company requesting an audit is satisfied is a thankless job that avoids potential lawsuits. Imagine doing that when you have a certain percentage of your workstations running pure open-source software, or a virtual machine WITH licensed software. Well - it boggles the mind.

But these aren't reasons to NOT embrace a heterogeneous environment - these are simply problems to be overcome. Asset and license tracking applications are out there and gaining traction in these SOX-compliant hallways. People requesting to use open-source software tend to be more responsible about running their own environments and perhaps corporate acceptable-use policies can extend a 'you break it - you fix it' addendum to those that want to push the tech envelope. Persons doing workstation support can extend themselves to support multiple operating systems and this puts a challenge back on the company to recognize the talent and value those individuals provide to the company.

These are just thoughts on the top of my head -- how say you?

How Do YOU Take Credit?

2008-02-19T11:02:00.000-08:00

Someone chided me the other day for something and it made me realize that I had something to work on. I do a lot of after-hours volunteer work; some of it is family/friend-related and some of it is not. I was discussing one of the said things I was up to with someone and he gave me some kudos. When I responded to it, trying to downplay it, he said "don't get all stoic". In the ensuing discussion, although he was being friendly about it, it was clear that I don't handle getting praise from other people very well.

That might sound like a no-problem problem, like the guy who complains about having too much money - but it does point out something about me that I'd like to change. When credit's due - I like to give it to other people and I should also be capable of graciously receiving credit or praise or kudos. I'm not - I should be, but I'm not. My mindset is kind of weird on this - I'm purposely turning people away from saying positive things about me. I wanted to throw this open to other people and elicit suggestions (in the comments page below, please) on this topic and see what you thought.

See? Adam Carolla Agrees With Me

2008-02-11T11:14:00.000-08:00

Was listening to a podcast of the Adam Carolla Show and someone called in for advice on going to a job interview. As I've said, job hunting is like dating and things can work out for a lot of different reasons. Turns out, the Ace-man agrees with me and I thought that was worth passing along. If it turns out that a job opportunity falls through, your best bet is to shake it off and not let it get to you. Like dating, people don't respond well to desperation, frustration or bitterness; make sure you're not carrying any baggage into the interview.

Check out Adam Carolla on job interviews - about 2:20 into the podcast.

Deploying with Cruise Control and NANT - Part II

2008-02-08T14:50:00.000-08:00

In the interim between now and the last time we talked about this - I've learned quite a bit about NANT scripting. In the first place, it's best to put together a Cruise Control environment together APART from the one the app dev team is working with. People tend not to have a sense of humor about having their build tool go down in the middle of the day.

For This Project - You Will Need

Installing Cruise Control on your box is complex, but not terribly hard. In my case, my personal workstation is running XP Pro - I had to install IIS and .Net on the box using Microsoft's Add Windows services program and
the .Net 2.0 installer from their website. UseThoughtworks manual page for details on how to do it the right way. Once you get Cruise Control running - you can start messing with your ccnet.config file that controls kicking off different projects, including NANT. I didn't have to modify any CCNet file BESIDES this one - so keep that in mind if you get the urge to tinker.

Here follows a sample CCNet project that kicks off one build file from NANT. Notes and commentary after the sample:

<cruisecontrol>
<projectname="NANT-Activebranch01-DeployAll">
<tasks>
<nant>
<executable>C:\nant-0.85\bin\nant.exe</executable>
<buildFile>[Location of NANT .build file]</buildFile>
</nant>
<email from="[CCNet SMTP Address]" mailhost="xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"->
mailhostUsername="ccnet.usrname" mailhostPassword="xxxx" includeDetails="TRUE">
<users>
<user name="User.A" group="buildmaster" address="user.a@domain.com"/>
<user name="User.B" group="developers" address="user.b@domain.com"/>
</users>
<groups>
<group name="developers" notification="change"/>
<group name="buildmaster" notification="always"/>
</groups>
</email>
</tasks>
</project>
</cruisecontrol>

Notes & Commentary

1. Make sure that your path to NANT is correct; Cruise Control will not be able to get to it otherwise.
2. NANT runs a .build file which is written in XML - the <NANT> task is simply telling NANT to run with that
.build file, wherever it is. Info about what the .build file will do to follow.
3. <EMAIL> will notify me or anyone else I designate when the NANT task is complete. I have to put in the address of our mail server, a username and a password to make it work (I also have to make sure my mail server
will accept this kind of traffic...). With that in place, we start experimenting with NANT commands to see
who does what, when and why. Fortunately, NANTBuilder is helpful with suggestions and sanity checkers to warn if you're missing a quotation mark or forward slash. It can only help so much, however, and this is why the NANT
reference manual is so helpful.

So I've created my Cruise Control, I'm ready to use NANT with it - let's look at a NANT deployment task - Notes and commentary follow:

<projectname="Project.Name" default="all">
<target name="all">
<servicecontroller action="Stop"service="W3SVC"machine="QA.Machine"/>
<property name="source" value="[sourcedirectory - \\machine.name\e$\...]"/>
<property name="web" value="[destinationdirectory - \\machine.name\e$\...]"/>
<delete dir="${web}\Project.Folder" failonerror="true"/>
<mkdir dir="${web}\Project.Folder" failonerror="true"/>
<copy todir="${web}\Project.Folder" failonerror="true">
<fileset basedir="${source}\Rest\of\Directory\Structure" failonempty="true">
<include name="**"/>
</fileset>
<filterchain>
<replacestring from="Old.String" to="New.String" ignorecase="true"/>
</filterchain>
</copy>
</target>
</project>

More Notes & Commentary

1. Note that you can end a NANT line without having to do the <command></command> syntax - just throw a/> at the end of the first line.

2. We're using the <servicecontroller> command to stop web services on the QA Machine. This is helpful to
prevent anyone from blundering into the deployment - testers might accidentally log on and then Windows will refuse to overwrite anything, citing 'files in use'. Get around this by killing the services.

3. We remove the destination project folder and then recreate it - although we used Robocopy previously, we wanted to make sure that all app files were completely removed from the old version. This has killed some weird issues we were experiencing between old build files and new build files.

4. The COPY and MOVE commands in NANT (see NANT reference for info about MOVE) have their own behaviors. MOVE does not run as quickly as a DOS move command. This became relevant later on. The copy command asks you to reference where everything will go first, then asks you to specify where it comes from and how
much of it ("**" means take everything). Additionally, the <filterchain> command allowed us to filter some character strings inside the files - this is helpful since we deploy to a number of places and have to filter our own web.config file every time to point to a settings folder.

It took a bit of experimentation to port our deployment builds over from DOS to NANT. You'll need to do the same - just spend time with all of the tools open, refer to the reference often and experiment, experiment, EXPERIMENT! I'm really jazzed now that it's cranking and I'm looking forward to making Selenium work with Cruise Control as well.

A Neat-o For Loop Script for All Occasions

2008-02-08T10:05:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you have a command-line driven program that does something really great but need it to batch-process a large amount of data. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of open-source tools out there (LAME and FFMPEG, for example) that are originally written as command-line tools. Someone will come along and write a GUI interface that does nothing more than make it friendly to look at and ask you to pay thirty or forty bucks. Who wants to go through that every time?

This happened when I got some great FLAC files that I wanted to convert to MP3 for my car stereo using LAME. Who wants to sit around typing the same command line in over and over again? And who wants to pay $40 for something that a geek should be able to do by themselves? I faced a moral imperative to do this myself. I re-engineered the FOR script below to make that happen.

After I figured out the right settings for converting FLAC to MP3 (shortest way to finish, I found, was to convert first to WAV, then to MP3 - more on that later), I wanted to do this for every FLAC file - 22 in total. I referred back to this FOR loop script that a friend helped me put together a year ago. We used this script in modified form to convert 800+ GB of AVI data to FLV. I’ve found it handy for a variety of batch-processing tasks I get stuck with. I'm publishing it here in a stripped-down version so that you can use it for any .exe you want to run against an entire folder of files.

I’ve got the FOR script in its entirety – I’ll explain each piece in the Notes section – be sure to check notes if you don’t understand something.

:: SET SOURCE PATH HERE
set root=[root folder of wherever you will be working from]

set source=%root% #<--- This sets the source directory you will be working from.
if not exist "%source%" (
echo Could not find Source directory %source%
goto :ERROR
) #<-- See Note #1

set working_root=%NASroot%\Working # <- See Note 2
if not exist "%working_root%" (
mkdir “%working_root%”

Echo Created Working Directory %working_root% >> log.txt
)

set working_dir=%working_root%\%COMPUTERNAME% #<-- See Note #3

if not exist "%working_dir%" (
mkdir "%working_dir%"
echo Created Working Directory %working_dir% >> log.txt
)

set completed = %NASroot%\completed #<- See Note #4
if not exist "%completed_flv%" (
mkdir "%completed%"
echo Created Working Directory %completed% >> “%NASroot%\log.txt
)

set completed_src=%NASroot%\completed_src #<-- See Note #5
if not exist "%completed_avi%" (
mkdir "%completed_src%"
echo Created Working Directory %completed_src% >> “%NASroot%\log.txt
)

echo Processing started at %Time% on %Date% >> log.txt
for %%x in (%source%\*.xxx) do ( #<-See Note #6
if exist %%x (
echo Processing SRC: %%~nx
move "%%x" %working_dir%
[run your command line program here – see Note #7]

move "%working_dir%\%%~nx.avi" %completed_src%
)
)

Echo Processing completed at %time% on %Date% >> log.txt

goto :EOF

:ERROR
color 47
pause
exit

[Note #1] – Each of these IF statements checks to make sure the directory exists and creates it if it does not. I originally just had it error out but it was taking too much time. Now I just have to be careful not to run this script where I don’t want a ‘Working’,’Completed’, etc. directory hanging out.

[Note #2] – Sets a Working directory where the actual work of the executable takes place. You don’t necessarily want that happening in the source directory – file overwrites or permissions issues could step on it.

Note #3] – Sets a machine-specific directory underneath ‘Working’. Useful if you’re doing batch-processing against a single directory and you want to use more than one machine.

[Note #4] – Sets the completed area for all ‘finished’ files (for example, if you’re batch-converting a bunch of files from .gif to .jpg, this places the completed .jpg files in a separate folder.

[Note #5] – Sets the completed area where all source material is placed. This keeps your ‘finished’ pile separate from your ‘to-be-done’ pile.

[Note #6] – The beginning of the FOR loop – note that it checks the %source% directory for any file that has the ‘xxx’ extension. This means it only runs against files of that type, not just any file in that directory.

[Note #7] – Your command line runs here. You would use the ‘%%~nx’ statement to describe the filename, sans extension (we’ll get to extensions in a second. ‘%%~nx’ means any string of characters or numbers in this case. If your command line has arguments like [File1.xxx] to [File1.yyy], you would use %%~nx.xxx and %%~nx.yyy. See this link for more info about DOS script programming basics. Remember to output the %%~nx.yyy file to %completed% to keep your newly processed files in a separate area (for example - %completed%\%%~nx.yyy)

Other features of this script include a nice little logging function that writes the output to a log.txt file on your %Root% directory. If it errors out, it’ll paint your DOS window red and output the error – nice attention-getter.

DOS script programming isn't exactly sexy - but it does have its uses and it's a lot easier to learn than Ruby or Perl because it takes advantage of everything you already know about DOS. Batch-process to your hearts content!

Finding a Job in IT - Looking for Love Part II

2008-02-05T13:51:00.001-08:00

Continuing with the discussion that answers a very simple question (how do you find a job in IT?) one of the things I realized is that we aren't dealing with a simple question at all. We’re really dealing with a complex process that most people, me included, do poorly at in the beginning. We learn a lot of lessons the hard way. It shouldn't be like this - we're trained to resolve a problem and document the solution by reflex. Why shouldn't this apply to securing employment?

Most of the material I've read on the subject gives information in two varieties: A) Blinding Flash of the Obvious and B) Obscure points that only work for you after you've done it the wrong way 10 or 20 times. It's a frustrating process that leads many people to stay wherever they're at and accept a job situation that's slowly killing their soul. I heard on the radio today an interesting thought: there's never been a better time in human history to reinvent yourself. It's never been easier to market yourself. In times past, you picked a career and stayed at it until you died. Nowadays, you have the ability to explore several avenues and change course without that much pain. Yes, it's inconvenient - but in times past a career change might mean you have to leave home, be disowned by your family and maybe even burned as a heretic. We're not there - we're living in an age where reinvention is almost expected. Make all of this work for you.

Do the Hustle – It’s funny but I think sometimes people have the idea that job opportunities will somehow fall into their lap. I hear stories from time to time where people will get a job meeting someone at the Starbucks, sitting in an airport lounge or at a party. I’d love to meet these people and get inside their head for a minute because this has never happened to me. Every job I’ve had has been the result of hustling for it. ‘Hustling’ is about putting some positive activity toward accomplishing a goal. You can immediately tell in almost any job, activity or sport who is hustling and who is not.

Hustling and being persistent go hand in hand. Persistence is key in searching for a job. To quote Calvin Coolidge, "Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." We're not trying to solve the problems of the human race, but the spirit is similar.

Whatever you do - do not give up. I've got friends who stagnate in whatever job they've got because they made a few steps toward getting something else but found themselves stuck behind roadblocks. The temptation is to give up and accept what you have. This is wrong. You know yourself and you know what you are capable of. If your current gig isn't utilizing your full capabilities then you are selling both yourself and that company short. Chances are, they already know this and it’s only a matter of time before you’re quietly edged out in favor of an employee who is supposed to be doing that work.

Hustling is not the same thing as being persistent. As with getting anything else you want in life, the more important goals often come with some blood, sweat and/or tears. You get there by hustling. How do you hustle? Every day, make it your goal to do something to move the project forward. A principal at an architect firm I used to work for sent ‘round a memo about something one afternoon. I forget what the memo was about but he said something interesting. "If you think computer problems are preventing you from getting your work done, think again. There has to be something you can do to move the project forward." I've applied this advice in various ways since that time; in this case I've always found a way to be doing something about finding a job.

Never forget that you can be persistent without hustling. You can do nothing and still be persistent in that you aren’t exactly giving up but you are also not that serious about moving forward. You need to be serious about moving forward. I’ve heard it from some associates – “yeah…got my resume out…there’s a few things happening” and then you ask them about it again in 12 months: “Yeah…got my resume out…there’s a few things happening”. People can lull themselves into thinking they're doing something when they're really doing nothing – this is job search suicide. Keep moving forward. Keep hustling.

Hustling for the job signals that you want to work – this translates to a positive attitude at any interview you go to. It can only go up from here.

Learn
I can't put it any more simply than this: Learn. If you get the job, great - job well done. If you didn't get the job then it is your job to figure out why. We're assuming, of course, that you are applying for jobs you're qualified for and are asking to be paid a reasonable amount for this work. Apply some project management concepts to the topic and start to develop a learning curve for how you're executing your job search.

Put what you have experienced to work for you. Ask the tough questions: why did it go wrong? What did I do, if anything (and remember that not getting a job is not always about you) did I do wrong? These are difficult to ask - especially if you feel raw about not landing a dream job. Ask them anyway, this is sometimes your most valuable source of insight on how you're presenting yourself to prospective employers. Keep a journal about what you're learning and review it before you go on the next interview.

Be prepared to question your own methods and revise your process. Don’t wait for other people to do this for you. What can you be doing at any point of time to move this project forward? You are in the best position to answer this question – don’t farm it out to someone else. Asking these questions of interviewers, even the ones you did poorly on, reflects a candid desire to do better. Again – this only helps your chances of landing a great job.

Post-Interview / Nailbiting / Dos and Donts
I’m sure you’ve heard it before – after the interview, send a thank you note. I’m sure you won’t mind me saying it then – SEND A THANK YOU NOTE AFTER THE INTERVIEW. Thank them for their time, thank them for their attention. They didn’t have to do it, but they did. The thank you note is a nice segue into asking for feedback about the interview, which feeds into your learning curve that we just talked about. It’s also nice fuel for talking more about getting you hired.

If you’re working with a recruiter – let the recruiter handle all follow-up calls. If you’re working with the employer directly, don’t flood them. This goes back to what we were saying earlier about the job search being like dating. Call too much and you look (for lack of a better word) creepy. Calling too much signals more negative things about you than positive. Leave a voicemail, follow up with an email and then let them get back to you.

Lack of response from a potential employer is sometimes amazingly frustrating, especially if you liked the job. It’s tempting to repeat calls and email if you haven’t heard anything. The right thing to do is let it go. Flooding them gains nothing and plus, if it ends up hurting your ability to bargain when a job offer does arrive. After you’ve had your interviews, after you have sent your thank you note and possibly followed up with an email and/or voicemail – let it go. It’s very hard to sit still when you’ve been hustling all this time but ride it out.

Sometimes you get hints about how things went. Job prospects who are very responsive suddenly go silent – this is a bad sign. Or they’re staying in touch with you and everything sounds upbeat – this is a good sign. Again, apply the lessons you learned in dating – you can tell when the guy or gal is just not into you. If that’s the case – accept it with grace. There’s a time to seek and a time to give up as lost. Arguing with them will never change their mind and in most cases simply convinces them that they made the right choice. When you aren’t going to get the job, the most you can do is keep your dignity.

The best way not to get wrapped up in a single prospect is to have more than one – stay busy and move on. A recruiter was at one point saying to me, “they’re going to get back at some point…” and my response immediately was “let’s assume they won’t – what else is going on?” A few hours later that recruiter had not one but two prospects coming in. Keep the activity focused on doing something positive.

Exit Strategies
Eventually, you will find the job. Go on enough interviews, go through enough second rounds, get enough response to your resume and it’s mathematically impossible not to get an offer. The unemployment rate in the US is too low and it is lower still for this industry. Are you savvy enough to have a job right now? Then you’ll probably be able to fit in somewhere else, too.

When that happens – how do you handle the exit? It’s tempting to live out that fantasy where you dance a jig on the boss’ face and leave a flaming bag of dog poo on the CEO’s front porch. It’s tempting to write that blistering email accusing everyone from the janitor on up of incompetence and send it to the company-wide d-list. Tempting, but wrong…so very wrong. Let us discuss why.

From a company point of view – they kept you employed for a length of time. They paid you in salary and (possibly) benefits. They invested in you by sending you to seminars and kept you from working with hot tar for minimum wage. It would be in very poor taste to ignore this. It would be both tacky and classless to handle your resignation this way.

From your point of view – a malicious exit does almost nothing to harm the company but it does a lot to harm you. This is a small world. In IT, the world is getting smaller every day. As we discussed earlier, we have the benefit of social networking and email and blogs and whatever else. The last thing you want is to have all this technology turned on to discuss the tacky and classless exit you just executed. Your new job is sure to hear about it. In California, HR reps across the board know not to ask about any potential problem but asking an HR rep “Is this candidate eligible for rehire at your company?” and having them say “No” is a big stinky mark on your record. Your former colleagues aren’t legally bound not to talk about the big mess you created prior to your exit and this information will get around. It does nothing to help you – don’t do it.

When leaving – give notice, even if it’s only 3 days. Unless extraordinary circumstances are in play (illegal activities, sexual harassment, etc.) give notice. What should a resignation notice look like? I like the Richard Nixon approach – a very simple statement like:

As of xx/xx/xx (however many days ahead of now) I resign the position of

(Your position) at (Your company).

Sincerely,

(Your name)

Send it to your boss, CC his boss and your HR rep. If an exit interview is conducted – you have to decide how much you want to say. Exit interviews shouldn’t be used as editorials on your job or your boss. Exit interviews are conducted by HR to see if you’re planning to sue for some reason – unless a legal issue is involved, whatever you say is going to be looked at by very few people. Keep that in mind and keep your head up. You’re out, you’re free – you voted with your feet and that says more than anything else could.

In conclusion – looking for a job doesn’t have to be something you enjoy to do well. In fact, it’s one of a few activities in life that not loving actually makes you more effective at. You hate it so much you’re focused on getting it done…get it done by finding a job. Finding a new place to work at, new opportunities and challenges, is one of the biggest boots to the human psyche out there. Leaving a job that you don’t enjoy, on your terms, is one of the most healthy ways to deal with that situation.

I hope this information is helpful to you – if you have some questions, comments, success or horror stories to share – bring ‘em on in the comments section. Best of luck to you.

This Just In...The Sky is Blue, Water is Wet and Objects Will Not Fall Up

2008-02-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get sarcastic and people are confused. To me, when a situation's outcome is so obvious that most people, realistically, should see it ahead of time but choose not to because of personal reasons, I don't feel obligated to hide a little bit of snark. To me, sometimes a persons' ignorance is willful and they shouldn't be shielded from the outcome. I'm not saying go around like Mr. Nick Burns, but it does become necessary at times to point out where the train left the tracks. If you don't do it, people will continue staring at you with those dumbfounded looks: "Why are we surrounded by a smoldering heap of Amtrak wreckage?"

When it comes to getting your desktop worked on - you have three choices: do it yourself, get a friend to do it or take it in to a store. Option #3 is still popular, judging by the success of businesses like FireDog or Geek Squad. But here's a tip - and this article proves it - that the 'technicians' often know about as much as you do and furthermore, have sometimes are less likely to fix things the way you want them fixed.

So here's my point about all of this: when it comes to personal electronics, you're responsible for your own experience. If you want to use the big toys, the price tag (in addition to whatever you spend purchasing it) is some learning how to use it in the most effective way possible. Think of it this way: when you were in the classroom in Kindergarten and everyone was learning to spell their name, you didn't complain about the teacher for 'making the letters too hard to make' or make fun of your crayons because the 'interface was bad'. You just learned what to do, how to do it and you were on your way to a wax-and-pencil-shaving-aroma paradise. Some people like to assert that technology owes them all the doo-dads but none of the hard thinky-stuff. I had a family member wax philosophic for years about how 'no one could explain how computers were useful' to him - this was through the late 80s. I got a computer, because I loved them, because it was free, with DOS 6.0 on it and I just started cranking. Few years after the fact, that person wanted me to sit down and explain everything to him and it was just an exercise in frustration for me.

For people like that, or the other ones who ardently refuse to take the time to learn about this tool that's driving your business or your life - there's people like Geek Squad or FireDog who will take your money and do the thinking for you. There is a price tag and it's more than just the labor charge.

Confessions of a Firedog Tech [Consumerist.Com]

Finding a Job in IT - Looking for Love - Part I

2008-01-30T21:57:00.000-08:00

When I left a previous job, it completed a 4-month-long process of job searching. Four months of first round interviews, second round, references, resume polishing, nail biting and stress. I came away with quite a few lessons learned and I wanted to document them for myself and for you.

When you make the decision to leave a job you’ve been at for a while, it usually comes with a lot of emotional turmoil. It doesn’t feel good for me, surprisingly. It felt like I was ending a relationship with a significant other. Going to interviews felt like I was cheating. I hated the process of looking for a job and I think it showed for the first two of those four months.

But I still had to leave. A baby on the way has a way of focusing your activity. When I finally landed the new job, I felt so elated that I did a little happy dance right there in the office – albeit silently lest I wake the kid. The last week of work I did helped reinforce that I was making the right move; I think everyone but me knew that I needed to be doing something else.

So when do you leave? How do you look for another job? How do you tell your current job that you are leaving? How do you handle exiting a bad job?

Fortunately, there isn’t a better industry to be looking for a job in. Thanks to the dot-com bubble, there’s no lip service paid to company loyalty – everyone is comfortable with the idea that it exists but not at the cost of your own personal career development. IT as an industry embraces re-invention…it is perfectly acceptable to step away from one job and take on another career path while remaining friends with everyone you used to work with.

It is best to have the right mind-set when starting your job search. It lays the foundation for everything that happens afterward. It helps you celebrate your wins and accept your losses with much better grace and poise than you otherwise might have. I often compare job hunting with dating since both activities are an exercise in human relationships. In each case, you’re looking for someone to have a relationship with, even though the relationships in this case accomplish different purposes. Knowing how one process works makes you more effective in another, so let’s spend a few moments on how dating is like hunting for a job.

To begin with – in each case we’re asking perfect strangers to decide whether or not they want to spend a large part of their waking lives with each other. This by definition is a big investment and the consequences for choosing poorly are many and usually bad. So you get a lot of leeway up front to go “Umm…nah – this won’t work.” Do not fight this. If you have to lobby for a second date, or lobby for a second interview, this is a not-so-subtle clue that you are fighting a battle that, by all logic, you should not be fighting. The more experience you gain in relationships, the easier it is to spot when you’re heading toward one that is bad for you. So up front, realize the truth: You aren’t perfect for everyone – not everyone is perfect for you. Don’t waste time or energy in your job search fighting that reality.

Do your best to present yourself as a healthy, happy person in an interview. As with dating, nothing turns off your prospective partner faster than someone who is desperate, needy and clueless about how they come across. The best way to present yourself as a healthy, happy person is to be a healthy, happy person. Work on your interpersonal skills, polish off those annoying relationship habits and make improving your personal self a priority. Ask your friends (or even your enemies, they sometimes are more free to tell you when you stink) for some honest feedback about how you do your job and how you come across. Here’s an important tip – when you ask for advice, listen to it. Nothing is more flattering than to be asked for advice, nothing is more gratifying than to have the advice given produce happy results. It shows you’re worth investing time in, it makes people want to help you.

In your job search, know yourself and know your limitations. If the interview isn’t going well, if you are getting feedback you don’t like hearing – pull back with some grace and accept with rueful humor that you aren’t where you want to be yet. It’s a sprint, not a marathon; sometimes your opponent will be ahead of you. Sometimes you will not be as far as you would have liked. This is normal…accepting it in a mature fashion is healthy.

These are all building block points – let’s start talking about the process. How do we look for a job in IT? Step One – no want ads. You will not find your next job in the newspaper, I promise you. We’re IT – our job search engines were designed with us in mind. Do the usual rounds: Monster, Dice, Careerbuilder, BAHelpwanted.com, BAJobs.com and Craigslist – get your resume out there. Next, start thinking about recruiters – IT headhunters will start spamming you with job opportunities and even if these aren’t promising, start to talk with the nationwide or local recruiters in your field. I’ve worked with Remington International, Atlantis Partners, MacArthur Associates and the Boylston Group.

The key for working with a recruiter is to keep your expectations very clear and up front. If you don’t feel an opportunity they present is right for you, say so. To understand whether an opportunity is right, ask the right questions up front: What is the role? Where is it located? What is the pay range being offered? Why do I want to work for this company? What about my resume makes me a good fit for them? It may be from the answers you get that some red flags might appear – it’s up to you to decide whether the company is worth pursuing or not. The more interviews you go on like this the more experience you gain in deciding what sounds like a possibility and what sounds like a waste of time.

Once you get to the interview, do your homework up front. Spend some time looking at the website of the company. Checked Linkedin for employees of the company and see what other people say about them. Google the name of your interviewer. Take the time to see what the Internet says about the company because you can guarantee they’re doing the same about you. And on that point, Google yourself and see what comes up. Get rid of that crummy Myspace or Facebook page where you were shotgunning a can of Budweiser at 19 and blathering about Incubus. Make sure that whatever comes up about you on the Internet suggests a regular person with no major red flags (i.e.: You’re on any state-sponsored criminal database that’s web accessible, etc).

Within the interview process, as we said before, keep in mind that it’s like dating. They’re going to tell very quickly whether they’re going to invite you back for a second interview or politely end the conversation with ‘we’ll keep your resume on file…’. Be sure to present yourself as the professional individual you are in that space of time. Do some practice interviews with a friend and ask for feedback. Better yet, take your digital camera and film yourself. Are you answering too quickly? Do you sound stressed? Are you articulate? Don’t wait until the interview is over to find out that these things were keeping you from nailing it.

That’s enough for now – let’s discuss more in Part II…

New Job Blues...

2008-01-29T12:57:00.000-08:00

This was posted over at The Consumerist but I wanted to pass it along because it dovetails into my eventual piece about looking for a new job in IT. There's a right way to do it and there are about 2 dozen wrong ways to do it. People dream of giving their job, their boss, their manager the big kiss-off but in reality this never ends well.

This doesn't let the HR rep at the former company off the hook - I'm sure Best Buy will be paying through the nose over this one.

I hate to sound like Donald Trump but the adage applies: "Keep it classy".

Ex-Manager Sues Old Job for Blackballing Him

I know tongue fu!

2008-01-28T10:47:00.000-08:00

The office is filled with people who are human (what a shock...). Bad human behaviors still creep into a space where business has done their level best to weed out such nonsense. If you find yourself the target of a bully or of someone with bad interpersonal skills - the options on paper are pretty limited. For instance, someone snaps at you or is generally unpleasant - your only recourse is to go to their superior or engage HR. Sad part is, this rarely works out in reality and you'll still have to work with this person as the process completes.

So what to do? Ignore them? Do you out-shout the bully? Pull some prank that's liable to get you fired? The following article had some helpful hints that I wanted to pass along:
The Art of Verbal Intimidation

Deploying with Cruise Control and NANT - Part I

2008-01-25T11:22:00.000-08:00

I have two tech projects going at the moment; building a load-balanced environment for our IIS/SQL servers. The one I want to address now is deploying applications using Cruise Control and NANT.

Application Deployment is a discipline unto itself; one I wasn't familiar with before I started working with The Company I Work For (TCIWF) but have absorbed in the past 17 months. Working with the application development team, we started with simple batch scripts that copied the compiled app code to our QA servers. Over time, we added features like synchronization of DB schemas, installation of application services that ran under the Windows OS, then later automatic deployment of the QA'ed code to our production environment. It has been a very organic process - figuring out what is possible, how to do it and then mixing it into what is already there.

But still - we've been doing this with Windows .bat scripts - not very advanced technology. The directive was handed down that we needed to move to NANT for our one-click deployments. Since I hadn't used NANT before, I spent a lot of time just figuring out what it was and what it could do. I'm still learning but I wanted to cap off what I have so far and make telling this story later on that much easier.

In brief, we're writing application code using the continuous integration model of development. What that means is that, picture a library of books - if you want to update something on one page of one book, the previous 'waterfall' model of development meant that the entire library would be re-written. Naturally this was very time-consuming. Under C.I., you would check out one book, make changes to it and check it back into the library. The library remains much more available and all writing tasks take much less time.

We use a common set of tools for this work: SVN for code repository management, Cruise Control manages rebuilding the checked-in code and Cruise Control integrates with the Microsoft build tools to compile said code. I'm not giving away any secret info; this is very common for a modern application development team to use. Cruise Control also gives you the ability to kick off other regular tasks, like automated QA using Selenium and anything you could normally execute from the Windows command line. We've been using Cruise Control to handle our QA deployments for almost a year now.

NANT is a scripting language that holds several advantages over simple batch scripts - it provides build log info directly back to Cruise Control (whereas batch scripts don't do this without a lot of massaging), additionally our goal is to make deployment tasks much more universal and shared among the team - cutting down on how long it takes for us to automate our build process every time a new feature is added.

But how to port all this work I've done from .bat to NANT? I started hammering away, experimenting with a variety of NANT commands. I found a great help in Nantbuilder, since it has an automated 'suggested command' feature and an auto-correct feature much like Word's auto-spellchecker works. It cut down on the different issues I was experiencing during the learning curve (spelling issues, command syntax problems...).

The other trick - to get our scripts ported to NANT immediately and improve their working order over time - this seems like the direction I want to go right now to accomplish some quick wins. Lots of experimentation ensues with various NANT commands that accomplish what I want to get done; getting the syntax involves looking at the documentation and then looking at examples from other blogs. (By the way, if you get this stuff worked out, the corking thing would be to post about it - that's why I'm writing this; pay it forward).

So if you've been doing your deployment via .bat script and want to get it over to NANT immediately - get started with this:

Apologies for the crummy graphic...

We're moving forward with this and will be improving the NANT scripts over time. One of the things this gives us immediately is the ability to deploy single pieces of the app rather than having to push everything every time. As I learn more about NANT, I'll be mod'ing our scripts to incorporate this.

The Big R...

2008-01-24T11:04:00.000-08:00

The next several months will be interesting to observe as the US economy edges closer to the word no one wants to say: Recession.

Already the blogosphere is manifest with entries like "Recession-proof Your Career" and "What to do if you’re laid off in 2008 recession". In IT, recessions mean more if you're at a company that bleeds workforce now and then (Ford, Yahoo, GM, etc.). Everyone fears the faceless spectre of the impersonal pink slip; the five-minute meeting on Friday afternoon. Even when I was at a large corporation (That started with an H and ended with a long Japanese-sounding string of characters) the possiblity of a layoff wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Recessions are scary only if you don't know what you'll do if you lose your job. Fortunately, you aren't in that boat, right? (Right??) The magic of our economy has taught us never to assume we'll have a job a day, a week, a month or a year from now. It's actually a good thing. By accepting that we might at any point throw ourselves back into the job market, we're keeping our job skills relevant (There's no old-folks home for punch card operators or Filemaker database administrators). We're looking at staying on the right side of bleeding edge (either because the tech is bleeding-edge, or our execution is).

IT still is a growth industry - recession or not. The current economy woes are happening for a variety of reasons, but none of them are because people are using their computers less. Scott Adams (The creator of Dilbert) said that jobs once-removed from the customer experience (anything with the word 'quality' or 'initiative' or 'process' in the title, for example) could easily be considered redundant and layoff-prone. The reality is a little bit more sinister - if you're working a job that's not directly connected with the success of the company you're also layoff prone.

'But my job is connected to the success of the company!' you cry. Really? Does your boss think so? Have you asked him, lately? That might be a good step, señor. No matter what you think reality is, it doesn't matter as much to your career as what your boss thinks reality is. Make sure that your version of reality and your boss' looks the same. If you're in that 'layoff-prone' category, what should you do?

First of all - embrace it. Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid says "If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you". Forget the "Who Moved My Cheese" and the "People will have multiple careers in their lifetime" statements - losing your job still sucks. It still hurts to be laid off. Whether anyone wants to admit it or not - we draw a substantial amount of identity and information about ourselves from our jobs. When that source of identity and information says "You aren't worth keeping around", that's a blow to you - a legitimate impact on your emotional and/or mental health. I don't know why so many people walk around with the 'losing your job shouldn't matter to you' rap. It does matter - it does hurt. Pretending that it doesn't only postpones that process - accept the pain for a while (a short while...1 or 2 days max) and then make up your mind to go out and get a new job.

So you've mentally moved on...now what? Let's talk job searching strategies. What's worked for me, since I have a non-traditional resume (jumped around a lot inside IT, no 4-year degree) is to work on marketing myself. Before I worked for The Company I Work For (TCIWF) I had to learn a lot about how to find a job. I'd been at the H-company for over 5 years. I drew some interesting parallels between searching for a job and dating. I'll discuss the details in a future blog post.

Can You Really Make Everyone Happy?

2008-01-23T12:08:00.000-08:00

Reading this article on Consumerist.com, I was struck with a question that had been circling my head for some time: how do you create the perfect customer service environment? Is such a thing even possible? I hope to find that company or service and then take whatever winning strategy is happening there to any organization I work for currently or in the future.

Information Technology has a role in customer service, since not only are we inventing the toys that shape the future, we're explaining it to the rest of the world. Even Facebook (a wildly popular social-networking app by any standard) requires a learning curve. Despite that, people are all over it - Facebook presented itself in such a way that people were willing to learn what they had to in order to use it.

You can draw some lessons from that - if your application is so awesome that kids are lining up to be a part of it, there's less motivation to make it idiot-proof. If your application cannot be awesome, for whatever reason, people are going to care a lot more about how easy it is to use. You can make that application run smoother than an iphone hooked to a Cray supercomputer but you will not make the people love it. The problem there being that people are expressing an 'it's not working' comment when they really mean 'I don't want to be doing this'. When that happens - you must understand what people are really saying and not beat yourself into a pulp for not making people feel something.

But back to customer service...I've been hearing this discussion for years. If we ever solve it, I'd like to be a part of that just because I think I'd make a killing writing the book about it. I've been reading tons of books on the same subject (new ones roll in every second financial quarter, it seeems) but I question whether they're really getting to the heart of what makes a great customer service organization that works for everyone involved. To get the right answer - you must ask the right question. Here are some of those questions:

1. How can you build a jerk-proof customer service process? Let's face it: every customer service horror story, whether it's a bad customer or a bad service rep is a story about a jerk. Jerk customers take advantage of customer service processes by hammering the counter and screaming 'The customer is always right!' Jerk reps make your day miserable in much more subtle, passive-agressive ways. They defy a single proverbial saying - but if you've ever been to the DMV, the post office or tried to return something at the mall on December 26th, you know what I am talking about.

2. How do you make the jerk-proof customer service profitable? We can't give foot massages to every customer at the Thrift store. We don't make money by spending more than we make on customer service. I can't tell you how many times I've read about some company having 'great customer service' only to find when I look further that this title is actually a misnomer. If you look hard enough, you'll find that every company has some 'horror story' attached to them. Sometimes they are based in fact - sometimes not...remember the Neiman Marcus Cookie Recipe that got emailed around with a fairy tale about being overcharged for it? Can't imagine what Neiman Marcus might have done, what process they might have created, that kept that from happening.

3. How do you make a corporate image universal? Funny thing about corporate messages, they never seem to make it down to the front-line rep level. 'I'm Lovin' It' is McDonald's motto right now - are the front line people 'lovin' it'? Obviously not...but whose job is it to make that happen? Corporate? The employees of the store? I'm always fascinated by the sleek, airbrushed image that every company has on their website and how catestrophically different it is when I talk to the guys who do the lowliest job there. Corporate image doesn't penetrate their reality and in most cases, this is where that message needs to come from. If your phone reps don't understand and agree that this your message is their message, what's the point of having that message in the first place?

I'm asking these questions now and if anyone has an answer to them - please feel free to discuss it with me. I'd really like to know how to make the perfect customer service organization that can and will be 'horror story'-proof.

.Net Hijinks

2008-01-22T17:43:00.000-08:00

Microsoft .Net is an application like any other - it's prone to failure and it decided to fail on one of my web app servers today. Not as bad as it could have been because it wasn't the production app server...not as good as it could have been because it wasn't a QA server.

I've been in situations like that before - the app server goes offline for whatever reason and it's your job to quickly troubleshoot it and restore it to working order. But that begs the question: what goes into troubleshooting? A few years ago, I didn't know the answer to that question and I think it merits discussing the topic with you.

Computer Troubleshooting has some basic steps that, if you keep them in mind you'll probably be able to troubleshoot 99% of whatever is out there. For the other 1%, that's what tech support is for. Here are the major steps:

1. Figure out how bad it is - what isn't working? Look at the system objectively: what is it not doing that it should be doing? Is it browsing the Internet? Not sending mail? Don't just stop at the first major problem; look and see if there are any other problems that the system is experiencing - the grouping of problems can help you narrow down the major cause.

2. Do simple resolutions fix the issue? If not, how far do they get? Start taking notes about what you're experiencing. Write down what you're trying and what happens when you do. It may sound dumb but if you're working a problem that takes several hours to fix and maybe several iterations of the same recovery steps, it's easy to skip steps because you think you have already done them.

3. Start reading – punch your error message into Google and see what comes back. Patch from Microsoft…Simple reghack…Who knows? I’ve had several strange problems that I was able to resolve by virtue of a really nice blog post by someone else, detailing the problem and the solution.

4. Backup, backup and back UP! – Solutions you might try will require you to delete files, registry entries, etc. If you try it and it doesn’t work, how will you get back from there if you need to? Never assume the solution will work – I’ve read countless posts where people go “Yeah, try this – it can’t lose!” only to find, guess what? It did lose. Back up your registry, back up the old files before you install new ones. Don’t make a bad problem worse.

5. Know when to fold ‘em – Sometimes the solution really is an OS reload. If an OS reload takes 6 hours (or 15 mins if you Ghosted the drive before you did anything – see suggestion #4), don’t waste hours trying to modify some .xml file. As you go through the process, look at your critical path and make the call if you need to call in the nuclear option.

Going through our process to create a website several time before (and documenting this process) is what made re-creating the web site after reloading .Net and Internet Information Service in Windows 2003 a pain rather than a catastrophe. You can troubleshoot! Don’t be afraid! This is where the rubber meets the road in Operations. This is what makes you a geek instead of a user.

Disaster Recovery - Real World Style

2008-01-20T19:59:00.000-08:00

I encourage anyone who works in Ops or who has an interest in Operations-style IT to check out the following post by Interdictor. Interdictor (real name unknown to me) was an Ops guy who worked for Zipa Networks - he rode out Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, working around the clock to keep the systems of his web hosting customers functioning.

Some parts are humorous - others are terrifying. In the week or so after the big K, the idea of keeping a data center secure and powered is a feat unto itself. I encourage anyone with similar concerns to look at this real-world case study and think seriously about what you would do.

40 rounds per second of awesome...

2008-01-16T14:27:00.000-08:00

Tech offices are often purveyors of interesting tech. The office downstairs from us has an operating Moog. I've often wanted to work in an office like that and the invention above fills the mind with many possibilities.

What Your Alhambra Bottle Teaches You About Project Management

2008-01-15T14:52:00.000-08:00

Ah, the ubiquitous bottled water service. I'm sure you have one in your office. It never occurred to me before yesterday that there was something to be learned from it about IT project execution.

This probably happens to you - you're filling up your quite little mini-jug because you want to drink more water. It's close to the bottom and you aren't looking forward to lugging the new jug in from wherever you store them. Fortunately, you don't run out but you feel a little guilty about leaving it for the next guy. Or if it isn't the water jug, the office coffee pot.

It isn't practical to replace the old jug before it is completely empty because the gravity-fed nature of the tap means don't plan on removing it without a lot of water on the floor. You must empty the water jug. Inconvenient, perhaps? Shouldn't the water company make a device that is capable of this kind of replacement? It's in your nature as a geek to wonder if there isn't a better way.

Practically speaking, however, a better way to deliver water might in fact be a poorer way to do so. Reason being is that if you want the convenience of not swapping having to wait to swap out the jugs, or not swapping them out at all - this would drive the cost of your water delivery up. Running filtered water to the tap is expensive. Putting a more feature-laden water service is also more expensive than the one you have - really you should be grateful that it does hot as well as cold water.

This brings us back to IT project management. Sometimes things just take time. There does become a point where you cannot crash the schedule, cannot creep the scope, cannot add features without hurting your overall project deadline. You will get water on your pants.

Sure, you could add that extra dashboard, but in reality it would increase your coding and testing time by 25%. That cost has to be absorbed somehow. The product isn't being made and tested by the Keebler elves. Your client (client being an actual paid client or your management structure) needs to understand what changes mean to your project. Sure, project management in the Agile dev format means that you develop your requirements over a short period of time, but this doesn't abdicate our responsibility to make them aware of the tradeoffs. This is what a good project manager is paid to do.

What Not to Do...

2008-01-13T21:02:00.000-08:00

You might have heard about the hijinks of Gizmodo at CES last week. A small prank to mess with corporate flat-panel displays got one of their staffers banned for life and maybe who knows what else for Gizmodo.

If there ever turns out to be an update to the proverbial 'don't bite the hand that feeds you' saying, it's this little episode. 'Don't prank CES if you happen to be Gizmodo'. I had been getting my gut full of reports from CES, I'm no fan of it, but it serves a purpose in IT to showcase new gadgets and software. If your business (like Gizmodo) is centered on being a first-hand resource of info on all that stuff, it should have gone without saying that you don't do stuff like this. Someone's just executed what a former boss referred to as a 'resume-producing event' (meaning that you'll be producing your resume elsewhere after that one-way ride through HR).

One thing I've learned about corporate communications is that they take the message their company projects very seriously. Stuff that the average geek doesn't worry about - comp doesn't work during demo...so what? Next time skip loading all that spyware! - could reduce a sales or marketing person to tears. Whenever you step on a company's ability to communicate their message and do it in a venue where everyone is sure to notice, it's like walking up to Marlon Brando in The Godfather and putting a big beer-and-cheese burp right into his face. Think you'll survive that long ride he wants you to take? Hope you kept your affairs in order, Gepetto.

I think it's probably a great metaphor for professional development, this little vignette. Even if you're not keen on your job, even if you feel unappreciated, even if you think it's good for a laugh and even if you think you'll get away with it - None of this makes it a good idea. Respect your employers, respect what they are trying to do. They might be doing something you consider silly or pointless, but it doesn't matter what you think.

It matters what they think.

Web Startups and Commercials

2008-01-11T15:49:00.000-08:00

One of the cool things about working at a startup is that you can sometimes get away with a truly crazy idea. Meebo and other startups decided to release commercials timed with the Super Bowl, only instead of paying millions to air the next Pets.com ad (one of the more glaring where-they-went-wrong moments of the previous Dot-com iteration) they decided to post it to Youtube.

It got a lot of attention - The Company I Work For (TCIWF) wanted to do something similar and, after mentioning that I'd shot movies before, I got handed this opportunity. Don't get me wrong, it's work. However I didn't know how much fun I was going to have doing it and this is why I think a job where I can do IT and be creative is closer to what I'd love to do for a living.

However, if you're a web startup and you're considering making a commercial on your own - I've come up with a set of pointers which you you may find useful. The Web Startup Commercial version of the Cluetrain Manifesto, if you will.

1. You have all the experience and know-how you need to make a Youtube commercial. Don't worry about hiring a production house. You can shoot it with your $400 DV cam and edit it with Windows Movie Maker. Nobody cares about production values when your resolution is around 320x200. Just be funny.

2. Begin with the end in mind - start with the tagline you want your commercial to have. Then work backward to make a commercial that centers around that idea. For example, if your commercial's intent is to hire developers, come up with why you're awesome and then make a commercial that talks about how un-awesome it would be to work somewhere else. If your commercial's intent is to talk about the problem your business is trying to solve - start with the tag "Company X...We Solve This Problem" and then work backward to find a way to (humorously) illustrate what life is like without your service or product. Just a tip - if you want to see someone doing this incorrectly, you need look no further than those 'As seen on TV' products where the lady is wearily sweeping a floor, chopping a tomato or folding a shirt in black and white, only to have them smash-cut to the color shot of the product they want you to buy. Don't be like that.

3. Be Original! - Meebo ripped off Microsoft's rip-off of the Volkswagen commercial. Don't be like Meebo. You can come up with an original, humorous way to describe your business and what you are trying to accomplish on your own. If you don't, I will make a spoof video making fun of your lack of creativity. Somehow I'm thinking of an unholy union of tabasco sauce and Play-doh...I don't know why.

4. Keep it simple - The humor and the message, these must be obvious and immediate. Therefore it's reasonable to shoot the commercial in an afternoon, cut it and have it ready for a first-draft screening and then potentially available for posting by the end of 14 days (from concept to production to post to first-screening to upload). Don't spend a lot of calendar time, especially if this is not your full-time job (if this is your full-time job, you should be able to turn this around even more quickly). Just remember that you'll probably be using your peer employees, borrowed equipment and everyone's spare time. They aren't SAG-card-carrying actors, you aren't Scorsese and this ain't Hollywood. Storyboard with post-its, come up with a script, shoot each scene with a 'best-of-3' mentality (only shoot the same scene 3 times...take the best one) and get it out the door. If it sucks, if you think of another commercial idea that's also funny, shoot another one in 1-2 months.

Some companies dig the commercial route - heck, Apple and Microsoft compete to throw out something every CES - that can't be a coincidence. If you want to do the same for your little mom-and-pop shop, don't be afraid. Pick up the camera and let it roll.

PM-Lite: How to Migrate Hosted Web Providers

2008-01-08T14:44:00.000-08:00

The Company I Work For (TCIWF) approached me with a request to migrate all web-hosting services off of their current provider, Earthlink, and move it to a different provider. The back story is as follows: when the company started, we used one of Earthlink's $99/year hosting services that included web hosting, DNS, mail, web apps, etc. Everything we could potentially need to get the company off the ground.

Unfortunately, Earthlink's performance in this regard was less than stellar. Our hosted website (which didn't get more than a few hundred hits a day and wasn't more than some HTML, Java and Flash content) failed more than 4 times in a calendar year. The DNS stopped DNS'ing, the hosting didn't...things like that. Earthlink's support response was to send you to their chat-line, which never got beyond 'engineers are working on this and we will get a response to you as soon as possible'.

So the decision was made to move to a new provider. This was a project to be executed quickly - I had to skip planning, scope statements and other accoutrement. The following steps describe how I did it without (hopefully) being too boring. This is helpful for anyone in a small business who would like to change their hosting provider.

1. Locate and cross-reference national hosting providers. Create a matrix of cost, published uptimes and features. We decided to go with Godaddy.com ourselves, you shouldn't consider that sufficient to make your own decision - everyone has to do their own math and be prepared to show their work.

2. Create a backup of the existing site - I used the Windows version of WGET (which is available here) to pull the site down.

3. Using Filezilla - we established an FTP connection to the new site and uploaded the existing content. Part of this project had an interesting constraint - they were using the opportunity to mod the existing content and they were using an outside contractor. I let him handle the details and he used the same process.

4. I insisted that the stakeholder of this project - Marketing - sign off on the new content before we went live. PM101 instills in you the idea that you get consensus for your project at different milestone points before pushing ahead to the next phase. If I hadn't done that, I could have easily transitioned the site over to something and had an exec or 4 screaming about how the new content made the company look bad. Take the time to make sure you're making a decision that the stakeholder will support - that might sound bureaucratic, but do it. Just do it - you'll thank me later. Marketing signed off in less than 24 hours so, it didn't take that much time and it was well worth it.

5. Migrating the ownership of our .com domain proved difficult. When the domain was originally registered by Earthlink - they used a third party registrar (1and1.com) to do so. Now that I was asking Earthlink to change domain ownership, they pointed me to 1and1.com. Maybe it's just me, but I remember a simpler time when you only had to call one company to get something done...especially when they were the ones charging you for it. 1and1 proved just slightly more helpful than the Department of Motor Vehicles. There was an outstanding bill that no one knew about - forwarded to collections, no less - that we had to settle. Then we had to call back - but everyone was out on vacation - the tech support line was backed up while they responded to voicemail - it amounted to a 5-day turnaround to get this paperwork taken care of. This is the Internet, right?

6. Once the ownership and billing had been sorted out - I had 1and1 point the domain to our new IP hosted by GoDaddy. I tried to time the request to take advantage of DNS-propagation (24-72 hours to make sure every DNS server knows your new IP, folks!) and it fortunately took place over the Saturday following Thanksgiving.

7. I did have to call GoDaddy once - I misunderstood their web control panel and mis-entered all the domain/dns info that I had put in a couple of weeks ahead of time. Tech support very kindly helped me out - one guy in five minutes did more for me than Earthlink had done in a year.

GoDaddy has been performing without a hitch since then. Earthlink's services have been quietly let go and I would say that I would not use them again in the future if I had a choice. Hopefully this shows non-technical people that the world of the Internet still has some very non-tech aspects. At the bottom of it, it's still people and as long as you can work with them - you can migrate your website to a new hosting provider.

Living the Dream...

2008-01-08T14:32:00.000-08:00

And now for a little tech-heresy...

2008-01-07T12:42:00.001-08:00

I'm going back through my list of regular-blogs-to-read and 'firing' a few of them. I know with the advent of RSS it's tempting to just keep them around but I find RSS feeds too much work. I find Facebook a waste of time. I think Twitter is a waste of web hosting. Digg is lame. Everyone and almost anyone can have a blogspot.com blog. Stuff like Justin.tv is an interesting concept but nothing I'd want to be a part of for longer than 4 minutes.

As Web 2.0 grows and continues to evolve, it's weird how the newest ideas seemed be nothing more than pared-down versions of old ones. In fact, Collegehumor.com did a really funny short movie about every dot-com brainstorming session I've ever sat through. I just wish the ones I had were done as quickly as this movie was. The sad thing is, the more I get into Web 2.0, the more I realize that people who want to be 'early adopters' of a new technology aren't being as judicious about what it is they're adopting, why it's relevant and what benefit (if any) they could hope to get.

Please don't get me wrong - I like tech. I love tech. That's why I do the job I do. But at the back of my mind, almost daily, is the little voice that's saying "Hey...What's the point?" Not everyone should be blogging. Not everyone should be on Facebook, or looking for Diggs or creating viral marketing. It's yet to be proven the benefit of being the first guy on the bandwagon for these new technologies.

Good surfers don't try to ride every wave - they simply know to jump on one when it comes by.

The Case for Outsourcing II – Please Lay Me Off

2008-01-04T15:04:00.000-08:00

Information Technology as a business is rapidly becoming more mature. As such, it’s important to start applying the lessons learned by the previous generations of business toward this industry.

So as I said in my title, please lay me off. Please send me packing if the job I do isn’t helping your bottom line. If you can’t figure out how I help you make money, if I can’t explain it to you when you ask, I have no business working for you. If that sounds too brutal, I have a question for you: how kind is it to hold a resource in state that forces him to rely on job skills that wouldn’t be valuable elsewhere? Isn’t it more kind to let him go find a position where he can be relevant and valuable?

Picture it this way, you’re a boss and Joe’s a great employee. He’s been with the company for 10 years. You know that there are better people for the position than Joe, but Joe’s loyal and you feel loyal to Joe. Here comes the hit – company’s stock tanks, recession hits, another 9/11 scenario happens. Joe’s position is to be eliminated for reasons that have nothing to do with Joe, his loyalty or your perception of how good an employee he is. You hate to do it, but it really comes down to this: lobby for Joe’s position and find yourself out of yours. Joe can go or you and Joe can go. You take a few Maalox and sit Joe down for the five-minute meeting on Friday afternoon. Now Joe is on the pavement, trying to find a job in a market where he’s dealing with his stale job skills and poor job market.

You’ve killed Joe with kindness.

Now I’m not Joe’s boss and you probably aren’t either. But if you don’t want to be Joe, you should at least spend some time thinking about the choice in front of Joe’s boss because even if it isn’t in front of your boss now, it could be.

Information Technology needs to differentiate between different classes. There’s the class of IT that makes money and the class of IT that allows other people to make money. That’s what I call ‘support IT’. The job I do now is considered support IT.

In terms of ‘support IT’ jobs, each one of us is a potential Joe. It’s sad, but that’s how it is. Support IT is overhead, much like office furniture and the janitor. Office furniture is there to make it possible to work effectively in that space. The janitor is there because you have a hard time keeping employees if they have to do their job plus keep the toilets unclogged. Overhead is what needs to be kept to an absolute minimum in a successful business.

That makes a strong case for outsourcing your entire support IT organization. I believe that this is a good thing. I think it resolves a long-standing problem about IT. I think it would kill the ‘Nick Burns’’ of the world.

The problem with Jimmy Fallon’s ‘Nick Burns’ is that he’s the unappreciated, irreplaceable IT guy. He’s not tied with the success of the business directly, he feels that in how he’s perceived at his job and his defense is to make snide remarks about the people he’s supporting. The dumb users don’t know how to configure their mail client, haw-haw. The joke is on Nick, of course, because his snarky attitude makes him an object of derision. He’s the teenager who mocks you for not knowing more about playing Halo 3, completely missing the point that there is far more to life than playing Halo 3. He’s the guy with the narrow point-of-view, the persecution complex and the clueless sarcasm. His kind is so universal that you can make a sketch about him on SNL and everybody knows exactly who he is.

So who benefits from having a guy like Nick on staff? Does the company? Does Nick? I would suggest that no one benefits. I would further argue that both the company and Nick would be better off if Nick’s job function was provided by an outsourced vendor. Or better yet, make knowledge of the computer systems, applications and tools more central to the objectives of every employee. Make every employee responsible for knowing how to change toner, add a printer, configure their mail client or troubleshoot a problem with their network connection. What’s wrong with that?

By acknowledging that support IT doesn’t have a direct business impact, this forces a business to think more seriously about what it is paying for. If support IT is necessary to your business, don’t treat it like a necessary evil. If your business needs an in-house resource, don’t make that resource apologize for coming to work. This is something that comes from the corporate culture and corporate culture is ultimately a manifestation of how management really feels. It’s subtle but becomes more apparent over time.

There’s a paradigm that exists right now within support IT roles. The paradigm is: you are necessary but you are not wanted. It’s hard to enjoy your job when management feels this way about you. It isn’t fair to those IT folk who chose that career path, work just as much to develop it as Scott from Marketing or Tara from Sales but can never enjoy the same stature within the company because they are not Scott or Tara. Putting IT within a business model that makes ‘support IT’ tasks central to the success of the business means that everyone wins.

The client company benefits because they are free to go with another vendor if they feel they need to. The outsourcing provider wins because of the reasons I just described. Employees of the outsourced business feel better because again, you’re part of the team. You’re part of the success of a business where you would not have been previously. This results in a benefit as the culture of your company sees you in a different light.

So to wrap up – support IT needs to think in terms of other service-based businesses and react accordingly. Rather than moaning and whining that ‘nobody appreciates me’, put yourself into a job or business model that means you will be appreciated. Think in terms of Joe’s boss and you will never be Joe.

The Case For Outsourcing

2008-01-04T12:44:00.000-08:00

Outsourcing is a dirty word in my line of work – heck, it’s a dirty word anywhere. The idea that management would bring in someone to do the job that you’re doing at a fraction of the cost. How dare they! There’s just no such thing as loyalty in business!

My response is – “Yeah…welcome to capitalism”. You should be looking at outsourcing as a viable, necessary part of business. You should be comfortable with outsourcing and even recommend outsourcing yourself if there is a good reason for doing so. Let’s talk about why.

Healthy business is about doing what it takes to make your company grow. The company grows when it can invest in growth-producing initiatives. It can invest when it has the capital to do so and it has the most potential for capital when it has reduced its overhead as much as possible. Notice what was not mentioned – “job security”. Job security has nothing directly to do with business growth. Job security can indirectly influence it – having job security helps retain your star performers (or potential stars) and these are the people who will do the work that makes the company grow. However, it isn’t a direct factor in company growth.

As businesses move, management has to make decisions about what to do that will encourage company growth. They have to decide what to support, what to discourage, what to keep and what to throw away. It requires a cold level of objectivity to make such decisions because, after all, this is what they are paid to do. Management is worried about job security – their own. Their job security is based on their ability to make the company grow – that is all.

As market conditions change, as problems appear and solutions materialize (or not…solutions appear far less often than problems do) – they have to make decisions about what to get behind, what to let go, what to pay for and what they will not be paying for. They have enough direct impacts to their business to worry about, stuff that might indirectly impact the business – they can’t even hope to get their hands around. The market moves too quickly, their competitors move too quickly for them to worry that much about it.

I’ve noticed that not everyone in IT understands this rationale. When confronted with these realities, I see a lot of resistance. The resistance comes, not from business acumen or understanding about how the market works but from fear of what lack of job security implies. Especially if you’re a parent, or the single income for your home – you’ve got these scary images of movies like “Roger & Me” or those old folks coping with mounting bills and stale job skills. How does anyone guarantee that they will always be able to provide for themselves and their family in this day and age?

The answer is – you can’t. Life is risky. Even the guy with the best paying job and the most on-paper security, house in the hills, kids in college, blah blah blah – he’s still subject to the rest of the uncertainties that we all face. Get a great job and get killed on the road commuting to said job. Miss the car wreck, get the cancer. Miss the cancer, your spouse becomes an invalid and you become their primary caregiver. Miss all of that and you’re taking pills and drinking because your life is a dull, meaningless existence.

Welcoming the fact that your position can be outsourced actually makes you less likely to be outsourced. This might sound ironic, but in fact it is not. By welcoming the fact that you make your job cost less to do, you are signaling that you have the company’s interests at heart. You’re supporting the ability of the company to grow. By being focused on the company’s bottom line and critical business initiatives, you make yourself more valuable. You become an asset to the organization because the organization knows you here to help the organization win, not just yourself.

The most succinct way to put this is a team sports analogy. If you want to be the kid not-picked-last on the ball field, you have to be valuable to the team. You’re valuable to the team if you help it win. If you aren’t – all the whining and pouting in the world won’t change this fact. In fact, whining and pouting just distracts you from the real problem which is you need to be valuable to the team if you want to play. Kids understand this instinctively; the sooner you learn that lesson for yourself, the better off you will be.

Look at your job. Look at how much it costs you to do each task and see how much it costs someone else. If he’s doing it cheaper or faster, find out why. See if other companies have decided not to do what you’re doing and are thus more competitive. Make the case for ‘de-cluttering’ your job – lobby for dropping time-intensive tasks that have no clear benefit to the company. Sometimes you need to be the person asking the question, “How is this right for the company?” Maybe your boss hasn’t thought of it – maybe he’s waiting for you to suggest it.

Live with the reality that your job is not guaranteed – make your job skills valuable. Don’t sacrifice your viability as a technical resource for short-term benefits. Be informed about trends within the IT community to see what new techs will be absorbed and which will end up at Weirdstuff. Keep your job search warm…keep your resume current. Be open to new opportunities, even if you aren’t considering a job change at this time.

At the end of the day, you want you to be okay. It’s not about the office, the title, the business card or the cell phone. It’s about you being okay. Make yourself okay by keeping ahead of the curve of change.

360 Degree Awareness

2007-12-26T18:17:00.000-08:00

IT Operations is a discipline inside information technology. Picture the normal 2-dimensional grid of issues surrounding a product and then expand to a 3-dimensional view when you factor in how each product has its own grid of issues and one problem in one area can impact another product in a completely unforeseen way.

Before I came to The Company I Work For, I had a boss who hammered into the team I was on the importance of knowing what boxes held what applications, where they were connected to and what depended on them. In a 400-server data center with shaky power delivery, this wasn’t an academic exercise. After the second or third data center loss through local power problems, we developed a process that had that kind of 360-view of all systems so that we knew what had to be turned on first, second, third and so on.

At The Company I Work For – our application development environment is physically small but houses several dozen applications pertaining to our job. Our PHP/Apache environment shares space on the same server as our code repository and our SQL schema repository. Upgrading the Bugzilla app can have people coming over to us going “Where’s the Wiki?”

It pays to be aware.

Our mandate is to have an environment that requires no more than 25% of a single headcount – we’re always encouraged to find any way to make our job more efficient, happen faster and require less admin overhead. If we can keep the cost down, so much the better. I haven't found a way to put all systems within a Matrix to show their relation to other systems - a configuration management tool, perhaps? If I find one, I'll publish it here.

Site Monitoring and Operations – Part 3

2007-12-26T10:21:00.000-08:00

Burn-in, Close-Out and Lessons Learned

The virtual appliance has been running for two weeks continuously. We’re cautiously optimistic - so far, so good. A couple of points to mention, things to watch out for:

VMWare/Virtual Appliances do not run as a Windows service – so when I kill my Windows console session, the virtual appliance dies, too. I’m leaving the console logged in and have Windows Terminal Services configured to leave the connection alive after I close out. In our organization, this isn’t a problem but in others where you have your terminal services configured to kill idle connections after a period of time, this could be a problem.

Nagios Tuning – I’ll be going back in to tighten our warning system in response to Nagios whining when our ISP gets saturated. If the VPN link between our app dev and data center locations becomes saturated because we’re downloading a large file, I can count on Nagios to send at least one ping complaining about ping response or a single dropped packet. We’re not that concerned about a saturated line yet – I’d prefer only to know when there’s a real problem.

Nagios doesn’t update changes you make to its configuration immediately – you have to commit your changes made through Monarch first, then kill all Nagios processes using ps –ef | grep nagios and then kill (process numbers). Recommitting your changes in Monarch (which doesn’t die when you kill Nagios) immediately starts the Nagios processes again and then your changes are visible. Monarch contains a handy backup tool to back up whatever config changes you make – never, ever forget to back up.

Although I spent a longer amount of time than I would have expected getting Exim4 and Sendmail configured, this did give me an opportunity to become more experienced with Linux and that is always a good thing.

Some Thoughts About Office Politics

2007-12-23T11:10:00.000-08:00

When I first got started, I thought office politics was something that people in my line of work didn't worry about.

I was wrong.

How human beings interact, co-exist, is everyone's problem. To suggest otherwise is dangerous to your professional development. With that in mind - I started learning more about office politics - not to use them to some malicious advantage but simply to learn how they could help me or harm me. I found the following information worth considering and am passing it along to you.

Read "How to Improve Your Skills at Office Politics"

Site Monitoring and Operations – Part 2

2007-12-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

Building Nagios

We earmarked a single server to act as our host for all virtual servers. Named “Wintermute” (some cyberpunk fans will get a laugh out of this), it was a Windows 2003 RC2 server that had previously been our demo/Roadshow server for the NYC show in May.

Downloading and installing VMWare is pretty simple – just follow the default prompts. You can download the Nagios virtual appliance we used here - http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/372. This particular virtual appliance is helpful because it includes two additional tools to help configure Nagios. Monarch and Monarch-EZ are open-source applications that provide a web-based configuration tool and this makes the job of configuring Nagios easier. Monarch as a web-based tool is fairly intuitive and we added our production servers in about 15-20 minutes.

But what should we check? Our IIS servers are checked for HTTP and Ping availability; This just means that Nagios verifies that the box can be pinged and is responsive on Port 80. Our mail servers are checked for Ping, HTTP, SMTP and POP services since our users access their mail from the web, different mail applications and mobile devices.

What turned into a very-large problem was getting Nagios to email us when it noted a problem on a server. The virtual appliance uses Sendmail and Exim4 to act as a mail transfer agent – I’m not a Unix guy by nature – how was I going to get this to work? After a few hours looking at various pages, I found this page which turned out to be one I wished I had found in the beginning - http://pkg-exim4.alioth.debian.org/README/README.Debian.html. We still needed to modify some configuration and alias files using vi, but the majority of configuration was handled via the dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config command. By performing this reconfiguration – we were able to immediately get Exim4 to send mail to our mail server and configured a distribution list to forward all Nagios traffic to several people. Although it wasn’t an issue, we also checked to allow SMTP traffic from the virtual appliance to our Exchange server.

Now we were ready for testing. Since no one was using POP mail services on our second mail server, I killed our POP virtual server in Exchange 2003 and waited to see how long Nagios would take to notice it. Not long, as it turned out. In about 2 minutes, I had the “Warning” message appear in our web tool and 2 minutes after that, several messages showed up in our mailboxes to let us know that POP wasn’t responding on our mail server. I restarted the POP virtual server and got several “Recovery” messages after that.

As a nice-to-have, we configured a manual DNS entry to allow the virtual appliance to be accessed from http://nagios/nagios. Manual DNS entries for different web servers is a lot easier than IP addresses for your team to remember.

In our last entry, we will talk about the Burn-in process and Lessons Learned. There are a few things you want to watch out for.

- “Site Monitoring and Operations” continues in Part 3…

Site Monitoring and Operations – Part 1

2007-12-19T12:39:00.000-08:00

Although The startup I work for has a small infrastructure compared to other organizations, we strive to maintain maximum uptime and respond as quickly as possible when problems come up.

Site monitoring is part of this process – we needed a way to be informed about problems. Nothing is more embarrassing than getting a phone call from a user or customer saying, “Do you guys know your site is down?” We considered performing daily tests on each server – not only was this an inefficient use of our time, it wouldn’t help us if the site was alive at 8am only to be dead around noon. To solve this, we examined several options:

Automated Site Test – Using our automated site test application (QTP) – we would run a series of simple login tests to verify the life of the site. This option was rejected for a variety of reasons, but chiefly because we needed a site monitoring system that could provide a single-look format for the health of our environment and although it would handle the site and application, an automated test wouldn’t test our mail capability.
Outsourced Site Monitoring – Companies like Cittio and Siteuptime.com offer managed site monitoring. We may visit these in the future, but wanted to keep our budget as low as possible.
Commercial Site Monitoring Software – Cricket, Big Brother and Site Scope are site monitoring softwares that are used in data center environments. As with outsourcing – we may visit this in the future, but we were looking for a cheaper way to do this, if it existed.
Open-source software – Nagios is an open-source application that runs on Linux to provide site monitoring. Being open-source and free, it was attractive but was going to require that we run a Linux server. We were going to have to allocate a single server or desktop-as-server to run this application.

Another project we had on our plate was examining the use of server virtualization. Our application development environment is housed on three servers and those servers have more than a dozen different commercial and open-source tools installed on them to assist in developing our product. Upgrading a single application can prove problematic, especially if other tools utilize the same underlying program, like ASP, Perl or PHP.

Out of the open-source options for virtualization (We decided early on to stick with open-source and not to go with products like Microsoft’s virtual server), we decided to go with VMware. The decision to do so was pretty simple.

VMWare has been encouraging people to use their product by allowing individuals to build virtual appliances on their own and publish them to the rest of the world. The link to this page is here - http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/ . A quick browse through the pages and we noted that someone had already built and published a Nagios virtual appliance. We downloaded it and started configuring it for our use.

Ruling by Policy

2007-12-19T12:29:00.000-08:00

Quick Note: I wrote this in 2003 and thought I'd share it with you here. I think it illustrates how much I knew at the time and also how much I had to learn. I don't agree with everything that I've written below - I can spend time later giving my own personal rebuttal to this piece.

I don’t go to normal resources for wisdom and advice when it comes to how to get through my job. I’ve learned that there are enough discrepencies in working in Corporate America that my personal motto is “Sense the Irony”. Among my coping mechanisms, I look to sources like “Dilbert” for inspiration and I recommend to anyone in or considering joining this monkey house to go out and read Work Would Be Great If It Weren't for the People. Kernels of truth erupt out of this place. One of them being that if Bill Gates were to hand me a signed check for $2 Million, I’d be out of here so fast you’d never catch me. I checked around and it turns out most of my co-workers feel the same way, so it drills a few holes in that whole “I’m excited about this company” mantra that every HR on the planet is chanting. Of these truths I've gleaned I've added my own bits of wisdom. One of them being from Scott Adams' "The Dilbert Principle". He discusses a lot of different aspects of the corporate system and suggests his own business model to encourage people to contribute to the system by leaving earlier and thus making the time they are here more productive. He mentions in all of this that a company can't really do much topush creativity but it can do a lot to discourage it. His point was: hire the right people, give them the tools and get out of the way. I like his thinking and this is just my personal spin on his idea as it applies to me. The job doesn't really require much creativity but communication is paramount. Heck, I AM the e-mail admin - my paycheck begins and ends with communication. Inter-group communication is something that the powers that be are pushing and I've been thinking about it: this falls in the same arena as creativity. They can't enforce communication but they can go a long way in stopping it. I find it humorous that my company is layering communication upon communication instead of ensuring that the low-level stuff is taking place.

In my new group, Operations, we've got Computer Operators. Tragically, it's not a very glamorous job. They do 12-hour shifts that consist of being there, changing tapes and calling if something blows up. It's thankless and boring but it's necessary to ensure that we have someone here 24 hours a day if something should happen. Like firefighters without the women chasing after you. Some folks in the company have this breathless "We need to get this going ASAP" line that just makes me want to ban the word 'ASAP' from any conversation that takes place. It's not like someone's going to die if they don't get this e-mail sent. It's not like the world will fall down if a print job doesn't go through. Not to hear them tell it. They get so cranky and upset if a single thing isn't working that you may need to call Grief Counseling. Oddly enough, these are the same people who nastily ask why you’re requesting extra in the budget for all these new toys they want to play with.

Before this turns into a bitter "I-hate-my-job" rant, let me change some focus. If I were running the show, I'd model this a lot more like my previous boss Jearome has it. He encourages his people to get the job done, points them in the direction of the people they need to talk with and then steps back. No staff meetings or meetings to discuss meetings. If he has a question, he'll come to you to discuss it or call. Other than that, nothing more to say. He senses the irony and oftentimes when I was hot under the collar about some mundane little thing he'd remind me "Keep cool, it's just a job." Words to live by. So, what would Tim do? Here’s a few suggestions from the trenches:

Good management is more than just writing policy - Any organization can be easily turned into a galumphing, over-managed beast through the overapplication of policy and official decisions. Just look at any governmental organization, GM or AT&T. What makes smaller companies better is that decisions flow faster, people react quicker and the company adapts more rapidly. As a previous employee of McDonalds (for all of three months. Can you imagine getting fired from a ‘trained monkey’ job?) it was the only job I’ve ever held where every single detail of that job was documented on 8 ½ x 11 in 3-ring binders. Everywhere else, some seat-of-the-pants flying was involved. My limited experience has told me that it’s impossible to write a policy to cover every single event that happens within this place, not without hiring double your current staff and tasking one half do the job while the other half writes up documents on how to do it. Sometimes you have to make decisions and go. Later on, you can refer to your original decision in making new ones in the future. If it’s major enough, if it happens often enough, policy can be enacted.

Change for the Better – Be very careful that the decisions you make do not make the problem worse. In my current capacity, I’ve seen a lot of decisions made by management that involve changing our schedules. The new edicts they’ve handed down serve only to punish the subordinates, without whom the situation would have been much worse. This kind of goes back to the first suggestion, but it’s unique in that most managers try to create a blanket fix for problems, but blankets aren’t always the answer. Sometimes, it’s specific people and nothing solves those problems except for a nice eyeball-to-eyeball conversation. If movies about the Mob have taught us anything, it’s that sometimes by making an example of one person, you keep the group in line. Managers’ success depends on the efforts of their people. If those people are making things worse and not listening to direction, they’re making it a clear cut case of them-or-me.

Lead the People, Moses - Leaders are managers, but managers aren’t necessarily leaders although the good ones are. Lao-Tzu once said,"The wicked leader is he who the people despise. The good leader is he who the people revere. The great leader is he who the people say, 'We did it ourselves.” Great management is so subtle that those being led usually don’t realize it. Great ideas are ones that don’t have to be sold. The best form of subtle management is leading by example. There will always be the ‘grunt jobs’ that are dished out in any organization. Covering the weekend pager, working the dead watch in a data center, on and on and on. Why not volunteer to take a few of those shifts? It’d certainly foster a “We’re all in this together” spirit. It would also prove that you believe in the decisions you make. As a grunt, I need to know that you know what you’re doing and that you’re serious about the decisions you make.

No job is perfect. If you find you hate a certain person at work, I guarantee you that his or her clone works wherever you’re going next. It’s best to learn to make peace with them, learn to get along or get around them. At the same time, you need to remember that the higher up the ladder you are, the more you’re likely to make someone’s day or ruin it by your decisions. Like all the backups I make before I work on a server, you need to leave yourself room in case something goes south. Be humble, listen and act on some suggestions and you’ll make yourself that much more fun to work for.

Growing Technically / Growing Professionally

2007-12-19T12:16:00.001-08:00

It's important to learn that part of your technical job isn't about tech. It is about people.

Apple gets that right in that they are as passionate about their products working for people as they are about the technology itself. The days of snarky, technically-brilliant people with no social skills are over. The days of 'nerds' are over. If you plan to be in a technical field, you must be prepared to polish your professional skills as much as your technical skills. This is what makes you valuable in IT.

Every job has a technical side - carpenters are very skilled in their own way, as are bakers, mechanics, architects, lawyers and doctors. What everyone realizes, almost instinctively, is that it's not enough just to be good at the technical side of your job. How many horror stories have you heard about the doctor with no bedside manner, the shady contractor and the crooked auto mechanic? You must also be professionally competent.

I published a number of 'professional growth' essays on my older blog area. I didn't write them to put myself on a pedestal - I had simply learned something about myself and wanted to jot it down for future reference. Some people have come back and told me how much they enjoyed them and so - I'll be re-publishing them here to put what I've learned about professional growth in a more strict context. I'll tell you when it was re-published; it's not like you would have had to pay to read the old archives anyway.

Hi, there.

2007-12-19T11:59:00.000-08:00

Thanks for visiting. Startupgeek is a blog about several things:

1. The things I've learned technically in the past 12 years.
2. The things I've learned professionally in the past 12 years.
3. New things I learn, both tech and professional.
4. Random thoughts about working in IT.

What the blog is not about:
1. My employer - I'm vetting the blog to ensure their privacy; this isn't a corporate-sponsored blog and this content is not approved as far as what should represent the company. To eliminate that as an issue - I'm leaving them out of it and trusting everyone to respect that.
2. Politics - I'm politically neutral...I don't discuss politics.
3. Product reviews - I don't think I'd ever hope to compete with CNET or Tomshardware.

About Me
I've been working in IT since August of 1995 - in a nutshell, I started in phone support, moved on to desktop support, then to systems administration, then data center operations and finally, deployment/operations for a startup in the Silicon Valley.

My opinion is just that: opinion. I do my best to back up my POV with reasonable, empirical data. I reserve the right to be wrong about something and fortunately, I don't make the same mistakes too many times. I'm hoping this information will help someone else do the same.