Work Journal
For Week of September 20, 1999
Page Updated Wednesday, December 22, 1999 10:02 PM
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
Well testing my documentation on unattended installations of Windows NT to find my errors certainly found the errors. I found two small errors, one was caused by me relying on my memory instead of my notes when I wrote one section, and the other was due to poor notes.
A little tweaking of my test installation and documentation and now everything works great. Using a Windows 98 startup disk, with the addition of loading smartdrv.exe I was able to install Windows NT on a freshly formatted fat partition in 20 minutes on my test PC which is not known for its speed.
Now all I have to do now is clean-up my draft copy of documentation on basic Windows NT unattended installation, then I can start work on advanced unattended installations.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I am working for a large electrical utility at the moment which just had one big problem drop in their lap at noon today. The whole data center for the company lost power, thus the entire company in all local and international areas lost access to data, Lotus Notes, the Internet, and SAP. How you ask does a large multinational company which generates electricity lose electrical to it's central data repository. Well the story as I have been able to piece it together so far is that the entire data center is hooked up to two very large UPSs ( Uninterruptible Power Supply). One UPS is the primary and the second is a backup and there is also a backup generator. It seems that while testing one UPS the other UPS failed to pick up the load, then the main breaker went so the generator system did not sense a load requirement so the generator did not kick in, which left the data center without electricity. The generator had to be fired up manually to get power flowing till the breaker could be reset, then a battle plan for getting approx 150 mostly NT servers running was required. The repercussions of this will not stop being felt for many days. What I don't get is how can such a large server farm be connected to only two UPSs and a backup generator. If there were pairs of UPSs for clusters of servers at least only some of the servers could be knocked out of service, not the whole server farm as happened today. Now the business has lost 10s if not 100s of thousands of dollars in wages etc..
***
No sooner than I send out a request to remove my name from one mailing list, that I get another legally not Spam, Spam email message for credit card collections. Even worse these people do not appear to be setup for people to merely reply to the message with remove as the subject so some mail reading program can update the mailing list. Now I have to direct mail to a specific person, and ever so nicely ask to have my name taken off their mailing list. Part of the Spam law passed by the U.S. Congress should have been a section on providing a reasonable method for receivers of this junk mail to get their name removed from mailing lists.
Oh now I am really pissed off at these Spam mail people. The email address they ask requests for removal from the mail list be sent to does not work. This is not how a reputable company operates, and they do not hide behind a CompuServe address. I have replied to the address that sent me the message, and asked them to remove my name from their mail list, and to also fix the email address they have provided for those who wish to be removed from the mail list.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
ZDNet has changed their free email service and merged it with a service provided by Onebox. Now you can get free email, access to your POP mail, receive faxes and voice mail all from one free service. You get a voice mail box which converts voice mail to wav files and puts them in your email inbox, so you can listen to them on your PC. There are plug-ins so you can listen to, or a record voice mail right on your PC as well as options to view faxes as a GIF file, as a TIFF file with your own external viewer or with a downloadable Java TIFF viewer.
I have been using the ZDNet email service for a while and have nothing but good things to say about it. These additional services make this a even more appealing service, and the changes that have been made to the email page makes the service even easier to use. The biggest plus for me with this service is being able to access my POP mail accounts from any PC which has internet access, which is great when I am traveling or at work.
***
Microsoft is making changes to the MCP and MCSE tracks with Windows 2000 coming out sometime in the future. If you are Microsoft Certified check out http://www.mcpmag.com/mcpnews_con.asp?url=99top and http://www.mcpmag.com/mcpnews_con.asp?url=990920 for an look at where Microsoft is heading in regards to certification in the future.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
As my current contract ends September 30th and I have already been told that there will be no extensions etc. of the contract I have spent part of the evening reacquainting myself with my many internet job resources.
Its kind of funny how things are only now getting interesting at work now, and I am about to go out the door.
I wrote a simple batch file to maintain multiple generations of backup data for a Y2K test PC at work and it seems to be leading to at least one more project for me before I am done on the 30th.
The following is basically what I wrote for a backup batch file for work:
@echo Please close all applications
@echo off
pause
@echo off
@echo Data Is being copied to Drive G:
rd g:\backup5 /s /q
rename g:\backup4 backup5
rem rd g:\backup4 /s /q
rename g:\backup3 backup4
rem rd g:\backup3 /s /q
rename g:\backup2 backup3
rem rd g:\backup2 /s /q
rename g:\cbackup backup2
xcopy c:\temp g:\cbackup /s /e /i /q
The person who was originally given the job for designing a data backup routine kept trying to use PKZip. He was making little headway in trying to make many generations of backups when I through this together. Basically all it does is remove the oldest backup, rename the existing backups and create a new backup. This provides may versions of data backup to go back to locate data.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
Ever since I moved to Calgary in the fall on 97 I have been doing contract work which I have gotten through agencies. I have a love hate relationship with these agencies. I love them when they get me a job and I hate them the rest of the time. Today is a prime example. A rep from an agency calls and asks if I am currently working and/or if I am looking for any new opportunities. I reply that I am working but that the contract is over as of September 30th. So she informs me of a position which I find acceptable and agree to her forwarding my resume to the client, and that I can make it to an interview with the client today as I can walk to their office from the office I am currently working in. So I go to the clients office and have a wiz bang interview and the two managers who interview me are very pleased with my interview and credentials, BUT. They are hiring to fill a term or contract position and they want to handle the contract themselves, not go through an agency, but would deal with a headhunter. Well I tell them that I am new to dealing with this particular agency and am not sure if they work in a headhunter type fashion. I leave with myself and the managers saying that we had better contact the agency ASAP. I get back to the office, call the agency and the rep I talked to earlier is not available so I leave her a voice mail. later in the day just as I am rolling out of the parkade on my bicycle, my cell phone rings so I stop and dig it out of my pack only to miss the call which I am sure is the agency calling me back. The caller ID on my phone shows the number for the agency so I call them up only to be put through to another rep who says he is taking care of the other reps messages. I give him the run down that the interview went well except for when it came to the details of how the client expects to do their hiring. Well the rep explains the while his agency has not dealt with this particular department of the clients, they have dealt with the department manager so he feel that there will be no problems and that I should have no worries. He says he will sort things out. Now I feel about 1% better about the situation, but who is right and who is wrong, the agency or the client. I am more likely to believe the client as they are the ones doing the hiring and I would think would know their policies a lot better that any agency.
This plus a few other run ins with different agencies makes me feel like they are all a bunch of snake oil hustlers. They tell you what you want to hear, get you a job (maybe) and collect their all too high percentage from the client. If I ever get to where I can contract under my own name, or get full time work so I can quit dealing with these agencies I will be one happy camper.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
This morning there was enough snow on the ground that I could not see the grass in the yard. I live in the far northwest corner of Calgary at what is one of the highest elevations in the city. So as I descended the hill I live on, down into the river valley it was interesting to see how the snow became less and less to where I could see it had rained instead of snowing. It was a cool day but still well above freezing, but there was still snow by my truck where the sun could not warm and melt it.
I heard from a new agency today, and the rep there is going to make some calls on my behalf next week. This is a small firm that I learned of from a friend. I have talked to a few of the small agencies over the past few months and have found them to be on average much nicer to deal with than the large corporate agencies. This I think is partially due to them often being owned and run by the people that work there, and that their lively hood is on the line if they don't take good care of the people, and companies they work with.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I'm late posting updates for the weekend as my attention has been elsewhere. I have been busy doing domestic stuff and I also I picked up another old motherboard from a friend which hopefully is fully operational.
While out taking care of chores I took a look through the local CompSmart store which just opened in the local mall. I see that there is more Linux product on the shelf than I have ever seen before. I also noticed that if you purchase a low end PC that you could spend just as much on the latest and greatest software as you do on the hardware. If someone doesn't really need Microsoft Office I think I would encourage them to look at StarOffice, and save the cash they saved for another day. I also noticed that there are more Apple add-ons being carried in stock. I wonder if the increase in visibility of Linux and Apple in the media has driven the store to stock more of these products, or if there is a true demand by customers for these products.