Oct 01
ErinGarbage, Work agile, rant, Work
I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today so I need to vent out and nitpick… 🙂
I want to reiterate the advocacy of minimizing the use of the word “resources” when referring to members of your team.
A resource is a finite, inanimate stock or tool. A hammer is a tool therefore it is a resource. My time and skills are resources but I don’t want to suffer the indignity of being categorized as a tool. I am neither a tool nor a resource; and I would appreciate not being abstracted to the same level as a computer. Computers are dumb, they can only follow instructions.
Use FTE to refer to the workload unit, but use team member, colleague, personnel or employee when referring to the human being. Respect the person doing the work. The IT industry may be being overhauled and optimized with automation, but this remains a creative industry and not a place for human automatons. Each member is unique and brings something special to the table.
ciao!
Aug 08
ErinGarbage, Work Work
During this lifetime I have heard people say a few times that their work is too stressful that they want to vomit. I didn’t realize that this morning it would be a literal thing for me. 🙁
I went to sleep at around midnight after a healthy dose of boring reading material (aka project work package aka contract) for some big shot discussions this week. At around 2AM I suddenly awoke with a jerk with the words UAT[1] in my mouth and the feeling of having a lot of bile in my throat. Thankfully the trash bin was on my side of the bed so I swiped the cover open and started dry-heaving on it. The icky and rough feeling on my throat was not going away so I ended up drinking a lot of water and munching on fried and salted corn kernels to get the taste of bile away.
Now I can, with credibility, say that I can relate next time I hear somebody say they are sick and tired of their work that they want to vomit. 🙂
[1] User Acceptance Test
ciao!
Feb 07
ErinWork
And it is not meant to be funny.
Oct 12
ErinNon-FLOSS, Technology, Work SCM, Work
Installing RTC 2.0 client on the Win2003 machine provided by our customer is proving to be a challenge of patience and futility. I spent the better half of the day trying everything I can think of but:
– Using the bundled launchpad doesnt do anything: everything just quits without any warning or error.
– Invoking the launchpad using the parameters in the autorun.inf file () doesnt work.
– Invoking launchpad\launchpad.bat terminates with a wrong variable expansion.
– Invoking the various installer executable inside the win32 sub-directory produces a “Missing file install.xml” error and then will show the Installation Manager window. Unfortunately it cannot install anything even if the preference shows the repository to the RTC 2.0 extracted files are detected as “connected”.
I know the installer works because we have installed it fine on our WinXP workstations. The md5sum of the file in the Win2003 machine matches the one in our XP workstations.
Ready to give up and log a RTC bug, I did some more fiddling to gather more information and tried to download the web install even if it is going to be painful installing RTC on a slow and erratic connection. I got the same results.
Then I noticed that there were lots of files named install-[something].xml in the win32 directory but no install.xml file. An idea hit me and created a copy of the “install-client.xml” and renamed it to “install.xml”. I then executed the win32\install.exe and everything installed as expected.
And that concludes a whole-day wrangling on getting RTC 2.0 installed in the Win2003 server. Sometimes the best solutions are really those that hide under our noses. 🙁
ciao!
Oct 12
ErinGarbage, Work
– The car owners from Green Ridge who turns left too early; and those who hog the opposite lane of the Barkadahan bridge. I hope you have a worst day than what I had today and for the rest of your $DEITY forsaken lives while you are inside any vehicle.
– The 3.5 hours commute to the office. We left at 5:10AM and arrived at 8:40AM.
– The Pasig rainforest route is still submerged in flood water. We can still see the water from the west bank of the floodway road.
– The cyclist who almost let himself get run over by a tricycle when he made an abrupt left to cross the street.The reason: some street vagrants are having an early morning drinking binge and they offered him a shot of Red Horse Beer.
– Pasig Blue Boys (traffic enforcers) who opened a counter-flow west bound but made sure those those came from under the Jenny’s avenue bridge would not be able to use it and get stuck in horrible traffic.
– Jeepneys, FX taxis and buses plying the Ortigas route who insists on weaving through the traffic and loading/unloading people in the middle of the road.
– Inconsiderate pricks who keeps on ejecting their sputum and saliva on the side of the overpass that I am using such that their bodily fluids are always aligned with my line of sight.
– The other inconsiderate prick who blew his/her breakfast on the landing of the said overpass.
– The bus driver from hell who drives pedal to the metal as soon as the last passenger steps on or off the bus. I know there are hand-rails but human beings are not designed to be standing upright when their inertia shifts from 0 to 40kph. Sideways.
– The $#@%# building administration who insists that sauna treatments are good for your health by making sure their ground floor hallways and elevators are a couple of degrees above the comfortable temperature.
And my work hours has only just started…
May 30
ErinGarbage, Work
Right now my leg muscles hurt. Every single one. The last time I felt something similar to this was when we watched the E’heads concert. My lower back also hurts but that is something to be expected. The bedroom now stinks from the menthol-laced oil that I applied to ease the pain. 🙁
The reason for the pain was I had to stand up most of the day during the Agile methodology introduction that I co-facilitated. My physique is really not something that can tolerate standing up most of the time. Now I realize that aside from the time that I had willingly sacrificed for the training session, I now have to unwittingly sacrifice some more to the pain.
In retrospect I can say that I regret being the primary facilitator for the training. I don’t like speaking engagements because I am not confident enough to put into words what I am thinking, much less in my non-native language. Thankfully the audience today was very forgiving and the mood was relatively light. Jon who co-facilitated the training with me has me enthralled in his public speaking prowess. He seems very at ease in handling the audience and that is something that I would like to possess someday.
I am looking forward in seeing the feedback as I know this impromptu shepherd has lost some sheep along the day’s journey. But for now I would settle in looking forward to some reprieve from the pain.
Sleep, my mistress, I bid you to claim me tonight in your bosom and provide some relief. Please don’t let that mischievous Cramps worm his way into our union as he will definitely wreck havoc for tomorrow if he gets his way…
ciao!
Nov 10
ErinRubbish, Work
Or your money back!
Sounds like a pitch for snake oil medicines. 😀
Tonight I opened my company mail and I found a curious memo about a new guideline about backing up data on company owned machines. The first though that entered my mind was “WTF, another roadblock for doing backups?”
Reading the memo, it made some sense if you apply some common sense. And then I tried reading it from a “Security Expert slash Manager extraordinaire” perspective who follows everything by the book and then my world shrunk by a magnitude of ten. The phrasing combined with current practices is enough to give me the shivers if I think about embarking in a simple task of performing backups.
In line with the company’s commitment to protecting client data, effective immediately we are implementing the following process for backing up data on company-owned machines (desktops or laptops):
You may not back up any sensitive data residing on a company-owned computer (Laptop or Desktop) without permission of the IT Support team and obtaining a signed form. Only encrypted back ups are allowed, including copying files to flash media or CD.
Not bad eh? Not until you read that you need a very high approver before you can even think of performing a backup. If you need an analogy then think of the company as ruled by a god and you need the approval of the high priests. That approval is now on top of soaking one’s self in gasoline, rolling in live coals, and dancing a cha-cha number on top of broken blades and glasses.
To top it all, the last sentence was like adding insult to injury:
Further details will be released this week, as the IT Support team mobilizes to handle this task.
Yeah, I am brimming with confidence that the over-worked and ticket-closing trigger happy support team is able to take on this new task while spreading cheer and world peace. I am saying goodbye to backups then. I think it is easier to just slaughter some chicken and offer it to my anito to protect the company data that I am working on from sudden glitches and electronic crashes.
ciao!
Jul 17
ErinRubbish, Work
Today I received a peculiar office memo; it gave five steps on what to do when a water/sprinkler leak occurs. The contents are pretty much in the realm of common sense
- cover and shut down electrical equipment.
- contact the company facilities department
- don’t power up equipment until conditions have been verified.
- if evacuation is required, follow proper evac procedures.
I merged two items since they are basically the same thing. What made this peculiar is that the memo was from the company’s information security department. I would expect this to come from the facilities department as it is a basic operational reminder but from the security team?
The only reason I can surmise is found in the last item. They are considering it as a localized disaster if it would require an evacuation. Nevertheless, this information should have come from the correct source as I am seeing a blurring of the distinction of the boundaries of the IT security team’s area of responsibility.
I am wondering though which office sprung the leak to prompt the memo. And how many employees actually tried to work while a leak or flooding is in progress. 🙂
ciao!
Jun 16
ErinFun Stuff, Garbage, Work palmface, Work
I started the day in a bad mood, again due to draconian IT policies in the office but this real-life instance made the day a bit better and worse at the same time.
Noticing that I am always a couple of minutes early for international conference calls, I asked my counterpart for their local time and found out that my system clock is 12 minutes in advance. I asked around and found that we have varying system clocks so I asked Mike, a junior member of my team, to log a support ticket for the steps to configure our machines to synchronize with an office NTP server as I know the local domain server has that service. I know because I already did it once using w32tm on my previous project but I can’t remember the name of the server that I used. Besides, it’s the support personnel’s job.
After some time, I was already in the call. I noticed that somebody was hovering near my station. He said something about a clock so I let him do his stuff on my machine since I only need the phone. I had to restrain from laughing when the support engineer started moving my trackball like a wireless mouse. Since if I let this continue I might blurt out laughing in the call, I just pointed to the clock and when he nodded I took over the trackball and double-clicked the system tray clock. I was already wondering what options are there for NTP synchronization since I already inspected it a while ago and didn’t see anything.
And then the unthinkable happened, the support engineer adjusted my clock by 8 minutes and pressed the Apply button. I was shocked but couldn’t say anything as my Madrid counterpart was discussing something important. I just heard the engineer talking to Mike about closing the ticket so I frantically waved my hand to get their attention, and hastily scribbled the characters “N T P ?” in a scratch paper. I just let Mike do the talking as I needed to focus on the call.
After the call I asked Mike what happened and he said the engineer stated that he just took a look at his system time before coming over and synchronized all of our machine clocks. Our system clocks are still surprisingly different (duhh!) but the engineer apparently said that it’s OK to have some discrepancies. Millisecond discrepancies perhaps may be alright but a full minute? And I didn’t know that we have a gifted engineer in the company that has his body clock attuned with the network’s NTP server.
I feel so safe in the reliable hands of our support personnel. /lol
ciao!
Jun 06
ErinGarbage, Work
Scenario At Work: A required resource service is not functioning properly.
Manager: Get somebody to fix it. ASAP!
Me: Will do.
[Me contacts internal support]
Me: Did we change something in the configuration? Product X is borked.
Internal Support: Nope. Everything is dandy. Try contacting the provider.
[Me contacts provider’s support hot line]
Me: Your service is not working properly. Please check.
ABC Support: Thank you for contacting Company ABC’s support hotline where (long spiel about how they are $DEITY’s gift to my poor existence). We’ll ask our technical team to look at it. Here is your cookie reference number.
[after an hour]
Manager: Well?
Me: (looking up from the pile of tasks being worked on) Err, ABC support hasn’t called back yet. Ill follow it up.
Manager: Should have done that eons ago…
Me: right! (whispering inside my head: and i am just twiddling my thumbs here… )
[calls ABC hot line]
Me: Im calling regarding reference number 123456. Any updates?
ABC Support: Thank you for contacting Company ABC’s support hot line where (long spiel about how they are $DEITY’s gift to my poor existence). Tech team has stated that they don’t see any problem with your service. It must be something internal (read between the lines: you are a stupid customer. all of your problems are your imagination. ITS NOT OUR FAULT, ITS YOURS). Please check your lines again.
Me: [groan]
[calls internal support]
Me:ABC said there is no problem from their side. Are you sure there isn’t any test that we need to do to isolate this?
Internal Support: We already executed all tests. Everything is still dandy.
Me: (whispering in my head: Oh crap) Uhhh, ok.
[puts down phone, somebody speaks up from behind]
Manager: Well?
Me: (startled) uhh, wait a second.
[pulls open the drawer, takes out the gun, points it in my temple and pulls the trigger]
Problem solved.
Note: Manager, ABC company, and Internal support are all fictitious characters. But they represent somebody real though may not be their literal counterparts.
ciao!
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