/dev/zero

Since the car wouldn’t be ready in time for work (they had to special order a 4th hose), and still isn’t, I elected to walk to work.

The good news is I can still do it. ~5 miles. At 35 and about 80lbs over weight I can still make that walk. I wasn’t even overly tired when I finished. I was, however, very sweaty. No one likes to see a sweaty fat man, least of all me.

I was also very red faced.

But I feel good. I didn’t walk fast enough to be releasing endorphins or anything, but it actually felt pretty good.

I may do that more often, at least while the weather is still cool enough to get away with it. Which means about 1 more week. Might work off some pounds that way. Even if I don’t work off any pounds, it will be good for the heart.

But I will have to remember to carry another t-shirt with me to change into something dry when I get here.
The problem is walking home at 0200.

Now, if only the weekend shift who had been so “not busy” all weekend (I read the shift reports. They claimed to be un-busy all weekend) had actually got any work done, there wouldn’t be a ticket that’s been waiting since Friday to be completed.

It took me all of 10 seconds to do what needed to be done.

I really liked my car when I got it, but at 144000 miles, this BMW is getting just too expensive.

So far this year I’ve had to have one tire fixed (free. Nice shop.) Replace another tire ($80). And have it towed and replace the water pump and thermostat (~$800).

I had to have it towed into a shop on Friday because it was losing all it’s radiator fluid and overheating. Shop couldn’t find what was wrong with it. They checked all the hoses and even pressurized the system but couldn’t find the leak. Since all that shop could do was the hoses, they told me I’d have to take it elsewhere to have it fixed. Luckily no charge. I got the car to work, but it lost all it’s fluid and overheated again on the way home. No working car, couldn’t do anything all weekend.

Filled up the radiator yesterday and limped it in to another shop, whereupon I could clearly see where the leak was: the very top-most hose!
It being an older car, the shop recommended and I agreed, that I have them all replaced. Since the car had already overheated I also agreed the thermostat needed to be replaced again. $623 later, my bank account is empty once again.

I think I’m taking it to one of those “$3,000 minimum for your trade” places and getting a new Hyundai.

EDIT: 22 April, 2007 - I replaced this car with a 2005 Ford Escort from Carmax about 6 months ago.

Since I went to bed around 0200 last night, I woke up about 0800 this morning. A good 5 hours earlier than I normally would.
There’s nothing to do when you’re car is broken. Ken and I planned to use his truck to tow my car in to the shop, but I can’t do that until I’ve had a shower (I refuse to leave the house without a shower), and I can’t shower until I have a clean towel. And the drier is taking forever to finish drying my dark batch.

No one on my game server. I’ve read all my online comics already. Caught up on LJ for the most part. No one posting on my mailing lists.
I could watch TV.. or I could read a book.

Hmm. Book it is. Maybe I’ll finish the one I’m working on.

It’s Memorial Day weekend.

And I’m tied to the apartment.

My car overheated in traffic yesterday before work. I had it towed to Sears auto. They checked it out and couldn’t find anything wrong with it. Funny, considering there was radiator fluid all over the engine compartment. they said where ever it’s leaking, it isn’t in any of the hoses.
I was able to drive it to work (with a coworker driving right behind me) and nothing happened. But driving home it lost all it’s coolant and overheated again. I had to stop to let the engine cool so I could drive it the 2 minutes left to get down the block, in the gate and to my parking space.

I just had the water pump replaced a couple of months ago. I don’t think it’s that.

Whatever it is, Sears cant’ find it and all they work on is hoses. So on Monday I’ll have to pray that a) I can find a shop that’s actually open and b) it won’t blow out my bank account to get fixed. Time to replace the Beemer.

I was just thinking a couple of weeks ago, I have a job, a functioning car, weekends off… I can take off for a weekend any time I want. Go camping, go visit another city, whatever. And now I’m tied down to the apartment because my car doesn’t work. I won’t even be able to go to my co-workers house warming party tomorrow.

First 100 degree day and my car overheats in traffic.

It’s not every day the Chairman of the Board / CTO of your company walks up to you at your desk, puts a hand on your shoulder and tells you “You write a hell of a ticket.”

He complimented me on the way I explain what we’re doing, what has been done, what needs to be done and what we can do for a customer in my tickets. (Contrasting it with the way some other support techs document their tickets, though he didn’t use any names, I got a pretty good idea who he was talking about.)

Of course, it’s not every day the COB / CTO is down here at the data center either, so it was already an unusual day.

‘Cause, like, it’s always a good idea to log in and change your root password while NOC Support is still logged in and working on your server. Cause, like, they never log off and have to come back later.

What the hell are some of these spammers thinking???

What on Earth gives them the idea I would purchase a home loan from someone who can’t even spell “mortgage”?

And pharmaceuticals? If you can’t even spell your product, let alone the many, easier to spell synonyms for it, why would I buy it from you?

“Hey, ${my first and last name}
Madical Ree-fill for ${my first and last name} is ready.

Please re-confirm City .

${spammer-URL}

The Buyer as per our records: ${my first and last name}

your info if wrong order please help us to correct it
Just visit our site above to make sure.”

Madical?
Ree-fill?

The only thing they spelled right is my name.

Yeah, I know, they don’t really want to sell me medicine. They want to scam me. And all the mis-spellings are to get past my (or my ISP’s) spam filters. But let’s think about this: If I go to the trouble to set up spam filtering, what makes them think that just because they got past my spam filter (I’ll have to investigate how that happened) I’ll suddenly overlook the fact that it’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t want AND their glaringly bad English?

Damnit, I stop paying attention to Woot for ONE DAY… and they sneak something cool in between all the lame items they’ve been offering lately. (I have no coffee maker at my apartment. I don’t drink enough coffee to justify something that makes 6 or 8 cups at a time. But something that makes one cup of frothy goodness… that’s something else!)


(19:38:39) ${level 1 moron}: what is the command to look at whats mounted?
(19:39:40) ${level 1 moron}: its(sic) shows what the hard drives are mounted to
(19:40:09) Dilbert: uh... mount.
(19:40:23) ${level 1 moron}: no
(19:40:46) ${level 1 moron}: the one that tells me what hda1 is mounted to
(19:40:52) ${level 1 moron}: you know the one that list them
(19:40:54) Dilbert: uh... mount.
(19:41:12) ${level 1 moron}: uh... thanks for the sarcasim(sic)
(19:43:50) ${level 1 moron}: yopu(sic) it really doesnt make me want to learn anything
(19:44:20) Dilbert: You asked for the command, I gave it to you. It's still the same command.


I had this exact conversation (the other way around) with at least 2 other Level 2 techs and it went exactly the same way. Except they looked at me funny because I should already know the answer.

Yeesh, work has been hell lately.

Busy, busy, busy. Why I haven’t been posting much.

Not sure why it’s been so busy lately, other than we’ve added something over 500 customers in the last month. But we’ve always done about that per month.

Fridays, however, is the day that everyone is on duty. All shifts overlap on Friday. So right now we have both the full weekday and weekend 1st and 2nd shifts on duty, which means 4 team leads, 4 Support 2 techs, 6 Support 1 techs all on duty. And ticket load is lighter than usual to begin with.

So we’re actually caught up with work today.

I can play my online go game against <a href=”http://www.livejournal.com/users/_techie>Techie</a>, browse LJ, read my comics, read technical documentation, mess with Ubuntu on the laptop…

Congrats to Amythest for being selected Wal-Mart Teacher of the Year for North Richland Hills!

I hate Wal-Mart, but it’s still a big honor for her anyway, especially as this is only her second year as a teacher.

So, what does it say that I’m blogging on LJ from a Windows box while a second machine under my desk is doing a FreeBSD “buildworld”, while simultaneously installing the “vim” port…

Meanwhile the laptop next to me is doing an Ubuntu dist upgrade from Breezy Badger to Dapper Drake.

Of course, if I really wanted to go all-out, I’d fire up the Indigo2 and the SparcStation 10 and have them download and install patches. But they’re nosy and slow and I don’t actually use them for anything any more.

Today was, if anything, worse than yesterday.

I can sit at my desk in the NOC and do nothing but play traffic cop with tickets, in which case nothing will get done, or I can do tickets, in which case the Triage queue will fill up before I can blink.

The problem with being out on the floor doing tickets is that every Level 1 support guy can’t go 5 minutes without having to come ask me how to do something. I swear, just one ticket I was working on, every time I started to reach for the keyboard on my laptop to tell the customer what I did, someone would come to me with a problem. I’d have to spend 10 minutes helping them out, then I’d reach for my keyboard again… wash, rinse, repeat.

Not once today did I even look at the Support queue. I spent the whole shift just trying to keep up with the Support Triage queue. I only got that down to 0 after my shift was already over. I then spent another hour trying to work a ticket that hadn’t been touched in several hours and the customer was still waiting. This is two days in a row I didn’t have time to take a lunch break and was on my feet constantly for 6+ hours.

At the end of my shift emailed my boss:

I need people who know what they’re doing and don’t need to ask me what to do every 5 minutes.
I need people who come back from lunch on time.
I need people who do what I ask them to do, let me know what they’re up to, don’t give me attitude when I ask them what they’re up to.
I need people at Data Bank for the whole shift.
I need a CSR.[1]
I need people!

Did not go well.

Note to self: When they ask “From the OK prompt, how do you tell a Solaris system to ‘reconfigure’ it’s list of hardware devices”, the answer is “boot -r”. <bangs head into desk>

First, Happy (belated) Birthday to and . Don’t know how old is today, but turned the big… no, I’m not going to say it. I’ll not reveal a lady’s age.
Cool link posted by : Fly with the Blue Angels.

Work has gotten no less hectic. E and I were running full speed today just to keep up. I’d get the Triage queue all, well, triaged, go to actually work ONE ticket, and there’d be 10, 15 new tickets in Triage again. Never did get time to touch the reload queue. Luckily it was exploding today.
And now that the Data Entry department is the Data Entry / Deploy dept, I have to teach them, in between my tickets, how to use Unix, how to install and license cPanel, Plesk, Direct Admin, how to configure multiple IP addresses in CentOS / Red Hat, Debian, FreeBSD, etc. Imagine trying to teach your basic secretary, who knows how to use Word and Excel, to be an entry-level Unix sys admin. In between getting tickets done yourself. No, I’m not complaining about them. They’re picking up on it pretty fast, but it does add to my work load. Loan (pronounced “Lawn”, not “Loan”. Apparently “loan” will get you slapped, or worse around Vietnamese speakers.) keeps apologizing for taking my time. I’m happy to show her, but it does get frustrating at times. Mostly because I’m out on the floor with the laptop trying to work a ticket and 10 Jabber messages (with their audible alerts) every minute breaks my concentration.

So, along the lines of ’s post about ticket stats, I decided to do some poking of my own. I’d been feeling a little insecure lately due to the number of tickets still in my queue at the end of my shift, the number of times in the last week I’ve ended a shift with 10+ reloads in the Reload Pending queue, occasional ‘dropped balls’, etc.

Agent Summary Report for May 01, 2006 to May 31, 2006
Agent Name              Email Handled   Avg. Response Time              Avg. Time Logged In
Andrew ( Team Lead )    231             3 hrs, 11 mins, 51 secs         2 hrs, 12 mins, 28 secs
D ( Team Lead )         70              2 hrs, 49 mins, 17 secs         1 hr, 33 mins, 2 secs
J ( Team Lead )         165             2 hrs, 15 mins, 50 secs         2 hrs, 34 mins, 55 secs
K ( Team Lead )         242             3 hrs, 18 mins, 16 secs         1 hr, 48 mins, 42 secs
T ( Team Lead )         36              4 hrs, 6 mins, 30 secs          2 hrs, 56 mins, 49 secs
Agent Averages          74 agents       6 hrs, 8 mins, 59 secs          2 hrs, 43 mins, 53 secs
System Averages (weighted) 6551 samples 3 hrs, 43 mins, 45 secs         2 hrs, 30 mins, 57 secs



Average Initial Handle Time Report for May 01, 2006 to May 31, 2006
Agent Name              Samples Avg. Initial Response Time
Andrew ( Team Lead )    109     1 hr, 8 mins, 54 secs
D ( Team Lead )         38      3 hrs, 38 mins, 37 secs
J ( Team Lead )         12      3 hrs, 1 min, 35 secs
K ( Team Lead )         62      4 hrs, 34 mins, 29 secs
T ( Team Lead )         10      6 hrs, 14 mins, 32 secs
Agent Average Initial Handle Time 68 agents
                                        6 hrs, 48 mins, 32 secs
System Average Initial Handle Time (weighted) 3896 samples
                                        3 hrs, 37 mins, 9 secs

The only one who comes close to my numbers is K, and his response times aren’t as good. He’s the master at shuffling tickets, trying to make his queues look good, but if you look at the real numbers, he’s not doing so hot. I don’t know why T’s stats are so poor. He’s been there longer than me, he’s been a Team Lead just as long as me and he’s almost as good a technician.

Anyway, I have an important meeting tomorrow. Wish me luck.

This has been one heck of a week.
I’ve barely had time to breath, let alone keep up with LJ.
Monday was an OK day. It went down hill from there.
Everything’s been fine for me personally, work has just been hectic. I put in 17.3 hours of overtime this week.
The chairman of the board / COO jabbered me at work tonight about a couple of tickets to ask if I could look into them for him. One was a build ticket that was getting old. 2 were server reloads at our other data center. I was already behind on reloads. Not much I could do about the reloads at the other DC, since there was no one there who could do the reload then hook up a KVM for me to finish them off, and I’m a support tech, not a build tech. I had enough reloads to do as it is without dropping everything to go do a build.
He was very polite to me about it, but apparently he got on the phone and started screaming at Jack, the Dir. of Operations about not having anyone at the other DC and people at Savvis not knowing who was on duty.

I had to re-do half the work my one team member did tonight before he took off early to attend to a personal matter.
A customer orders a reload of a box with Debian Sarge, 300MB /boot, 1GB swap, the rest of the 80GB drive in /, 2.6 kernel. What did E load? Debian Sarge (he got that part right at least) with a 300MB primary partition, a extended partition with one “Win95/FAT32″ partition with a 2.4 kernel. What the hell was that? I can understand getting the wrong kernel, but how the hell do you manage to partition a drive with an extended partition with a FAT partition inside it, when you just needed to build 2 ext3 and 1 swap partition? It’s that kind of shit that’s been keeping our ticket queue load so high all week.
Oh, and I wont’ even get started on the 3rd shift team lead who’s idea of “verifying” customer data before marking a reload ticket as OK to proceed is quoting the customer’s initial ticket verbatim and adding the word “Acceptance”. Makes me feel real good about the next guy who asks for a reload and puts my IP address in their form by mistake.
Thank god, I found out from Jack today that this same 3rd shift lead is NOT being considered for the support manager position. I could tell he was trying to maneuver his way into the job, but I, for one, would walk out the door if he got it. Jack apparently realized he would have that kind of situation on his hands and told him no. I also will not be considered, but I wasn’t hold my hopes out much for that anyway.

“You have to use rlogin for that. You can’t pipe anything through SSH. It’s designed to not allow it, for security reasons.”

“If you say so, James…”

“I’m talking as someone with 20 years experience as a Unix sys admin…”

Guess when I go back to the NOC I’ll have to take him to school.

>yawn<

To update the FreeBSD ports collection, I need to use cvsup.
But cvsup isn’t installed. How do I install it?
cd /usr/ports…

Start packages installation
Install package psa
bsdtar 1.02.023, libarchive 1.02.026
Use gtar
/usr/local/bin/gtar
bsdtar 1.02.023, libarchive 1.02.026
Use gtar
/usr/local/bin/gtar
To continue installing, you should install Perl 5.008008 (you have Perl 5.008007 installed)
Execute cmd failed: sh /root/psa/PSA_8.0.0/dist-standard-FreeBSD-6.0-i386/psa_v8.0.0_build80060406.16_os_FreeBSD_6.0_i386.sh
ERROR: Error while install .sh package
ERROR: Installation failed

This is getting crazy.
Lost the Support Manager last week.
Worked an extra 5, 6 hours last night to help the Deploy department dig out of their backlog (while not making much headway on our own backlog.)
Today one of the Deploys up and quits with no warning. And boy did she burn her bridges behind her. I can still smell the smoke.
Worked 8 hours today struggling to catch up with our own backlog with no luck.
And here I am working on Deploy tickets again.

Someone tell me the overtime will be worth it?

>thud!<