I ate a steak tonight! First red meat I’ve had since January – since “the incident,” to be more precise. It’s probably an abundance of caution bordering on paranoia, but I’ve limited myself to fish since then (with chicken once or twice). Made some peas, carrots, and mushrooms to go with the steak. Everything turned out pretty good! Back to fish now.
The temperature today plunged back down to the low 50s. It had been in the 80s for the last few days, so it really felt a bit chilly this morning – I had the windows in the office open for a while (until it started to rain), but I eventually turned on the heat for a while. Strange, because I’d just switched from heat to air conditioning on Saturday.
I did manage to get some decent work done today – mind still wandered a bit, but I generally stayed in control of it. I also put in an extra hour just to be sure. Also played around with my Webcam quite a bit, and figured out how to drop “exotic” backgrounds into my video meetings – so instead of just me in my office, people can now see me in front of Lake Ahmic or the NC mountains or in a snow storm on the shore of Lake Huron. That was kinda fun.
Planning to hit the sack early tonight. Might as well take advantage of the cooler weather and get 8-9 hours of (hopefully) deep sleep. Nothing else to do in this “shelter in place” bit anyway. I could go for a walk, I guess, but I got nearly 6 miles in this morning, and I don’t want to push my feet any harder than that.
I set up the Bluetooth keyboard on my phone again this morning. Haven’t used it since I was in Michigan 18 months ago, but since I’m doing most of my work in the office on my work laptop, which I really try to keep separate from my personal stuff, it’s easier to keep this site updated from my phone. Therefore, please be more understanding of typos and don’t expect a huge number of photos until I can remember how to get them into posts with this little WordPress app. Just for grins, I’ll try to insert one here… Assuming that that picture made it, it’s of a new feral cat who’s been showing up on my deck for the last few days. Very pretty black kitty and it seems wee-fed and happy. Maybe it’s not feral, but I’ll treat it as such. You can also see how much pollen has been falling in the last few days. It’s making walking a lot less enjoyable, but I guess it’s to be expected given the mild winter we had. It’s kind of scary that the WORST pollen generally doesn’t happen until late April. Continuing to work from home and I’m now into the third week of it. I’ve noticed that it’s becoming more difficult to stay focused on work. Need to figure out a way to stay more engaged with my team, since I’m not actively working tickets like they are. I’m trying to provide assistance for them, but it’s very easy to take a break from that and read some news pages (or Facebook), or run to the kitchen for a snack, or just stare out the window. I might try to set up a written schedule and daily milestones for myself until I get fully comfortable with the idea of being part of a team while in isolation. It’s tougher than I thought it would be. I think it would be much easier if I were still an L1 and just needed to answer the phone and work tickets.
Since I’m being the responsible, “socially-distanced” individual (working from home), I figured I might as well try to update a post throughout the course of a day at work. I’m a few hours late – started work at about 7:30 this morning – but I’ll gloss over those three hours and keep things updated going forward.
I started the day by kicking Joshua out of my office chair. He’s decided that it’s his. I’ve decided that he can have it when I don’t want it; and, since I’m bigger than he is, I get the last word. He and Boo are currently sharing the cat tree by the front window.
Lazy Morning Kitty Tree
Spent some time BS’ing via Microsoft Teams (chat) with the other leads in Alpharetta – who’s feeling sick, who’s buying ammunition (not kidding!), how are teams are handling the enforced isolation, etc. While doing this, I went through my team’s ticket list trying to identify cases that could be resolved or needed updates. I also started working on the cases that were auto-assigned to me overnight.
At around 9:00, the “Open Office Hours – Coffee Chat” meeting started. This is something that my boss put together on Monday as daily meeting for anybody who wants to join it (webcams, microphones, and chat) just to combat the feeling of isolation that some folks might be having. It’s a good idea and people seem to enjoy it. Early on – from 9:00 to 9:15 or so – pretty much everyone who’s working will be in the meeting, just to shoot the shit about nothing or to ask questions about specific tickets. After that, people just start to drop out and get back to focusing on their work.
One of the tickets that I’ve been working on since 9:30 or so has to do with a user email account that’s having problems. I’ve been unable to attach to it with my own testing account, which is a red flag. Other users have said that they’ve gotten kickback messages when trying to send something to the problem address, but I’ve been unable to replicate that. So I’m waiting on a few more details from the users before opening a case with Microsoft.
Right now, I’m putting together call and ticket statistics from yesterday for my team.
Got the stats out. Now I’m trying to coach one of my people on what sounds like an incredibly simple ticket (a user can’t get connected to a Citrix session), and it’s like pulling teeth to get my person to follow simple troubleshooting steps. We’ve been dealing with a lot of clients having problems getting set up to work from home this week – everything from, “My monitors look funny,” to “How do I print to the office?”
The answer to that last question, should you be wondering, is, “You don’t. And why on earth would you want to?”
At any rate, if a user can’t get connected, there are only about 3 things it could be. I could jump into the call and do this work for my direct report, but I really want her to figure it out on her own. I get amazingly frustrated when my people don’t follow the simple troubleshooting steps that I preach to them every week.
20 minutes later and she still hasn’t figured it out. She also hasn’t answered any of the three troubleshooting questions that I put in front of her. I know that she’s expecting me to jump into her call, jump onto the remote machine, and fix it for her. It’s not going to happen. I have a meeting in 10 minutes – ironically enough, one concerning how to deal with “uncomfortable” discussions with our consultants – and she’s either going to have to figure it out by herself or get some help from the rest of the team.
She did end up getting help from one of my senior consultants. As expected, it was an incredibly simple fix (literally – click “Reset”).
The meeting was a rundown of new procedures for issuing warnings (verbal, documented, written), PIPs (performance improvement plans), and terminations if the warnings and the PIP don’t work. Happy stuff.
Speaking of happy stuff, I’ve learned that a large number of sporting/gun stores in the metro area are running out of guns and ammunition. This bothers me. A week ago, we were in a normal society. Now we’ve got people stockpiling firearms? Believe it or not, I registered at Adventure Outdoors – literally the largest gun store in the world. Perhaps I have to finally pull the trigger (no pun intended) and buy an actual gun, rather than counting on the BB pistol I’ve got to deter people.
We’re now in a possible SysInc (System Incident), although it looks like it might be restricted to a couple of cities in Texas where ISPs are having trouble. Not surprising, since the load on them from people suddenly deciding to work from home is probably pretty intense.
Chamberlain has replaced Joshua and Boo on the Kitty Tree. Joshua has – you guessed it – settled into my office chair. I’m standing. Good thing I brought home the Varidesk when I moved from the office!
Chamberlain loves to sleep near an open window
This afternoon has been fairly slow. We’re still having clients call in regarding disconnects, but it’s become widely known that multiple ISPs are having problems and there’s isn’t really much we can do about it.
My team has chugged away and we’ve gotten back down under 30 tickets, though how long that will last I don’t know. A couple of my guys will be working tomorrow, so that will help. Call volume will be low and I hope they can snipe some of the low-hanging fruit on our ticket board.
At 3:00, we had “Beer Cart Friday – Virtual Style,” which was interesting. Normally on Fridays, we push a literal beer cart around the office and everyone grabs a beer. Today, we all just took pictures of ourselves holding up beers (or a shot of bourbon in my case) and shared them in our internal bulletin board.
I’m just wrapping things up now – helping some younger consultants with tickets that they’re working for my clients, finding documents for them, etc. Most of my team has gone offline for the day, and I’m not far from joining them. So I’ll wrap this up here. Happy Friday!
Been quite a while since I did anything with this, and I’ve been keenly aware of that fact. Oddly enough, a bunch of stuff has happened since I left wrote an entry, and I wasn’t completely sure how I wanted to approach writing about it. So let’s just jump into everything.
While driving into work on Tuesday, January 27th, I slowly began to realize that I couldn’t see. Fortunately, I was almost at work by the time I figured out what was happening. It wasn’t that I was going blind – my eyes basically just stopped working together. My right pupil was larger than my left, it was basically impossible to focus on anything that wasn’t directly in front of me, and if I moved my head (hence having to focus on something ELSE right in front of me), it’d take probably 5 seconds to get that new focus.
As I said, I didn’t really figure out that this was happening until quite a bit later. I just knew that it was getting more and more difficult to really see anything. That may help explain how it is that I got myself to work, told my boss something was going on, looked up directions to the hospital, and drove myself there. I told the woman at the front desk that I thought I might be having a stroke, and she lost no time in getting me through the doors and sitting me in front of a doctor.
And another doctor. And some nurses. And some other people. They squeezed and shone lights on me and gave me a couple of CT scans and plugged about 500 wires into me and asked a bunch of inane questions (true story – I told them I was having double vision and they asked, “In which eye?”), and about three hours later told me that I had high blood pressure but no signs of a stroke. The also said that they wanted to admit me and give me an MRI, but I’d already promised Jenny (she was in the Galapagos at the time) that I’d take care of her cats – and I didn’t know what this was costing me – so I declined and somehow drove myself home.
It was during the drive home (white-knuckled) and while sitting there the rest of the afternoon that I actually figured out what my eyes were doing (as described above). Needless to say, I was kind of freaking out for most of the day, but I managed to let my boss and co-workers know that I wasn’t dead and went to bed pretty early.
Wednesday morning, my eyes were back to normal. I took the day off and picked up a couple of prescriptions that the hospital had given me for hypertension and made an appointment with a GP for a follow-up.
Do you remember when I said, near the end of my last post, that I really needed to cut down on my smoking? Yeah – I went ahead and quit that. Coming up on two months now. I’m also walking (rather quickly) a bit over 5 miles every morning and taking drugs for hypertension and cholesterol. I’m also not eating anything that tastes remotely good (no sugar, no salt, no cholesterol, no fat, no carbs, blah, blah, blah).
The GP wants me to go see a cardiologist about carotid stenosis (blockage in my carotids), but I’m not ready for that yet. The worst part of things now is that one of the BP meds occasionally gives me vertigo – and every time it happens, I start to wonder if the whole thing is starting up again.
That can’t be good for my blood pressure.
In other news…THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE! Yes. Coronavirus. COVID-19. The big one. Or not. Who knows? All I know is that everything in Atlanta (and much of the world) has been canceled, and we went from talking about maybe working from home a bit to EVERYBODY WORK AT HOME ALL THE TIME – over the course of 3 days. So that’s what we’re doing. I straightened out my office, brought home a standing desk and my laptop, and made sure that all of my people brought home whatever they needed to be efficient from home. Just like that, all of us are remote for the foreseeable future.
My work-from-home setup, featuring a stand-up desk
The remote working isn’t really a big deal – I’ve been doing it a couple of days per week anyway – but the fact that I’m at home all the time now is going to get really boring really fast. I’ve got a project, which I’m calling “Campmachine 3.0,” to keep me occupied for a while. Not sure how long it will last. I’m basically building a bed and some cabinets in the back of my car in anticipation of going car camping sometime after tax season. At this point, what I’ve built is perfectly functional (helps a great deal when I’m bringing home groceries!), but it doesn’t look “finished,” so I might just consider what I’ve got to be a prototype and built the whole thing again better. That’s assuming that the Home Depot stays open long enough for me to get the material that I need.
I bought a Dremel tool a few weeks ago. Now THAT’S a good time! I’m still very green with it. Not sure of all the cool things that it can do, but I know it can do more than cut the ends off of screws that go all the way through a piece of wood (which is all I’ve used it for). I have a feeling that I’ll be doing more with it as I get more bored.
I’ve also been watching a couple of woodworking channels on YouTube, and I’m definitely going to build a Joiner’s table to replace the aging worktable that I put in my garage 15 or so years ago. I’ve got the plans and everything. I’m really looking forward to building that. I probably should do that before I do any other projects, to be honest.
One last bit of news is that this blog may be moving yet again. Or it may not. I’m definitely doing something with it, but haven’t decided exactly what. I’ve started a new domain called TomsBrain.com, both because I don’t want my personal blog so closely associated with the football site and also because I wanted a non-gmail address that was more “me” than my hotmail address, but not all-the-way “professional” like my Outlook address is. For those of you who didn’t know I had multiple addresses, you haven’t been paying attention – and I have others that are basically “stealth” addresses that you’ll probably never know about.
Anyway, I liked the idea of “tom@tomsbrain.com,” so I got that setup. The new domain is indeed built on a WordPress structure; in theory, I could just move this whole thing there and call it good. I thought about that. And then I thought, “What if I use the TomsBrain.com address to apply for a job? Do I want complete strangers who might be looking to hire me to see a personal blog?”
And I’m not sure that I do. But I might want them to see a less personal blog. Not necessarily professional, but maybe more structured, with more formal writing. Maybe articles about brass banding or thoughts on various technical issues or even just day-to-day nonsense, but written for a larger, general, audience (as this is most certainly not). That’s a decent idea…but what do I do with the last 15 years’ worth of stuff that’s already here?
Don’t know. I might move it (truth be told, I already HAVE copied it) to the new site, but set it up in a more protected way, allowing access only to a select few. Or I might just archive it, allowing access to nobody other than me – no one wants to go back and read my old stuff anyway, right?
Anyway, it’s all still up in the air. I’m working on the design for TomsBrain.com now, and I’ll decide what it’s going to be – and where this blog will fit in – after I’ve got that taken care of. For now, this is still the only place to see all this literary nonsense.
Assuming that that picture made it, it’s of a new feral cat who’s been showing up on my deck for the last few days. Very pretty black kitty and it seems wee-fed and happy. Maybe it’s not feral, but I’ll treat it as such. You can also see how much pollen has been falling in the last few days. It’s making walking a lot less enjoyable, but I guess it’s to be expected given the mild winter we had. It’s kind of scary that the WORST pollen generally doesn’t happen until late April. Continuing to work from home and I’m now into the third week of it. I’ve noticed that it’s becoming more difficult to stay focused on work. Need to figure out a way to stay more engaged with my team, since I’m not actively working tickets like they are. I’m trying to provide assistance for them, but it’s very easy to take a break from that and read some news pages (or Facebook), or run to the kitchen for a snack, or just stare out the window. I might try to set up a written schedule and daily milestones for myself until I get fully comfortable with the idea of being part of a team while in isolation. It’s tougher than I thought it would be. I think it would be much easier if I were still an L1 and just needed to answer the phone and work tickets. 
