Tom's Brain

Technology, Schmechnology

By stumpy0166
Those of you keeping score at home may have noticed that I haven’t added a new entry here in several days.  There are a number of reasons for that, but they can all be summed up in two words: “Everything broke.”



I bought the cats some new toys a couple
of months ago.  This is where they decided
to keep them.



Actually, I didn’t post anything between Monday and today because my DSL went out at home (along with my television and phone) sometime Monday afternoon and I wasn’t able to get service restored until last night.  And the only reason I got it restored last night was because I jumped all over ATT when they told me that I’d probably be good to go by next Monday.  Think about this: the phone company cut off all of my services (except cellphone), without giving me any advance notice, and figured that I’d be cool with waiting for a full week before said services came back on.
In point of fact, I’m sure that I would have been cool with that scenario, but there are principles at work here – the main one being that I work for the same company that the technicians who caused the outage work for, I have take most of the same training that the technicians who caused the outage have to take, and I had taken a course at work on Monday (one of the annual courses, in fact – Monday was the fourth time I’ve taken it) in which it is very clearly stated that, “You must inform all parties who could be negatively affected by your work – and you must have a backout plan in place – before any work can commence.”

This is common sense stuff.  I used to laugh that anybody would actually have to be taught something that’s so blatantly obvious.  If I’m going to reboot a server, I tell everyone who uses that server what’s about to happen, and I make damned sure that I can route everyone to a backup server if, for some reason, the original one doesn’t come back online.

So for Ma Bell to just shut off everything that keeps me connected to the world and think I’m not going to notice for a week….you get the idea.  I jumped down their throats, I let them know that I’m a manager with their company, I let them know that I’m quite capable of troubleshooting my own phone lines, and I let them know that a freaking WEEK wasn’t acceptable. 

Damned if it didn’t work.


This dog sits on the roof of the
sextant’s office at Rose Hill Cemetery in Macon

Making this particularly annoying for me was the fact that my football website has been experiencing a lot of spam traffic and other problems and I really wanted to install some new security patches on it and tweak some of the code. My office has FTP services locked down, so I was counting on working on the website from the house.  Instead, I had to keep responding to emails (on my iPhone) about how the website was getting slower and slower and logging people out and yada yada yada, and there was nothing that I could do about it before last night (which is why I didn’t get a blog entry typed up last night).

I managed to get everything working okay on the site last night and today (I can do some things from the office) – which is a good thing, because, for reasons that I have not been able to determine, my iPhone’s battery went completely dead this afternoon.  So dead that, when I plugged it into my computer to charge, the computer didn’t even recognize it for about 20 minutes.  Now, this phone was fully charged when I left the house this morning – as it always is – and for it to totally die like that in less than 6 hours is troubling.  I just got the stupid thing about three months ago.  So, I’ll be keeping an eye on it.  Maybe I accidentally had the camera running while the phone was in its holster.  I just don’t know.

At work today, I got basically nothing done.  Oh wait – I got this blog entry typed up.  That’s something, right?

Today’s pictures are things that I have on my work laptop.