Hotels and Motels

At the Fairfield Inn and Suites in Clearwater, Florida.  Been here since Sunday night and I’ll be leaving Saturday early in the morning.  As of writing this (Monday morning, about 7 AM), I’ve found that Floridians aren’t completely crazy in their driving, and a hotel is a hotel, no matter what part of the country you are in.

I haven’t traveled a lot in the last six years or so, but not much has changed in comparison to when I did.  A hotel room is a basic thing, with two beds, one bathroom, and a TV.  The only noticeable difference I’ve seen is the CAT-5 cable coming out of the wall to provide internet connection.  Which is nice, and better than the splotchy WI-FI that is generally available.  Otherwise, not much has changed. 

My need for plugs?  That has changed immensely.  I used to need one, now I feel like I’m taking over every outlet I can find in the place: laptop, cell phone, blue tooth.  I’m sure I’m missing one or two here are there, but it’s just crazy.  Maybe it’s the giant fear that people live lives so greatly connected by technology that requires vast amounts of electricity.  And that causes fear, and shows just how dependent we are on the magical juice running through the wall. 

But that’s neither here nor there.  It’s just a thing.  I’m not sure it’s a good thing or a bad thing.  Just a thing.  Breakfast wasn’t bad.  I never eat breakfast, though.  Maybe one day out of thirty.  And now I’m sitting here contemplating breakfast again tomorrow morning.  I’ll probably get breakfast.  Is it that traveling and complimentary things cause us to change our behavior?  Or is it that the desire to consume?  I own an iron, but I never iron my clothes.  Yet I always contemplate ironing my clothes when I stay at a hotel. 

Towards the end of the first day now, Monday.  Not sure when this will get posted, but it’s a good thing to note.  Part of me is getting more and more relaxed, and part of me is wound up tighter than a drum.  There’s a desire to calm that winding with copious amounts of alcohol, but I don’t think I will.  I haven’t had real time off in I don’t know how long and my day usually doesn’t even begin to end until 8PM.  Generally more like 9PM, so I have no idea what to do with my life.  It’s strange and substantial all in one, and I don’t know what to do when I’m not working 24/7 anymore.  Might be job work, might be parent work, might be housework…  don’t know at all.  

Layover pt II, Airports pt III

At a layover in Austin, waiting for the next flight out to Tampa.  Last time I was in Austin airport, it was October of 2001.  I had just finished USMC Infantry School (0311, Alpha Company).  I flew into Austin and had a friend pick me up.  I had intended to fly into Lubbock, but the best laid of plans of mice and men often go awry.  And those who don’t ask, don’t know.  And that’s very true of those who join the USMC without asking too many questions.  

I joined the USMC without asking too many questions.  I can make implications as to why, but those are all numerology type inferences.  Maybe politician inferences.  I’m joking about the effect before cause inferences.   A failing of cause and effect makes 99% of numerology inferences fail.  All those inferences are based on tying two things together.  And tying those two things together often results in tenuous connections. 

But tenuous connections are often the best kinds.  Because the person’s floor I crashed in after visiting Austin airport was a good friend that I liked a lot.  And I wish something would have happened out of it, but nothing did.  A decade later, and everyone is different.  Still the same, but different in ways that are hard to describe other than “older”.  Some I haven’t talked to  in years, but that’s okay.  There are still tenuous connections made more than a decade ago that cause memories to come flaring back, and hopes and dreams and fears to become something different.  I find it hard to think about myself a decade ago.  I don’t even know where I was mentally at that time.  I can draw pictures and dates and tie things together chronologically, but that’s been a while.  The younger me would probably try to beat the older me up, but would lose because the older me is more cunning.

Still, it’s a different time and place.  The connections exist, but it has been so long that the logic behind all of it has been lost.   Such a different life. 

Is it the mindlessly long waits at airports that cause us to remember vague things?  Or is it the lack of entertainment and overpriced beer?  Seriously.  What better way to kill a three hour layover than three or four beers.  But not at $7 a beer.  I realize airports have a monopoly on your traffic, but this is just insane.  Maybe the airports of the world just don’t want customers completely loaded while we wait on a five hour layover to save a buck or tow.  Or is it simply that the airport/airplane business model has colossal holes in it that no one wants to fill. 

In hunting down my $7 beer, I found a $12 cheeseburger, a $6 slice of pizza, and an $8 sandwich.  The McDonalds dollar menu has nothing on airport travel, and they know it.  Next time you see a McDonalds commercial, pay attention to the message about “at participating restarunts only”.  What they really mean is “anywhere but the airport”.  I think they’ve roped the TSA into enforcing their monopoly as well.  There are size limitations on what you can carry on at an airport, so you are limited by what you can make it through security with. 

I would guess that you couldn’t make a decent lunch out of what you can carry on at the airport.  The airport knows that there isn’t a thing within walking distance so it is isolated and separated.  Secondly, you’d have to go through the security checkpoints in order to make it to anything around.  And they make going through security all together so pleasant.  “Okay buddy, take off your belt and empty your bags while we treat a law abiding citizen like a criminal”.  Once you’re done being shoved through security and treated like a terrorist, it’s time to cram into an uncomfortable bus with tiny seats and ride that for hours on end.  Because the air travel model is really well designed… for a monopoly.  

The airport model really makes me think about what you can do with enough fear mongering and political clout.  I guess the real question is this: how much of those dollars that go into an airport make it to the city coffers?  I’m guessing a decent amount.   Otherwise, you might have a competitive business model happening.  And what you’ve got right now just isn’t it.    

While I'm thinking about it, or Airports pt II

While I’m about it, I’m going to mention my disdain for PDF Complete and Adobe Reader all in the same group.   PDF Complete tries to handle what Adobe doesn’t do by creating a lightweight, easy to use and operate PDF reader program.  Great concept, and if the execution was as good as the idea, then it would be perfect.  But it’s not. 

While I have little to do, stuck in an airport, I’m catching up on reading amongst other things.  I rarely have time in the day or night to work on anything other than what I’ve got in front of me.  Studying?  Just forget about that most of the time.  But I’m in an airport for the next hour, killing time and catching up.  This trip to Tampa is working vacation for me.  I’m technically flying out to go through a class and pass a certification test.  But most of what I’m studying I’ve been doing for the past year.  This is not a lot of new stuff to learn, just refinements in what I already know. 

As I was saying, I’ve been catching up on my reading, and a bunch of what I read is in PDF format.  So that means I need a PDF reader to handle that document.  It would be nice if the PDF program would remember my place without hours of work.  Hit a “remember my place” button or “dog-ear this page” button.  Something like that.  But I’ve never found that.  So I go with the other option.  And the other option is to write down what the PDF says the page is.  Here’s where PDF complete fails me. 

Let’s say I’m reading a 2,000 page book.  I read for twenty or thirty minutes, and then I write down the page I’m on in a text document and I exit the reader.  Next time I want to read that book, I pull up my text document with my “dog-ear”, and I open the file.  Once it’s open, I type that page number into the page location and press the enter key.  Within seconds, I’m back to where I finished.  Except I’m not.  With PDF Complete, that page number never updates once I continue reading.  So I end up reading the same thing over and over.  I did that at least twice before I uninstalled PDF Complete and installed Adobe Reader XI.  

Adobe Reader has always been a buggy, bloated, painful to operate program.  It doesn’t play with other programs and has always had a problem with memory leaks.  It’s like whoever wrote the memory free/release structure for Adobe Reader never checked it to make sure it was releasing everything and closing the way it was supposed to.  Combine that with the constant updates, and you’ve got a generally crappy program. 

Other thought…   Adobe acknowledges their product is such a delivery method for viri and malware the bundle anti-x tools with the program.  What a piece of crap.  I guess that’s my new method for determining how buggy a program is… what has it been bundled with?

While I’m discussing viri and malware, there are generally three programs you need.  R-Kill, Avira, and Malware Bytes.   Malware Bytes the trailer though, and often it won’t find anything.  But R-Kill and Avira will solve 95% of all issues.  And from a Windows user perspective, I would recommend you have at least two accounts on your computer.  Both can be administrators.  That part is irrelevant.  What you essentially need is a stable account that hasn’t been jacked with in a long time so when the virus takes over your computer you can get rid of it. 

There was one computer that had issues.  The virus had changed all the operating system links, so Windows didn’t know an .exe file was supposed execute things. Every extension had been changed.  Luckily, this was a domain user and they had a local computer account on that computer.  So what I did is put R-Kill in the “all users” startup folder, logged off as the domain user, logged on as the local user, and R-Kill fired off because it was a separate account.  R-Kill fixed the file extensions so I could install Avira and clean the computer.

Okay, enough rambling from this airport, as I’m about to board and head for the next airport.  There is a several hour layover at the next one, so I’ll probably fill up another couple of pages.  Maybe by the end, I’ll have a couple of weeks of updates so my blog actually has activity.   

Airports, part 1

I am sitting at the airport, waiting to fly out to Tampa for training.  It’s been a few years since I’ve flown.  I think the last time was… 2007?  The process has definitely been streamlined.  I showed up a good two hours early just in case and spent less than half an hour getting boarding passes and making it through security.   What’s a guy to do on a Sunday morning in an airport?   And if you suggest beer, this is Texas and they don’t serve alcohol till noon on Sunday.  Why not write updates for a blog I haven’t had time to mess with in a couple of weeks?  Sounds like a plan to me.   Maybe by the time I check in to my hotel tonight I’ll have a good couple of posts written so it will look like I update this thing every once in a while.

Side note…  I was going to write “actually” there a few lines ago, and came to a dead stop.  I work with someone that uses “well, actually” as the beginning of most sentences.  So the word “actually” now  grates on my nerves.  I hate to hear the word uttered.  

My wife watches “How I Met Your Mother” on Netflix quite often.  There’s an episode where they expose unknown habits.  Lilly eats loud.  Ted corrects everyone.  Barney bursts into falsetto every once in a while.  I don’t remember what Marshal did.  But Ted’s girlfriend in that episode never shut up.  She talked constantly.  But Ted never noticed.  It took someone else pointing out her action for Ted to realize.   I know others at my job haven’t noticed the “well, actually”.  I asked one or two of them about it.  But I noticed it and it drives me up the wall.

The other thing that annoys me at the moment is my laptop touch pad.  I replaced the HP Elitebook with an HP Probook 6570b.  The primary reason for choosing this laptop was the inclusion of a built in serial port.  USB to serial converters and PCMCIA cards just don’t work the way they are supposed to.  Something is lost in translation.  Speed.  Speed is lost in the translation.  What takes me 28 minutes to do on this laptop used to take an hour or longer on the old laptop.  That part is great.   Processor, RAM, and hard disk space are also great.  What isn’t great is the touch pad.

The touchpad itself works fine.  It’s a touch pad, and by that title they suck.  I’ve tried the “magic” Apple touchpads and they suck just as bad.  Touch pads are serviceable.  What annoys me about this one is a small orange light.  Now, the functionality built into the touch pad gives you the ability to double tap  the touch pad on and off.  Which would work great if my hands stayed put while typing, but they don’t always do that.  So my hand lifts and raises, and slides around, and the touch pad turns on and off in the midst of everything else I’m doing.   If I move my hands, the thing turns on and off.

It’s worse when playing games, because I use my left hand on the number keys and my right hand for the mouse.  If there was an external keyboard, I’d say it would be the perfect laptop.  But that touch pad just drives me up the wall.  Even worse, when the transition occurs, the processor usage spikes like crazy and the whole system drags to a halt.  If they could fix that issue, I would love this laptop.  As it is, I have my misgivings. 

Busy..

Been just a bit busy the last few weeks.  We are prepping to take over 10 more stores.  These stores look like ours before I implemented star topology and we dedicated it with our replacement Cisco equipment.   It's a random collection of network cables thrown in and everything shows very little dedication. 

The store layouts aren't very good either.  We are trying to impose some order on them, but it's going to be complicated to fix this many stores in what essentially narrows down to 6 working days.  We really have 11 working days, but I'll be off in Florida for training for 5 of those days.  So I've got to skip town and go work on certain locations as fast as humanly possible, building boards and mounting and configuring network equipment in preparation for taking these locations over.  Considering I'm the only one capable of configuring the network equipment, I have to get it done so everyone else can handle their part.   It just sucks because I know the kind of time crunch we are facing and know how much there is to do.  The remainder that needs to be done is essentially two days worth of work, and only a few things have been done.  There is just so much to do...

On the plus side, I've upgraded laptops to a HP ProBook 6570b.   What's so great about this one?  A built in serial port.  So I can fix a register in twenty-five minutes.  I just have to figure out how to get Putty to act like HyperTerminal.   I'm pretty sure it will do everything I want it to, I've just got to figure out how.  

Oh, and even more praise for Team Viewer.   I'm using it transfer all my files from the old laptop.  Have to stop the transfer for some reason?  Use the "Overwrite all" function, and if the files are duplicates, TeamViewer just skips past the file.      All I have to do is quit adding to the old laptop and eventually everything is transferred over.   It's awesome. 

Bashing around

While I'm stuck at my desk for several hours, with my computer bogged down with several remote desktop connections, I thought I'd slide over to my Ubuntu box and start messing with things.   I mean, I've got nothing better to do that sit and stare at bars that slowly move across the screen to indicate progress.  Really, I don't.  

But then automation is not something that has been properly built into the company I work for.  As we expand and grow (as we are doing right now) we haven't taken any time to develop and use tools that provide monitoring or automation for almost anything.  The only way we currently know if something goes down is a phone call from a store.   That's a backwards process. 

Slowly but surely, parts are building their selves into automation and remote management, but not at a pace that it should be happening.  I think as a company we've entered the 21st century, but there's a ton of stuff that needs to be done.  Far too much is fly by night, hope like hell it works.

Maybe I'm talking about pro-activity as opposed to reactivity.  I'm not terribly sure.  I just know the way we are doing things is not the right way to do them.  Too much legacy junk that serves only small purpose without providing much.  But someone decided we need to keep all that stuff.  Great.  Have fun. 

So I don't know how to do it in Windows...  maybe there's a way to do it in Linux.  People tell me its the greatest thing since sliced bread, and even better than peanut oil.   So off I am, to design and automate an entire network using nothing but Bash scripts and a Window's users knowledge of Linux....   Am I a glutton for punishment or what?

long nights and long days

So I haven't been updating.  Anything.  Well...  I've definintely been learning a lot.

At the moment, I'm exhausted but still running.  I'm in the beginning of an update to seven locations.  It's some fun stuff.  Is this the second 15+ hour day in a row?  Day one 8 to 1900, then 2030 to 0030..  so...   11 + 4...   15 hours that day.   Today was 8 to 1800, and then 2030 to who knows when.   It's not really pleasant when the 40 hour week is just another name for Wednesday, and you've still got Thursday and Friday to go. 

This is what I got my self into, in one sense though.   I'm not terrible sure I enjoy that all that much.  The initial goal was to make myself considerably more important to the company by taking on responsibilities that needed to be done but no one did.  Great, and it worked like a champ.  I picked up skills left and right.  And all those skills are now taking over every single moment I have.  

At some point, I assumed the additional personnel we hired would be worth their weight and they would learn something.  But we hired (what I think) are the wrong kind of people.  They are hesitant, slow, and unwilling to take charge or responsibility.  They are horrendously afraid of screwing up or doing something wrong.  And you can't be that way.   There's too much in this job where you have to be balls to the wall and just go crazy.   There isn't a nice way to do it.  You have to be willing to jump in the fire to learn and get good. 

The people we've hired use the kid glove approach, and a year later I've only lost one responsibility.   Is that something I wanted?  To take on all this responsibility and to become the person everyone else calls when they have a problem?  Sure, it sounds like a great job.  But it's also one that doesn't give any other benefit.  You get a lot of phone calls and that's about all their is to it.  No extra pay.  No extra benefits.  No comp time..   just 50 to 90 hours a week of balls to the wall work.