A Little Monkey and Tails.

I had this cute munchkin visit me yesterday for a bit. Her father (my nephew) was passing through.  He and his wife have a set up where he takes this little one to visit his friends from around where he grew up (they have children also) for the week-end, and her older son (from another relationship) goes to his father's grandparent's for the week-end - resulting in the Mom getting 2 days all to herself. They call it a mental health day (or something similar). I think that is wonderful! Although I am not positive when my nephew gets any totally alone time.

She is the cutest little 3 year old and she climbed the neighbor's swing set/fort like a little monkey.

I am going to try harder to post more often. I have so many things I can do on-line that almost all of my time is spent sitting here at the computer. Almost everything I do can help me in my job in one way or the other. Helping people is still one of the biggest areas in my life for me. Online, I am a reader of redd!t and have several divisions that I read to see if I can help. I also get several ideas and tips from readers to benefit myself.

Just last evening I was reading the area about Tor (The Onion Router). This one has been an example I use when I am instructing the techs about the filter. Most of them have no idea what it is, or how it works. Sigh. But that is an entire book in itself and if you know me, you are probably aware that I can get very long winded when I start talking tech.

Anyway, the user mentioned Tails.  I had not heard or read about this one. So, I had to investigate and of course I had to have it. For testing purposes and to present to the techs how end  users (the savvy ones) are getting around the filter in the schools and endangering their network.

I had to find 2 USB sticks with 4 GB available. (I had always referred to them as flash drives, but I kind of like this term). So I did have one empty 4 GB one (how did THAT happen?), and the other had just back up data on it - so I moved that to one of my external HDDs.

So, I started this new endeavor.  Four hours later I went to bed. LOL!  I am learning a lot, but I am also being very, very cautious. I have screwed up my system before trying this stuff and I should have known not to start this after 9 p.m. I was much too tired to think this through and follow long, intricate instructions.

It is one of those deals where you are going through the steps one at at time, and you come across the step that reads "If you don't have such and such, click here to set that up (or install it). So, you follow that link and you start installing that program. You get halfway through the steps and you come across another one that reads "If you have never installed such and such before, you need to change this or that before you can enable it". And I follow the link to THAT site. It went about 4 sites deep and I was getting very tired.

Well, it didn't work my first go round. But hey, I did learn a lot. And, I will try again today. Maybe. Of course I will - I am too excited to get this puppy on a flash drive and see what I can do with it in my work environment so I can bring it to their attention to watch out for this work around.

I run into the techs who have the attitude "So, what? They are always going to find a way around the filter. I can't stop them all."  This might be true, but I can see that he/she has given up the fight. This saddens me. Yes, there will always be a rogue student who knows so much about technology that he will consider this a challenge (sometimes they don't mean harm, they just want the ego boost that they were able to beat the system) and brag to his friends and share his knowledge.

But once in a while, guys......once in a blue moon - I get a tech who gets that look in his eye, the "Oh really?" look and they write this down. They hopefully are going to take action to block or attempt to block this activity in his or her district.

And that is why I do it. That is why I share what I know with others. I want to make the schools safer for the students. It may be a losing battle, but I can't just say "Screw it. Let 'em see it. They're gonna see it anyway."  Well, I'd prefer them NOT to see it in an educational environment. In other words "Not on MY watch."

Did anybody watch the movie "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?"  You know how I love my movies and I have so many I can talk about. I like Tina Fey in MOST of her movies. I am not a HUGE fan, but at least she does not make me cringe. For this movie, they delicately add humor to a horrifying situation that so many live through. But then there was MASH. I know the humor was exaggerated, and there were only a few times when the show brought us back to the reality of the horror of war.

It is slowly coming back to me. I had trouble remembering my password today. I had trouble finding spell check. But it is coming back. I need to go and ready all of YOUR posts this past year (or has it been longer) to see what is going on with you.

I have a lot more to write (tell). This year seemed to be a bad one for cancer hitting my friends. They are fighting the fight. A lot of little children in my family. I always like that. I was the youngest of 8, and I was 12 years old before any of my siblings had a baby. They then came thick and fast, but that first grandchild (for my Mom) and first nephew (for me) was doted on. My sister was the type who packed up her husband and baby and drove 50 miles one way EVERY week-end to stay with us (at my Mom's house). And on Sunday evenings drive 50 miles back.  Well, her husband drove. Her husband did everything for her. Nice in some ways, but over the years (as she has told us) it can be very smothering. We used to chide my sister when the gas stations changed over to self-serve. She had ALL the gas stations marked out who would pump the gas for you. It was ages before she was able to pump her own gas. I'm not sure she can, even now. Hmmmmm..... LOL!

Rambling on

I have bits and pieces to post about today. Above is a photo of a vehicle of some sort I was following a month or so ago. It is stopped - see the tail lights. We were sitting in construction traffic.

The new study on marijuana smoking. Or is it new?  I always used to say "They should just legalize marijuana."  I don't smoke it. I figured it was not much worse than alcohol. Maybe better. Now that I am in my 50's I see older people who have smoked for great lengths of time and it ain't so pretty. I now personally believe the smoking has had a negative impact on their lives.

I was in a meeting on Monday. I had taken a survey of what various educational organizations around the state of Ohio used for filtering their school districts' networks. A tech was rambling on in his negative view of the product our educational organization uses. He is always negative. I feel he has a personal vendetta against me, but I could be right. (!)  He blabbed out that only 2 organizations in the state uses such and such. I corrected him and said 12 did. There are a total of 23 educational organizations in the state of Ohio.

He stopped and asked me "12?"  I nodded and confirmed "12." I had sent out e-mails asking the directors of the organizations what they used and 22 out of 23 places had responded to me.

And, the others in the meeting would have believed him had I not been there. He did not take a survey. He was just spouting off negative blabber.

This is only one incident. This guy "grandstands" at almost every meeting. What do you do with somebody like that? He is poison. He has a "posse" of other guy techs that gravitate around him. Four at least. I say they "drink the kool-aid" that he is dishing out. The sad part (for me) is the other 4 techs - two at least - are very good in their own right. They are strong techs that work well with me at other times. I guess they just gravitate to him. I may not ever understand why. Maybe if they sit next to him, he will do all the talking and they won't have to.

When he does have a network problem, I approach each incident as fresh and new. I do not keep the negativity on my back when I deal with him. I am polite to him and cordial. He gets the same attentive response I give every other tech that asks for my help. I make sure of that. I won't sink to his level or let him get me down.

But, each new incident where he thrashes my work or my organization's work knocks me back a bit. Some of the female techs are beginning to ask me "What is his problem?" 

Sigh. He is just one of those experiences in life, I guess. The human psyche. Unbelievable.

Crap

This acronym is all the buzzword around the education meetings these days. In Ohio, at least. Backwards is pretty much how I see it.

Technology is in an uproar because of all the demands the state is making on schools to be able to support the testing that is going to be coming our way. The idea is for thousands of students to take an on-line test at the same time and I know - school networks are unprepared to handle the load.

It is a serious sh!t-storm. The arguing back and forth is depressing to hear. The demands on school networks will be intense. I've read where one panel discussion at a PBS station almost needed to call security.

A statement from one state that has already tried it:  Thousands of students experienced slow loading times of test questions, students were closed out of testing in mid-answer, and some were unable to log in to the tests.

It can't be easy for education departments to make the rules and standards but 'wow'. This one seems to take the cake.

Slammed!

I have been crazy busy at work and with the postings about The Wall, this topic is about a week behind. On the 18th the big "A" (red fruit that Eve ate) released an update. Within education there were a lot of devices and some of them were set to automatically download. It was chaos for a day or so, pure chaos. It does go to show you what can happen, though.

http://www.vistaone.com/amx/the-initial-impact-of-ios-7-on-education-networks/

The above photo is a gauge of a port that monitors traffic passing through my filter appliances. If it gets to 100% (and it did, I just did not get the chance to capture the photo at that time) - my appliance drops packets. What that means - certain web pages can slip by unfiltered. So, if somebody is trying to go to facebook and their district does not allow it - they can get there. Until they change the screen or click on anything that refreshes the page. By that time, chances are; their next request will be properly filtered. (I used facebook as an example, but you can imagine what sites could be accessed if even for one full screen shot. UGH!)

Not a catastrophe, but this gauge read this for an hour at a time, then dropped down to the regular 0.4 - 0.5 range for ten minutes or so (class changes) and then it was boom! - right back up there.

For a global gauge of the Internet, you can go here:

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html

http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

Connected

Three hours in the hotbox yesterday. I had to stand on a chair. My back was about to give out. I grabbed an empty desk from the hallway. The secretary was more than nice and accommodating. I was about to kick the custodian. I guess his cleaning supplies were in the filing cabinet that I had to stand in front of to access this network.

He kept coming in while I was standing on the chair, opening a drawer getting a spray bottle out, then he would come back two minutes later and put the bottle back. Another few minutes there he was opening the drawer again, getting out (I swear) the same bottle. Then yep...two minutes later putting it back.

Finally I snapped at him, "Why don't you just pull out the whole drawer?"  He said "No, that's okay. I'll just work around you."

Once I obtained the desk and sat a little away from the filing cabinet he never came back. What a dork!

Then the speech therapist who was in the little room behind where I was working felt the need to tell me her life story. I heard all about her yellow jacket stings while she was mowing, all about her dogs, all about her daughter...it went on and on. I try to be polite but gee whiz!

I did take one five minute break and went out to the car and turned the A/C on me full blast. It saved my sanity, I think.

Anyway, I finally had success. I moved on to the next site after that and it was warm in the room, but at least there was some form of A/C running because this school had the equipment in the secretary's office. The secretary and principal there were also very nice.

I went home hot, dirty and sticky - but happy. Oh, the dirt accumulates over the years on this equipment. Needless to say nobody cleans it because they are kind of afraid of it. Or, I think that is the reason.

Chin UP!

...continued from yesterday (and the day before).

I found this picture and I just had to at least use it at some point during this epic tale. :)

During all of this back and forth with the cable and the valley school, I had other things that are falling behind. We were hit with a massive mess this year. My filter had issues and the tickets were coming fast and furious.

A few techs take to the distribution lists (all point bulletin) to complain about the filter and this valley tech takes this day to pipe up and slam my filter yet again. He has cried for two years that he wants another filter. I took  a vote at one conference and the majority said to keep the present one.

Back to the cable. I take the cable back to my office. Seems I was out of (phone) range as my home office was trying to reach me before I left because they wanted me to leave the cable there. Their research had dug up a module that they can order and we can still use this LC/LC cable.

Too late. I was back to my office before I saw the message.

I told my co-worker (former manager) and my current manager I would contact the valley tech to see if he wanted me to run the cable BACK out to him or just bring it on Monday when the module would arrive.

He said he wanted it that afternoon so that his maintenance guy could run it very early Monday morning.

I took the cable out and all the way I am thinking to myself "Just pretend like you did not even read his slam on the filter".  Chin UP! Chin UP! And I did just that. I was in such a good mood. I chatted with the secretary. We laughed and told a few stories back and forth. (After hours - school students and most staff long gone).

Then I took the cable back to the valley tech. I smiled sweetly at him and asked him if he wanted me to come Monday as soon as I got the module or wait until after school hours at 3:30. He said 3:30. I said "You got it!" I smiled even more and went back to the main office. I chatted with the secretary a bit more, then told her I did not want to waste any more of her time - and I went home. Secretaries are very busy.

My co-worker (former manager) told me that the shipment was being overnight-ed to my (home) address on Saturday. He sent me a copy of the order by e-mail. (He did not send the Fed Ex tracking number). I scanned over the message (making sure they had my home address correct) and closed the e-mail.

I was busy on Saturday. I was busy here and busy there. I had a party that evening. I got home at 10:30 p.m. and looked on my front porch and in my mail box. Nothing.

I double-checked Sunday morning when it was daylight. No package, no note.

I e-mailed my co-worker (former manager) and my current manager that no shipment had arrived. By any chance did they have a Fed Ex tracking number?

By this time I was certainly hoping they had not expected me to stay home and sign for anything. I knew I had a busy Saturday and I would certainly have remembered them asking me to do that or at least mentioning that it would need a signature.

A little later I got their e-mail. According to the Fed Ex tracking number it was sitting in Indianapolis IN. Ah, well. Nothing I could have done, then. I had not missed the shipment.

I did send another e-mail and said that I really did not need the part until 3:30 on Monday. Because the valley tech refuses to take the Internet down until then.

I just realized I forgot a big part to this story.

The valley tech told me my home office told him he had to wait until I returned from vacation before he could do this switch over. I returned from vacation on Tuesday the 20th and was given the orders to go to the valley school on Thursday the 22nd.

That ticked me off. I am the first to volunteer to go out of my district and help the others. Nobody could bother themselves to come out to my area and cover while I was on vacation.

I was shocked and I told the valley tech that. He said he knew that everybody deserves a vacation but was a bit surprised that we were "allowed" to take them when schools start. He was very upset because he said if they had sent somebody to cover me then they could have discovered the "mistake" a week or so ago and could have started the steps to correct it while I was on vacation.

I imagine a rule will be created. No extended vacations the second half of August. They did this about fifteen years ago. I am guessing they will try to enforce it again.

Here is another interesting tidbit. This valley tech is a big guy. Not tall. Just very, very big.I am portly. I have mentioned this before. I am not slim. Not even close.

My current manager said to me over the phone "Tell (as he mentioned valley tech by name) to get his FAT ASS up on a ladder and run the cable." Of course he was "kidding". He really didn't want me to tell the guy that. Sheesh. At least I hope not.

It was our mistake that this was all screwed up and my current manager was saying this. AND I am heavy. What does he think or say about me?

Stay tuned. I am so far behind now in work, and I have two vacation days scheduled for the end of this week and two after the Labor day holiday. All approved months ago.

Just for the record. I can climb a ladder. (I clean out my own gutters.) I can run cable. I may make people nervous (being so big and up on a ladder) and I may not smell the best after I begin to sweat but I am agile. My back will hurt but I can do it if the job needs me to. I just take more Advil.

So...what will this week bring? Will Peruby get to take her vacation at the end of the week? Will Peruby solve the major filter problem before she takes more time off? Will Peruby get three more schools on fiber this week? Will Peruby get her objectives and Professional Development goals all written up before the end of the week?

We shall see...

Oops to the nth degree

This post may be a long one. Depends on time and how much emotion I can purge out through this miracle of miracles "the keyboard".

The incident I am about to post is work related. I am going to try to keep things as inconspicuous as possible.

I will call this tech/school my valley nemesis. I have posted about this tech before here  and here.

Big breath. Okay.

This valley district tech has determined that his school needs three hundred Mb/s of bandwidth. Most of my schools run on 100. A handful are moving to 200 this year. I know that may not register with some of you but just an idea. Most have 100, he wants 300.

That is okay. It is do-able.

My co-worker (who used to be my manager and was demoted) set up the order. He used to do all of this as a manager and now he still does this work. Since I was hired in 1995, the home office techs rarely have to go to a school in my area any longer. Note that this co-worker (former manager) still gets the same pay because they cannot take money away in our system. I bet they can if they really want to, I'm just stating the fact about him and his role.

He has not been to this valley district in years. Years and years. To move to 300 Mb/s this valley school needs to switch from an rj45 cable to a gBic module. If you worked with your Internet equipment you may be familiar with the rj45 cable. It is the big clip cable that looks like the old phone cables (actually the phone cables are rj11) but are bigger. If you do not have wireless, they are the patch cables that connect your PC or laptop to the Internet modem/router or a switch/hub.

The factory-made ones are very nice with their moulding that covers the clip so it does not catch on stuff and snap off. My hand made ones are not nearly as pretty and most all the clips have been snapped off. LOL!  Here was my cabling bible for years.  (For anyone who crimped cables, sing it with me!  Each three syllables:


Orange/white, orange,
green/white, blue,
blue/white, green,
brown/white, brown!


UGH!

My fingers began cramping up with sympathy pains just writing this from my nightmarish memories.

To move to 300Mb/s they need to convert to THIS type of cabling. Fiber optics.

 

I won't go into single mode and multi-mode here. Now, at the time I was told to go to this school and perform this switch over, I had no idea what lay ahead for me. I knew the configuration of our equipment. I figured the rj45 cable would plug into the gBic module with an rj45 interface (hole in layman's terms). I really thought it would look like this:

 

I would go to the school, simply unplug the rj45 cable from one interface (port or hole - whatever you want to call it) and plug it into the new "fiber" interface. The hole where I would insert the above pictured module. When I plugged it in I noticed the module had a  fiber interface on it and not an rj45. I looked at the tech (if you read the links I displayed above, you will know that this guy is not amicable). 

I asked him if the telco had pulled fiber to this room. He looked at me incredulously. "No."  I said perhaps I brought the wrong gBic module. My co-worker (former manager) had handed me six in little brown boxes but never told me that they were different. I had assumed they were all the same. There was no writing on ANY of the boxes. I sighed thinking I would have to fly back to my office and look at the four I left there (I had brought two. I did think ahead enough in case one was D.O.A.).  They were both gBic modules for fiber.

The tech called my co-worker (former manager) and asked him about the module he had given me. This is where it started to turn sour. This co-worker (former manager) was in a meeting. He has been given the duties of moving their home office into a new building. The amount of work this entails is enormous. He has stated several times that he does not feel he is qualified to perform this job. Yet, he is still doing it. In some situations you do it the best you can. His stress level is beyond enormous.

My co-worker (former manager) told this school valley tech that it HAD to be fiber optics. Now, at this very moment the tech and I did not know the distance between this wiring closet we were currently standing in and the electrical room of the building. We measured it with our feet (walking and counting) later and discovered it was about 230 feet away. 

In other words my co-worker (former manager) was telling this valley tech that they needed a fiber cable run from the electricity room to our wiring closet for this to work. My co-worker (former manager) since he had not been in that building in years did not realize that the telco equipment was that far away from our equipment.

Now you see where the Oops comes in.

To be continued....

Mangers lie

I am trying to figure out why my manager lies in this fashion. This is about the third time this has happened.


In this circumstance the school districts want a service from us that will tell them and help them control what is eating their precious (expensive) bandwidth.

Sites such as YouTube and gaming can sap all the bandwidth, thus leaving nothing available for actual work.

Where are the teachers? I don't know. I have been in some situations where there is no teacher to be found and the kids are really going to town on the computers and the Internet.

I think a lot of teachers treat the computer lab as a babysitter. Plop the kids down in front of the TV computer and go to the teachers' lounge.

Back to the application. We (as a department) have been talking about such a program for a year. We have a program in place that monitors our equipment and lets us know when a device loses connection, etc. We can investigate - did the building lose power, did a janitor unplug the equipment, what happened? Stuff like that.

This application has a sister app that will tell the district what their traffic is. For example: Pandora. If you are not familiar with Pandora - it is a streaming music application.  Streaming radio is a huge hit with office personnel. I can't tell you how many times I will go to work on a secretary's computer just to find she has the radio streaming to her PC, but the volume is turned down low or muted - she forgot it was running.

Big bandwidth sucker there. Another one - video. YouTube. If a computer lab teacher tells students to watch a video and 25 end users all go to the same video and watch it - wow. Bandwidth usage skyrockets. The teacher is supposed to stream it to an overhead projector so all the class can watch it at one time. Thus only one machine is viewing the video and streaming it down the Internet pipe, instead of 25.

Or, the teacher is out of the room and some kid finds a great dirt bike video and the kids around him see him watching it and they in turn, look it up and watch it.

Chaos.

Anyway. This post is already getting too long.

I told my manager that I was very interested in working with this program when we get it.

Now, I am not a perfect employee. I slack off now and then. But there I was sitting around this summer, knowing that I have three huge projects looming. I am always waiting for something. Somebody to get this ready, somebody to order that. I sigh. I fear that everything will come at me at once. It usually does and then I do things half assed because I don't have the proper time to work with it.

Don't misunderstand. I call or communicate many times asking my co-workers or managers who I am waiting for, if there is anything "I" can do to speed up the process.Can I make some phone calls, can I come to the office and physically install equipment? Can I do the legwork?  ANYTHING! Nope. Zilch.

I get anxious and I decide to download the evaluation copy of the program. I try and do not succeed. I am naive and try to run it on my stand alone laptop with just adequate CPU power and memory. The program (even the evaluation part) needs a server with more power than my piddly laptop.

The company that sells the program contacts me and is very anxious (salesmen) to get me using this. I am stalled but at our staff meeting at the end of June my manager tells me we have it and he needs to install it on a VM (virtual machine) then I can begin to use it.

I am beside myself with excitement! Okay! I ask "Can I tell the techs about this program?" 

And this is how I remember this incident vividly.

He meant to say "You will want to play with it for a while first" instead saying something like "Play with yourself".  Well, that was all me and my delinquent co-workers needed. We started laughing and making jokes. That kind of conversation sticks with you, you know?

A month goes by and - nothing. Just e-mails back and forth where he says "Next week, I can get that done." I began calling him "Next week Andy".  Not his real name.

I sit and try to think of a way that I can be proactive instead of bitching about how much of a slacker my manager is. He is not a slacker, I am sure he works his ass off. But I found myself grumbling because I was anxious to go and here I was - waiting again.

I heave a big sigh and I decide to use an old server that was given to me a few years ago to "play" with. It may not have the power, but I have to do something. I had installed Linux on it (my Linux playing days) and decided next time I was in my organization's home office I would ask for a Windows Server disk and install that OS so I could download and work with the evaluation copy properly.

I was there on Wednesday for training. My manager was at lunch. I asked a co-worker for Windows Server disks and he began looking through a tray of disks. Another department co-worker asked me what we were looking for. I explained the situation to her. She said "I can have you a VM up and running in 30 minutes."

My heart sank. Really? I explained to her that the manager has been promising me a VM for weeks. She said "I'll do it." I gave her the specs. I told her that this was an evaluation copy and after 30 days we hoped to roll it over to the real program. The company that sells this product told me we could do that.

By this time our manager came back and got in on the conversation. I told him and he said "We haven't bought the program, yet."

I just looked at him. Somehow I knew this. Deep down I suspected as much.

I should have called him on it right then and there.

But to tell you the truth, I was so damn happy to have a VM to work with and they had just purchased me a new laptop I did not want to spoil my good luck.

I have been told many times that I have a "bad attitude" so I try very hard to never say anything negative.

I like my manager. I have to believe that he does not mean any harm when he lies like this. I am trying to figure out why he tells me they bought the program (remember the play with yourself conversation - I did not imagine that) when they did not.

Some things that come to mind are - he does not want to disappoint me. Or maybe he likes to make me happy. That is my "positive" thinking. What he does not realize is that he jeapardizes his integrity with every lie. When I discover the lie, I think less of him.

I am just trying to understand. There are many reasons I never take a management position when it is offered to me and it happens at every job I have worked at.

I was an "office manager" in my early twenties and really just managed myself. I didn't have big staffs or have to decide pay raises, etc...

I would not want to be a manager. Just like I would never want to be the president or the mayor.

I am a worker bee. I do best working by myself. Managers need to delegate and make hard decisions. And lie, I guess. For whatever reasons, managers need to lie and I have to tell you - I'd have more trouble with that than anything else.

Another world

I had my head stuck in subnetting at work yesterday. It took my mind off all the other problems I was having. When dealing with this it is like you stick your head into this big tree that is full of leaves and you can see nothing else around you until you pull your head out of that tree. That was how it was for me. Very intense.Four long hours with one bathroom break.

The tech on the other end of the phone was super fantastic. We started off slow because I did not know what to expect and neither did he. By the time we were done he and I had shared dog stories and we were laughing and calling each other awesome.

I actually only had him on the phone for maybe two and a half hours. The first hour was prep work on my part. The last half hour was pack up and get out of there.

Yes, my head hurt by the time I was done. It may have been from no lunch. This tech is on the west coast so we began at 11 a.m. my time and finished at 3. I did have a helper - he ran and bought me a bottle of water during the marathon.

I was not "properly" trained. I have never been to formal schooling or training for computers. I have been to a few week-long classes - mostly two to three day classes. I did learn the hexadecimal numbering system - on my own. I  did not need it for work - for some reason that one just clicked with me.

As for subnetting, I did write a paper on it back in 1997 or 1998. I understand it, I just cheat and use an online calculator. I do not know how to figure it out in my head. Yet. I may learn, still.

In high school I was the artist or the short story writer. I managed B's in math but I only took as much as I would need to get into college. First level algebra and geometry. Nothing higher. It made me sick to my stomach. So did the teachers. Then, I did not even go to college. To this day I have not come across a math teacher that I liked. I did pick up a college refresher course (when I thought I would go to college back in 1992). His name was Lovejoy Das. I sort of liked him. He was from India. He said as a boy they used to do math problems in the dirt with a stick. WTF? I would have drawn pictures in the dirt.

Anyway, the day (yesterday) ended with a huge success.  I (we) pulled off a minor miracle as far as I was concerned. I had no idea how to set this unit onto the network and we did it. It required the wonderful world of subnetting, but I did not give up. I figured out the necessary changes and they worked. By god - they worked. It certainly made me feel better than the last few days of holy horror I have been through with another district. I have another job today and I am going to try my hardest to be successful with that also. Then tomorrow - back to the horror mess. Who knows? Maybe I will hit them out of the park all week. LOL!

My headache. I did take some Advil. By the "bewitching" hour of 9 p.m. it was completely gone. I have mentioned before that strangely, a lot of my headaches seem to dissipate by 8:30 to 9:00 p.m. By the time I went to bed I felt wonderful. I had taken a sinus Advil maybe that was the ticket.

Seeds of doubt

So that is where the poppy seeds come from. Well, the kind that regrow the poppy for next year, anyway. I have no idea where actual poppy seeds that you eat come from. I read a bit about it on Wikipedia just now. Actual poppy seeds do not contain much opium so that Seinfeld episode where Elaine fails the drug test is more than likely all fiction. As if I needed proof. :)

The doubt part of my post. I have a sister who can probably be classified as an alcoholic among other things. I am over 50 and have been around her quite a bit. I believe that she misleads people to cause them harm or to gauge how gullible they are. My Mom said our Dad used to do this. For example - she tried (quite a few times) to get us to eat grass from the lawn. She sprinkled it on our dinner plates. She also tells people wild stories. I was in a bar years ago where she worked and the owner (a lady) was there cleaning. She was yapping on an on about my sister. She said "I asked your sister how she gets such clear skin, and she told me it was oleo. So I just keep eating and eating oleo."  My sister probably told her that. I think actually that oleo claimed to help skin "topically" but I didn't even start to go there with the lady. Why bother?

I had a co-worker who would believe wild things. Remember the e-mail that spread around a few years back claiming that oleo was one molecule away from plastic? She barked out "We are eating plastic!"

People can crack me up with their "taking things at face value" without questioning their origin. I am a big fan of Snopes. Even so, I am past the point where I would e-mail back to people that what they are spreading in e-mail is unfounded. I used to try to educate people but again, why bother? It's a waste of time. A few weeks later there is another mass e-mail telling another woeful story or telling another untruth.

Seeing that networking is my vocation, I am convinced that the real damage is the amount of useless bandwidth and time consumed by the spreading of this garbage. Please do us all a favor. Stop the mass e-mailing to everybody in your contact list. The forwards are the absolute worst. How often do you get an e-mail where you have to scroll down seven pages through all the previous "forwarded addresses" to finally get to the actual message?

Sixty large pictures in an e-mail sent in massive forwards can bog down a network to it's knees. The next time you are at work and the Internet is running slow think of your co-workers. Are they having a break and reading "fun" e-mails? And are they sending those cute puppy pictures to all sixteen people in their contact list? How about sixty people? Networks are so busy processing these mass mailings that they (the machines) have little time left to process the real data that is supposed to be handled.

I actually told a co-worker to remove me from her mailing list. I am convinced that this lady had (has) entirely too much time on her hands due to the amount of forwarded messages I kept getting from her. OMG! It got ridiculous. The religious people really pile it on. Good grief!

Whoops. This post ended up being more than just seeds of doubt. Okay, rant over.

A Personal Choice

I am a member of Neflix. One of the features of this service is that they recommend movies for you based on the movies you have watched and rated. You go through the list periodically at your leisure and rate the movies from the following five choices: "Loved it, Liked it a lot, Liked it, Didn't like it, to Hated it". Then, they give you a list of movies they think you will like.

One that was recommended for me was: Whose Life Is It Anyway? with Richard Dreyfuss. It had me in tears in certain parts of the movie. I read up on it and it was said that Mr. Dreyfuss did not remember any part of making the movie because of his drug addiction. Nothing? A big plus was Christine Lahti. She is one of my favorite actresses.

The movie is about an artist who became a quadriplegic from a vehicle accident and faced with a life of nothing he wants to be released from the hospital to die.

I also borrowed the book Q & A from the library. This is the book that Slumdog Millionaire is based on. Between the movie and the book I am running pups out into the wet grass to do their business. It was a long hot afternoon at work sitting in a wiring closet on the 3rd floor of a school with the air conditioner broke. Sweat rolling down my face and neck. I was miserable.

I came home to air conditioning and sat in front of a fan until my brain cooled down enough to be able to comprehend my reading or the movie. It was close to turning into mush in that sweltering closet. I'm talking so sticky that my finger could not move the cursor with the touch pad. I was like "Are you kidding me?"

Needless to say I did only the bare minimum that needed to be done to get this school up and working again. The tech person had many more questions and I could have shown him another 5 neat tricks to help him troubleshoot his network, but I wanted out of there as soon as I could get away. I hate working like that. Especially when I am not used to it.

At my doctor appointment's this morning the doctor told the nurse to add another test to the blood work that was taken this morning. The test? To see if I was menopausal. Yeah. It was a great day!

What a mess

I don't like to clean gutters

I don't have a fear of heights. Well, maybe I do. But not six or eight feet off the ground. I don't fear that. I really need to clean my gutters so I guess I'll get the ladder out this week-end. This is my patio during the rainstorm. That's where my daughter and I spent the evening Wednesday watching the storm. Sirens were blaring all over town, but we stayed put.

My neighbor asked me if I wanted him to clean out my gutters? The really bad one was on the side of the house where he could see it. That does it! I'm going to figure out some way to reach that side and clean it. I may have to buy a new ladder. I am considering sitting my 6 ft ladder on a table to reach. Sigh. I know. I won't do it. Dammit.

It was very nice of him to offer, but you have to know me. It was an insult to me. It made me feel inadequate. I thanked him profusely and his offer still stands, but I cannot ask for help from anybody. He said "I work for beer!" I laughed.

I am going to watch very closely. When he leaves (hopefully for a golf outing) I am going to get up there and clean them out. What a mess.

I have a horrible case of plantar fasciitis in my left foot. It came about from doing so much work the week before the graduation party. It flared up and has not let up since. My days have been sheer misery. Hot, sweaty, grimy and in pain. I am certainly not getting the Miss Congeniality award this week.

Still here

Close up from September 2008

I'm still here. I just have had my head stuck in work-related stuff.

Half car...

During the storm, I snapped a photo west of my front yard. One neighbor drives a small truck and one drives a large car. Put them together and this is what you would have. If the front end of the truck were a wee bit higher.

I went to the park today. I need to take my camera over there soon. The trees that came down there were pretty big. Two huge trees were completely uprooted. As I said, Ohio has not experienced this strength of a wind storm in such a long time, this one just sort of took out the weakest links, I guess.

Many are still without power. Schools are opening their gymnasiums up in the mornings for folks to come and shower. That is a blessing in itself. There is free water somewhere else for folks to come and help themselves. I hope that only those in need take the water and nobody greedy goes to get it.

I had my head stuck in a Catalyst 4006 all day today. I had to replace the supervisor module. That was the easy part. Re-configuring the switch took up most of the time. The part arrived at 11:45 a.m. It was shipped out from Texas yesterday afternoon. I find that remarkable.

"The Mothman Prophecies" is getting ridiculous. Talking about folks being abducted by aliens or some taking spaceship rides to other planets. I am breezing through it just to finish the crazy thing. I am hoping that the author writes the last paragraph "This was all a joke, I really don't believe this stuff."

The author is getting more and more absurd as the book goes on. He is now speaking of aliens predicting events in 1967 (R. Kennedy shooting and attempted assassination of the Pope and MLK murder). Things of this nature. Little red lights, spaceships hovering in the air. It will end with the collapse of the silver bridge and how people knew something "bad" was going to happen because of all the sightings in the area. How they made a movie out of this is beyond me.

Not so bad

This was my world today. It wasn't gray. It wasn't cold. It is unseasonably warm for January in Ohio. The sun was shining bright. The wind had whipped clouds into a frothy mix in the sky and then the wind left. The puffy clouds remained. It brought in a bit cooler weather. I think we are still above normal, though.

My drive was brief. I swapped some network equipment out. The work was brief. The school went down 3 hours after I left. I knew it. It wasn't my equipment. It was the telephone company. Usually is. They don't care. They don't have to face the angry customer. They arrange it so that they do all their work remotely. A pole in a field somewhere. Rarely do they come inside the building.

And they know they are the only game in town. But, for how long?