Category Archives: Work

POW! Zing! Sudden Schedule Change!

Work

In which I don’t have to be at work until one o’clock tomorrow afternoon.

Due to a personnel change at work, I’m now going to be the closing technician. Starting tomorrow.

Which is fine. You know how I feel about mornings.

Trying to get a fixed schedule is proving to be difficult though, because I need a lot of Fridays and Saturdays off for gigs and the other evening employee – the one with seniority – is in his twenties and wants those same nights off too. We’ve been trying to settle on a schedule between the two of us for the past four hours and basically gotten nowhere.

Which means that I’ll be working the following weird schedule for the next couple of weeks:

Thursday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Friday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Saturday 11:00 am – 8:00 pm
Sunday 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
Monday 1:00 pm – 10:00 pm

Pretty sucky, huh? I wish I could work Monday through Friday from 1:00 to 10:00 with occasional Fridays off for gigs, but considering the NOC’s necessary coverage needs and the available warm bodies it really doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

My boss said he’ll make sure I get my days off together, at least. I’m just afraid they won’t be days I actually need to have off; if I were to gig in Richland on a Saturday night I probably wouldn’t get to bed until three. Getting up four hours later to work the Sunday day shift? Would be pretty much unbearable.

Oh well, it’ll all work out! No moar waking up at six in the morning, at least!

HAPPINESS

Geek

In which I love my new job because they give me benefits!

I started here at the ol’ ISP/CLEC three months ago last week, which made me eligible for not only the first health insurance I’ve had in a decade but also free DSL! Free!

My dry loop was delivered by Qwest today. Oh yes it was.

I got to sit with the engineer while he set up my connection on the DSLAM (card 24, port 6!) and built my connection onto the router.

When I get home, I’ll need to tone the pair out of the apartment back to the demarc and connect it to the new loop, and then program the modem and plug it in…

demarc

…and then? And THEN I should have a FUCKING ROCKIN’ SOLID SEVEN MEGABIT PER SECOND FEED INTO MY HOUSE, ONE THAT DOES NOT GO THROUGH A QWEST DSLAM!

Squee!

Baffled By Broadcasting

Nerd, , , , ,

In which universe does this make any sense?

Okay, so I don’t really know how wi-fi works. I assume it’s some sort of transmitter/receiver relationship like radio or old-style television. I figure there needs to be an appropriate amount of proximity and an inversely appropriate lack of obstacles between the two stations, but once you’ve got a device that’s transmitting and a device that’s receiving, it should just work barring interference on the same frequency, right?

So why does my wi-fi signal degrade over time?

I have a cheap-ass Encore wireless DSL modem. It’s in the guest bedroom, which is at the front of the house. I do 99% of my computing from my bedroom, which is upstairs and at the opposite end of the house.

I can get online just fine most of the time; but then everything gets really shitty. I can barely surf, let alone watch vids on Netflix (which is, yes, my main use of my connection these days. So sue me). If I run a tracert, the first hop – between my computer and my modem – takes FOR. FUCKING. EVER.

And here’s where it gets weird: no standard troubleshooting (refresh wifi adapter, reboot computer, reboot modem, etc.) has any effect whatsoever, BUT if I just carry the netbook down to the router I can then put it back where it started and it WORKS JUST FINE for a week or more.

In my room I get two bars. Next to the modem, duh, I get five. All I have to do is get the netbook close to the router for a few minutes and my problems are solved for days. I have experienced this phenomenon too many times to dismiss it as coincidence. I don’t have to reboot anything, or even reconnect: I just have to get physically closer for a few minutes and my connection stabilizes for up to a week.

My question is this: WTF, over?

Coolest B-day Cake Ever.

Work, , ,

In which there’s an amazing cake!

Today was the office “comfort food” potluck. (I brought a casserole.)

There are two birthdays in the office this month; mine is one of them. And Dani, whom I didn’t even know was a baker, brought in this fantastic cake:

Birthday Cake!

Isn’t that thing just freakin’ awesome?!?

Geeking.

Geek

In which there’s software and hardware and stuff.

Today I updated three WordPress installations on my web server. And then I updated a bunch of WP plug-ins. And then I updated Mint, my stats app. And then I installed some Peppers.

And then I ate Mexican food, because I didn’t get up early enough this morning to pack a bento.

And then I seriously considered going to Gnomedex 9.0 (Human Circuitry: a Technology Conference of Inspiration and Influence) in Seattle next week. It would cost about eight hundred bucks (including con cost, airfare, and a hotel), but it would be hella fun. Plus I haven’t been out of town in a couple of months, and you know how that goes.

Or I could just stay home and do nothing but buy a bicycle.

Work conditions

Work

In which the office is loud and dusty.

Office remodel

They’re taking out a wall in the office today. It’s noisy, which makes phone work a little rough, and the people who should be sitting in those two desks aren’t in the queue so it’s been busy (plus bills just went out so I’m in Billing Call Hell).

But when it’s all done, there will be room for yours truly to have herself a proper desk! W00t!

Placeholder

Work, , , , , ,

In which this will have to suffice!

I was gonna write about my weekend, but it really needs a particular image to make the post work, but I still can’t send images from my phone to Flickr and I forgot the phone’s USB cable at home so I can’t get the image online until later. Ergo: no real post until tomorrow.

In other news, I just got off the phone with a guy who is running a dual boot XP/Kubuntu box, possibly a laptop. He could connect and surf in XP, but not in Kubuntu. I had him put Google’s IP into the browser and the page didn’t load. I said he wasn’t online. He said he was. I asked him if he knew how to ping. He did not. I told him I’m not trained to support Linux distros, but that I suspected his problem was one of the following: lack of appropriate drivers for the wireless adapter; firewall settings; or conflicts from trying to connect to the same wireless router from two operating systems with the same MAC address. I explained that I couldn’t fix his problem.

He asked me if there was anyone else in tech support who could help him. I said there was not. He asked me if I could ask around. I explained that no one here was trained to support Linux and could do so only from personal experience and that NO ONE HERE RUNS KUBUNTU AT HOME, TRUST ME.

Stymied, he then went into detailed questions about encryption types and the fact that he has a wireless DSL modem with a wireless router behind it. I replied that I had no way of knowing which encryption type he had enabled on his wireless AP and that having two broadcasting wireless routers in his LAN was a personal problem. He then went off on another round of 1D10T questions that were only tangentially related to ANYTHING AT ALL EVER.

I finally said, “Listen! Since you can surf when you’re booted into Windows, we know that your connection works and that your hardware works. Therefore, your PROBLEM is with your LINUX DISTRO and as I’ve said NINE TIMES already I am not required to nor INTERESTED in supporting your issue, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to because YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO PING. So! Go log into Windows, go to kubuntu.org, and surf the forums until you find your answer.”

Moral: if you’re running Linux, (1.) be a geek, and (2.) GET OFF MY PHONE.

Tech Support FTW!

Work,

In which you simply cannot make this shit up! LOL!

CALLER #1
My caller wanted to “buy bandwidth… enough for, say, a thousand?”

Me: “A thousand what?”
Caller: “You know, people. Computers.”
Me: “What, you want an OC-3 or something?”
Caller: “Yeah, I have a T-i at one place.”
Me: “You mean a T-1?”
Caller: “Yeah, one of those.”
Me: “What do you want to do with it?”
Caller: “Sell wireless in Post Falls.”
Me: “Do you, ah, have any technical experience with wi-fi?”
Caller: “I know people.”
Me: “Ah.”
Caller: “Where’s, like, the demarc? I want to buy a lot.”
Me: “The demarc?”
Caller: “Yeah, where, like, the Internet comes into town. Someone told me it was a few blocks from here. I want to connect to that.”

So, because I’m SUPER AWESOME, I explained that: (1) backbone is owned primarily by telephone companies, and, as much as he wanted to argue with me about it, it was still true that he’d need to contact his local telco to buy “a lot,” (2) in order to sell wireless successfully he’d need to buy a frequency, which often cost millions of dollars, because wireless companies who do not tend to go WAY out of business, (3) wi-fi is not typically delivered through plate glass windows via laser (whatever he meant by that), and (4) he could probably start by putting, say, cable or something into his “thousand unit building” and getting off my phone.

I did give him a sales rep’s number in case he wanted to call back tomorrow during regular business hours, but I don’t know that the gentleman was quite ready to become an ISP just yet.

CALLER #2
The caller after him has been calling every single week for months, and was calling back today for the forth time when I got her.

She contradicted herself nine times in two sentences (can you get online OR NOT? can you surf OR NOT? can you send mail OR NOT? can you receive mail OR NOT? JESUS, LADY, MAKE UP YOUR BLOODY MIND!) and I basically told her that her operating system, Mac OS 9, was retired seven years ago and that no one is going to support it, especially not me.

I love tech support! Love it!

In other news, tomorrow is VUBOQ’s one year unemployment anniversary so I sent him something from his wishlist. You could, too!

Stuff. Things. Objects.

Work

In which I am acquiring things.

I now have speakers and a UPS for my work machine. Still waiting on a proper desk and a second monitor. And a vid card.

But still! Getting stuff!

And my boss almost got me an ergo keyboard but they were $60 at Staples so I didn’t get one. Yet.

Also got a skin for my cell phone.

She who dies with the most toys wins!