My brother gets his rant on

My brother called yesterday to complain about his computer and get some free tech support. Unfortunately, he called in the midst of a mild family crisis and I blew him off saying I would call back in a few minutes. (He should know by now that that is a lie, but that's a post for another day.)

Anyway, he wasn't finished, so he emailed me the rest of his complaint. I include it below with this one comment.

Amen.

As I was saying, networking, especially in a relatively confined space like a uSoft network shouldn’t be this hard. I shouldn’t have to re-install my operating system just to reset certain parameters that were set when I set up my network initially. I mean really, we have hackers every day writing viruses to clear the boot sector and/or the FAT. Its all just ones and zeros on the disk somewhere. For crying out loud they even gave us RegEdit so we could really screw things up. The world is now running rampant with computer nerds. Surely it can’t be that hard to write a utility that will reset your networking variables so that you can do a clean network install without getting an OS enema.
And as long as we’re at it why not write an aftermarket network wizard that goes into a little more depth, perhaps asks a few more questions instead of using the dumbed down, one-size-fits-all uSoft piece of crap that rarely gives intelligent users what they really want.
Does this make sense or is my ignorance showing?

New Job Skills

You know you are in for some fun when your wife informs you that a major appliance has failed. I got my latest bad news last night. The hot water heater seemed to be out, and sure enough, there was water on the floor and lots of corrosion.

So last night I bought a replacement and prepared mentally for the installation. You see, here's the deal. The unit costs $450. The installation costs $199. Being of distant Scottish decent, I cannot even entertain the thought of an additional 44% in installation. So this morning, I got up early and started tearing things apart. About noon, my son-in-law showed up to help. And let me say at this point, that I have the greatest SIL in history. But to continue...

Here is the bottom line. There are a LOT of very subtle things that have to be right to install a water heater. Specifically, the alignment. More importantly, soldering copper pipe is exactly as difficult to do as it appears. Today was my first chance to try that. By the end of the day, I have learned enough to get it right about 2/3 of the time. Another thing that I learned today is that I need a Saws-All. Those things are just too fun. And propane torches are fun. I just don't know what else they are good for besides sweating pipe.

So, I made enough mistakes that I probably did every step twice, but the doggone thing is in, and not leaking, and it's heating water. As soon as I press send on this, I'm headed upstairs to take a well deserved (and needed) shower, and then I'm off to bed to dream of pipes and burned fingers.

Clue-o-gram

Just wanted to pop into the blog for a quick second to rant about the folks that I work with.

At Unisys SLC, we have two completely separate sections working on different projects. Downstairs we have a handful of engineers doing outsourced data center stuff. Upstairs they have a few hundred tech support people manning call centers for various clients, including, unfortunately, the Unisys internal help desk. What might not be obvious to the lay person is that the standards for these two groups of people are vastly different. To the point that we get email to all employees about once a week reminding us of things that ought to be obvious. Many, perhaps most of the memos concern the dress code.

Now personally, I think it's pointless to harp on dress code violations when half of the folks upstairs have piercings or tattoos on their face, but perhaps I'm showing my age. The other aspect of this dichotomy that bothers me is the people from upstairs are always trying to get jobs downstairs in the data center. And I'm sure they have no idea why they are unsuccessful. So. Here is my little clue-o-gram. I'm addressing this to the guy who wandered into the office at the same time as me on Tuesday.

HEY BONEHEAD! IF YOU WANT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY ON THE JOB, YOU CANNOT SHOW UP TO WORK IN SHORT PANTS AND FLIP FLOPS!!!

That is all.