I love being an Oregonian. It means that I took care of my civic responsibility over a week ago. If you haven’t yet… please do.

No, today’s fun isn’t about voting. It’s about leaving on a business trip. I’m headed to IT Nation in Orlando FL for the rest of the week. Yay? I haven’t been through the airport/airline/hotel process since the Datto ( Read more... )

On the day I started work with this company almost 10 years ago, I had no tickets assigned.

Once, late last Autumn, I got down to zero tickets.

Welp.


( Read more... )

For most of the calendar year so far we at work have been plowing through a massive reorganization, upgrade, and consolidation of our servers. One of the last stages of this consolidation & upgrade process involved upgrading our Kaseya environment. During the shuffle I found some quirks. For instance, the UserProfiles directory contains roughly ( Read more... )

This week is getting an early start on kicking my ass:

• Sunday Night Insomnia with a vengeance.
• Remembered to do dishes and take out garbage this morning, forgot to grab lunch.
• MAX train broke down one stop away from where I needed to go. (The operator had to be talked through cycling the breakers. That’s right: They rebooted the light-trail train.)
• ( Read more... )

The script you’re about to read doesn’t detail how every interaction with a particular vendor’s tech support staff goes, but it’s very, very indicative and common…

Me: Hello! A problem has occurred with your product. Now, having worked with this product nigh onto a decade now, I’m aware of the usual issues and have gone through the knowledge base ( Read more... )

My morning started with a ticket assigned before I got here, scheduled for first thing after the morning “huddle.” The dispatcher pitched me to the client as “the best person at this sort of thing,” having wholly misunderstood the nature of the call. (They thought it was a backup-restore situation, when in fact it was an Office Behaving Badly ( Read more... )

Ablative Pay Increase: The raise you receive at just about the same time as costs go up in every other part of your life, such that you actually end up taking home less money every month but hey, it could’ve been worse, right?

Mirrored from greyduck.net.

Yesterday, I learned a few Linux tricks I didn’t already know followed by everything about ZFS and the nitty-gritty of how Dattos work that I didn’t know, not one bit. Today, I learned about bare-metal restores and some troubleshooting tips, then I took a test.

I feel sorry for the guy who has to grade mine, because many of the questions required ( Read more... )

I woke up at 3:00 yesterday. I woke up at 3:30 today. Well, 6:30 today, but my body clock says 3:30.

It’s all very disorienting.

The flights weren’t so bad. Getting through security at PDX went normally, the flights were early, there was only one bit of confusion as gates were scrambled around last-minute for the puddle-jumper leg of the trip, and ( Read more... )

I like seeing other parts of the country. I like the idea of seeing other parts of the country.

I’m not so keen on using air travel to get there.

Tuesday morning I board a plane bound for Connecticut (well, Chicago… where I’ll catch one for White Plains NY… you get the idea) so I can take a two-day training & certification process for one of our ( Read more... )