It's been a while

It's been a while since I last made a blog post, mostly because I'm lazy, hence the title of this blog.

Today is not a good day. The company I work for has decided to lay off 18 people, and just 8 months ago let go of 7 others. In a campany of 120, that a significant number. I know that the economy is tough, and that there was bound to be some cuts. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is the way that they (management) was sneaking around. Closed door meetings 3 times a day, bold face lies when asked about the state of the company, and if they were planning on making any staff cuts. That's what bothers me. The worst of it all is that I've been told on several occasions that management doesn't have a comfortable trust level with the employees in 2 departments, mine included. Well quess what managers.... I don't trust you either. From now on the info flow will be cut off and all you'll get from me is 8 hours of work. No more suggestions on how to improve the department and company, configuration changes, entitlements that we are not utilizing. You are going to have to be the big boys now and figure out how to run the department. I'm not doing it for you anymore.

and in the world of Tech support, a change. One I don't like...

This morning I received this email from IBM Support.


" Dear IBM Customer,

We are pleased you chose IBM to provide high-quality solutions for your business and information systems needs. As part of IBM's ongoing efforts to serve our clients better, Lotus is taking a transformational approach to update its delivery of support. I'm pleased to announce a few of those improvements.

Based on the feedback we received from IBM customers and after looking at optional support delivery models both inside and outside IBM, we will be changing the model by which we handle the initial receipt of support calls. Currently, when calling for technical support on a large majority of Lotus products, U.S. and Canadian Passport Advantage (PA) customers experience live call transfers to our technical support teams. With the remaining products, PA customers experience our call back mode of support. Those live call transfers often result in wait times. We understand that your time is valuable and every minute of wait time is time away from your business. To address this issue, effective Monday February 16, 2009, all Passport Advantage remote technical software support for Lotus products (with the exception of Lotus Foundations and LotusLive) will be provided exclusively in call back mode. You can expect the same response times you experience today, but the time formerly spent on hold will be given back to you.

You will still be able to open support requests electronically as well via the Web-based Electronic Support Request (ESR/SR) tool. IBM is simplifying the electronic service request process with IBM Service Request (SR), our new Web-based tool that will be extended to handle ALL software related electronic service requests over the next two years. ESR users will be migrated seamlessly to the new SR tool in April 2009 and will see the key features of ESR, along with improved system performance and 7x24 availability.

Our customers tell us that increased access to information and the ability to be self-sufficient in finding the solutionsthey nee, whenthey need them provides the optimum capability to manage their IT infrastructure. Lotus has an array of tools that make it easy for you. If you're unfamiliar with these tools, we invite you to learn more at: www.ibm.com/software/lotus/support/clickaway. We are committed to meeting the evolving requirements of our customers and continue to focus on enhancing the tools and support we provide.

We're excited about the outlook for 2009! All of us in the Lotus Technical Support organization look forward to assisting with your software support needs. We are here to help you achieve maximum benefit from your investment in IBM software and support services.

Thank you for choosing IBM.


Robert McDonald
Vice President, WW Technical Support
IBM Corporation, Lotus Software"

Aside from the typos in the second to last paragraph, which by the way are really annoying especially since this was a mass email from a large company, the message I'm getting from this is that if I call in to support with a level 1 outage, my system is down, and I can't get the thing to come back to save my life, I'll be put in call back mode and will receive a call with in the following 2 hours. I say 2hours, because that is what you are told today when a queue is in call back mode, and according to this letter, I'll receive the same level of support that exists today. So I ask you Mr. McDonald, are you going to tell my users that they have to wait 2 hours before the repair even begins if/when my server crashes and I can't get it back on my own? I hope you speak Japanese, cause the President of my company will be pissed...

And in the category of "I didn't see that coming"...

So being the Father of two wonderfully awesome and amazing Boys comes with some extra work that didn't come to mind when I was looking forward in my life. Poop. Yep, poop. Anyone who is a parent of a child under the age of 2 or so thinks of this in terms of diapers, the occasional "Blow-out" as my wife and I call them, but when it's the magical time known as Potty Training Time, poop becomes something that you not only dread, but actually wish for. My oldest boy is doing pretty well with his potty training. He has a few accidents here and there, but for the most part he's doing great, so long as you don't ask him about poop. The word makes him well up with tears, he'll hold it in for days and days, only to complain that "my belly hurts".... well no kidding? This usually ends up with a massive release in a place not designed to hold that much bowel movement, like the bath tub, or in the smallest little pair of boxer briefs that you've ever seen. This past Saturday was my 5th wedding anniversary. My wife asked one of her friends to watch the boys for a couple hours while we went out for dinner. We knew that we couldn't just roll the kids out of the car and split right away, that would cause for a lot of undue drama on the part of our friend, and since she was helping us out, we would have felt bad. So we unloaded the boys and headed in the house for what we hoped would be a smooth transition. All was going well, our friend has a boy just a little older than ours, and they play together often. The two boys and I headed to the basement where the play area is setup with toys, dress up clothes, art supplies... all the things young children love to play with. While presiding over the rambunctious play of the two boys, I noticed that my son had wet his pants. Now he does occasionally have accidents and not tell us, so I didn't think anything of this. It was what he said next that presented the challenge. "Dad, I pooped in my underpants". He wasn't upset by it, in fact he didn't want to go change. In his mind, he was just telling for something to say. After spending a few minutes convincing him that we should change our pants, it was up the stairs we go. I grabbed the clean clothes from the backpack we brought full of "Just In Case" stuff and began with the delicate task of taking off the dirty clothes, not getting the boy any dirtier, and not getting any of the mess on me. Thankfully I was able to keep his attention away from his dirty clothes, and on all the fun stuff he was going to do while we were out. I got his shirt off... clean... got his socks off.. clean (parents out there know, this usually isn't the case!) pants.. wet, but not poopy, now the real issue.... the underpants. Because it had been a few days since his last movement, the weight of the underpants was significantlly increased. I managed to wiggle the weighty underpants off, and promptly placed them out of sight in the bathtub, to be addressed later, cleaned up the little guy, spoke encouraging words of "Next time you need to go poo poo, let us know and we'll take you to a potty", dressed him and took him back to play with his friend. Now that he was happily running, jumping, and riding a big wheel indoors, I had to address the mess. In the tub sat the little red underpants with a baseball sized lump of poop. I was amazed at the roundness, it didn't look like it came from a human, let alone a little human. Without any other options, I picked up the underpants, and carefully flipped them insideout over the toilet. The thing sunk like so much concrete. For a moment, I was nervous that the toilet would clog, and I'd have to play plumber too! To my relief, the flush went smoothly, the underpants get bagged up in a plastic grocery bag, and left on the porch to freeze while we went out. After dinner we scooped up the kids, packed up the bag, and ever so gingerly picked up the parcel that I left on the front porch, and headed for home. I did the worlds smallest load of laundry the next morning and erased all physical traces of the incident. I hope to have the big guy all trained and set before the summer ends, but once that happens I'll be on the crest of starting the whole process over with my younger Son... at least I'll be better prepared!

The start

Today was the inauguration of President Barack Obama. I watched the ceremony in the conference room at my office with a few other people, others watched while eating their lunch in the break room, and we all watched with great attention. There were several points during the process that I was almost moved to tears. For the first time, I truly feel like an elected official can make great strides to bolster and advance our nation. I feel invigorated and want to be part of the solution. Hopefully others will be motivated in the same way. Whether it's volunteering in your community, donating good or money for those in need, or enlisting to serve our country, I hope that this can be the start of the turn around for the United States of America.

Random thoughts to help pass the time.

Today we had a pot luck lunch at work. I made a HUGE batch of stuffed shells. Half with Spinach and half without, and they were a hit. Sometimes I think I would like to start a restaurant or a catering business, but then I realize that I don't have the cash for that... so I'll stick to my day job for now. So I stuffed myself at lunch, all the food was good, but now I'm feeling a might full, and sluggish both in mind and body!

As today is the last day of work before I am off for 12 days in a row (Woot!) I'm finishing off a few loose end projects *Sarcasm*

I did figure out the final piece of a Timesheet report that has been nagging me, had to create a calculated field to compute overtime and compensatory time for HR, and I'm ALMOST finished with a paging issue that has been lingering for a few month at one of our remote offices. I want to finish that off before I head out for the holidays because I'll never remember to look into it when I get back to work on Jan 5th, but just as I thought the issue was complete, I got a phone call that an error still existed. So 20 minutes after an email to support was sent, I got some things to try... but wouldn't you know it... it was 3 pm Eastern Standard Time, which meant it was Noon in San Jose... and thus all testers are on Lunch! Hopefully they will be back in the next few minutes so I can run a couple more tests and get this error resolved within the next 2 hours... because I'm really suffering from short timers syndrom, and I'm having trouble sitting still!!!

I just signed a contract with the devil

Sadly I just completed the phone call that canceled my favorite entertainment provider of all time, DirecTV. I had to do this due to cost measures... which is also sad. I had been subscribing to both DirecTV and Comcast, the latter simply for internet access. Last night my wife and I arrived home to find that our satellite receiver had thrown a fit and decided to lock up. It would not power off by way of the button, and forcing it off by pulling the cord would not bring it back to service. A call to support went no where fast as I own my receiver, and do not lease one of theirs.... so a replacement would not come cheaply, nor without a new 2 year subscriber agreement. Needing to have news in the morning, I recalled a phone conversation that I had with Comcast during the spring where I was informed that I had been put onto a bundle package to help soften the blow of my introductory rate expiring, and that this bundle included basic digital cable. So with a splitter in hand I masterfully installed it before my cable modem, restarted that cable modem, and connected a line to my television that was in the living room. After 10 minutes for the channel discovery to complete on my Aquous LC-C37AU gem of a television (seriously, I LOVE this TV) I was watching tv again, and it made me think... how much would it be to dump DirecTV and switch to a similar package for television with Comcast? Well all told it would be $20.91 less a month, and the package would come with HD channels and a DVR that had the same capacity as the one that just died from DirecTV. Sold I say.... but not without a tear. I'm sure the Comcast service will lose it's luster after 6 months... but hopefully by then AT&T will have gotten it's act together and gotten the fiber lines run for U-Verse in my town, full fiber TV and internet is my ultimate goal.

BAH! I need help.

With a project that is, although sometimes I am mental too... anyway,

I'm writing a report in SQL Report Server Report Writer. I'm trying to find a way to group some values from a view field based on the content, for example I want to report the sum of x number of fields that all have a value of exempt hours worked. The type is one column, and the number will be in another column. I think I want it to read " Select CostCat, hours from table where CostCat="Exempt Hours Worked" for a field in the view, and then somehow I need to make this a value in the grid on the report, but only show that for Exempt employees, and perform a similar process for Non-Exempt Hours worked. I have done some preliminary testing, but I can't seem to get it to succeed, seeing as how some employees are exempt, and some are non-exempt....so one or the other computed values fails... and failure is not an option! ahhem.. sorry... anyway

I've got a couple of weeks to get this sorted out before the report needs to be live... so off I dig for answers!