A customer of mine bought another company. Last night I moved their main business application from their server to the servers of my customer. I sent an email to the main user of the system detailing this change. I even spoke with her on the phobne earlier in the day to explain that tyhe next day she would access the system via a terminal server session. Below is the my email from yesterday and her’s from this morning (names and server info changed).

From me (yesterday):
I have copied SuperApp to the XYZ server. There is currently an icon for it on the terminal server desktop. I unshared the SuperApp directory on the local server and renamed the directory so it does not get accidentally used.

From user (today):
Hi Crabby,

I am unable to get on SuperApp from my desk top this morning so I had to go into the terminal server desk top to get on. Not sure what happened because it worked all day yesterday for me. I rebooted the main system but still not working. Not a rush to fix because I can get on and still work just letting you know.

Have a great day and thanks for all your help.

Clueless

So…. I agreed to take a customers computer over the weekend to optimize it and fix a few minor issues. Because I had some other appointments Monday morning, I knew I would not be able to get it back to her until late morning. I made arrangements to get to her place when they open at 7am which required my wife to go into work a little late and I knew I would have to rush back home to get the kids on the bus. When I arrived at her office at 6:50am I saw two other employees already there and working. I caught one’s attention through the front windows to only have her gesture the number seven with her fingers, indicating that they don’t open until seven. She went back to her work and continued to ignore me. I wasted ten minutes waiting for 7am to arrive at which time they opened the door. I indicated that I was here to drop off a computer to which the employee responded, “I don’t open the door before 7am”. Well… isn’t that just f**king wonderful!!!

I guess that is the last time they receive any special treatment. Next time I get there when I get there.

It is memorial day weekend and the family and I are away for a short vacation to Pittsburg, PA. Just a quick getaway from Buffalo to go to the zoo, science center, museums, etc. and enjoy the pool at the hotel. I am writing in regard to the pool time. My boys, seven and ten, were playing with a hotel owned beach ball in the pool for some time. Along came two teenage girls who managed to get involved with the ball playing and eventually were exclusively using it and would not share. They even took in in the hot tub with them. When it would accidentally end up in the pool, they would ask for it back as their ball or they would take it back. My kids would not confront them and I held my tounge long enough. When the ball went in the pool and they asked my boys “can we have our ball back” my response was “do you think they can play with it”, said with a much nasty tone. They obliged. The following day they were again in the pool hogging the ball this time when it went out of the pool at my feet I threw it to my son. They gave a collective sigh and went to the hot tub. I guess The Crabby triumphs over the bitches.

I must remain calm…..

A customer of mine just hired a new director. She seems nice, but from first meet I got that feeling. I stopped in on her first day to ensure her account, email, PC, etc. were functioning correctly for her and to answer any questions she may have. I indicated that I needed to uninstall a startup program that sync’ed the previous director’s cell phone with email/calendar. She indicated that she wanted to send/receive email on her phone as well. I noticed she did not have the same provider as the previous user and therefore the software would not work for her.  I began configuring her phone, indicating that no other users do remote email on their phone in this company, so I may have to open ports, etc. No problem, until there was a problem. Email was sending until I left, of course.

I stopped back in today to fix the issue when she indicated that she also wanted her calendar on the phone as she did at the last place. Oh, your phone supports direct Exchange Sync. Excellent, I will delete the old account and configure to this server. Well, again, NO other users at the company use this feature, so the ports were not open, permissions not set, self signed certificates were used so legitimate ones were needed to be issued, etc. All the things that would normally be done behind the scenes by IT and tested before rolled out to users. However, I did not have that luxury and had to do it all on the fly. She repeatedly asked what the problem was, and who we could call to get it fixed. I wanted to say, uhh, you could call me as that is what I do. Then came the douche remark of “nothing against you, but the IT guy at my last place had it setup in minutes without all these issues”. Again, I wanted to say “For all you know, the last guy may have taken a month to configure the server and you would have never known as it was already configured and tested by the time he got to your phone”. She insisted on calling him, and as she handed the phone to me  finished my changes and hit sync to successfully sync all her email, etc.

These pics are from last summer. I pixelated the innocent bystanders as well as the offender. Yes, yes, I know, I am not exactly into fashion, and yes, I could careless weather a pair of jeans cost $20 or $200, they are still jeans and look the same. But this… come on!!! Lady, Ronald wants his clothes back.

I have been waiting and waiting for FiOS to get to my neighborhood, and it is almost here. If you know me, you are probably tired of hearing “when are they going to get to me”. The pictures below are from a few weeks ago. The cables are buried and the new pedestal is in at the end of the street. This week and part of last, they pulled the fiber on the polls of the main road that will eventually link into my neighborhood. It is near. My current service with Time Warner is stable and fast for downloads, but very limited for upload (1 mbit). 10×1 service with a dynamic IP and blocked ports. I want to replace my business line 768k synchronous with static IPs with the FiOS 20×20 static. Offsite backups will be what they should be.