A Bad Day On The Interwebs
Sep2
Since my company provides a hosted solution to its customers, we depend heavily on all of the Internet providers to ensure that everyone in the country can always access our service. Today, as of right now, XO Communications is having some serious problems on their network. This image below basically shows the health status of how all of the different providers connect to each other. Normally, this image would be all black with maybe one or two red or yellow squares. Never before have I seen one single provider having such issues. I’m sure XO’s technicians are going to be quite busy for the next number of hours.
PS – Interwebs is not a valid word
Wordpress Issue #A4T3W
Sep0
Just a comment on a small technical hurdle dealing with Wordpress (the software that powers my blog) which I spent a couple hours over the past day or two dealing with. It seems something broke the permalink structure during the upgrade to version 2.6.2 so outside links to my older posts and my feed suddenly stopped working.
I knew it had something to do with the mod_rewrite module of Apache but I couldn’t seem to figure it out. It just so happens that I had been playing with my .htaccess file to try and disable a few settings in the mod_security module that my new hosting provider uses (I still didn’t find the solution) and so I broke part of the configuration.
So, I removed my custom .htaccess file hoping that would solve it, but to no avail. Searching around and reading through the documentation on Wordpress finally led me to make sure the .htaccess file is deleted, that the Wordpress process on your server has write access to the root directory, and then visit the Permalinks settings page within the Administration dashboard. Suddenly, a correct .htaccess file (listed below) is created and lo-and-behold, my permalinks work and the feed functions as well. Cool.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
As for the issue number listed up there, it actually means absolutely nothing. I just thought it would be fun to add some random characters to make the issue sound more serious. It must be a Brady thing.
House Tour
Sep1
I thought I would finally get around to following through with my mention of doing a video tour of my house (and also at the request of my older sister). There is not a whole lot to describe here in written words so I’ll let the video (well, me in the video) do the talking.
[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7505524662174896753&hl=en[/googlevideo]
So that is my house. That is my sanctuary. It is my refuge. I really loving being able to come home to peace and quiet. I only hope it stays that way in the months to come and that someday I can have a home of mine own that is able to provide the same sense of security to me and those who live with me.
Technical Difficulties
Sep0
You may have noticed that a lot of these posts have been showing up all at once with back-dated time stamps. The reason for it all is that I recently decided to switch hosting providers because I was tired of how unreliable my prior provider was. So, I made the necessary data backups, found a better company and thought everything was good to go. However, this was not the case as the backups from the old company were hard to import to the new one and I had to do a fair amount of hacking to get things up and going. You might have even seen the site in it various stages of being recreated over the past week or so but now everything looks good. Thus, in my downtime at work I’ve been posting the older items that had been held back in the queue until the technical issues were resolved.
By the way, I’ve unfortunately had to implement a CAPTCHA on my comments because I was starting to get 10-15 spam messages each day sent through there. I guess I didn’t really implement it, but used someone else’s Wordpress plug-in that worked the way I needed it to.
My 8-to-5
Sep0
I thought I would take a moment and write how my first two weeks of work and school have been going.
I started work on the 2nd and went through the first day of training just kind of getting a basic introduction to the history of the company and the products and services they provide. They started out as a Telecom company in the late 90s but through various acquisitions and market changes have become a hosted call center provider. This means that they host the hardware/software that provides the intelligence for call centers (IVR, skill based routing, etc) and then just lease it out to various companies so they don’t have to worry about. Actually, it is a bit more complex than that but you should be able to get the basic idea.
My jobs look like it will consist of helping to maintain the network the exists between our datacenter sites in Los Angeles, Dallas, and Salt Lake as well as become the go-to-guy for everything VoIP within the Network Engineering team. The first number of days have been kind of slow due to my manager only getting a minute here or there between his meetings to show me what I need to learn and do until I get the hang of things. I seem to have the same patten when I start new jobs that I want to start doing things right away instead of transitioning into my assignments over time. Since I’ve seen myself do that before so I’ve been able to recognize it and not get so worked up about the slow days.
The lunch room at work as a fountain drink stand that is free to use whenever and as much as you feel like it. It is kind of cool to be able to just walk in and get free soda and lemonade but after the first two days I had to recognize that I’d have to limit my trips there to just once or twice a day or else I could easily get carried away. I’m looking forward to when it gets cold enough to warrant hot chocolate because they also have free Stephens Cocoa, but again, I’m sure I’ll have to limit myself.
On Friday last week the company had a huge barbecue and we all went to a local park outside where the all the executive officers (it is a publicly traded company) gave their one or two minutes spiels and then there were free games and sports like you would find at a small town carnival. The executives even volunteered for the dunk tank and a pie in the face stand where you could redeem your ticket for the opportunity to get take out your “frustrations” with them. It was all in good fun and quite enjoyable to watch. I even saw one of my co-workers get run down and tackled the CEO himself just to put a pie in his face. Funny, funny stuff.
I think things are going to go well for me here and I’ll have plenty of opportunities to grow my technical skills while being able to “play” with some pretty expensive equipment. I could imagine working here for the next couple of years while I finish school, my Cisco certifications, and I have even pondered graduate school once or twice as well as given thought to perhaps buying a house in the area if it is still a buyers market when I get to that point.
As far as school goes, I’m only taking two classes at the SLC campus on Wednesday nights from 5 until 10. My two classes are Technical Writing (ENG 316) and Western Humanities (HUM 201). All I have to say about school is it is nice to only have it one night a week. I can get any assignments done over the weekend and then not worry about school until the next Wednesday. My writing class is going to be a breeze and I think I might even enjoy it a little bit. For example, our first two assignments were to write our resume and a cover letter for an actual job so I did mine based on the job I just started.
The humanities class is interesting and it is fun to be in class, but the type of assignments we do like studying types of artwork (sculptues, pottery, paintings) and literature such as The Iliad just doesn’t capture my interest all that much. I can deal with it and who knows, I may even remember some of the things I’ve learned when the class is over in December.
Well, that is what my life consists of now I really enjoying it. Who knew?
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