Frakking State!

Have I told you kind people lately, that I hate the state of Utah? No, then let me say it again. I HATE THIS FRAKKING STATE!

Between the frakked up weather, the overwhelming number of idiot drivers, absolute lack of humidity, and the utter absence of the color green, I am convinced that God saw this place and decided "Ick!"

/end rant

Ok. All done. You may carry on with your business. :)

This post was brought to you by the letters J, A, I, R, and the number 11.

Are you one?

WARNING! GOOD-NATURED RANT FOLLOWS!

Are you one of those people who have a cell phone? If so, why did you get it? If you got it to be cool, then great - you're cool. If you got it to keep in touch, please do what it takes to fulfill that? If you have it for emergencies only, please be sure not to give the number out.

This post is for the people who have a cell phone to keep in touch.

I know it reads as if this is a targeted posting, and to some degree, it is. In my defense, I have recently run across this issue in personal life as well as professional life and it's truly annoying to try calling someone only to get voice mail over and over again. After finally getting in touch with this person, you find out time and again that they didn't bring their cell phone with them ("I forgot to bring it"), or the battery is dead ("I forgot to charge it"). WHAT?!

I'm going to use the Queen as an example here (please accept my apology, btw :) of how she needed to run an errand and wanted me to make a phone call to correct a situation for her. Unfortunately, I didn't have all the information I needed and when I tried calling her to ask a quick question, her cell phone which happened to be in the next room, began making pretty noises. She had left her cell phone at home, sitting on the table. I'm happy I was able to wing it and ecstatic that nothing happened to them or the car while she was out, but I would have been very hard pressed to get in touch with her in the event of an emergency.

If you don't have it with you and charged, what's the point? If you're one of the people who has given your cell number out to the majority of the people you know, do them a favor and keep it charged, on, and with you. :)

Now that I've ranted about cell phones and called out the Queen (again, sorry about that), I'll step off my soapbox, and relinquish the microphone. FYI: I am fully expecting to be flamed by this post and I probably deserve most if not all of it.

Queen, dear, please be a good sport about me calling you out. You just happen to be an easy target. Please forgive. I'll be sure to get some chocolate or something to make it up. :)

This post was brought to you by the letters C, E, L, L, and the number 5.

Last Rant of the Month... :)

I tried to give myself a bit of time to get over this one, but I did say I would post the rant, so here it is, finally.

So, here we are, paying an arm and a leg for airplane tickets on an airline that allows you to pick the seats you're purchasing and when we get there, the seats we chose are NOT available to us. WTF!!! Didn't I just mortgage off my spleen to pay for these tickets?! Didn't you allow me to choose my seats? Since that's the case, why in the living HELL didn't I get to sit in the seats I paid for?

If we don't get the option of choosing my seats, then remove that feature from your website you useless wastes of JP-10 (that's jetfuel). Along about this time, you're probably wondering who these CRETINS are who upset the Queen and I. Well, I'll tell you. The airline was Delta. Yes, I did indeed utter it aloud. It was Delta Airlines who introduced us to the shaft on this trip.

I suppose I should simply be happy we got there and back in one piece, but I can't help being a bit annoyed by their IDIOCY in screwing us over. That's why we'll try to give our business to someone else, like Southwest, United, or American the next time we fly, unless they are prohibitively expensive.

There... That's off my chest now. :) I can enjoy what's left of the Holiday. :)

This post was brought to you by the letters S, W, A, and the number 4.

Neglected

I'm sorry to make you feel neglected, but I really don't want to turn my blog into a mostly ranting, soapbox derby. (I really should make more use of my ranting blog just so I can do so. :) Most of the things I've been tempted to post recently have been rants and complaints, so i spared you all the nastiness associated with that.

I do have a question to post to you all. If you had a blog, (some of you do and some of you don't) is there a topic that you won't post about and what is it? I'm not asking to know why as you all have your own reasons why, but I'm curious about my readership - all 4 of you. :)

Thanks!

This post was brought to you by the letters A, R, G, and the number 6.

What's the Holdup?

OK. In 5 days, tax returns are due. How many of you fine folks have completed and filed them? A lot fewer that should have, right? :) If you're getting money back, why haven't you filed them?

I know why they haven't been filed if you owe, but it just doesn't make any sense not to file if you're getting money back. If you wait until the last minute, it will take longer to get your money back. It just seems like a no-brainer to me, but I'm sure that far too many people out there haven't filed yet. It's a shame really...

OK, enough of the finger shaking. Hopefully you'll all get a giant return and will be able to afford a huge trip or something. :)

Please forgive my rant, I just needed to get it out. :)

This post was brought to you by the letters I, R, S, and the number 15.

Nailed!

The hammer fell today at work and I happened to be one of the 2 folks caught under it. That's right people, I was laid off today any I'm not happy about it. I could rant and rave about how I hate the company and spit bile about the situation, but I won't. I'll simply say that through no fault of my own, I'm no longer a full-time employee there (I'm a contractor until the end of the month) and I'm available to anyone looking for a full-time Senior Systems/Network Administrator in the Salt Lake City area.

The owner of the company decided he wanted to suck more money out of the company into his own pocket and decided that since he doesn't like IT, I was just so much overhead. He'll find out shortly, when the systems begin to crash that I wasn't for show. I wish the rest of the IT staff good luck in finding employment elsewhere, because they'll need it.

Stay tuned for the next development...

This post was brought to you by the letters P, I, N, K, S, L, I, P, and the number 2.

Final Journey

Journeyman has officially been canceled. That SUCKS! This was a great show! It had a nice mix of drama, science fiction, and action. The mix was so well done that the Queen, who does not like science fiction, actually liked the show.

I'm sure she's going to deny that she doesn't like science fiction - she just pretends for my sake sometimes - but what matters is that she liked the show, or at least seemed to like it. It's too bad that the networks have decided that shows need to be absolutely perfect in order to be successful.

At least they knew early enough that it wouldn't go too much longer that they wrote a suitable ending for it. :)

I'm done with this rant, so I'm gonna call it a night. Later!

This post was brought to you by the letters R, S, K, T, and the number 23.

Christmas Concert

We attended the Christmas concert tonight at the LDS Convention Center. While I wouldn't call it my favorite event ever, the music was pretty good actually. The music was choral and while that isn't my favorite type of music, it fit the season.

I do have a question for you readers, though. What is the purpose of getting dressed up in one's "Sunday Best" in order to go sit in the dark and view a concert? I understand wearing decent, clean clothes, but come on! It just seems to be a bit of overkill to me. Of course, that's my perception and I'd appreciate you guys telling me why people do this. :)

The only other issue I had with the evening was security. I told them I had steel-toed shoes on (the ones I wear to work) and I had to go through metal detectors 5 or 6 times, each time wearing a little less. I was nearly to the point of saying, "Nevermind! I'll just go home. I don't want to be here that badly." They finally believed me when after using the wand, they verified that my shoes were indeed setting off the detector. This is worse that Airport Security where they'll just have me remove the shoes and x-ray them.

Such is life I guess. I lived through it so I guess I'm OK.

This post was brought to you by the letters G, O, S, R, and the number 6.

Work Sux!

As you can probably tell from the title, I'm not particularly enamored with my place of employment right now. Basically, as a result of the greed of the owner, all requests for equipment that will give a modicum of disaster aversion over the last year have been denied. As a result, we suffered that catastrophic failure that all Sys Admins hate. The production database server's hard drive failed and this last week has been hell! I've had 2 16+ hour days, most other days were 10+ hours and I went in yesterday as well. The week before, we hit the wall in terms of storage space (we need more hard drive space!) and had to babysit several business critical tasks until 2am several nights. Since hitting the storage space wall, I've been staying up until 1am at least each night in order to babysit the servers remotely.

My immediate supervisor told me to order the equipment I need and that he'd take the heat. :) Nice-ish guy, but it was too late to avoid the galactic headache associated with the owner's actions (that should probably be LACK of actions) that caused the issue in the first place. To top it off, I'm salaried so there will be no real compensation for the last week and a half of pain.

Anyone need a Senior Systems Administrator? I'll consider relocating for the right package. :) I'll have to clear this with the Queen of course, but I'll consider it.

This post was brought to you by the letters N, A, S, and the number 16.

High Pressure

I'm sure you've all had enough of my complaining about work and the asinine ideas the owner has about what's most important to keep his business afloat. The business is based on a service provided to clients through a web site and via email. The entire business relies on the servers. This mental giant refuses to pay for physical protection for the equipment nor will he pay for proper electrical protection for his equipment. His servers are sitting on a folding table!!! There's no redundancy and the core machines are out of resources. How long does this intellectual colossus think his business can continue to function on the ragged edge? I'm also under pressure to get our developer (a new employee mind you) to deliver a significant code change before becoming familiar with our software source code. Oh, by the way, we only have the 1 developer since it costs money to have 2 at the same time. Go figure...

Anyone out there in the Salt Lake area looking for a senior level windows systems administrator? I'm only half kidding. If the pay and benefits are right, I'll consider it. :)

OK, enough of the stupidity. If you don't read OTJ yet, you should. She has managed to figure out exactly why some of us blog. If you're wondering why blogging seems so important to some of us, then give her a read. Be warned, that she is very popular and you'll probably see a ton of comments to each of her postings. They're pretty entertaining posts and she loves to play with photoshop. Enjoy!

It's been a while since I posted as it would have only been complaints about work. Please accept my apologies for slacking on you all. :) I'll try to post more often.

This post was brought to you by the letters M, T, O, E, and the number 9.

Beta...

They updated Blogger / Blogspot and are in the process of converting to Blogger Beta. It seems fine to me, but is it possible to make the conversion process any more painful? You practically have the Queen in tears!

Anyway, I hope this new one is worth all the trouble. So far so good (aside from a little problem converting, but it's been resolved).

Nothing much happening here these days, but we'll see what happens as the month progresses. :)

That's all for now! This post was brought to you by the letters B, E, T, A, and the number 1.