Productive at Work
Over the last few days I've setup Dell Openmanage and finished tweaking our install of IPMonitor. Now, when a service goes down or there's a hardware failure I'll get an email notifying me. You'd think that this would have been setup before, but my predecessor apparently just scheduled weekly walkthroughs of the two datacenters to look for amber lights on the servers.
Tomorrow's project will be configuring tighter rules for alerting that will go right to my phone via a text message (I only want the really critical errors to come there) as well as automatically open up a helpdesk ticket. I also began sketching out a new server inventory which I will need to put into Sharepoint along with some other documentation.
It's a fairly slow time right now, and since I've gone to work in academia I've really enjoyed the ability to set things up the right way, rather than rush from fire to fire like I had to do in startup-land. That's not to say that I don't miss some of the fun of being in a startup - I worked with some absolutely brilliant people at Grid, and I really miss spending time with them and having debates and conversations about tech.
I also found a piece of software which, so far, has helped me a lot. My desk is right outside of the office that the desktop support folks work out of, and there's a lot of traffic in and out of there. It's very distracting to be troubleshooting some server or network problem and hear people BS'ing with the desktop folks. Since my desk is actually in a really nice space (although it's a bit small) and there's political reasons why I can't move into an office, it's become imperative that I find some way of isolating myself. Well, besides the big frosted Japanese privacy screen that I set up in front of my cube, I found an OSX White Noise Generator, Noisy. I have it set to generate pink noise at about 10% of my iMac's volume. It's a small app that I just keep open on my second monitor and jack up the volume if someone starts talking loudly or I really need to focus.
I still miss working with Jae, even if he was noisy.
Apple Fanboy
It seems that nearly overnight I've turned into a raging Apple fanboy.
I've had my iPhone for some time now, and I've used Mac equipment before, but never successfully. My co-workers will doubtless tell of my lamenting my first generation MacBook Pro, which I traded a Dell XPS M1210 for. The MacBook Pro generated so much heat that the finish on my desk was affected. It was so unstable that it made the Vista Latitude XT tablet I have seem like an old reliable DEC system.
All that has changed with my Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. 2.33ghz, 2GB of RAM, 160GB disk. And best of all, when it's working hard it gets warm, but not skin blistering like my old one. In fact, when it's unplugged, the thing gets barely warm at all. It's only when it's on line power and encoding a video in Handbrake that it gets anything close to hot.
Still, there's the annoying jump from home/end working like it does in every other operating system known to man to Command-arrow left and Command-arrow right. I now have home and end working in the terminal, where it's the most important. Cut and pasting text in gui apps is a bit dicey now too. No longer do I have shift-page down to select a bunch of text, now I have to drag my mouse across it. It's a bit of a learning curve, but it's so nice to have a really well polished GUI and then be able to drop to a bash prompt when I need to do more serious work.
To complete my transition to an Apple fanatic, I now have the Airport Extreme and an Apple TV - albeit hacked. More on that in another entry.