Monday, September 8, 2008 by Myke.

Do you work in the IT field?  I do.  Are you a “Jack of all trades”?  I am.  Do you have a great counterpart working with you?  I do.  Could the two of you take over a small country with your incredible ability to intimidate and b.s.?  We could.  Between you and your co-worker, do you have the IT intelligence of an entire team of engineers and then some?  We do.  If you are like our IT group, we have a vast knowledge of just about everything and are always looking for ways to implement the newest technology.  We have a mix of male, female and something or other.  We have the jokers and the HR friendly at all times folks.  We have a great boss with an even greater personality.  Bottom line, we get the job done.

I am sure there are numerous others out there like us and I am sure you are just as proud as we are and just as confused as well.  Why is it that when you have the talent pool of IT Gods/Goddesses would your company go out and hire a group of “high priced” consultants?  That hits us all in the mouth at some point and time.  Do we take insult to this?  Sometimes.  Do we get mad?  Sometimes.  Then after some time and some serious money goes flying out the door, what happens?  Things sometimes do not go as planned and the powers to be look for the reason.  Then the finger pointing and gestures begin.  The consultants blame the internal team or infrastructure and the internal team just sits there in disbelief.  We sit there thinking to ourselves…wait a minute, did we just get blamed for something we have no part of?  Did they just call us out as retards?  Did they just treat us like newbs?  It happens folks…and I am here today to show you how to fight back against the onslaught of BS!

So you want to know what helps prevent you getting bombed by management and the consultant team?  One word folks, documentation.  Document everything in your department before, during and after the consultants are there.  The one thing a consultant cannot defend himself/herself againest is good documentation.  Always stand tall with your department and be there for your team from start to finish.  Never shy away from questions, just point them in the direction of your documentation.

Consultants are not a bad thing and they are not the enemy for the most part.  But they can cause a huge stir if they come in and find a rats nest in your department and you have zero documentation.Word to the wise for consultants, never try and bury a person that can help you out of a jam.  Especially if he/she finds out you ****ed up and can prove it.  We are proud.  We are strong.  We have many flash drives of naughty photos of you in the server room dancing to “Goodbye Horses”.

Reason for this story - Left Brain and Right Brain were attacked by a group of consultants and the consultants lost.  They not only lost but are now forking out the big bucks to get it fixed.  Do not mess with the Brain folks…we are evil in ways that has never been seen on the big screen. 

Posted in Rant, Technology | Print | 2 Comments »

Saturday, August 30, 2008 by Myke.

…but…oh who am I kidding.  I am a Star Wars fan but I think I can admit that I have not gone this far.  Daniel Deutschhas actually built an R2D2 and a full size Landspeeder.  That to me would take way more time and patiance than I have.  First of all you would not actually have any instructions to follow and second of all, I think the family would end up disowning me.  :-)  Make sure to check out his website to see more photos of everything.

Very cool, but way out of my league.

Posted in Technology, Funny | Print | 1 Comment »

Friday, August 1, 2008 by Myke.

On July 18th of 2008 we launched the new technology blog, Tech Talk.  We will no longer run technical based articles from this site.  We hope you enjoy.

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Friday, July 11, 2008 by Myke.

I would first like to say that not only did I say it but so did Travis.  Comcast is filtering traffic and they should not be doing so as it is not their business.  Especially when they do not let you know but say to you, “It is your equipment, not ours that is causing your issues”.

So let me start by dancing around in the best white boy routine possible…running man…sprinkler…tug-o-war…lawnmower…while “Play that Funky Music White Boy” is playing in the background.  Second I would like ot say to Comcast, “Please do not try and lie to the technical community out there that was faithful to you for years.  We promoted you and used you for personal and business accounts.  Now I am no longer your customer and I have also taken a total of 38 folks with me in the last 6 months.  Enjoy your sanctions/punishments by the FCC.” 

FCC Chief Says Comcast Violated Internet Rules

Several readers sent in word that the FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, is calling for sanctions and enforcement actions against Comcastfor resetting BitTorrent traffic. “Mr. Martin will circulate an order recommending enforcement action against the company on Friday among his fellow commissioners, who will vote on the measure at an open meeting on Aug. 1… Martin, a Republican, will likely get support from the two Democrats on the commission, who are both proponents of the network neutrality concept. Those three votes would be enough for a majority on the five-member commission.”

FCC chairman says Comcast punishment will serve as warning to other Internet providers

Na na na na na na, stick your head in doodoo.

You can find this story from the following two links.  Please read and enjoy, and always remember…Qwest - The spirit of service…and the best Internet available.

FCC Chief Says Comcast Violated Internet Rules

FCC chief hopes Comcast sanction serves as warning

Just for grins, here is another story about the FCC gut check to Comcast.

FCC - Have a Comcastic day

UPDATE: TorrentFreak.com - Comcast Uses Hacker Techniques

Posted in Technology, Funny | Print | 1 Comment »

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 by Myke.

Brothers and sisters of the technology world, hear me roar and let your voice be heard.  How many times have you had to call into tech support and cringe each time you do?  How many times have you hit up your network of contacts long before calling some outsourced tech support?  Man let me tell you.  I hate it and have hated it for years and will always hate it.  That is why companies like, LeftHand Networks, CommVault, Exagrid, Lewan and Homerun Networks will always have my vote as the best companies.  They not only have local “USA” tech support, but we can actually have a conversation while a system is rebooting or an application is loading.

I know, the sweat is pouring down your face right now and you are cringing at the thought of your next call.  I have actually been so mad at them that I decide that a complete reload is better than talking to Habib Alibaba Sandindabutt.  I am not a raciest, I am just a proud American who thinks that companies could do a better job at having local tech support.  instead we save a buck and send it over to India.  STOP!

Now with many years of knowledge under my belt, I have to call them very little now.  Thank god!  But when I do call now, I have made it a game and it has actually been pretty fun and it can make your job more enjoyable.  Heck, you might even decide to call an outsourced India tech support group just to play.  Basically when you call, have fun with them.  Act like you know them and they are best buds with you.  Act as if you know India and have been there so many times you cannot even count.  Act like this is the greatest thing, having tech support sent over to India.

Still wondering how fun that could be.  Well, let me demonstrate for you.  this is the dialog from a recent call to a certain hardware vendor tech support group.  We had to get a new part for an under warranty server and since we have 4 hour response support…we called. 

(cough cough…clearing throat)

Tech Support: “شكرا للدعوة الى دعم فني ، إسمي بوب محمد . كيف هل لي ان تساعدك اليوم؟”
Me: “Hey Bob, how is it going?  Man, long time no speak home boy.  man it has been forever since I have talked to you and the rest of the crew out their in India.  Man I miss you guys.  Listen I am calling because we have a server that has a bad power supply in it.  I need a replacement.”
Tech Support: “ما هو الرقم المسلسل للخادم وما هو الجزء على عدد امدادات الطاقة؟”
Me: “Oh, the serial number is ****************.  So how is the wife and kids doing?  Still herding goats in the spare time?  I know the feeling of needing to moon-light for some extra cash.  Times are tough man.  I mean with our tech support jobs going to India and all your cab driver jobs going to Americans, it is tough right now.”
Tech Support: “ولست متأكدا من انني افهم ما انت تقول. وانا لست راعي الماعز ، واعمل لحصان وليس  لدي زوجة واطفال”
Me: “Man, good times, good times.  So about that power supply.  Can I get that here in the next 4 hours?  I mean that is what our agreement is.”
Tech Support: “نعم ، مكتبة داغ همرشولد سيلقي في ذلك الجزء من جان pm اليوم. هل هناك اي شيء آخر يمكن ان يساعد لك؟ آخر يمكن ان يساعد لك؟”
Me: “Sweet, so 4PM today.  Man you always rock Bob.  tell the wife, kids and goats I said “hi”.  Maybe next time we all come out there we can go catch the latest sand-script and have some drinks and talk about the good times we always have.  Thanks again man.”
Tech Support: “لماذا لا تذهب بنفسك اللعين الاحمق!”

See, you get what you want and you can make it a pleasant call.  Now I know that not all calls will go this smoothly, but it is worth a shot.

Cheers and have a great 4th of July!

Posted in Technology, Funny | Print | 1 Comment »

Wednesday, July 2, 2008 by Myke.

For over 15 years, Bill Gates and the Microsoft teams have been a very large part of my salary. For that, I thank you very much. For all of those that just plain hate you, I toast you. Most of your haters are just mad because of how much money you have made over the years. I say congrats man. I have lived through every single version of your software and will continue on. Now that you are “retiring” to your Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, what will you do to keep yourself busy? I vote you take over a small country like, oh I do not know, Canada. Build a wall, allow only those that have certain Microsoft certifications to move in and we will all live a technical and wonderful life.

You and Microsoft are a huge factor in where this World is today when it comes to personal and business computing.

MILLIONAIRE FACTORY. The success of Microsoft DOS, and, later, Windows, helped the PC spread to businesses and homes, empowering office workers and consumers alike. By the count of market researcher Gartner Inc., 1.75 billion Microsoft-powered PCs have been sold since 1981.

And consider the even bigger picture: Economists estimate that all information technology, including PCs, contributed about one-third of the 2% average annual U.S. productivity growth since 1995.

Gates’s greatest legacy may be the creation of wealth, both his own and others’. Microsoft churned out $88 billion in profits since 1985, some sucked from customer pockets as payments on his monopolies in PC software. That drove up the company’s stock, enriching Gates and other insiders, who held 26% of the shares in late 1999. But Microsoft also minted, by some estimates, thousands of other employee-millionaires, maybe the most at any company ever.

Starting in January 1975, Gates and Allen develop Windows Basic for the Altair 8800 to June 27th of 2008 when you officially became a part-time employee…you made the world a better with each and every launch of software…minus the every famous Windows ME. (puke)

Here is my farewell thanks Bill,

William Gates III will live on forever as one of the most successful, wealthy, loved, liked and hated men in the history of this World.

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Wednesday, June 25, 2008 by Myke.

In today’s IT world, we have an ever growing trend. Data growth. With the
need to store more and more electronically, companies are running out of room.
In the oil and gas industry we have a huge need for storage space with documents,
maps, charts, readings and so on. So what is a company to do? Do we keep throwing
storage space at it or do we draw the line and create a solid retention policy?
Well, the answer is both actually. With the average cost of SAN storage at
$7000 per TB we can financially let some data keep growing. With a
retention policy, it will need to be razor sharp so it has the ability to cut
through all retention regulations.

At our company we had a 250% increase in storage requirements from December
2006 to December 2007. With this growth, we added iSCSI SAN storage that was
going to handle growth and be run on an existing GB network. We chose LeftHand Networks
because of their ability to expand with ease and the management
interface was very straight forward. On top of the abilities of the solution
their support was top notch and very hands on. With the growth of storage came the second
step, backing up this data. We needed a solution that would allow us to store
data locally on disk and off-site on tape. We also needed a solution that would
keep us in line with any and all retention regulations. The solution we chose
is a combination of Exagrid and CommVault.
The choice of Exagrid and CommVault was inline with our LeftHand
Networks decision. We chose them for their ability
to expand with ease, management interface was straight forward and their support
was first class. We now have a solution that allows our users to store data
as needed for all projects and the IT department can
back up the data using disk-to-disk-to-tape. this now gives us the ability
to restore data for end users straight from disk and any litigation requirements
we run into we have data off-site on tape using the GFS strategy

So with all of this in place, now comes the hardest job of the whole project,
the retention of the data. We have data that is duplicated up to 25 times between
local user hard drives, servers and user home drives. So how do you get rid
of the duplicated data and find the best possible copy? We have decided to
assign groups to each area of data and they are now in charge of consolidating
data and getting it in line with our retention policy. We have also put in
place a data retention policy that our legal department has and all employees
are aware of. The one place that users like to store data at is in their email.
this is a huge area of concern so we have placed a data retention policy on
our Exchange servers as well. Any email that hits the 61 day mark is automatically
deleted. this allows our lawyers and IT department to let anyone know that
asks, we do not keep email older than 60 days.

Okay, so now we have our hardware solution and our company policy in place.
Now we must enforce it and move forward. Data storage is a growing need for
every company but it can and will be taken care of. You will always have a
need to expand storage but you can slow it down with the proper policies.

Bottom line - It does not make financial or legal sense to store information
indefinitely. Disposition is key to managing growing volumes of unstructured
and semi structured data, and the technologies required for a proper disposition
system underpin an efficient information management ecosystem. A solid disposition
policy can reduce the cost of legal discovery.

Off the record - If you and your company are going to say that you have a
retention and disposition policy, you better have it in writing. Along with
having these policies in writing you should have records and documentation
that demonstrates how the policy is implemented.

Posted in Technology | Print | 1 Comment »

Monday, June 23, 2008 by Myke.

Well we have been rocking and rolling with this backup solution for a few weks now and it has totally changed how we backup data. the data deduplication that the Exagrid hardware/software does has been amazing.

Check out these stats:

All Data
Deduplication Ration - 3.78:1
Total backup data - 12,441.08GB
Space consumed - 3,292.32GB

Misc Data
Deduplication Ration - 5.81:1
Total backup data - 4,413.62GB
Space consumed - 760.00GB

NAS Data
Deduplication Ration - 3.17:1
Total backup data - 8,027.46GB
Space consumed - 2,532.32GB

Our amount of tapes has dropped by 65% and our backup times are cut down by almost 75%. So now we are saving on backup times, amount of tapes being used and stored off-site and we will have about 12 weeks of backups on-site on hard drive. That means we can do restores from hard drive and in a worst case scenario we can request a tape from 13+ weeks ago.

Next step is to launch this as our remaining sites.

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Sunday, June 22, 2008 by Myke.

Some times, great ideas and great technology just fades away and we never get to use it again…even if it was a great product.

Here is the list of the top ten technologies that never survived.

10 - Knobs
Cool little heat touch buttons are cool but what happened to the good old knob we could adjust?

9 - Keyboards with real switches
Do you really need an explanation?

8 - RAMBUS
This was a great product but was knocked out by the royalties and the fact that it was way too damn expensive. Did you know it was actually faster than DDR?

7 - Minidisc
We had the ability to write and rewrite on these little suckers back in 1992, what happened?!?

6 - DVD Audio
Great idea, great sound but not enough backing to make it last.

5 - CRT Monitors
You can go to every single resolution and they looked great. Heavy as hell but still did a great job.

4 - Tube Amps
It kept me warm in my first apartment and they worked incredible. Sure today’s digital amps are good and cool but nothing beat out that beautiful glow of a tube amp.

3 - The Amiga
I dare you to to argue this one!

2 - Apple Newton
Hey Jobs, the iPhone would have been here sooner if it was not for you scraping this product. Dumb ass.

1 - HD DVD
The only reason this failed was due to Sony paying the movie industry with large truck loads of cash. Damn you Blu-Ray!

Posted in Technology | Print | 2 Comments »

Sunday, June 22, 2008 by Myke.

Have you ever been so drawn into something due to the hype that surrounds it? Like Star Wars Episode 1. With the help of the Internet, things and people can become very over-hyped and then become such a let down.

Here is my list of the top ten things that I felt were over-hyped recently.

10 - Multiple GPU Video cards
Not much to say here, just not as cool as one thought originally.

9 - Nintendo Wii
Now hear me out. This is a cool product and very fun to play, but where is my game list I was promised. Maybe over time the list of games will grow and maybe Nintendo will actually make enough for everyone to actual purchase.

8 - MySpace.com
All you ever seem to hear about anymore is how cool it is to have a MySpace.com page. To me, it is basically a way for people to do another form of on-line dating with actually saying it is on-line dating.

7 - 64-Bit Computing
With PC’s being able to handle more than 4GB of memory and the cost of setting up hardware for 64-Bit computing, where have all the apps gone that were supposed to come out? I mean the only logical place for 64-Bit anymore is in the server world.

6 - Battlestar Galactica
The once famous and awesome Science Fiction idea has turned into a futuristic version of Melrose Place or 90210. Sorry Travis and Ian.

5 - Downloading movies from the internet
Okay, this was very cool when I first tried it out back in 1999 and 2000. But today it is so easy and places like Netflix.com deliver right to my door.

4 - Facebook.com
This is a very distracting and fun place, but state of the art or revolutionary…Not.

3 - HD
Everyone everywhere is talking about HD this and HD that. By the time this becomes mainstream, there will be a new way to go. Let’s face it, some folks are still watching plain old analog TV.

2 - ASUS EEE PC
Experience easy, excellent and exciting computing with the New EeePC. Did you know there was an entire line of these PC’s? Things that make you go hmmm.

1 - The iPhone
Has anything in recent years received more hype and hoopla? I mean we were given a complete over dose of this crap. Yes it is a cool phone, but it has NO 3G support.
* Funny fact about the iPhone. According to AT&T, there is about half the number of subscribers as there have been sales of the phone. Damn hackers of the world.

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