Work

1 year anniversary

Monday was my one year anniversary of working in the United States. A lot of things have happened since then and I now have the fun task of filling out a review. This blog should help me remember what I’ve been up to in the past year, after all there are 40 posts in the work category but only 17 in the past year. There are a lot more things that I’d have liked to have blogged about but due to confidentiality reasons (or that I just want to keep my job!) I’ve not been able to blog about them.

Slimtimer

Slimtimer may be a great tool for those of you who need (or like) to keep a track of things that you are doing during the day. A web page app that keeps track of what you are doing automatically (as long as you click to stop or start a task) and gives you nice reports at the end of various time periods. I’m going to try using this for work for the next couple of days to see how it goes and see if it will help keep my time sheet uptodate. Currently I use a paper based system, but it only gives me details when I fill it in (not always by the computer) and this means I can run it from any computer that I have access to. Of course it doesn’t solve the problem of tracking things that happen offline like lunch/travel/ etc but it should hopefully be a start. Thanks to Joe for the information on this one

Sysinternals licences

Sysinternals have finally got back to me with details on their consulting licence for their tools – a while back Sysinternals changed their licencing terms for their software which meant that use by a consultant would require payment for a commercial licence. I heard back from them today that $200 per technician per year gives you the right to use the software on any computer – but you do need to remove it when you have finished with it. I don’t think that price is unreasonable considering the power of the software, but it remains to be seen whether work will pay for it – or whether we’ll have to use alternatives….

Microsoft USB disk doesn’t turn up :-(

I got an email on Friday from Microsoft with the following – “Thank you for your interest in the Mystery Solved Windows® licensing promotion. We’ve received your request for more information to help clarify Microsoft® Windows Desktop Licensing pre-loaded on the USB drive. Unfortunately, this Mystery Solved promotion was available in the U.S. only and while supplies last. Supply is depleted at this time, so we encourage you to please utilize the online alternative today.
Simply download* the Windows Desktop Licensing reference files directly at:www.microsoft.com/mysterysolved/corp. Oh well 🙁

Rewards!

Two weeks ago I got the honour of being the employee of the quarter from work which I am pretty chuffed about 😉 Thankfully I didn’t have to give an acceptance speech as there would have been too many people to thank. As a prize I was firstly awarded a Batbelt – complete with (nonworking GPS). This was because of the gps but mainly because of the fact that I always have a software tool to solve a computer problem and it’s become the joke to ask if I have a tool on my batbelt for a particular problem. Needless to say, everyone thought it was funny so I proudly hooked it up to the top of my cubicle to be on display – this also means the little dart gun is close at hand in case I need to ward off a particular nasty case of job sloping.

I also received an avaya t-shirt – again a gag gift – as I have done so much work on the avaya phone system that support should really be doing, that everyone thinks I am an avaya employee now! (incidentally I got a compliment from the tech I was working with last night (on our third firmware upgrade to solve persistent phone problems) when he said it was nice to work with a customer who actually knew their way around a computer and could help in the diagnostic problems)

Caricature at North Market The third gift was two tickets for the North Market 10th annual Apron Gala which we went to on Saturday night. The event was really good fun with loads of posh food to try out. We didn’t stay right to the end but did enjoy being there at the beginning when there wasn’t too many people around. One of the most popular stalls was Bob the fish guy who had two huge containers of shrimp which were really nice – lots of people made several trips to that stall! The picture framing stall had a caricaturist doing pictures so Kristen and I got ours done as you can see on the left – click for a bigger picture. We also purchased two aprons as our donation towards the event – the pockets in the apron were great for keeping napkings, forks and a cup handy whilst walking around.

Kristen also got me a congratulations cookie biscuit (thanks Rob!) which we are now half way through – thanks luv!

Employee of the Quarter!

Information Improvisation

Due to extensive wireless internet coverage, a number of wireless internet service providers are prospering. These include at&t wireless as well as rogers wireless. With the advent of wireless internet, how distances have been reduced to nothing is not exactly a miracle. Services like cingular wireless have made sure that one can find wireless internet anywhere.

More online publishing.

My tip on passwords was published in redmond magazine the other week and is available online. Shouldn’t be too hard to work out which tip I posted. Note to current employers – doesn’t mean that I’m using this function now – especially as Symantec Antivirus is crazy enough to think that certain tools are virus’s and deletes them!

New car!

scionmedia The new company car arrived at the office today – they’ve got one of the horrible looking boxes with wheels on – aka scion. Admittedly, with the smart wheels and rear bumper that it has, it doesn’t look that bad – and the advantage of the boxiness is that it has plenty of room for signage on the car. When I looked through the window I was a bit worried as it only had a cd player – no use for my mp3 player, but was then told it would play mp3 cd’s – which was good news. Even better is that it has a 3.5mm jack to plug the mp3 player into AND a cradle to hold it in place – sweet! The car doesn’t have cruise control which was a suprise as nearly every car has cruisecontrol over here but driving around columbus it’s pretty rare that you get to use cruisecontrol anyway. The boot was suprisingly small for a boxy car, but I think thats because there is a fair amount of room for the rear passengers – but the seats can be folded down for storage and carrying servers, printers and the other tech stuff we lug around. I’ve yet to drive it – that’ll be later this week or early next week so I can’t comment on the driving but apparently it is pretty good. It’s white (at the moment) and thats all the important things on a car covered – I have no idea on the engine size, rpm, bhp or any of that other stuff.

6 months.

In a meeting today I got asked if I knew what Sunday was – I had no idea until it was pointed out to me that it was my 6 month anniversary of working for the company. There is still some discussion over whether this is a bi-annual event or not (as noone can agree on whether biweekly means twice a week or every other week – personally I solve the problem by saying a fortnight but people have no idea what that means). Anyway, I’ve been there for 6 months so now have my review coming up. I must say it’s been a very fast 6 months – I’ve learnt a lot, gained several qualifications, had a couple of late night pages, had some good laughs and been very productive. I wonder whats going to happen in the next 6 months……..

Group policy problems with printing.

I’m having a problem where ctrl-p doesn’t work in a kiosk mode machine with group policy restrictions and wonder if anyone has a clue? I’ve posted this to google groups.

I have a group policy enabled for a particular user for a locked down, kiosk user interface in a public area. Currently in *some* web pages the ctrl-P shortcut key will work, but on other web pages nothing happens when ctrl-p is pressed. Other shortcut keys such as ctrl-h, ctrl-r, ctrl-w activate properly (in the case of ctrl-w this option complains that the user does not have access to close the window).
We are running internet explorer as the shell in kiosk mode, but removing the kiosk mode doesn’t make any difference. Likewise, we have disabled the toolbar, but adding the toolbar back and enabling the print button also does not make any difference – the print dialog box never appears on certain web sites.

www.msn.com, http://travel.msn.com/default.aspx both work but http://travel.msn.com/New_York_City_New_York_State_list_entitylist_attractions_23164_2.aspx or http://www.helsby.net or https://absoblogginlutely.net doesn’t. There are a lot more sites that do/don’t work but these are just a couple of examples.

Anyone come across this problem before?
I’ve uploaded the resultant set of policies wizard output to https://absoblogginlutely.net/test/lock.htm – the only thing I’ve done is change the domain name for security reasons.