I got a new bike back in June. A 2007 Triumph Daytona 675 triple in tornado red, which I picked up with only 1350km on the clocks. I then proceeded to crash it not even a month later at Zwartkops in turn 2 when I washed out my front tyre.

I went for a few months wondering why the bike was riding so badly. I eventually got annoyed enough to take it to a bunch of track specialists and drop R1600 on having my front suspension rebuilt. As it turns out my one fork had way too much oil in it and was causing hydraulic lock when under compression which results in no damping… so I may as well have not had suspension at all it was so bad. Quite likely this is what caused my washout with the front.

Next up: I bought a bow back in February and have been shooting on and off when I get some time. It’s a 2008 Diamond Marquis single-cam bow. It’s a superb hunting bow and can be cranked up to 70lb draw strength; I’m currently only running 60lb because I fatigue far too quickly with the thing. I’ve only got a basic sight and stabiliser, but the bow is more than capable of dropping a Kudu bull provided I use the correct arrows.

Also I decided to take up climbing. For now I’m only doing wall climbing out in Kya Sands once a week really, but I’m quite keen to get going with some outdoor rock climbing. Even so, I’m thoroughly enjoying the indoor wall climbing and as a result I decided to start purchasing some kit for myself a few weeks back. The first thing I started with was obviously a chalk bag and some chalk; the difference this makes is astounding. The next purchase was proper rock shoes, and compared to the rentals, the difference is like night and day.

Well, that’s it for the expensive hobbies of which there are quite a few it seems.

In other news; I’m still at the same company who is actually sending me for a bunch of training next week. I intend to go for as much training as I can over the next few months courtesy of my company. The handy thing is as part of our Enterprise Agreement with MS, we get training vouchers, which I plan to use and abuse as I’m aiming for all my certs. For now I’m going after my MSSQL2008 MCITP in DBA. Afterwards I would like to go after the developer and business intelligence ones as well. Unfortunately we have a ton of really high profile and urgent projects going on at the moment and a few extras coming very soon, so time constraints are going to be a limiting factor as always.

Not much has changed with regards to the work situation. I work in a team of 3 supporting a massive host of systems, and given the one guy is very very new we’re generally stretched thin. Good times; at least it’s better than being twiddling your thumbs and being bored all day at work.

This got me thinking a bit. At my company I only get 15 days off per annum for mandatory leave. This is the minimum by law, which I’d assumed was the norm for companies. As we all know, companies are there to exploit their employees (to my observation…), but as it turns out, it looks like 15 days is the cheap side of cheap. I’ve spoken to about 30 other people about this and only 2 people get 15 days like me. Most are between 20 and 30 with one lucky person getting a full 33 days off. This even accounts for people that have only been in their job under 2 years. I believe after 5 years employment I’m supposed to get an additional 3 days… yay. While the leave isn’t that important to me, if you work out the equivalent monetary value of the difference, it can be a fairly sizable chunk. Of course when your overtime pay (assuming you get paid) works out to significantly less than your standard hour pay, it doesn’t really come as a surprise when the minimum is always given.

This post is sponsored by cheap corporates who only do the minimum.

While I previously was in a 3-man team with the resignation I spoke about in my previous post, it’s currently a 2-man team. There is however a new person starting at the beginning of December, but it will be many months before he learns the systems and can take over some of the heavy lifting. Even I, who has been in the team since February, get passed over for a much of the critical work. Put simply my age and lack of experience is working against me, people don’t trust that I’ll do an adequate job on such a sensitive system; honestly I can’t blame them, and I’ll explain why.

My core functionality involves managing and maintaining our primary ERP system, the infrastructure it runs on and all related EDI links and systems. The major technologies this includes are: MFGPro, Wise and Progress OpenEdge based primarily on RHEL. There are a ton of other things that interact with these systems and all their data in both directions: BizTalk, QXtend, MSSQL, Cognos, Powerplay, a plethora of home grown code, etc.. I support all of that from an admin perspective. Supporting all of this is a pretty large responsibility, as for each hour of unplanned downtime literally equates to hundreds of thousands of Rands in lost revenue. Unplanned downtime is unfortunately all-too-frequent; copper lines gets stolen, UPS’ blow up, switches and servers fail, and of course people make mistakes.

Our main ERP system has something like 600 users working on it, so the most obvious cost when there is unplanned downtime is lost time for both salaried and especially shift workers. We have a few distribution sites, that involves loading trucks with products and sending them out to stores for deliveries. In the case that the systems are down, we could have something like 40 trucks just standing still, not getting loaded, and just idling. For shift workers, if it takes a normal 8 hour shift to load these trucks and you have 4 hours of downtime, you now have to keep those workers on standby doing nothing for 4 hours and pay them an extra 4 to finish loading the trucks. Then you have to organise transport since they’ve now done a 12 hour shift and missed their normal transport. So there’s a nice knock-on effect.

Thus concludes a rather lengthy description of my core functionality. Of course I’m also a Sharepoint admin and a DBA (MSSQL/OpenEdge) as well as an admin of many other smaller applications. I’m currently in the process of doing a massive migration project for MSSQL as a rather problematic and dirty environment has built up over the years; merely a case of “ignore the screaming baby”. We have 31 SQL servers at our main site because apparently it’s a good idea to deploy a new server for every application. So now I have the joyous responsibility of migrating them all to 2 shiny powerful servers.

With only 2 people currently supporting all of this as well as all the projects we have to deal with (DR, system upgrades, migration, etc.), things can get rather tense. Check the financial news, Tiger Brands wants to buy the company I work for, that should give some indication of the size.

So, when people ask me what I actually do I prefer to tell them I make sure other people can do their job. It’s simpler and easier. Most people give me a blank look and start drooling when the acronym ERP comes out of my mouth.

At the end of last month my direct technical team leader gave his notice. Where I work you’re required to give a calendar month. With that, his farewell was last night and I now find myself in a team that went from 3 to 2. The truly scary thing is that we’ve lost an invaluable resource; someone whose extensive knowledge of the business meant that the huge quantity of technical expertise could be applied rather expertly.

I’ve only been in my position since the beginning of February, and I’ve barely even scratched the surface of the systems I admin. Our ERP system is integrated into the business so tightly that it actually requires at least a broad overview of how everything works. This essentially means that I need to learn the business rules that govern the way the systems work internally, if not the technical aspect of the data itself that moves around within the systems. So what we’re losing is someone who has accumulated all that knowledge.

I’m in a rather difficult position now, over the last few weeks I’ve been utterly swamped with work, even opting to work from home on weekends to get some of it done. I believe the other guy in my team might be experiencing something similar. Our work tends to come in waves, unfortunately without more personnel we can’t accomodate the peaks, and trying to replace someone in that position is going to be close to impossible. I believe this is also the reason our team hasn’t been expanded past 3 people, because when we hit dips and have nothing to do the people holding the purse strings wonder what they’re paying for. I shouldn’t need to explain the logic, or illogic behind that particular decision.

So last night as a fit of prescience gripped me I foresaw a few difficult months ahead as more projects get dumped on our desks without the aid. My crystal ball confirms this.

I’m now on standby every second week… oh, joy.

I will be the first to admit that my English leaves much to be desired, however I still believe it’s not so bad that I will fall into the trap of creating sentences that are just wrong by mangling words and applying new meanings that make no sense. I do have a tendency to use archaic phrasing and I definitely abuse the semi-colon when I juxtapose two ideas in a single sentence, but I still don’t redefine words based on popular use. This sort of thing really shouldn’t annoy me but it does. I guess democracy is alive and well in the world as the majority certainly rules when it comes to butchering language.

Before I go on, I should clarify that I’m not really a purist. I have no problem with adding words to the dictionary and using phrasing that sounds better even though, syntactically and semantically, it may be incorrect. I also don’t have a problem with applying new meanings to words as the language evolves. However the word “revert” is not one of these. This, in my opinion, is a case where the dictionary definition of the word has been warped and mangled to fit a context in which it doesn’t belong.

re·vert  
–verb (used without object)
1. to return to a former habit, practice, belief, condition, etc.: They reverted to the ways of their forefathers.
2. Law. to go back to or return to the former owner or to his or her heirs.
3. Biology. to return to an earlier or primitive type.
4. to go back in thought or discussion: He constantly reverted to his childhood.
–noun
5. a person or thing that reverts.
6. Law. a reversion.

In the two examples I gave at the start of the post revert is used to mean reply, or get back to, or come back to in a written conversation (most commonly email). I see emails with these phrases almost daily, most often coming from a native English speaker. Even if you were to accept the definition that revert somehow means reply, in the second example the word “back” becomes redundant and even more incorrect. I’ve always been under the impression that revert is used to modify a state, and the dictionary definition above appears to confirm my thoughts. It seems like definition #4 is the source of the confusion… except the example that follows the definition clarifies the meaning quite well.

I can’t be the only one that takes umbrage at the manner in which this word is used. How do these words even make their way into popular usage?

DFUs kept forgetting their passwords or typing them wrong and locking them. I really wonder if the stats have changed and the number of unlock/reset requests have dropped. As an admin it is really frustrating, having to type 16 character passwords in everywhere. On a daily basis I will log into a number of different servers as well as set up new services and applications all requiring authentication. On an odd day I could easily see myself authenticating a few hundred times.

The irony of the whole situation is that admin/super-user accounts have actually become even more simple. Where previously we would use something like “~@dm.5vc!” we now use something like “passwordpassword”. The most common password (even for admins) appears to be “1234567890asdfgh”. The kicker to my whole story here, is that we actually had a 3rd party auditing firm (KPMG I believe) recommend this as part of our “security” audit.

This post is sponsored by companies who follow “best-practices”.

About 6 weeks back I managed to strain the muscle connecting my right scapula to the spine (Rhomboid). A rather painful exercise that has severly hampered most physical activity. The shoulder joint being one of the most complicated joints in the body is highly susceptible to injury and when injured creates a lot of problems. Right now I’ve been unable to ride for long, go do any rifle shooting and gym has also been very haphazard. I’ve been doing about 40 minutes of rehabilitation work on my shoulder almost every day and it’s slowly improving to the level where I can do a bit of gym and some riding without being crippled by pain.

This previous Saturday I went to draw some money out of my credit account. That didn’t go too well as the ATM decided it was hungry and my credit card was the most available sustenance. The only thing I did wrong was to type my PIN incorrectly just once. No grace apparently. So now I have to wait in a nice queue to go collect my new card, whenever its ready that is.

That server I blogged about a few weeks back, well as it turns out I wasn’t entirely correct about its intended purpose. It’s now gloriously serving as a dust collector. Yep, there’s been absolutely no movement on that project, and virtually nothing regarding the other 2 servers.

My job scope is expanding even more as I pick up an increasingly larger number of responsibilities in order to manage to our various application services. I’ve even been shanghaid into some development work, something I’m happy to do, but unfortunately I’m in the wrong department to be doing it as it’s not part of my job function, so I don’t get paid for it.

This year my company has gone on what appears to be a really aggressive cost cutting push, slashing budgets across the board (or so I’ve been led to understand) and retrenching employees from many of our business units. IT got hit quite hard, having 5 CIOs retrenched and only replacing them with 2 positions available as part of the corporate restructuring. Add to this an entire department was dissolved and quite a number of people resigned seeking greener pastures; people who I’m not sure will ever be replaced forcing the work to be distributed amongst the rest of us. The scary thing about all this is that very little information has come down from the top, leaving us “workers” mostly in the dark forced to contemplate the outlook and have the blanks filled in with typical water-cooler and smoking balcony talk. Leaving your people in ignorance in matters such as these is not good for employee and company morale.

But anyways, back to my story. This background is like this: one of our company’s core business functionality runs almost exclusively on 2 application servers (glorified PCs really — lets call them OldA and OldB); each performing a different role. If either of these servers were to tip over there would be a rather large crisis and a lot of screaming people. Thus it was decided a DR solution had to be built and implemented. This task mostly fell to me as a learning experience with the aid of my team. So we had 2 older servers (I’ll call these BeefA and BeefB) that were just lying around, not being used, earmarked to replace the 2 existing servers (don’t forget — glorified PCs) making the existing servers the backup. If you’re still following: BeefA replaces OldA thus making OldA the backup, and BeefB replaces OldB making OldB the backup.

BeefA and BeefB are both decently specced servers. Dual CPU, Dual core, 6x 72GB scsi300 drives, dual gigabit nics; BeefA with 6GB ram BeefB with 2GB. Aside from the RAM either servers is specced well enough to serve both OldA and OldB’s functions; which ultimately was the plan… until yesterday that is. The servers are physically identical, so we could easily move hardware as well. OldA’s\BeefA’s core function was to be done away with and the server decommissioned later in the year, this means that any peripheral functionality would eventually be migrated from BeefA to BeefB, enabling BeefA to act as backup for BeefB. Until the time that this happened OldA and OldB would stand as part of the DRP.

In step the powers that be, and hence I have a brand new server delivered to me along with a “request” to set it up. What? Did I forget to mention that yesterday was also the first I’d even heard of this brand new server? Yea, I really love it when they forget to inform the people doing the actual work. Judging by the forwarded email I received, this server has been in the pipeline since February. Right, so my natural response was “WTF?!” and then “what’s this for?”. Then I find out what this server is actually for, it’s to replace OldB. But wait, what about BeefA and BeefB and the work going into making those the live servers and OldA and OldB the backup?

Bear in mind how I started this post, we now have a nice shiny R60k doorstop. And, all this happening amongst serious budget cuts. I seriously don’t know how this stuff gets past? Unfortunately I’m just a peon, someone who does what he’s told, who hasn’t even been at the company for a year and essentially just a trainee. My opinion doesn’t really count for much, and I’m not about to get myself embroiled in the corporate politics surrounding such decisions.

This is a prime example of some seriously broken communication. Had someone bothered to CC me into the emails (peons aren’t part of the managerial decision circulars) I could have had the opportunity to tell them they’re wasting their money for no good reason. I do hope I’m wrong in all this and this server actually has a different purpose, but I’m pretty sure I’m on the money in this regard.

This post is sponsored by corporates worldwide

However, as much as I like my job and enjoy where I am I’m already having doubts. Life somehow managed to throw the proverbial spanner in the works this time. The latest increase in petrol price has really started to make me worry, and by the sounds of things the situation is only going to get worse next month. Considering my training regime, I eat a lot of food, so whenever petrol goes up I feel the pinch particularly in that department. Unfortunately this time I appear to have been bitten and not stopped bleeding, only made worse by the recent haemorrhaging of funds due to my car and my ill-conceived trip to Cape Town.

Alas, such are the decisions life presents. Do I start looking for a new job now? Or do I try angle for a raise at my current company. Obviously I would prefer the latter, but then of course things don’t look too rosy as I’ve already been told I have to wait till the financial year end… July.

I’m currently sitting in my old home, at my old desk with my work laptop writing this post, meanwhile cursing MTN through my teeth (however much good that will do…) as I attempt to connect to the internet for the umpteenth time without success; or rather, some very marginal success if you can call connecting for a grand total of 10 seconds each time success.

I took some leave, booked flights and came to Cape Town on a holiday — pseudo holiday — with plans on how to spend the time. One failed opportunity later and I find my plans crashing down around me as the fulcrum on which they rested vanished. Thus I arrive at this point: boredom and so I blog… :)