Yesterday I was digging up some old email trying to find some information when I came across this little snippet:

In response to the question that was posed to me; I believe that if I were to be given the opportunity to work for your company, in time, I will be able to make a valuable contribution to its future growth as well as continued success. This being said the prospect of establishing a long-term career with your company is one that I find very favourable and I am greatly interested in growing along with the company.

I consider myself to have an analytical mind that is capable of independent thought processes with the ability to articulate my viewpoints should I be required to do so; enabling me to work as both an individual or in a team environment. In addition to this I am a fast learner that is able to adapt to changing circumstances. I am conscientious in what I do and maintain a high moral and ethical integrity. These are some of my personal traits that I feel would benefit both the people and the company itself.

I believe this was in response to the typical interview question of “why do you want to work for us?”. It was probably a closing question that resulted in me composing the response above and submitting it via email. I did get that job, though it was only a couple months down the line that I realised that that sort of work wasn’t for me. Unfortunately by then it was far too late as my inexperienced and overly optimistic self seeking the first full-time job stupidly signed a 24 month contract that essentially locked me in. As a result I ended up wasting both my and the company’s time. Chalk it up to a the hazard of learning through experimentation as the time I spent there and the mistakes I made contributed toward exceedingly valuable work and life experiences.

How disillusioned we become. I’m certainly far more jaded and cynical about work life than I was when I started out 4 years ago, which in the grand scheme of things doesn’t seem like very much time. Fortunately I’m now in a job that I enjoy, one that has taught me much. But, like all jobs (particularly in ICT), this one is just a stepping stone on the path to the next.

While chewing on my golden spoon as Marlon likes to put it I decided I would take some time out of my busy schedule to polish my diamond teeth and grind the inaccuracy in Marlon’s post regarding myself.

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.

I seem to blog about work a lot, I didn’t much care for my last job, so the change has been a positive one over all. I thoroughly enjoy my current job; this appears to have made quite an impact on my work ethic, and my daily enjoyment as well as the response I get from colleagues. One of the guys I work with has a good point: a job is where you spend a very large chunk of your waking life, so you really should enjoy it. That’s idealistic obviously, yet not impossible. On to my story…

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 just spent the better part 4 hours cleaning my bike… and it’s still dirty. The colours are a tad washed out due to cellphone camera, but it’s easy enough to see that my rear sprocket is gold. Before I started, it was black as my chain still is. My chain is actually the same colour gold as the sprocket, but that’s going to take another 2 hours to clean.

Oh, and you can actually see how badly the chain is sagging. It would suck rocks if that thing jumped the sprocket, I guess I should adjust it some.

“If you have any questions, please revert.”
“I will revert back to you later today.”

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?

We recently had a new password policy implemented at the office. We changed from an 8 character complex password (3 of 4: alpha, number, capital, special char) to 16 character simple passwords.

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”.

Anyone who has followed the news of the Tour de France for even 5 minutes will have realised that the sport of cycling is truly fraught with “chemically enhanced” participants. Where do you draw the line between ethics and ambition? There’s no such thing as a level playing field anymore. I don’t particularly care either way, one thing is for certain, I could never do what those guys do, drugs or no.

I inject heroin into my eyeball.

I hate eating. Always have, and will for the foreseeable future. I eat to survive, and I eat a hell of a lot; around 3700 calories at the moment of which only about 25% is fat. That’s all for now.

This entry has kindly been sponsored by the Conqueror of Ignorance.

A few updates:

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.

A few months back I blogged about my car’s waterpump deciding to fail on me and getting royally shafted by Ford SA and Porters Auto who decided to void my warranty. Two things, the conditions of the warranty were upheld by me, and my car only has 36k km on it… how the hell did the waterpump fail so early?

Anyways, 3 weeks back I reckoned I’d left it long enough to try get a resolution from Ford and figured I would have to fork out to have this thing replaced. So I book my car in to have the thing replaced. As an aside I had the pump replaced with a Ford OEM part that cost R100 less from the place I took the car to than the official Ford stealership. 2 days later (earliest I could get a booking) I hopped in my car and headed off. Barrelling down the highway at 120kph (gotta stick to the limit!) I notice fumes emanating from underneath the bonnet. Uh… yeah, so there I was struggling to get into the emergency lane on the left from the fast lane seeing as the centre island is not exactly a fun place to be.

I stopped in the emergency lane, popped the bonnet and took a look. I’m not a mechanic but I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t be seeing what I presume is water vapour everywhere. The bottle was completely empty so I guess that the entire system had overheated, sprung a nice leak somewhere and depressurised. Well the car would still run and I was pretty close to the off-ramp and the mechanic I was taking it to, so I decided to limp all the way there.

I made it there alive and it looks like nothing overheated too badly, so off I went to catch a taxi to get home. Finally finding a taxi going to Randburg I got in and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare but I thought now forget it, yo home to bel-air. I pulled up to a house about seven or eight and I yelled to the cabby yo, home smell you later. Looked at my kingdom I was finally there to settle my throne as the fresh prince of bel-air.