Yeah, well, it's been much too long of a silence here. There are reasons, difficult to articulate, but they mostly reside in the corridor of disillusionment with the whole thing. I mean, back in 2000 or 1999 when I decided that I was really tired of selling the crap that auto body shops need, it seemed like a good idea to go to school, get some training, and try to find a job in Information Technology (IT).
I mean, hell, I really liked what little I'd learned about computers and networking. I had figured out how to fix a really messed up Dell Dimension 233, played with loading Mandrake 7.0 on a laptop, did several other little repairs and upgrades to various computers, and was generally familiar with the Internet and what it had to offer at that time. I got DSL and enjoyed having an always-on relatively fast connection, and found lots of ways to use my toys in my profession.
As a traveling salesman I enjoyed having a laptop with a modem that could connect to the 'net and also to the mainframe system at work. I could collect orders during the day and put them directly into the company system at night. This eliminated a lot of errors and unnecessary work, and helped me avoid having pointless arguments with warehouse people over whether I had told them something or not. I noticed that I seemed to catch on to how to use these tools faster than my coworkers did. I suspected that I might have some ability with these things.
So I did it, I enrolled in a 2-year school and took a course in Computer Network Engineering. I was very nearly fifty years old. The program was reasonably well-rounded, including some math, technical writing, public speaking, human relations and Spanish as well as the core of technical courses that covered basic PC hardware, networking, and the entire Windows 2000 Network Operating System. School was fun, although demanding, and I did very well. After putting in about six months I decided that this was the direction to go. I quit my day job and went to school full time (with some part-time employment) until I graduated in the Summer of 2002.
At the end of my training I had a part-time job in the IT Department of the college. This kept me busy some of the time, but I needed more income and definitely had lots of time on my hands now that I was done with school. One of my friends was unemployed, he'd been a network administrator for a company that had gone out of business. He and I decided to try running a little technical support business. Neither of us had much of anything to do, and we didn't plan to invest a huge amount of money in the business, so there seemed to be nothing to lose by trying this.
As we worked at the job of finding customers and figuring out how to take care of them, we had some little successes. In general, people were glad when we were able to fix problems for them. We found very few problems that were beyond our capabilities. We offered a guarantee that if we couldn't fix the problem, we would charge nothing for the service call, and we further offered an initial 30 minute survey-type visit for free. These policies got us in the door of a few small businesses.
One of the things that I learned from doing this type of work was that it is very difficult and time-consuming to find yourself in a strange location with unfamiliar equipment and a problem description. The task of simply figuring out what is there and how it's connected is daunting. Then, becoming familiar with individual computers and servers that were set up by someone else, someone who is generally not available for consultation, can be a very complicated task. You have now spent a lot of time just drawing a map and making lists, and you haven't even begun to approach the problem.
Another thing that I learned in this endeavor was how very difficult it would be to actually make a living this way. We did, as I said, a few jobs, and they were not easy to get. Nearly every one was successful, but the monetary rewards were not fabulous. It did not take a very complicated calculation to realize that we would need to do a much greater volume of work than what we were doing if we were going to actually live off the income from this business. The job of just looking for work was huge and took a lot of time, and some money. We cold-called on small businesses all over the area. We mailed fliers, and post cards. As it turned out, the mailings seemed to get us about the best results, but we were lucky if we got enough gross sales to offset the cost of the postage and printing.
The tech. support business was fun, and didn't really hurt us, but I was very glad when I actually found a "real" job in IT. A friend pointed out a couple of interesting ads in the newspaper, and I applied for both jobs. I got responses, and scheduled interviews. The result was that I started working Here.
That was well over four years ago.
Now I have some experience, and let me say that this is one easy job. I'm not kidding. I've never had it so good, in many ways. The pay is terrible; we have had to reduce our life style quite a little bit in order to live on what I make here, but I am surely not working myself to death. I spend most days here at my desk, typing, mouse-clicking, talking on the telephone a little. Occasionally I'm called upon to actually walk somewhere and fix or install something, but not very often. I haven't had to drive the few miles to one of the other locations in ages.
When I started we had a peer-to-peer network of Windows 2000 PCs. This was divided into four subnets, one for each location, and the locations were linked by frame relay provided by the local telco. We used DSL for our Internet connection. We had a UNIX server running a proprietary database peculiar to the agency's practice (
behavioral health), and file services, and an email (
Open WebMail) system running on a Linux box, backups, an intranet site, and a helpdesk work-order program (
One or Zero).
I was hired as a PC Technician. The main thing that I did was to maintain, repair, and set up PCs. I worked out a Windows 2000 standard image with all the software and settings that the agency required and found a good no-cost Open Source way to clone and deploy it (
g4u). Over time some other projects came my way. Among them: setting up a new file server independent of the UNIX box and designing and building a way to back up files and email. This stuff was fun.
The more I worked with Free Open Source Software (FOSS) the more I liked it. There are a lot of obvious reasons why people like FOSS, such as the low cost, freedom from licensing, stability, security -- but I think probably my own personal favorite is the availability of practically any application you could imagine via download without any unnecessary rigamarole. Since I was doing this work for my employer the cost of the software wasn't of direct concern to me, but the bureaucratic entanglements of purchasing and keeping track of licenses of proprietary software are unattractive, and counterproductive, and definitely the type of thing that will kill any initiatory impulses that I might have.
For example, when I began working Here we were using an application called
Track It! to run our helpdesk work-order system. One problem I noticed right away was that the organization only owned 5 client access licenses (CALs) for this program, so if 5 people were connected, a sixth person would not be able to use the system. I quickly learned that there were reasons why this had not been changed, even though it was a perennial problem. For one, the cost of additional licenses was prohibitive, and they had to be bought in blocks (of ten, I think, but I don't remember). Even worse, though, the manufacturer would not sell additional licenses for the version we were running. They insisted that the organization purchase an upgrade, which would require installation, and then additional licenses. This being a poorly-funded nonprofit organization, it would have been a very difficult job to sell the management on the idea of spending a lot of money to make our jobs a little bit easier. Furthermore, we'd have a major installation to do, and we'd have to learn how to use the new version of the product. We didn't like Track It! all that much anyway. It was fairly clunky and hard to move around in, and required yet
more proprietary software in order to query its proprietary database and produce meaningful reports.
In the interest of fairness, I must say that this was the situation in 2003. I have no doubt that both Track It! and Crystal Reports have changed quite a bit since then, and they may be well worth considering, depending on your needs and environment. From where I sit I'm not interested in either one, but that's the type of thing I'm explaining here.
The easy solution to our problem was to look at Open Source software. What we envisioned was a product that would run on a MySQL database (FOSS), which is standardized and can be queried and configured in a number of ways with open source tools, and which would be served as a web site so that the only client we'd need would be a browser. In this way we didn't have to depend on anything special at the client side -- everything done at the server side is a good way to go, especially if you don't have the resources or the desire to do a lot of maintenance and software installation at the client side.
We found an excellent solution,
One or Zero. It had all the features mentioned above, cost exactly nothing, and worked extremely well. We ran it on a somewhat beefy PC on our internal LAN for a long time. What a great product. Yes, it took a little time and effort to set it up and figure it all out, but having saved thousands of dollars by not having to pay license fees for it we could afford to do some work.
One or Zero is just an example of the type of solution that we were able to discover and implement. My boss did a fantastic job of learning about it and customizing it. He has a copy of it installed on a server of his own and uses it to keep track of things for his home and family.
This type of software comes with its own built-in motivation. It provides a terrific feeling of accomplishment, and the ability to give back to the FOSS community by participating in online forums. People will tell you that a drawback of FOSS is that you don't get any support from the manufacturer. Well, sometimes you don't. Oftentimes you will have something much better: a forum where you can contact people all over the world who are using the product you're using, as well as representatives of the group that actually wrote the software. To illustrate,
here's a link to the official One or Zero forum.
Well, time rolled on, and the organization began to do strange political things. To this day I don't really understand, but I know that there were various power struggles going on. The department I worked for was called Information Systems (IS), and was considered part of the Finance Department. I reported to my boss, who reported to the IS Director, who reported to the Chief Financial Officer.
Various rumblings and grumblings could be heard. The org. wanted a fancy new networked system. We had given them everything they asked for by specification but it just wasn't good enough. They wanted to tell us exactly what to do. To facilitate this, they hired some consultants. Pay attention to this if you are in a similar situation. The coming of the consultants was the advent of ugly change.
I'm not going to get into the details of all that happened. The large picture is this: Some people were fired and a couple quit. An enormous (equal to about 10% of annual revenue) expenditure was agreed to for new hardware and software. We were going full-out Microsoft Windows 2003, Exchange 2003, Office and Sharepoint 2003. We would use Citrix Metaframe servers and thin clients to deliver desktops to all users. There would be laptops and PDAs for folks that needed them. I don't remember hearing anything about a
chicken in every pot but I wouldn't have been surprised if that had been mentioned.
It makes me tired to think about all that has transpired in the past year, so I'm not going to go into detail here and now. Perhaps I will write more about some specific discoveries later, but at this point it seems sort of futile. They are all the same discovery at the end of a different but similar experience. The discovery is: this stuff is crap.
Crap. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've said, "This stuff is crap."
Microsoft, Citrix, Symantec: all crap. Garbage. Expensive, but garbage.
And, it's no fun. It's boring and frustrating at the same time -- quite an accomplishment! Working with a corn cob like Active Directory is enough to make you want to get a job at Wal Mart. Trying to find out how to do some obvious task in Exchange is something that should be assigned to pedophiles in Hell. Click. Dialog boxes with dancing tabs. Cryptic phrases next to check boxes and radio buttons that don't quite mean what they say. Error messages that never, ever mean anything, except that something is probably wrong.
And how about that Event Viewer? Holy cow. I used to have systems with logs. You could search the logs with 'grep' and find what you were looking for. You could actually use logs to discover what was going on in a system. Imagine that.
Oh, yeah, the
Third Party Software. You need the
Third Party Software. George Mc Miracle's Fancy Solution to Event Viewer (or Active Directory, or Group Policy Editor, or Exchange, or whatever...) installs on top of your already overpriced Bloat-o-soft bloatware and costs you a bundle. Furthermore it adds the excitement of not being able to pin anything on anybody. No matter what problem you're having, it's being caused by the other guy's stuff. Or the hardware, unless you ask HP or whoever made your hardware. Then it's caused by the software. And nobody really knows. This is so much better.
Citrix, you might say, is third party software. Well, not exactly. You see, what really happened is that M$ sort of borrowed the technology for Terminal Services from Citrix. Of course they didn't really get it right, but they borrowed it nonetheless, and apparently didn't exactly ask. So there was some ugly legal stuff that ensued and now Citrix has kind of a special relationship with M$. Sort of like a "kissin' cousin," or "incest."
So I haven't written much in here. There has been no joy in Mudville. I haven't been inspired to play with FOSS stuff or write a script to do some mundane task. Scripting for Winblows is a nightmare. I did some scripting when we deployed this stuff: I did the work in Linux and exported the results to a text file with DOS carriage returns. I know how to write "batch files," and I've even done some vb scripting. I have a good book that covers all that arcane bullshit. I just can't get excited about it. Click. Click. Click. The sound of the Windows administrator checking boxes and dancing tabs.
Mostly we sit here and wait for somebody to tell us what to do next. Unfortunately I don't think there's anybody that realizes that we're waiting. I don't think I'm going to be the one to tell.
