Just been working a lot. I’ve been working at our showrooms in Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, getting them ready for NeoCon. Saturday and Sunday I was helping to get them all (we have seven showrooms in Merchandise Mart: Allsteel, Basyx, Gunlocke, HBF, HON, Maxon and Paoli) ready, computer-wise. I made sure that faxes, phones, computers and printers were all up and running as they should be. There were long hours on Saturday and Sunday to get the showrooms ready. Let me tell you, running through all the showrooms making sure that everything is working as it should can really get to a guy. Had to run patch cords, mount access points, install drivers, change configuration on IP Office… wow.

Monday was the first day of NeoCon and it was killer. I got to there at about 7:30; the show was to start at 9:00am. Lots of standing, walking and going from showroom to showroom. I also heard a “trivia fact” that the Chicago Merchandise Mart is the largest commercial building in the world. I only got to sit during lunch, and finally left the building around 5:30. I stayed at the Renaissance Hotel, which is about three blocks away, so it wasn’t really too bad to get back to the hotel. After the day I went with three others to Greek Town and ate dinner at the Parthenon. WOW! I don’t know the names of all the food I had but it was all delicious! I know I had saganaki (flaming cheese), mini spinach-cheese pie, Greek salad for appetizers. I had the Special Combination, made up of dolmades, moussaka, pastitsio, roast lamb, potatoes, and vegetables. (and yes, it was ALL Good!!!) For dessert we split baklava and galaktoboureko. Oh, man. What a meal!

Tuesday was much the same as Monday. Got there about 7:30 and left around 5:30. Lots of standing and walking… very little sitting. After it was all over, I got with my friend Randy and we and others went to the Chicago Cubs game!! What a great time that was. Talking baseball with Randy, Jim, Mike and John… drinking Old Style Lite beer (Harry Caray’s favorite!) Heck, the game was even a good one. The Cubs came from behind and won it! I called up brother Al and made him jealous just by telling him I was at Wrigley Field - sorry Al, I just couldn’t resist the dig!

Today was just as long, but I got to leave at about 3:30pm for home. And home was never so good. (Well except for the fact that KC went to The Lake of the Ozarks with her friend Norma on a “girls trip”). I’ve still got laundry to do and I’ve got my expense reports to fill out, but all things considered it was a good week/weekend.

So I’m sitting in an “all-day” meeting yesterday at work. You know the kind… from 8am to 5pm. All in the same room. All about the same thing. Ugh. On a lighter note, one of the folks at the meeting had this to say: “If it lasts more than four hours, it isn’t a meeting…. it’s a seminar!”

That’s right. Independence Day is a done deal. Now it’s back to work. Why is it that we can work on our field sales folks’ laptops and they work fine here, no matter how we try to screw them up and the very minute the field sales folks get them they screw up? Isn’t that one of Murphy’s Laws? Stuff like that drives me crazy, and it is a major component of my job. About the only good thing to come out of this is the fact that I went to the Y today and worked out at lunch.

I can’t believe it. Last night I cleaned out my Outlook Inbox at work until I had only 8 emails remaining. It was quite an effort as I do tend to get a lot of email at work. Then I come in this morning and check. WTF?! I’ve got 247 unread messages. The worst part is NONE, ZERO, NADA are spam… AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHH!

Well, not exactly NO play; just very little. Work has been quite busy lately. Tomorrow will be the “end” of this recent onslaught. We have had 80 laptops that we had to transfer the user profiles from their old laptops to a new laptop. Also, we had to install a number of software packages. I had the “honor” of creating the installation script to copy training files, install packages and do some other sundry tasks. It seems to work. For the profile migration we are using Microsoft’s SCANSTATE and LOADSTATE tools, configured to migrate only what we want. Seems to work well.

Anyway, tomorrow will be the “end” because we hand out the last batch and I lead the training on the new features. Oh, yea! (Please note the sarcasm) I thought I got out of the teaching business… 40 field sales folks with new toys? I’d have better luck teaching them calculus.

So I’ve been stuck here at work all day today. I’ve handled about a dozen calls all day. You see, we have some business units that are not off today (President’s Day), but most are. So we have to have a skeleton crew working in order to handle any calls that come up. Mostly the calls are “I can’t log in” or “My email doesn’t work” or “I forgot my password”. Translation: The end-user can’t remember their password over the weekend and now after three incorrect tries their LAN account is locked out. Translation of the Translation: The end user forgot where they put the sticky note where they wrote their password down.

I’ve had one “challenging” call and it was because the end-user did not have our standard equipment. She had slightly non-standard equipment and the call lasted about 10 minutes. (or long enough for me to figure out that she needed to power cycle both her Linksys home router and her ORiNOCO wireless access point in order for her to connect wirelessly at home)

Oh, and if you are reading this, Chris (my boss), I’ve been working my fingers to the bone keeping our users connected. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

That’s what I’m going to do today! We are having the department Christmas winter holiday party this afternoon. Since we have about 130 in our department, they need to get a sizeable place for the party. It will be held at a local country club, the same place we held it last year. We have a choice of a small rib eye steak, grilled chicken breast or grilled portobello mushroom for the entre. We are also served a green bean casserole, baked potato, roll and salad. For dessert there is either cheesecake or chocolate dream cake. It ought to be a great time. Heck, I’ve heard that Santa might take a little time off of his busy schedule to join us!

We are having a nice food day in celebration of Halloween today at work. Lots of us brought in some kind of food; I brought in a loaf of Tuscan bread, a small container of almond butter and my “world-famous” egg rolls. There is a boatload of food here today: potato soup, chicken casserole, barbeque pork, egg rolls, macaroni and cheese, cheesey potatoes, hot wings, a variety of chips and dips, different kinds of sausage/cheese/cracker trays, a fruit tray and, of course, a TON of desserts. I think the coolest was one brought in that looks like a kitty litter box, complete with partially melted Tootsie Rolls that look like cat poop. (I really had qualms about eating that!)

I had a co-worker ask me today, “Did you ever have one of those days where everything you touched turned to shit?”. I had to answer honestly, “YES!”.

Yup, that’s right, I’m quoting the Bangles. It was a Manic Monday. It actually started on Sunday, Bloody Sunday (Ok, Ok, I’ll quit with the songs; sorry, U2). I went in and cut some CDs to take with me today. Had to include some drivers and some software on them and I had the stuff all at work, so I went in to burn CDs to take with me today. This morning started early. I went to Enterprise here in town and rented a car (standard company policy), packed up all the stuff I needed and headed for the Windy City. That’s right…. Chicago.

I had to go to one of our four showrooms in the Merchandise Mart to reload drivers, set up PCs and check wireless connectivity (our four showrooms are for The HON Company, Allsteel, Gunlocke and Paoli). This was all a part of getting the showrooms ready for NeoCon 2004. Reloading drivers took a little bit of time but was really pretty easy. Setting up PCs was really easy as well. Checking the wireless connectivity was easy but coming up with recommendations on how to improve the signal strength in certain areas was not. As with any business, we want to spend as little money as possible so adding an access point or getting a signal booster are options they don’t want to hear; however, they are really the only options.

So I left one of the CDs at that showroom, dropped another off at a second showroom and headed back home. All in all it was a busy day. Left home at about 7:30 and returned home about 7:45 (about 7 of those hours were driving …. BY MYSELF)

Our field sales force is in for a semi-annual region meeting and I am spending my time updating laptop software. I have spent the better part of the last two weeks scripting all of the updates and fixes so that there is as little tech interaction as possible so we can work on as many laptops as possible. Here is a list of all we are doing to each laptop (nearly all of these are scripted):

1. We are updating to version 6.1 service pack 2 of SalesLogix.
2. We are installing the latest version of Apple QuickTime. This is a story in and of itself as our marketing department contracted out a multimedia presentation and it was delivered in QuickTime format… even though none of the sales force laptops had QuickTime installed and they also didn’t have administrative privilege to install QuickTime. Wouldn’t it be nice if martketing would talk to us first?
3. We are updating our wireless drivers to include security profiles for all of our locations.
4. We are removing all old “fix-it” software cobbled together to help our older SalesLogix program.
5. We are installing our quick fixes directly on the laptop for our VPN client and its security profiles. The users used to have to go to our network in order to get these quick fixes, but since they couldn’t get in to our network without the quick fixes, they couldn’t get the quick fixes. Catch-22.
6. Updating our dialup software’s phone book. There have been many numbers added in the past few months.
7. Double checking to be certain that none of the users are local admins. This will solve most of our headaches before they happen.

So my week will be taken up by all this and the onesy-twosy hardware and software issues that inevitably occur like: “My Palm doesn’t sync with Outlook” or “Why can’t I open our product photos?” or “My system is really slow”.

Sounds like fun, huh? You just want to be me!

We did it at work today. Patched almost all the servers (about 150) to protect them from the latest ASN vulnerability. I say the latest because there will probably be more. Also, at home I went out and performed all the updates. You know, Windows Update, Ad-Aware update and AVG Update. Even though I have AVG set to automatically update, I thought I’d hit it anyway.

The main reason I went to Windows Update was because I was surfing along and checking email when all of a sudden, my screen went black and I had a static-like noise from my speakers. Jeez. No, I didn’t click on a link; no, I didn’t open another program. The screen simply went black. After rebooting, I went out and did a WU. Hopefully my Windows will not be so volitile. When I run in my Linux partition, it simply works - no reboots, no lockups, no strange happenings. It only does that stuff in Windows.

I went to the Ad-Aware update site and then scanned with Ad-Aware and found almost 40 pieces of spyware. Must have been Breezomatic loading something on my PC - I certainly haven’t done anything that would install spyware.

What? You said you haven’t been to Windows update recently? Get there now! Update your computer. Update your spyware-detection software. Update your virus protection software. Do all these things at least weekly. What are you waiting for?