Hacker for Hire

I’ve been saving this post for sometime, but it appears that since I am the only one left, the time has finally come.

Well if you know me, then you know I’m a fond believer in the fact that it can always get worse. And today it did. I am now the only engineer left at my company. We have 4 people on the administrative staff and 1 on the engineering. It feels almost like office space. I would like to reassure myself with happy thoughts of greener pastures and a company that appreciates what I do and the effort that I put forth for them, but it’s harder to do that each and every day. Everyday, the spiral continues downward further and further and the fight to stay out of oblivion becomes more tiresome each day. I find myself waking up to my alarm only to watch it tick the minutes by as I wait until the absolute last second before getting out of bed and dawning my armor of sarcasm and bitterness for the day.
Continue reading ‘And Then There Was One’ »

Every now and again, a vendor comes along to entertain my boring existence that I’m currently experiencing. This time it was Cisco. If you don’t already know, Cisco is the big dog in networking equipment. Rivaled by few, challenged by fewer, they tend to have a good handle on networking. Recently, they have stepped further into the security side of their equipment with their “Defense in Depth” campaign. One of the tools they are considering releasing is called Cisco PSA. What follows is my very basic, official, informal review.
Continue reading ‘Cisco PSA’ »

Ah, once again, Scott Adams saves what I could chalk up to another horrible day at work. Today, Scott’s post is about his bad thoughts that he’s had. Having worked at a place that I absolutely hate for 3 weeks, I can easily relate. So I present to you, my devilishly tasty evil thoughts of the week.
Continue reading ‘Devilishly Tasty’ »

Well, if you’ve been following along with the saga of Wyatt, you will know that I’ve been forced to go back to the client that I was removed from because I was not producing the results desired by the client. In case you missed it, you can go read my rant here.

Today, I returned to the client site to meet with, not the one, but the two engineers who would be replacing me. Seems kind of odd that I was not producing the desired results, yet the work I was doing required two engineers to replace me. But that’s neither here nor there, the important issue today is what actually happened on the client’s site. I should also note that my purpose for being on the client’s site today was to ‘learn’ from the gentleman installing CiscoWorks and Cisco ACS. So I meet these two engineers (sounds like the opening to a bad joke), Wingus and Dingus (names have been changed to protect these idiots). Wingus went on to work on ACS and I joined Dingus to watch and learn on CiscoWorks. That didn’t really last much more than 5 minutes before I got a nice heap chuck from Dingus. So now I get to do the install, to which I question…why? I mean really, I’m supposed to be the one that was removed for not knowing how to accomplish this task and now I have to do it again. Does that make any sense to anyone out there on any level? If it does, you let me know and I’ll come and club you followed by a pod of baby seals to commemorate the impact you would have left on the world. So during the o-so not painful install process that goes through one CD about every 2 hours (that’s a 6 hour improvement from the Solaris installation) Dingus sits and watches me. Well, no wait, that’s incorrect. Dingus whined and complained about how horrible his computer was running and how he couldn’t install PCAnywhere to get access to the system and how he couldn’t get VNC to install on his system and how he could barely check his email and on and on all the while doing the “flop like a dead corpse that was just beat in the head with the butt of a shotgun” move and adding the “oh geez” sigh with the “rub my bald head like a bowling ball” for flair.

Dingus proceeded to do this approximately every 5 to 10 minutes while we (and I use that lightly) were installing CiscoWorks.

If you think that this is enough to drive someone ape-shit up a banana sandwich tree, you are right on the money. Ever 5 minutes he would come over and look at my screen because that’s where all the “action” of watching the installer bar move was. After which, he would proceed back to his chair to do his patented move once again. Just for my enjoyment I’m sure. Well, this went on for … the whole blasted day. Oh, forgot to mention that we had to go to Vernon Manor for lunch to have a really crappy buffet that cost nearly $10.00 and wasn’t worth a bum’s left index finger.

So at the end of the day, I got a call from my boss asking me how my learning went, to which I replied, “I’ll have to call you back on that.” When I called and told him what had happened at the end of the day, he was pissed. First off, because there was only supposed to be one engineer billing time to the client. Second, because Dingus was absolutely worthless. Then he went off on how I was supposed to be there to learn and not be there to just install CiscoWorks by myself again. As the whole conversation wound down, he finally came to ask where we were at with the project. My response was “Exactly where I would have been if the client would have let me continue doing my job.”

It’s always a pleasure to get something unexpected in your email. Today, the 61st edition of the DNRC newsletter was released to me, and I must say, it was good. Along with all the other fun stuff that comes with it, I found that Scott Adams, the creator of my role-model and hero, Dogbert, has now started his own blog. You’ll see that I’ve taken the chance to add it to my blog role. Although I don’t personally know Scott Adams, his quotes, such as this one, make me feel as if he was my crazy uncle that no one liked me hanging around, but I did it anyway so I could learn how to make armpit noises and tell fart jokes.

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a
thought process much like this:

1. The world sure needs more of ME.
2. Maybe I’ll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of
knowing my thoughts.
3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.
4. I know – I’ll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.
5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn’t involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.
6. What? It’s called a blog? I’m there!

The blogger’s philosophy goes something like this:

Everything that I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head.

It’s statements like those that make me smile that sort of evil smile you get by smashing a kid’s ice cream cone into his face so he’ll remember you for the rest of his life.

Today is a new day, or so it seem. I’ve been officially removed from the last client I was working at. Yes, that’s right, removed. Ousted, dropped, etc. While relieving in the fact that I won’t have to go to a client where I’m hated, I’m slightly frustrated in the fact that they are hiring someone else with more network management experience. It’s not that I’m going to say I’m all that and a bag of chips, but that I feel these people really are dorks. I found out that the director of our client contacted another client of ours and had words and found out that I didn’t have as much experience in the Cisco realm as the guy who had been doing it for 10 years. Really? You think? Go fricken figure. But that’s completely worthless at this point because I’m very happy I don’t have to go there anymore. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced it or not, but walking into a place where everyone dislikes you and you are the communal scapegoat is not something I enjoy waking up for in the morning. Come to think of it, there is an even bigger reason behind why I was unhappy there.

I’ve seen many sides of the computer spectrum. I’ve worked mainly in the IT and support side, and studied in the theoretical and software design side. From this, I’ve come to determine that I hate IT. I love the security portion of it, but that’s all. None of the rest holds any value to me (this was determined as we went around the meeting table for the 7th time over the same 3 bullet items). When I think about all the fun things that I had done in school, the ones that were the most fun were designing and bringing to life software. Not just any old hacked out code, but something that you could see and interact with and had so much though and engineering in it, you couldn’t help but marvel at the amount of effort that the individuals put forth. That to me was awesome, not going around all day doing the never ending support tasks that eventually build up. Maybe I’m just tired of being around non-innovative people. Nothing in IT is ever created. It’s installed, patched, configured, operated, maintained, and crashed. I think I need to find my way out of this mess and into something that has a bit more creative license (just not too much, cause we all know what code with “too” much creative license looks like).

UPDATE 10-24-2005
It seems that the fates have spit in my face once again. Apparently, as the last indigent jab towards me from this client, I have to return the client to direct and shadow the engineer that is supposed to be replacing me. I need to leave before this gets worse.

Every now and again, I have this urge to just do something sinister and evil. It’s not that I’m a bad person, it’s just I think that we need to distribute the evil a little more fairly. So I figure the best way to mess with people is to keep it simple. The easier it is to create the evil, the easier it will be to use it. So I present to you, my most recent evil ideas.

1. Screeching Horn
OK, so this one came from having to drive around in the Rookwood Commons parking lot on Saturdays and Sundays. If you’ve never been to Rookwood, it’s basically an outdoor shopping mall for overpriced crap that a bunch of self indulgent nincompoops buy. If you’ve been to Rookwood, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Well, a couple of somethings these nincompoops do that annoys the crap out of me are walk outside of the crosswalk and drive really, really stupid. The average person would sit and curse under their breath in the car saying all sorts of mean things; however, the over aspiring engineer sees and opportunity for invention. Solution: The Screech Horn 100. Again, keeping with the idea of simplicity, this is nothing more than a 100 dB horn with a slight twist. Instead of creating a sound in the key of F (if you have an American car), the horn would produce the sound of screeching tires, at 100 decibels. I just picked 100 cause it was a nice round number. But imagine the joy that it would bring. You are sitting patiently at a stop sign, two people stop to chat in the middle of the crosswalk, and SCREEEEEEEEEECH!!!!. Just the thought of some soccer mom being scared so bad she can’t carry her 50 pairs of shoes from DSW is enough to put a smile on my face.

2. Door Handles
The common punishment for driver who do not obey the laws of the road is a fine or a revocation of their license. The problem is that this isn’t effective enough. Well, sometimes taking the license away is good, but a fine just doesn’t have the long standing impact that you like it to have. So instead of fining individuals, we do something much more annoying. We take their door handles. Not just the outside, but the inside ones too. So now you go to get into your car, you have to jimmer-jammer the door open and closed every morning when you get into your car, when you get off from work, cause you know exactly how frustrating it is to ‘miss’ the door handle in someone else’s car and spend 5 minutes looking around for it when all you are thinking is “Let me out of this damn car!!!”

3. Magnets
Yeah, I can see you over there thinking, “Wyatt, that is stupid.” But not when you apply it to good use. All computer cases, have some metal in them, it’s just a matter of where. Simple enough trick, add a magnet to the outside of the system case, preferably a magnet from an old SCSI hard drive or something of the like that is super strong. It probably won’t be enough to completely trash the computer’s hard drive, but there is a good possibility that just random portions of the system will develop sporadic behavior that is generally not desirable.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for more evil ideas as I think of them. Oh yeah, I’m not responsible for anything you choose to do with this information or anything else you decide to do. Consider it a lesson in PERSONAL RESPONSIBLITY.

You know, I haven’t complained about work lately; probably because it’s not been as bad. But I do have something to gripe about. At the client I’m at, I’m the first contractor they’ve had in 4 years. Anyone else smell something? So far since I’ve been there, I’ve been fingered as causing 3 problems. First, they had a system just sporatically reboot. They looked to me because I was walking out of the data center at the time they got the page. After some asking around, they found out that I was back pulling cable (yeah, hell of a job for a Security/Software Engineer) and no where need the racks of servers that had the failure. The second one was that a Solaris box locked up and caused a backup failure. Naturally, I was working on a Solaris system. Again, the system that locked up was not the one that I was working on. Third time’s a charm right? Ha, I think not. Their core router was spiking in utiliazation due to the SNMP process getting into an infinite wait. Again, they came to me because I was working on the system that talks SNMP to all the network devices. Nevermind the fact that I was working on a totally unrelated component. So after they come to talk with me about it, and we walk through what was wrong, we come to find out that THEY were the ones that caused the problem when they upgraded the router and removed a command that causes a bug. And as me to have a smart ass verification, I showed them that their SNMP querying system didn’t even talk to that router. And another thing, who in their right mind would put SNMP on an Internet facing router??? Oh sure, that’s a great idea, let’s just allow everyone and their brother to determine/modify our router configuration and blow up our Internet connect. Morons.

I got my first email account back in 1996. Back then, Juno and AOL were the big boys on the block and Microsoft was just being a pest by offering free email at Hotmail. Since then, I’ve become an email-account junkie. I have an account at Yahoo, Gmail, UC, work, and two at Hotmail. Since I’ve gotten this domain, I’ve added my wyatt at hackerforhire dot org account. Now of course, this requires having some sort of access to the email, either a client like Outlook or use a web mail solution. I’d have to say the best way to go is web mail access. For us open source folk, there aren’t that many *good* options for web mail. I know, I’ve looked. When I installed the server, I went through all 2 that Gentoo had builds for and the other 20 on Freshmeat that looked like they had some sort of potential. They were all pretty much sub-par. So I stuck with Squirrel Mail. It wasn’t the best looking or the most user-friendly interface, but at least I could check my mail without it exploding and dying horribly. Then I found this new one that I’m liking a lot. It’s called RoundCube Mail. It was posted on slashdot about a week and a half ago and it reminded me that I still had it “installed.”
Continue reading ‘AJAX Webmail’ »

Well, I finally got the new hard drive installed in the server, not that you’ll notice. However, now I can finally get my FTP site back up and running again. That will give me a good store for my music (yah iTunes!) as well as about 30 more hours on my MythTV box (when I get it back up and running).

I really miss my MythTV box. Staying up late to watch all the cool shows is really kind of annoying these days because I really don’t like getting up in the morning thanks work. There seems to be some issue with the card that I have and it actually displaying information on the television, but I’m to lazy at the moment to go hook up the real monitor to it to see what’s going on. It’s sad to say, but I think that I’m actually considering moving to Windows Media Center 2005 because of how much easier it is to get drivers that works. Then again…I don’t want to get a blue screen of death when I’m trying to watch the absolute last showing of my crappy sitcom that would ever be seen on television