do you know anything about virtual machines?

That was what my supervisor asked me, I said, depends what the question is, so he was telling me about 2 server architectures proposed by the vendor, one is purely with physical servers, another was all VMs.

The PjM who was doing the calculations, all the technical guys were out for lunch, and they wanted to ask me for a second opinion. She was not aware of the various components required so I explained to her what a SAN is, what a database cluster is, VM host, mount point, etc, then she asked me, "so do i need a vm host if i just use physical servers?" Without a thought, I said no. She said, "Really?" I confirmed with her that the physical servers were not intending to host VMs. After that she went back to do her calculations and all, then my supervisor asked me what I thought of the diagram, I said, I don't think you need a database cluster unless you intend to build a data warehouse.

In the end they went to look at the details and realised that there was no database cluster required. It was also supposed to only have 1 application server, so I don't know why they need a hardware load balancer.

Another weird thing on the diagram was a firewall was placed between the hardware load balancer and 2 application servers, and the load balancer was placed on the web-tier. Well... I didn't want to dig too much, so I just didn't bother, maybe people really do that.

The power of double

My friend commented that I havent been posting much on fb, which is true. Over the past 1 month, my workload doubled miraculously, but the time I have stayed the same, which meant that my response time for my original work doubled.

Simple logic right?

The power of doubling my workload in one month forced me to make changes to the way I work, for better or for worse lol. The most drastic, very unlike me thing I did was to ask others to do things that I would normally have done, like asking my user to arrange meeting, asking my user to tabulate a spreadsheet for tender evaluation, and talking with people over the phone instead of meeting them face-to-face.

The next change I observed in my behaviour is that I talk and write less. For e.g, normally I will explain to you the problem until you understand, but when I dont have time, I don't even explain to you and just tell you, once resolve, you test, ok, case close. I only talk when really necessary, otherwise I just email minimally. I reply emails only if the world will stop or the train will crash if I don't reply. Normally I will also ask people what their immediate task is to understand what my team mates are doing, that also disappeared.

In terms of tasks to be completed by me in the same working hours, it is still the same, but because more issues will accumulate before I process them, resolution actions became more efficient when there are similar issues. So maybe... Economy of scale theory applies to my queue. Workload doesn't really matter, I will end up reprioritising what to do, tasks stay longer in queue, but they still get done.

Sometimes you wonder where the phlegm got choked at

This morning I had a 9-10 am meeting, so I thought, cool I have some time in the morning to do work, then my supervisor told me I have a new mission, setting up of a website for another user whom
I haven't met before and then I ended spending my 10-12 pm with them. The choking thing was the guy I had to work with only got know about it few days ago and had no idea what the requirements are, his boss was also still in the brainstorming stage, but the good thing about the meeting was this guy had the limited edition League of Legends box on his table and played World of Warcraft before all the expansions, so we started talking about games before entering the work topic, and the atmosphere was very friendly.

But after the meeting you can't help but wonder where the phlegm got choked at, but the good thing is I will not be the only plumber clearing the phlegm from the pipes. And after writing this, I realized I used phlegm instead of the normal shxt, lol, maybe cos it just isn't as bad as a shxt-clogged pipe.

What are chances your vendor bitches about someone else's code?

I met my ex-vendor on the train, he was complaining about the code developed by the atas vendor. They hardcoded a lot of values and he had to fix their bugs even though he was only contracted to enhance the program.

We worked together for another similar program, and I decided to redevelop the whole thing because the one developed by the atas vendor wasn't scalable. So he was comparing what we did good with what atas did bad. I thought it was quite odd for us to be bitching about the atas vendor's code.

P.S: atas is Singlish for "high-class"

Do you always take very long to respond?

My colleague told me she wasted 30 min listening to my user complain about a software installation because I didn't follow up. I was glad she told me that because I thought I only had to get the software installed for them.

I didn't know that I had to teach them how to use the software. The users also didnt ask me how to use when i told them that desktop team will be going around to activate the software for them.

My supervisor told me to get the paperwork done to make sure that the users get the software. He also asked me whether anybody would be doing it, so I said the desktop team, but he added that there will be additional configuration needed, so I said that since there is no one else, I will do it. I never got to the configuration step because by the time I was done coordinating the installations for 10+ users, the trial key had expired and there was still 1 user whom we couldn't catch.

So today the same bunch of users complained to her about another issue then she told me I need to follow up, I said it's an ongoing issue and we have been updating the users. Well... Escalation is free and easy, but not effective if you try it time and again and you are not feeling any difference.

She also said I owed her the steps to create a blog entry, and because of that, the users are not doing anything, implying that I am delaying the schedule.

And then towards the end of the day, she must be quite fed up with me, she asked me, you seem to be always very cool about everything, do you always take every long to respond to things?

My answer to her, yah. She must be raving mad. :p Being at the bottom of the food chain means there will always be ppl shouting at you from the back of the toilet queue that they want to shxt but you must not be distracted, else nobody will get to finish their business.

2011 in a page

Unlike most years, this year was spectacularly different because yaya has joined the family. On the self development front, this year was very stressful for me, never had so much stress continuously day after day, mainly because the Hubby didn't want a kid, so I have to do everything that is interfering with his life. I am opposite from the norm, stress makes me weaker, not stronger. So I remove sources of stress, rather than face it because I am very destructive.

I was very grateful to have supportive bosses and colleagues who covered my duties during my maternity leave, and also allowed me to take 2 days of leave weekly for 2 months as I slowly adjust back to working life. They also had to put up with my milking schedules at work and days where I had to take leave when yaya was sick.

Some of you know that I get incessant nags from the hubby whenever I don't reach home by 7 pm and the bus 145 which I take from orpit to Harbourfront mrt was always crowded and infrequent. I still had to fetch yaya to and fro the childcare daily. As stress is always caused by not knowing what to do, I was frequently stressed by my homebound travel route. Car option is beyond reach.

The Hubby also nags at me to change my boss, easier said than done, because of my workload. I was held back at work a few times but gradually got more frequent, and to add on the self depreciating factor that my boss said I wasn't doing much work, and when I confronted her statement, she said I had no milestones delivered, it became the last straw that erupted the volcano building up inside me.

I changed my job despite many ppl advising me against citing the need to often take leave to take care of yaya and also stress from new work environments. But I remove stress factors, I don't work well with stress, so changing my job meant I had to be very selective with the job scope, location, boss, pay, ... I feel very fortunate to bump into a job with similar job scope, hence gentle learning curve, near mrt, so from my door step to my desk takes 40 min, pay higher so Hubby accepted my job more, workload slightly lesser, boss wise, so far so good lol.

Another change I decided to make was to change childcare next year when yaya turns 18 months from cherie hearts to Mindchamps. After a visit to the school, I was sold because all the kids were so alert, and they have gym, music, baking classes included in the programme. It's $1.4k/month after gov subsidy, but I still decided to go ahead with it because yaya had been falling sick very often recently. We will start her in the new school in June. When I ask ppl about Mindchamps, they tell me it's good but very atas, only for rich ppl, but I believe, 1 cent 1 good, money can always earn back, but yaya's health cannot.

I am very demanding when I want to, so I asked the childcare teacher what can be done to prevent yaya from falling sick so often, she told me that all other children are ok. Immediately I failed her, but I gave my demands, to wash her hands every hour, wash the toys before giving to her, for at least 2 weeks to give her time to rebuild her immunity.

So money is still important, this year has been a year with high spending. Medical bills for yaya is easily around 5k. Saving on the childcare would just translate to more medical bills and more downtime at work which also translates to $$. Of course there is still the stress option to hire a maid but I am sure it will cause me stress because hubby, my parents and in-laws will definitely tell me to tell the maid to do this and that and complain to me when things are not done to their satisfaction.

In terms of objectives for next year, I will continue to work hard at keeping all of us free from sickness.

desktop support woos

As you know, emails normally reach me after they have travelled a million miles around the world. Today we decided to make a call to the helpdesk call centre to enquire the status of a ticket about slow loading of m$ word documents on external servers and our intranet. When I read the email history, just like how you will flip the passport to look at all the visa stamps from all the various customs your passport had passed through, it seemed quite obvious that it was a desktop setting issue, which was why I didn't bother about it. The problem is, things that are obvious to me are never obvious to others for some odd reason. I decided to look at it because noobs were asking whether our server is slow -.-"

The answer the call center gave was somewhere along the line that the problem has been identified to be caused by a slow server in the network, which is curently undergoing migration. We asked him what he meant, he said there is a legacy server in the network which is causing the slowness. I still couldn't understand what he meant, but from what I know, the only migration works are the DNS and AD servers. The guy taking our call is also not dumb, he told us honestly, that he doesn't know what it means too. lol Thank goodness, there is a sane person in the call center. He said he will check and call back. I don't know how the story continued because I didn't follow it.

The next story was about a website's site access statistics report being inaccurate. As it was a straightforward thing, I didn't even look at it, I just let the vendors ding dong among themselves. So after 1 month, I took a look. After looking at the stats, I realised what the problem was. The stats included those pages which will result in access denied pages, and access denied page wasn't part of the stats. You can just imagine the user questioning why certain users who are not supposed to have access to those pages/sites are showing up in the stats report, and the vendors replying to check the permission of those users, and after the permissions are checked, these ppl don't have access but the stats shows they have access, so the user said it's a security breach and wants me to investigate. How intelligent. Product design wise, hatepoint doesn't differentiate access denied or access allowed, which sounds dumb, but that's what the vendor said, so I just left it as that for now.

So yah, the queue to see doctor me is about 1 month's long. If they perservere long enough, ie generate >20 emails in my mail box, I will look at them because those vendors have been paid to resolve those problems, and by right, I shouldn't even have to solve problems for them.