having committee meetings in my head everyday

What I like about psychological tests is that despite all the generalisation, and how unique I feel I am, I still feel that it describes me. My team recently did an assessment on our emergenetics profile and mine says this:

She has two thinking preferences (Analytical and Structural) from the "left brain" and one (Social) from the "right brain". This gives her brain a slight bias for the logical and rational over the intuitive and inspired. She has two thinking preferences (Structural and Social) that are concrete and one (Analytical) that is abstract, giving her concern for details and practical matters a slight edge over theorising and speculating.

The gift of the tri-modal thinker is the ability to empathise with other ways of thinking. She can understand nearly anyone. She can be a catalyst or a facilitator in a group and help promote understanding among the team members.

The stress of having this profile comes from being "Jack of all trades by master of none." She is not always able to sort out her thoughts or feelings about an issue, all sides of the issue make sense. Most likely, making a decision is difficult and time-consuming. As one tri-modal explained, "My brain needs to weight all sides of the question. It's like the committee has to meet, and sometimes the committee fights with itself!"

It really describes how I feel everyday - having committee meetings in my head everyday. It's amazing how it happens, and nobody can really imagine how it feels unless one experience it first hand. It is very tiring to listen to internal debate everyday, and it increases proportionally with my work (read: issues that I have to resolve). I am always the last tower in tower defense terms and I always need to try to influence others to position myself as early as possible in the game and yet still be able to cover the back). Sometimes I see myself as playing 10 boards of chess concurrently everyday. When I was younger, I used to suspect I had a minor split personality disorder. After reading a bunch of literature, I conclude that I wasn't because split personality disorder people are not conscious of the different personalities. I even thought that maybe I was possessed by another being because it became very scary when I had the whole scene visualised in my brain before I actually see the sequence of events happening -  everything happens according to what I plan. As I grew older, I started to accept that it's just the way my brain works, and used this gift to help others understanding themselves better, and lead happier lives.

lessons on interrogation

Today we met up with our vendors to resolve a 1-month old problem, SMTP set up. The last part of the saga was when I went around asking people how they configured their SMTP settings (because I haven't done it before), and also googling and reading how to send SMTP commands, only to have people asking me, "why isn't your vendor doing this for you?" "you are the first person I know who helps their vendor do such things" "why are you helping them?"

Simply because I didn't have a choice. The user calls me every 2 hours the past 2 days to ask me how to resolve the issue, saying that all the web forms must work and the vendors are saying that the web forms can't work without SMTP, and she has promised her boss that the site will be live this friday. After I passed all the information I gathered to the guy, he still said he couldn't get it to work. His boss said that this is an environment factor that is beyond their control, and if we are unable to provide them with settings that work, then they are unable to do anything.

The problem sounds simple. The vendor insisted that we need to give them a username and password to access the SMTP server. The SMTP server works on an unauthenticated mode, meaning no username and password required. I had 3 other systems sending emails through the same SMTP server and all did not need to authenticate with a username and password. Eventually, I sent the question to the helpdesk managing the SMTP server, and we are still waiting to solve the mystery.

That aside, I couldn't understand why the web forms couldn't work if we couldn't send emails. The web forms were storing the data submitted into a database, and the email part was to notify the webmaster that someone had just sent a feedback. They had been explaining and explaining for the past 2 weeks, but I couldn't understand until today, when I asked them, if I don't have any email available, how will the error message look like?

It turned out that the error message misled us into thinking that the form wasn't working! OMG The error message was "we encountered a technical difficulty in submitting the form". When I asked what other error messages he had, he said "we encountered a technical difficulty in saving the form". It was then that it suddenly became clear what the problem was. The forms were saving data into the system, but the notification portion wasn't working, so if we just change the "error message" to "thank you", the user who submitted the feedback will not think that it is an error, the feedback is still captured in the system, and the only thing is the webmaster will need to log in to the system to retrieve the data.

You can just imagine the users' reaction when this was reveal to them. What initially was on a critical path of failure turned out to be something not critical, and all we needed was someone to take the problem apart.

really serious troubleshooting business

I was troubleshooting a 5 month old inconsistent and intermittent problem earlier because I had been relying on the vendors and the issue had not reached the fire-on-the-backside stage.

The problem was easily resolved  in 30 minutes after I figured out the 10 lines of shell script that was fetching the files from the ftp server. I would not have been able to write the shell script from scratch, but I guess I have a good translator in my head.

Before that, 2 external and 2 internal data centre server administrators, 5 application vendors, infra manager, and myself, were all unable to resolve the problem. Just 2 weeks ago, the server admin was asking the infra manager why he is taking so long to solve the problem. The server admin was telling the application team that their code was wrong, the files need to reference the root instead of the sub folder. The application team blamed the script for not copying their files properly. I wasn't contributing constructively by chasing the application vendor for status updates as well.

11 people involved. What a joke, all I did was to tell the shell script to read from the sub folder instead of the root, but to be able to troubleshoot the problem, the person needs to understand shell script and html, which sounds like common sense, but I guess the stars were not aligned.

the account locking mystery

It start last monday 10.40 am when a user notified me that scampoint was down. We did the usual checks, but it was the first time we encountered the symptom - scampoint admin account was locked out, and irregularly, sometimes 30 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minute, finally stopping at 2 pm. 5 pm it started, locked out a few times and stopped at 6 pm. For the whole day we were checking the various logs, and well... nobody could identify the problem. The application administrator, server administrators, application support vendor. The source IP locking the account was the scampoint server itself.

Tuesday was peaceful. We did a reboot of the servers just to make sure. The server administrator was telling me that the application administrator doesn't even know how to troubleshoot the problem. I told him, administrators are like operators, and if they can do troubleshooting then they are better than others, like himself, he is an server administrator, but he helps us troubleshoot our scampoint issues sometimes. So that was a psychological nudge that I was passing problems to him.

After spending 2 days thinking, I asked these guys what they thought of my speculation, that it's a human triggered action, because it only happened during office hours, has irregular occurrence, and anybody who tries to log in with our user name will lock us out with the wrong password, which is so easy to find out because our admin account name appears all the over place, if you know how to look. What I could think of was just typing a wrong password for a particular user name will lock the user out. Everybody was still clueless, so I escalated to their infra manager, i.e. my infra guy, to ask him for ideas. He told me that he was impossible to prevent an account from getting locked out.

I went back to the administrators to tell them that we will be on our own so I asked the server administrator whether he could write us a script to automatically check our account every minute and unlock it if it is locked, and then send an email notification. His incentive was to feel satisfied that he has contributed to improving the productivity of the team, have lunch in peace, and not having to take turns to monitor whether the account got locked, else we will all have to write an incident report because the intranet is down when everybody is out for lunch. He was helpful enough to agree, and that took some stress out of our plates. My agreement with him was that it's just to help us save time to solve other issues until we can think of something for this issue. Today we had about 10 burning scampoint issues on hand. One of those days where it feels like I am defusing a time bomb, and I cannot make any mistake. The scampoint administrator is already quite stressed out and tickets are piling up.

Luckily for today, the account locking happened 3 times between 10.10 and 11 am, and for the rest of the day it was fine. I was trying to reproduce the problem, but couldn't, this is just self-affirmation I won't pass as a hacker. Thanks to the guy who told me it's impossible to prevent the account from getting locked out, I turned to my friends, and one of them suggested that I lock down the account. I was so glad that he had been thinking about it for 2 days too! So we will try that tomorrow and if it works, we may never know what caused it, and it may be a pity not to know the answer to the mystery.

who wrote it?

Me: [addressing question to vendor project manager] why was this sentence written this way?

Vendor project manager: Hmm, I didn't write this, I am not sure.

Me: Who wrote this paragraph?

Vendor project manager: [vendor technical director] wrote it.

Me: [addressing question to vendor technical director] why was this sentence written this way?

Vendor technical director: I don't know why it was written this way, I didn't write this.

Me: Who wrote this?

Vendor technical director: [vendor project manager] wrote it.

Me: When? [vendor project manager] said he didn't write it.

Vendor technical director: he typed it after the meeting he had with your team.

Users and I all burst out laughing.

strangleton

I am usually patient, calm and good, but when I am sickish, or lack sleep, I become aggressive and any one who annoys me makes them a strangle-ton, adapted the word from singleton.

Me: have we settled the outstanding issues with the user?

Vendor: yes, we have already explained to the user that it cannot be done and customisation effort is required.

Me: and the user agreed?

Vendor: yes, the user agreed to have it in phase 2.

Me: there is no phase 2.

Vendor: yes, there is no phase 2

Me: if we make this application too difficult to use, they wont use it and we don't need to think of any phase 2.

Vendor: yes correct.

Me: the users asked for a breadcrumb trail, why can't we give it to them since it's out of the box?

Vendor: because we didn't give them rights to open the root level folder so the breadcrumb trail doesn't work.

Me: why aren't you giving them rights to the root folder?

Vendor: because giving them rights to open the folder means they will be able to see the files and delete.

Me: can't we just don't give them rights to delete those files?

Vendor: no, because we don't want to break inheritance, and they have delete rights at the root.

Me: what are these files at the root folder?

Vendor: system files, the application pages that the user needs to use the system, that's why we cannot allow them to delete.

Me: why do you store the system files with the user files?

Vendor: because we only used one document library for our applications.

Me: how hard is it to separate the system and user files into two document libraries?

Vendor: it's a simple change of configuration.

Me: then can we do that and give users the breadcrumb?

Vendor: yes

Me: we need to give the users as much productivity features as much as it is within the cost and scope and breadcrumbs is there, and we will be short changing them by your (lousy) application design.

Me: now to the next issue. Why are you telling users to move files one by one instead of using the file explorer bulk moving of files functionality?

Vendor: because we only allow admin to delete/move files in bulk. Users are not admin, so they cant use the function, that's a requirement.

Me: but there is still an option for the user to move files via file explorer.

Vendor: they won't know because we didn't tell them.

Me: they are intelligent people and you think they won't know just because you don't tell them?

Vendor: yes

Me: can we tell them that they can use it?

Vendor: no, they are able to delete files in the file explorer when they don't have rights, but if they use the application they will not be able to delete.

Me: that's a breach of the security model of the product, are you sure you can delete?

His colleague explained to him that the user can click delete but if he refreshes the window, the file will still be there because he only deleted his local cached copy.

Vendor: there is another thing, if they delete from the file explorer there is no audit trail.

Me: audit trail for file explorer is an out of the box feature, why isn't it in the audit trail?

Vendor: because we customised the audit trail so there is no audit trail at the file explorer because we didn't want users to user that function.

Me: since you have already customised the audit trail, there is not much we can do for that, but tell the users that if they use the file explorer to move files, it will not be captured in the audit trail. I don't want the users to use the file explorer and then report the audit trail not capturing the move as a bug.

Vendor: ok.

Me: so think about how you want to tell the user everything we have discussed and we will meet the user next week.

Well the positive side of it is that I know we should be able to sign off the system next week after these issues are resolved. The bad part was to the user I took 2 weeks to get round to this because firstly, the vendors were supposed to be closing all the issues, and secondly, because I was away from work due to yaya's teacher's day school holiday, yaya's HFMD, 1-day course, my own body hibernating, my more ferocious users hunting me down immediately on my return, and of course the 10 chess boards that I rotate playing everyday. Another vendor I met today thought that I only have 1 project with them. Isn't that what every user thinks too? that they have tonnes of work whereas we are idling somewhere escaping from all the work. haha.

The trick is similar to multiplexing, getting the right sampling frequency of the user, and always appearing at a particular frequency to make them feel that you are full time with them, and always there for them, when you are not. And like in networks, you need to have a range of bosses/users/vendors with differet frequencies, so that you don't miss any packet. If they have the same frequency, then we need to double the sampling frequency. Ok digressed too much, the multiplexing bit was just a friday crazy bit, cant really be applied at work, there is no trick. Just pure brain juice being used to play 10 boards of chess concurrently. It helps if your opponent is 10 times slower than you are.

manual work rocks

This happened yesterday, a friday. My colleague asked me to attend her migration meeting at 4 pm but I told her I wasn't free. My phone rang at 5 pm, she asked me to go her meeting because there is an issue. So I went and it was over in 10 min.

Me: what is the issue?

Vendor 1: our migration service request only covers exporting of data to DVD but not importing.

Me: why not import?

Vendor 1: because there is no way to import a data table with attachments.

Me: so how is it supposed to be done?

Vendor 1: you will need to import the spreadsheet first, then manually attach the documents back one by one. It is not in our migration scope to do it. Users are also not going to do it.

Me: and why must I be the one doing it?

Vendor 1: that's the issue now.

Me: do you have any unique identifier to link the data row and attachments?

Vendor 1: no, you need to look at the title.

Me: how is the folder structure going to be like in the DVD?

Vendor 1: just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ...

Me: how do you get those numbers?

Vendor 1: we drag out one folder at a time, manually, the numbers are system generated.

Me: if the system has the number, can you export it out to the spreadsheet?

Vendor 1: yes.

Me: if you have the number, then you can create a link to folder containing these files. We just upload all these numbered folders into a folder.

Vendor 2 (vendor 1's boss): oh...

Me: do you understand?

Vendor 1: we can't link to the folder.

Me: we manually pre-fix the URL to the root attachments folder to those unique numbers.

Vendor 2 explained to vendor 1 because he couldn't understand. At this point, the users already understood.

Users: we will use this method.

Vendor 1: we will just give you the spreadsheet and DVD and there will be no links to the attachments.

Me: nevermind, I will show you how do it when the time comes.

He must be still lost, but I think his boss should be able to explain to him. I really don't how they survive as vendors to be recommending manual work. Actually I don't really have any business in this, but that's how my work is.