I work for a smallish company - currently somewhere between 250 and 275 people (I know we haven't hit the 300 mark yet). I've been employed for about a year and a half with them (started in May '06). And this company is a young one at 6 years of age. We seem to move at the speed of light compared to most businesses. In the year and a half I've been with the company we've outright bought one company and merged another under our brand name. And lastly we are a privately held company in the Dayton, OH area.

So I was originally hired in as the first person of a helpdesk. Only I've really never done that job for them. A helpdesk person is chained to a phone in a cubicle all day and takes calls. In the beginning, I'd take a call, and then I would have to head to the client's location and take care of the problem(s). And on top of that I'd get random paper shuffling jobs that I guess everyone else was too busy to do, so they just decided to give it to me. Fast forward to today, we do have a helpdesk these days (which has gone from myself to about 10 people), but I'm not really apart of it. No, indeed I'm pretty much still what I would term a field technician.

The company accepted a contract from a client that was to last 18 months. It's actually been shortened to 13 months, and thankfully that is up at the end of December. So for the last 11 months I have been doing what I said I would not do when I hired in (i.e. during my interviews). I would travel up to 25%. No more than that. Well from March through July I was put on a two week on the road, one week at the office rotation. OK we're up to 2/3rd travel... Then in August, the client and my employer struck up a special addon to the original client that was to last from August to the end of the original contract. Myself and 3 other poor souls/coworkers (who also had no option not to be put on this assignment) are now travelling 100% (except holidays of course) Mondays through Fridays until the end of the year.

I see my home 2 days a week: Saturday and Sunday. I have enough time to catch up on snail mail, make sure all the bills are covered, do laundry, and pack for the next round of travel. Somewhere in there I have to do some "paperwork" (its all electronic/database stored) before I leave on Monday mornings as well. I've been in 6 cities in 5 days at one point in time. I stopped counting the number of cities I've been to since I started this project after I counted fifty. And the number of states that I've been to (one of which I've been to 4 times) is up to 14. Next week I'll be heading to Illinois (15). And after that New Hampshire (16).

So what's the point? Well my salary still reflects what I did prior to this project. The closest match I could find to what I do on (looking on Salary.com) was "Field Service Engineer I". Namely, that I travel to places, install equipment (PCs, servers, and network equip), train personnel, troubleshoot broken equipment and get replacements on the way. That pretty much sums up my job description. Salary.com's profile says that the mean salary for a Field Service Engineer I based in the Dayton area is around $42,000/year. And that the low side is $36,500. Well, imagine my shock at reading that when all I get to bring home is $32k/yr. Talk about underpaid.

And it's somewhat funny (not really) at the same time. I think we just saw on Slashdot, in the not too distant past, a reference to an article about tech jobs exceeding other job sectors in compensation/benefits/whathaveyou.

Well, I'm not seeing it.....

I'd leave Ohio if it weren't for the fact that I would be leaving some really good friends behind, and the only family that I care about. I've seen some nice jobs posted OUTSIDE of Ohio.

The real kicker is that my employer is now "fishing" for a Systems Administrator. We have an IT Director whose been doing that role as well, but now that we're expanding again (significantly this time) they want to hire an SA. I applied for it, but haven't been given a definite on whether I'm going to get it or not. If I get the promotion, it would mean less travel. I'd only have to travel down to Blue Ash every now and then.

If anyone out there cares - cross your fingers for me. Then again, I'd be managing Windows servers... :/

I have to go to Philadelphia in a week. I've been to quite a few places in Pennsylvania, but not to Philly specifically, so this should be interesting. I've done a decent bit of traveling since I started my new job. In the last year I've been to...

• Indiana (twice... two different cities. Auburn and Angola).
• New Jersey (Newark)
• Pennsylvania (Washington, Somerset, Carlisle, Mount Joy, Morgantown, & Allentown).
• Tennessee (Nashville and Chattanooga)
• Alabama (Mobile)
• Georgia (Savannah)
• Florida (Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Jacksonville, Titusville, Fort Pierce, Orlando, and Palm Beach)

...and also next week I'll be in Delaware a couple days after I do some stuff in Philly.

Later!

Well, it has arrived. Wow. This Mac is a monster (both in size AND computing power). It is amazing just how fast this thing flies around OS X. I've yet to install anything other than Firefox and run software update, so I have four cores that aren't getting much exercise at the moment. (That comes very soon!).

One of the first things I am going to grab next is the MacFUSE package.

Oh and having a whole bunch of windows/apps open simultaneously without anything skipping a beat is sweet. I mean not even a hesitation. :) I've got Mail, Firefox(quite a few tabs), Dashboard (of course), iDVD (got George Carlin in the bottom superdrive), and a few other things running and this Mac hasn't even noticed its doing any work yet!

OK, I guess that's enough geeking out for now... ;)

I finally did it. I've ordered a new Mac with the intention of switching the majority of my computing tasks to a Mac...

I've played with Macintosh computers off and on since 2001. And even prior to that in middle school - the first computer I ever touched was in fact a Macintosh (I don't remember which model - but it was black & white only I do remember that!). Through friends and in high school however, I was introduced to the "intel-compatible PC" (Mac is part of that crowd now... heh). I became fascinated with DOS and Windows 3.1 after taking computer literacy classes in highschool. And somewhere around the end of my junior year I was introduced to Red Hat Linux 5. My fascination with Windows wore off around the time Windows XP was released. And as I've reinvestigated the Mac, I find that with the newer OS X (and classic but a memory) I like Macs this time around.

Of course, the last straw that pushed me over the edge is Vista. I can't avoid getting to know that OS completely, I realize. My job won't allow that. I *will* be doing support for Vista soon I am sure. However, I can limit my Windows exposure at home. It will be here just to keep up with the Microsoft world and not much more (hooray for Parallels). I've pretty much given up on gaming anyway - the games are getting lame/stagnant (or I'm just not interested anymore?). I did option out my Mac Pro with an ATI X1900XT 512MB just in case I decid to pick up a Mac port of a game I like sometime down the road though.

So, I opted for a Mac Pro tower. The specs of which are:

• Two dual-core Xeons @ 2.66GHz
• 2GB RAM (for now)
• A single 250GB hard drive (for now)
• And an ATI X1900XT 512MB 16x PCI-E graphics adapter

I think that'll do for a while. :)

With all the travelling I've had to do for work lately, I hadn't had the time to try out the LCD with my linux box properly. While I still haven't bothered tweaking the console yet, I did play with X tonight. For whatever reason, I could not get the "nv" driver that ships with X to run the LCD correctly. I tried modelines after just setting "1680x1050" did no good. Eventually what I ended up doing was emerge the nvidia-drivers package and getting the binary driver from Nvidia going. :( Upon installing Nvidia's driver, just setting "1680x1050" worked magically (no modeline needed).

It should be noted, BTW, that the linux box is attached to a KVM that the widescreen is attached to via the regular SVGA cable. I have three systems on the KVM. The DVI cable goes to my desktop system with the SLI setup in it. Of course I can only use one input at a time, which is fine. I use the keyboard and mouse portion of the KVM cable for the 4th port on the KVM to my desktop system. I don't use the video portion and instead use the DVI link.

Anywho, back to the linux box... Well since I don't use any 3D on this box (it's a server) I'd rather use the nv driver since I've had the occasional lockup when pushing the nvidia driver playing games. And if you're asking yourself "if it's a server then why do you have X running?" it's mostly there in case I need X + a web browser for an emergency lookup. I use Window Maker for the window manager (lightning fast startup even on this old dual PIII 600MHz) and I run a few xterms + firefox (not really slow either). That's it for the GUI. No - I don't like using links (or lynx). :P

...couldn't I have been lucky enough to get sent southward for a business trip instead of being sent further north!

Akron:

• Too fucking cold,
• Even further north than where I live,
• and it's fucking snowing.
• And one more thing... this hotel sucks ass.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

So, last night I got my 22" Samsung... WOW! What a difference. The first thing I did was fire up UT 2004 last night and... O M G, the action was so huge I think had motion sickness for a split second. But it's awesome. Fragging was never as much fun as it was last night. In fact, time got away from me, and so I never did boot into my Gentoo partition to try out the widescreen in Linux.

Unless I get side tracked, I plan on trying it out in Gentoo tonight. Or at least SOME time this weekend before I have to go to Akron next week on business. Damn - new monitor and I'll have to do with out it for a week!

So, for any of you that bother to read my infrequent JEs - have any of you tried a widescreen flat panel in linux using a DVI connection? I have my sights set on a new flat panel - this time I'm going widescreen and I'd love to be able to use the DVI connection while I'm at it. However, if it comes down to it, I have the analog VGA connection to fall back on.

Sonicwall, please tell me the fastest way to shove this TZ 170 directly up your FUCKING ASS!

Thanks,
Disgruntled Customer

Well, after being told off by a Gentoo developer tonight - I will be switching to another distro. I've never once made a demand or a request from any of them. I've used Gentoo for two years now, but... Fuck'em!. I'm done with Gentoo. I have always RTFM'd, and I know how to use the utilities. However, I am not a coder, and I don't pretend to be. Users don't edit packages and installers - they just use utilities and programs to achieve what they need!

Also, calling your users "stupid" is a good way to have no users in the end. (I am not stupid - I have installed successfully and used OpenBSD 3.2 once upon a time. Try that for a no-frills, do everything yourself OS. They even have the most cryptic fdisk program I have ever had the displeasure of using).

I didn't know about Eureka until someone asked if I had seen it (I haven't yet). So, I went to investigate on scifi.com and got a few laughs from the "Made in Eureka" portion of the site. If haven't seen the show or the web site either, then get a few laughs from this link.

Maybe some day we can have something like this? heh. :)

The EFF are terrorists according to the FBI...

So like one of these missed where I work by about two blocks...

I work on the 5th floor of what most people around here call the Dayco Building (across from the Dayton Mall). I thought on the way to work this morning, "I wonder if any of the windows were broken at work?" Nope, not a scratch! Unfortunately, some other businesses weren't so lucky.

The company I work for wants to have a documentation repository that field techs can access from the field. A key piece of information here is that we have a significant amount of contract workers in addition to our permanent staff. Now, in my haste, I blurted out, "How about a wiki?" After explaining what a wiki is, management is now interested in seeing a working proof-of-concept.

The guidelines:

1. Single Sign On: Management is big on having one logon for everything, in this case that means authenticating against active directory since we are primarily a windows shop.
2. This goes hand in hand with #1 actually, but the system needs to be able to allow for groups that have (for example) "admin" (full privs), "editor" (can add/edit content, but not control the whole portal), and "user" (get read access to docs only). Or something to that effect. The idea here is that to even access the wiki you have to have an account to login. We don't want the world viewing what is in there, yet it needs to be accessible from everywhere since we have staff in over 15 states now. I hear someone saying "use VPN" so that the normal "user" group is eliminated, and logons only being needed for editors/admins. Except, we prefer to not have contract workers VPN'ing into our LAN. We only allow permanent employees to do that.
3. Price: it needs to be implemented as cheaply as possible. Thus the reason I even mentioned the word "Linux".

Thoughts:
Well, obviously the simplest route to easy authentication is to implement the whole thing on a Windows box. Doing this on Linux would require OpenLDAP (right?) and I've not played with that at all, so that will be a learning experience. It would be kind of cool, though... and it would be the only linux server in the company so far.

Anyhow, if anyone knows of a good package (free or not) that can meet all three requirements, send me a link to said package so that I can take a look at it.