Bigger Than Life

Posted: 22nd September 2009 by ê¿ê in Classy Stuff
Comments Off
HOLLYWOOD - NOVEMBER 10: Writer James Ellroy ...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

As I was driving into work this morning and listening to my favorite radio station, an interview with author James Ellroy came on.

Now, I do enjoy reading crime novels, so was immediately captured by the subject of the interview. I was, however, totally unprepared for what came out of my speakers.

Ellroy’s presence literally erupted from the radio, diminishing my own character with the strength of his. Reading his words on paper  gives you no sense of this man’s strong aura. I cannot imagine sharing a room with him for any length of time.

It became apparent that Steve Inskeep, the interviewer, had his hands full with Mr. Ellroy. To Inskeep’s credit, he managed (barely) to stay on top of the interview.

Ellroy’s writing style may be more (or less) than the casual reader can follow. The excerpts of his novel “Blood’s A Rover” show him to write in staccato sentences that often aren’t complete. No adherent to proper grammar or sentence structure is Ellroy.

Taking his description of the outline to heart, this novel is compacted with information; no page should be skimmed over or the reader is likely to miss out.  A nearly 400 page outline is nothing to be fooled with.

Ellroy is self described as a history re-imaginer. He lived through the ’60′s in a haze of drugs but the rich history of the age seeped into his soul and is now emerging as these imaginitive twists on what we perceive to be the events of the time.

From peeping-tom-to-private-eye main character Don Crutchfield (who is supposedly modeled after a real Hollywood PI) to Wayne Tedrow Junior who turns diet pills into hard drugs and kills for the fun of it we are exposed to some raunchy people. But in the end, it’s a come-to-Jesus experience or so says Ellroy.

Read more about this amazing author at NPR.org.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Planning for Disaster

Posted: 21st September 2009 by ê¿ê in Technology
Comments Off
i wish i would have known yesterday
Image by // solidether via Flickr

One of the things I’ve been harping on for months now is having some kind of disaster plan formulated for our data. Of course the perfect plan would be to have our database mirrored on another server located somewhere else in the country – our California office came to mind initially for several reasons. Our new IT manager has the same opinion as far as the disaster plan is concerned and we have been working on getting that up and going.

We’re using VM Ware to clone our current system and have moved our backups from tape to a portable hard drive that we rotate taking home with us at night. We discussed using some kind of online backup service, but vetoed that idea as none of us are truly comfortable with our data being held by a third party.

As a blogger, I also have a backup plan in place. I have a routine backup job set to run once a week to backup my database and that file is emailed to me. I have also set up to have the system files backed up and sent monthly. I don’t change the basic look of the blog all that often, so backing up those files less often makes sense.

Setting up the job to send the system files is a bit more tricky as it involves you logging into your server and setting that up in the cron jobs. Or you could just FTP the files to a folder on your computer.The cron job can be scheduled though while the FTP has to be done manually, leaving a period of time open when you might forget or not get to it.

I’ve also installed MySQL on desktop unit not connected to the internet as well as some programs that simulate a server and restore those files to that server periodically just to make sure they are good files. I probably don’t do that as often as I should, but at least I know how to restore from backup to MySQL — and in all honesty it’s not that much different from SQL.

If you don’t back up your database you truly should take a look at doing that. It’s easy to set up a job straight through WordPress to send you that backup file as often as you would like it to come. I do it once a week as I figure a weeks’ worth of posts is the most I’m comfortable with losing, but you could set it up to run as often as you wished.

Stay safe!

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Service Businesses Face Challenges

Posted: 18th September 2009 by ê¿ê in Technology
Comments Off

View Larger Map

I work for a service company. We provide maintenance and repair services to other companies for their food service equipment. That means we are a 24/7/365 business. Thank goodness I work normal hours.

But I digress..

We try to do most of our administrative tasks in-house. We did try outsourcing our data entry at one time, but that was pretty bad. They were trying to read from faxed copies of handwritten documents and our technicians

a. don’t spell well to begin with and
b. have terrible handwriting.

The data entry people made a hash out of the information they were putting into our database and I spent a lot of my time cleaning up typos, or correcting poor grammar and spelling errors.

Now the techs have laptops and we’ve created a web-based portal for them to do data entry into that utilizes a lot of drop-down lists and has spell check for the other areas that accept free-text. That’s cut down on a lot of the spelling errors at least.

Another area we’ve outsourced has been our call center services. They used to rent space in the same building as we were in, so keeping them apprised of new customers and changing business models wasn’t such a big deal, but now they are not so convenient and it’s becoming an issue.

But these things notwithstanding, I find I’m still having to spend a lot of time correcting errors that should have been avoided and could have been if the call taker were just plain aware of what I take for granted like the proper two letter abbreviation for states. We had a call yesterday that was in Arizona and the call taker had put in AR instead of AZ. There’s a huge difference between Arkansas and Arizona! I guess it could have been worse — it could have been Alaska and they used AL instead of AK. Making a mistake like this one costs us in time as much as anything because the system balks at giving that call taker the correct tech assignment and then if someone actually gets dispatched, they end up at a site that hasn’t called for service or worse, an address that isn’t even a customer’s! Some of our contracts have stipulations that we must arrive on site within a proscribed period of time or we can’t charge them for the service.

Staying competitive in today’s market often hinges on the effectiveness of the back office personnel. It doesn’t do much good to meet the contracted response and solution goals when you don’t get the invoice out the door and into the customers’ hands! We’re working on automating a lot of those processes which, if what we’ve done so far is any indication, will  result in a big improvement in collections and billings.

We still have challenges to face, though. The face of business changes daily. Are we up to it? Yeah, I am confident that we are barring a spelling mistake or two.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Living in a Cube Farm

Posted: 17th September 2009 by ê¿ê in Friends & Family
2
North view of cubicle
Image via Wikipedia

Where I work, we have a cube farm. You know what that is don’t you?

It’s a huge space filled with these walls that go 2/3 of the way to the ceiling that you hook together to make pseudo-offices.

They give zero in the way of privacy and you can hear what everyone in the office says or does all day long. Forget having a private telephone conversation. Everyone knows that you called the doctor to find out the results of your STD test.

Lighting in these things is an issue for me. Ours are placed so that the ceiling lights just put glare on my computer screen. I go home nearly every day with a headache from that. I don’t know if san diego cubicles are any different from those we have here — I’ll have to ask the folks in our California office what they think.

My cube looks almost exactly like the one in this picture — the only difference is my chair. I do have a nicer chair than that one. You can’t see it, but there’s a light underneath those overhead cabinet things. It puts an even worse glare on a computer screen than the ceiling lights do.

And Ken wonders why I like working in the dark in my office at home….

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Older Entries
Newer Entries