Remember last week me talking about how the bandwidth provider for my company decided to be just plain stupid and put the screws to my company, thus ensuring we would hate them forever? Guess what? They weren’t finished.
This morning, as I was walking out the door, literally, with one foot on my patio, I get a call from my boss. It went something like this:
He: “Did the domain transfer screw up our network name resolution?”
Me: “Not that I can think of. Let me check the transfer status.”
He: “Because we have no communication, again. No email, no web, no vpn.”
Me: “It looks like the domain name is still in the previous registrar approval phase. I am not sure what is causing our outage.”
He: “Could you call our sys admin to see if you can figure out what is happening. Right now we have no email, no web, no vpn.”
Me: “Sure thing, let me call him.”
I called my guy and together we came upon something a little different from the last outage last week. We started with our normal troubleshooting techniques: ping, tracert, dig. Very quickly we came to the conclusion that our DNS was not resolving again for some reason. The only difference between this time and the last time was that this time the DNS servers were not responding at all to our requests. I called my boss back and told him that I had given our sys admin the name and number of someone to talk to, even though my attempt at calling him was an epic fail. The phone went to voice mail, but they have not message center so I could not leave a message. Instead I was transferred to the switchboard where I was told that there is no known number and I was hung up on. Nice.
Knowing that my hands were tied at home I told my boss I would be in shortly and began my drive to work. When I got in about 30 minutes later my boss was on the phone. Wanna know with who? You guesses it. Our bandwidth provider.
Now I know you want to know this. What was the cause of this outage? Was it a catastrophic failure of a hard drive? Perhaps a full blown upstream network outage? Maybe a power outage? No. You’re going to love this…
We didn’t pay our bill.
What? Wait, we just took care of that last week didn’t we? Apparently not. See, the email that contained the invoice we were supposed to pay from never sent. Their paper invoice printing system has been offline for a few months so they could not send us a paper invoice. And apparently it was not noted anywhere in our account that we had spoken to their highest level AP person who had assured us that our services would not be terminated again. With that, someone who saw that our account was past due decided to pull our plug all over again.
Are there any further lessons to learn from this? Sure. Try not to be stupid more than once in a given weeks period of time. I tend to think that if that company were a person my boss would have driven to that person’s house and kicked that person’s butt halfway across their bandwidth pipe. Which might not be as far as I think seeing as they are now pretty much nothing more than a name and a phone number. That doesn’t allow messages or actually route to anyone.
Oh that I would be a man and do the things that men do.
Robert Gonzalez
I have so wanted, as of late, to stop being a wimpy, cowardly, weak male and become the strong, dominating, adventurous, aggressive man that I was created to be. And for the most part I have begun this transformation, authoritatively, taking back what I should never have surrendered to begin with. And I have found that with this step toward exercising my authority, dominance (as a person, not as a man over someone) and power that I have also been faced with challenges designed to poster me to to that very thing.
What I mean by that is that I have felt the need recently to display my strength to myself. My physical strength, the stuff that comes out of the broad shoulders, large legs and muscles that God gave me. As I man I have been created strong and I believe that is for a purpose. But a purpose in design is nothing more than an idea if it is not put into practice. It is my intention to put my design into practice as often as I can and with that shatter the notion of what I used to be when being a man was not a priority to me.
To that end I have decided recently that I needed to begin the handle the management of the finance in our home. If you have ever read any of my more recent entries you would know that our finances are pretty unstable right now. There are a number of reasons for this and to be honest, I do not see Sandi handling the finances as a reason at all. I would say that any real man would take responsibility for ceding that role to his wife.
Now hear me as well as you can… I am not saying a woman cannot handle finances. Lord knows there are plenty of men out there that have put their women necessarily into the position of financial manager of the home. But I have to say that even though my wife is skilled at handling a checkbook and several bank accounts, it is my calling as the head of our home to handle that, very often stressful, responsibility. I am the hunter, the gatherer, the conqueror, the killer. My wife is the preparer, the tender, the handler of the kill. Together we are the consumers of both my work and hers. I believe it is my role to ensure that my wife has all of the tools the she needs to do her work adequately and effectively. It is my place as a builder to build her a platform upon which she can live out her calling.
To that end I am now in charge of management of the finances. Not blindly and in complete isolation. To the contrary, we are both involved intimately in the finances, we both know where we stand daily and we both are aware of what is coming up. The difference now is that I am making the hard, sometimes painful decisions that were really entirely too heavy a burden for my wife to carry for so long and she is supporting me in that.
So after church this morning my wife gave me some time alone to get the finances and accounting log in order and then we talked about it. I had to come to some pretty hard decisions and some pretty inevitable conclusions, but it felt good to do something I am supposed to do. Even Sandi told me that she is feeling better with this change. How can you not when you begin to fulfill your purpose?
Later on during the day I was working on something for a client. Lord knows we need the money something awful and this project has gotten so sidetracked by things in my personal life and the busy-ness of my client. It needs to be done, both the work and the project, and I need to get it done. I am a worker and builder after all. This is what I do. And I was doing it. And something came up. Something that needed my manliness at that moment.
My two older daughters’ bunk beds needed to be put together.
One of the funnest things a man can do is use tools of any sort and physical strength to forcible manipulate those tools. We love that kind of stuff. So much so that some men go into trades that require that daily. My friend Ray is a prime example. He is millwright. He gets to break stuff, build stuff, work on stuff, work with tools, get dirty, get bloody knuckles… the full gamut, daily. I write web applications. I still get to use tools, but not the kind that put the feel of cold steel into a burly hand and demand that the steel be wielded. So when I get that chance I run to it.
I was able to take apart my two daughters’ beds and reassemble them in a way that allowed me to stack them. The I had to assemble the rails and what not so that Sarah doesn’t fall on her face in the middle of the night. Then, the coup de grâce was that I had to coordinate the lifting of the upper bed onto the lower bed and move the assembled bunk into position on the wall that we decided to put it on. Outstanding. I haven’t worked like that, physically, in a long time. And it felt great.
After this I was a little tired (from waking up early primarily, I will explain that in a day or two) and from all the other activity this weekend. But it felt good to use my physique for its designed purpose. And it felt good to be tired because of physical exertion. I needed that. In more ways than one.
I really don’t like starting a Saturday working on work stuff at home. Especially when I am not supposed to be working on a Saturday. I don’t mind working when I am supposed to be working, but when I am supposed to be making breakfast for my family or taking care of stuff at home I get a little testy that I have to interrupt that so that I can tend to things at work.
So it went this morning, when by 8:45 I was getting called on my home phone and cell phone that there were things breaking left and right and why was this happening and what is going on? Huh?
It started with a frequent background job failing but not notifying. It then led to a series of other issues including an intranet that went down, an account management app that went down and our core site that went down. Coupled with that were all of the background jobs and middleware apps that were not transferring data as expected. Things were not working so me and a few fellow co-workers were.
The cause of the situation ended up being a few other nightly jobs running, killing something and never bringing those somethings back up. Then another job decided to reboot a server but not bring it back up properly. This in effect made all of the other servers that talk to the one that was reboot to stop talking to it. It happens. Anyone that has ever worked in an IT environment knows things like this happen.
But when handled properly it only happens the same way once. A second time means you didn’t learn from the first. Screwing up is inevitable and should be handled with grace and understanding the first time it happens. Any subsequent (and by that I mean the second time only… after that more than one person is to blame for these issues) instances of failure like this indicates an inability to learn from your own mistakes and should not, in my opinion, be handled with the same amount of grace and understanding as the first time. I know that may sound harsh, but that is the reality of living in a real-time environment in which money transacts and businesses serve.
The incident this morning was a case in point. Nothing that took place this morning should have taken place this morning. In fact, a remedy for this situation was put in place, for a different identical server, just a few days ago. So it begs the question, if an identical machine bought at the same time experienced something like this and was fixed, why would it’s twin not be fixed? You get my point.
What ended up happening is that three people, one of whom was me, ended up spending non-work time working because of an error on the part of another teammate of ours didn’t learn from the last time something like this happened. Yes, I am complaining about a teammate. We all are, or at least should be, held to the same level of accountability in everything we do as a unit. And this does not just hold true for work. It can easily be applied to sports, families, friendships and businesses.
I love my job. If I come across in a way that indicates anything otherwise please don’t hesitate to call me out on that. I actually look forward to coming into the office and taking care of business everyday with the team I work with. I appreciate their knowledge, their expertise and their experience. This is very much like my family, and more specifically my wife, whose experience and knowledge provides a wealth of protection to me and my family. My team at work provides a similar level of protection to our team at work.
That is the nature of a team environment. We protect us. We advance us. We are us. Every person on the team should take the responsibility for the success of the team and do whatever it takes to maintain a high level of accountability to the team to see to it that the team succeeds. If that is done then Saturdays can be spent as a normal Saturday and my blog post for today could have been about something entirely more pleasant than this.
This morning I was faced with an extraordinary issue when I got to work. We had no network services to our domain name. And apparently I was the one that was supposed to know why this was.
After looking closely at what was happening, and realizing that emails had not been received to our mail server for a time, and that none of our web sites were running, and that users of our VPN were calling complaining that they could not connect to the network for some reason it dawned on my that it was time to check our domain name servers.
A quick look as it was pretty apparent that our name servers zones were completely missing. After a little more time trying to figure out what was happening, and at the same time trying to vindicate myself from savage disciplinary action due to a recent domain name transfer request that has gone horribly awry, I finally came to the conclusion that our domain name provider (and our bandwidth provider) must have gone out of business last night. They have been on their last leg for quite some time and their services have tanked considerably. I figured this was the last leg of their journey into the toilet of despair.
I was wrong.
After following their horrible excuse of a menu system on their call-in support system I got to their new domain name providers (they have sold off every one of their divisions to other companies so I was actually talking to another company). At the same time I decided to call the guy that has been not helping transfer our corporate domain. While on hold with the new company I actually made contact with our current guy. And I found out something interesting: our zone files in their DNS server were removed because of failure to pay a bill.
Under normal circumstances I would say that this would make perfect sense from a business standpoint. Except for a few points:
- The amount we owed was $225. Our normal monthly bill is about $2,500.
- The last invoice they sent us was in May. For about $2,500.
- The last invoice was for bandwidth and domain name management services.
- Our DNS services were terminated because of an outstanding bandwidth invoice. Bandwidth remained online.
- They never sent a bill for the outstanding amount.
- They never attempted to contact us for the outstanding amount.
- They have been providers of our for more than 10 years.
- We are their biggest account.
That said I would say their handling of this case was an epic FAIL. Worse yet, the one guy that any answers for us (one of four remaining employees with the company) had no access to their systems, billing or otherwise, and was only able to add our zone files back. He was not able to transfer calls, take payments or offer any other insight into what was happening. He couldn’t even give us the phone number of their account person so we could contact her to straighten this out.
Once my director of IT was able to actually traverse their phone support system and get in touch with the woman that handles their billing and accounting it came to light that they never did send us an invoice and that we were apparently supposed to be mind readers when it came to paying for stuff we may or may not have used.
Ultimately the situation ended with my boss receiving confirmation that he would indeed receive an invoice that he could send to the AP department here so they could pay it and get us out of hock. And after a few minutes of downtime we were back on the air.
Now I know there are lessons to learn from all of this. But I think it would have been more useful and helpful if our service providers had taken to learning those lessons before shutting down a US$100M company for a stupid $225 invoice that was, get this, only 45 days late.
Wanna keep your customers happy? Try communicating with them. It would have made all the difference in this case.
A while back I turned comments off to unregistered users that were not logged in. What that did in effect was make it so that you had to not only register but also login in order to post comments on my blog.
I know that is a hassle but I was getting so much frickin spam that I had to do something. Akismet was doing nothing. I was moderating upward of 40 spams a day and I got tired of it.
But lately I have had a change of heart. I have ran across several very popular blogs that do not require user logins or even registration. And if those large scale blogs that are read by thousands of viewers a day can do that then my scant little blog can certainly do that, too.
So today I am restoring my trust in people. Trust that they will not abuse my little blog that all three of my loyal readers visits once every couple of weeks. Trust that spambots will not launch an all out attack against my little space on the internet. Trust that, if given the chance to say something about something that I have said, people might just speak up if it is easy enough for them to do so.
So I invite you to comment freely on my rants and blurbs. Beginning today.
Holy crap what did I NOT do today…
- Woke up at 6:30 to take Bekah to play tennis
- Made breakfast for everyone
- Picked up Sarah and Annah from grandma’s house
- Made lunch
- Cleaned some of the nasty kitchen
- Played the wii with the kids
- Handled quiet time
- Went for a walk with the kids
- Cleaned more of the nasty kitchen
- Removed Alaynah’s training wheels (at her request)
- Helped Alaynah a little bit with learning to ride a two wheeler
- Made dinner
- Cleaned up dinner
- Cleaned more of the nasty kitchen
- Handled (a longer than normal) bed time
- Started watching a movie
I say started to watch a movie because I only got part way through it. I feel asleep really hard in the middle of it. I know I was tired, but I was supposed to stay awake for one more thing…
My wife promised me some dessert tonight if I took care of dinner. It was actually a nice gesture since I was going to make dinner anyway and I have been dying for some dessert (it has been a while). I like having something to work for, not that I don’t always. But when your wife cuddles up to you and brings mention of dessert to the table in exchange for handling dinner… well, you have to think that making dinner just got that much better today.
I took care of dinner. But where is the dessert? Oh well, I am too tired for that anyhow.
I am a social media hound. I love the social web and all that it encompasses. And as a web developer I love finding new instances of technology in use around the Internet. In the arena of Internet technology no where has there been as exhaustive an explosion of technological advancement and the inventive use of said technology as in the social media space.
It would go without saying then I have a pretty deep place in my internet <3 for social web sites that kick ass when it comes to the use of modern technology (or older technology with a modern, inventive spin on it). Of those sites, my favorites are Twitter, BrightKite and FriendFeed. I am not really sure if I like Plurk and Kwippy just yet, though I do use them. I also have accounts at Utterz, Pownce and Identi.ca, and I tie them all together with Ping.fm. I am not at all a fan of Flickr or Picasa or YouTube or Facebook or MySpace. There is just something so nasty about all of them that I only visit those sites on occassion and, when I do, it is usually only for short amounts of time.
Enough about my fascination with the social web. Today I was asked by Twitter’s own @missmotormouth herself, Michelle Naranjo, to be Interviewed because some of the recent Tweets I have made regarding fuel prices and the effects of said prices on families, outings and the general economy of the home. I have used the social web for a while as a medium to voice some of my discontent with rising fuel prices. I have used this blog to voice a lot more of the discontented feelings I have regarding lots of stuff. A lot of what I feel makes its way into the social circle, including my thoughts on homeschooling, marriage, finances, work, programming and many other issues that I hold dear to me.
In talking with Michelle about fuel prices we also got on the subject of homeschooling. We talked briefly about her daughter’s challenges in public and private schools and her success with homeschooling before being admitted to a magnet school. We talked about the current state of the California education system. We talked about Christianity (mildly) and we talked about the economy.
We also talked about Toyota and the trail they are blazing through the auto manufacturing sector, the experience I had with NUMMI (a GM and Toyota joint venture plant), some of the knowledge I had gained from knowing the Toyota Production System and some of the other things I have experience with, like car sales, design, time to market and customer experience. In the end it was a great hour or so spent talking business, economy, children and experience. Plus I was asked if, in the future some time, I might consider writing a guest blog for an as yet to be named site (not sure how I would do that seeing as I can barely keep up with mine).
But of all that I could take from this experience the one thing that stood out to me the most is that the social web can be used in today’s business world if used properly. Not all socializing on the net is young men stalking young women hoping to “hook up”. It is very possible to find lots of useful information, and to provide lots of useful information, when you use the internet in an appropriate way. It has given everyone an equal voice and a platform by which to project that voice. And I have used that platform, sometimes thinking that I was the only one on the internet, to broadcast my thoughts, rants, feelings and commentary. And lo and behold, someone was listening.
Socializing with me
If you ever want to know what I am up to when I am not totally neglecting this blog…
http://twitter.com/RobertGonzalez/
http://brightkite.com/people/RobertGonzalez/
http://friendfeed.com/robertgonzalez
http://www.plurk.com/user/robertgonzalez
http://www.kwippy.com/RobertGonzalez/
http://www.utterz.com/RobertGonzalez
http://pownce.com/RobertGonzalez/
http://identi.ca/robertgonzalez/
I had a terrifying and horrifying realization this morning on my way to work: there are a lot of things a man should be able to do that I have never done. Scarier still, I have never even thought to do some of those things. This scared the hell out of me. The next thought that came to mind was that I had better set out to straightening this out before I never get around to doing it.
So I began to put together a list. And the list got bigger and bigger and bigger. And as of this writing it is now looking like:
Useful things I have never done
- I have never shot a gun
- I have never shot a bow
- I have never lit a fire without an accelerant
- I have never killed or skinned a hunted animal
- I have never stayed out in the wilderness overnight
- I have never tied something down that absolutely had to stay tied down
- I have never caught a fish
- I have never jumped a chasm
- I have never dove into open water (lake, sea, whatever)
- I have never built a house
- I have never fixed a broken car, motorcycle or bicycle
As I began to think of all the things that I have never done but should have done by the time I was 16 I realized that my entire life as a man has been spent on other things outside of the necessities of a man’s necessary knowledge. Men need to know how to do those things on my list of things not yet done.
That’s right. As I looked on that list I began to assert my desires and intents as a man. I fully intend to do each and every one of those things on that list. Within the next two years.
And hopefully at the same time I will be able to test some other boundaries of mine as well. That was another thought that crept in as I was coming to these conclusions earlier this morning. I have almost completely lost the sense of boundary testing that all males seem to have. When was the last time I did something that scared the crap out of me and gave me the willies like never before? How about you, when was the last time you scared almost to the point of skinning out?
I long for that. I think. But I didn’t realize it until today. I need an adventure. I need to test myself. And I sure as hell need to put myself in a position of handling those things on my list. I say I start with hunting and move from there.
As I have described in recent posts I am on a bit of a quest to find out who I am as a man. I discovered recently that I have abandoned my masculinity in favor of peace and harmony over the last few years and that has led to much angst and issue in my home and family.
Today I discovered something else about me that I hope to improve upon as I develop my masculinity: I all too easily will put a promise that I make aside for my own benefit. That is cowardly and shows no sign of fortitude at all.
Case in point: last night I told my wife I was going to go to Target at lunch and pick up the movie Chicago so we could watch it tonight. You know what I did at lunch? I went to lunch.
I know it doesn’t seem like much but to my wife it was huge. And I suppose it should have been. I said I was going to do something and I didn’t do it. I took my manhood and staked it on a promise that I blew off. All that does for me as a man is show that my words means nothing. Any of you men out there ever done something like this?
I am at a point right now where doing what I say I am going to do is vital. I have to be able to build that trust back up that was lost over all these years of complacent maleness. Not coming through is not going to do that. In fact, it will do the exact opposite. There are few things as important as a man as being accountable. When you stake your reputation on a word you have got to come through on that word. Period.
I hope there is a lesson to learn here. I am still learning and I full on expect to learn the hard way a few more times before I get it right. But it is important to take things like this seriously. Your identity as a man, and mine too, depend on that.
Every good morning starts with a last night. And my last night was pretty awesome.
If you read about my yesterday you know that last night my wife and I had a date. We attended the wedding of a mutual friend of ours (without our kids even) and the subsequent reception. And we had a blast.
Sandi was a knock out last night, with the gray silver, white and black dress she wore and her black leather boots. She also wore some very complimentary jewelry and she did her make in that “Rooowwwr” kind of way. She was stunning.
We sat in the reception hall for a while as the wedding party took there pictures. I had a beer and a glass of wine, then moved quickly to my regimen of Coca Cola and waters. The wedding party seemed to take forever to finish up the pictures which meant that we had an unusually long time to wait for dinner. But that was offset nicely by our tablemates, the lovely Norma, Roda and Katie and Katie’s man Larry. We talked, laughed, drank, talked more then finally were able to watch the wedding party come in.
By the time the wedding party actually made it to the reception I was ready to eat the legs off my table. But I handled my hunger well and by the time 9:30 rolled around and we were able to eat dinner I ate up like a dog, going back for seconds and thirds from the wonderful buffet that was served. After filling up on all those calories it seemed only logical that we should work to burn those calories. Apparently the wedding planner thought the same thing and turned on the disco.
Dancing has never been one of my favorite things to do. But when you are a man paired up with a woman that looked as hot as my wife did last night then you dance. Plain and simple. And I danced. Unfortunately the evening was late all around because of the start time of the wedding - it was supposed to start at 6:30 but didn’t really start until around 7 - and the wedding party photos, so after just a little dancing it was just about time for us to head out. Which we did at about midnight.
Now comes my favorite part of the whole experience. We went to bed. Together. In the same bed. Isn’t that exciting? And the even better part? I got to woke up next my bride. How awesome is that. It was the best cap to a very good night.
I almost wish all weekends were like this one.