07.22.08
New Job @Pomeroy IT Solutions!
This has been in development over the past few weeks, and I wanted to keep it under wraps until I had determined it was indeed blog-worthy. As most of my friends and family know, I have been looking for a new job for the past few months- something in the IT field.
I responded to quite a few Monster and CareerBuilder postings and even had a few interviews (including one for a job in Wyoming!) Either the jobs did not pay what I felt I was worth, were too far away, or were otherwise not a good fit.
I had initially been hopeful of starting at Robert Half Technology here in Cincinnati, as the recruiter seemed to like be and appreciated my interest in Linux and Open Source. Unfortunately, we had some communications problems after the interview- he was out of the office for an entire week and did not receive any of my voicemails and the position he was going to recommend me for was subsequently filled.
The interview at Pomeroy went especially well, especially when I identified a legacy BNC connector on a rather antiquitated PII server. I was skeptical that I would hear anything back, until I received a telephone call last Tuesday. They wanted to know whether I was still interested!
Starting August 4, I will be a Depot Technician in charge of reimaging workstations and portables at the Hebron distribution center. I will also receive training to be a certified HP Printer Technician. I’m looking forward to my new job, but I don’t think my current employer will be as enthusiastic about receiving my notice.
07.02.08
Farewell, Lindows!
I remember seeing the boxed copies of Lindows during my youth when my highschool buddies and I would, having nothing better to do, hang out at Best Buy. That was back when I thought I was cool because I had Windows 98 Second Edition and that 32 MB of RAM was plenty. Oh the sweet bliss of ignorance!
Even after agreeing to change its name to Linspire, many of us geeks still referred to the distribution affectionately as Lindows. Now this distribution is no more- now all Lindows/Linspire assets belong to Xandros.
The saddest thing about Lindows is what it was not. While other Linux distributions such as Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSE grew and found a following, Lindows did not. Other distributors figured out that the consumer was too fickle and mindful of trinkets to truly appreciate the power of a UNIX-like operating system.
Today, you will find Red Hat on application servers running JBoss, not in your eight year-old’s bedroom as the operating system on her PC. You find SuSE on corporate workstations, not on home entertainment PCs in the living room. And that PC in the kitchen the busy working mom uses to check her email, play a few games, and maybe ordering a pizza online to feed her family? It’s not a Lintel box.
Sure, a few enlightened people among the masses want UNIX power in a consumer package. Those people own Macs. Linux belongs in the enterprise. The enterprise needs Linux. Linux can solve some of the problems facing the enterprise better than proprietary alternatives- rising costs, licensing issues, and flexibility.
The Sad State of Tech Support
I am the assistant manager for a Comfort Inn here in southeastern Indiana. As a Choice Hotel, we are required to use Dell exclusively for our workstations, servers, and peripherals. Our equipment generally runs reliably and in the nearly three years of operation, all of our problems have been software related and thus covered by hotel support.
Unfortunately, we experienced our first hardware failure last night when one of our Dell Optiplex workstations began spontaneously rebooting. First we received a warning about a fan failure. After the second reboot, the boot volume could not be detected. Subsequent restarts resulted in bluescreens with MACHINE CHECK EXCEPTION codes and the ominous hexadecimal memory addresses. Finally the machine dies entirely and refuses to POST
So I call Dell. The guy on the other line was friendly, but evidently not very proficient with PC Support. He decides the fan must be bad and arranges for a dispatch to overnight me a new fan. I suggest to him that a new fan will not make a PC that refuses to post or power on suddenly begin working again and recommend he look at either the power supply or a backplane failure. He puts me on hold. Lo and behold, five minutes after consulting his “information”, he comes to the same conclusion and decides to send me a new power supply.
The sad part of all of this? While this machine is covered under warranty, Dell isn’t going to lift a finger as far as installing the power supply, since, as the gentleman said, “it is a simple part to replace”. Instead, we are on our own. Fortunately I have replaced my fair share of power supplies (and other PC components) and can do this myself. This begs the question; however, what good is the warranty and service agreement if we have to do the work ourselves?
Dell may have an exclusive contract with Choice Hotels, but if this is the sort of service we get for our money, Choice should consider going with HP. On second thought, as I reminisce about the incompetence of HP’s Support Department, Choice has only one clear alternative: Migrate to the Mac.
(Some other people have came to similiar conclusions about the viability of the Mac for the enterprise.)
