I worked for Pomeroy IT Solutions, the company you are CEO of, for a total of three and a half weeks, There is a reason why I no longer work there. I quit.

I want to make it clear that this letter is not published with the intent of blaming anyone or even to air my grievances. Quite honestly, I am not even upset, as I have moved on to more rewarding opportunities and have found the grass to be greener elsewhere.

No, this letter is actually to make you aware of some of the things that are going on with your company so that you can fix them. There are 4,000 employees in your organization, the vast majority of whom I trust are hard-working individuals who look towards the leadership with the highest of hopes in making Pomeroy a leader in the regional IT services and sales sphere. If you and the board fail, they fail.

While I only worked for Pomeroy for three and a half weeks, I quickly discerned many destructive patterns exhibited by both employees and management. I will briefly describe them and offer you suggestions as far as remedial action you might consider taking.

1. No sense of corporate identity. A large portion of your Hebron staff have no sense of loyalty towards the company. They come to work merely for their paycheck and they lack enthusiasm in general. There is little to unite them or inspire them towards excellence.

This is one of the more difficult problems to resolve as making people excited about their work is a challenge. This is where the HR department can get involved however. Start recognizing people who distinguish themselves in their performance, attititude, and capabilities. Brainstorm. Create a corporate culture that is positive and makes people want to come to work every day.

2. Poor communications among management with one another at various levels and with employees. Managers and employees should have fully operational communication. Communication is a skill that is utterly imperitive for an operation to succeed. It is also a skill that is deficient at Pomeroy.

Teach people to communicate with one another. Enforce a policy of mutual respect when it comes to communicating. If employees do not respect management or vice versa, then these individuals should not be on your payroll.

3. Little/no regard for IT Professionals. During my three weeks at Pomeroy, I witnessed the attitude of many employees and supervisors towards IT professionals. Many times, IT professionals who worked in various departments were sent arbitrarily to the warehouse to pull freight, break down skids, unbox/rebox shipments, etc.

While no one would suggest these employees were too good to do such work, is paying a certified technician more to do someone else’s job a wise use of capital? Why should you pay someone $15 an hour to do the work of someone who is only paid $10 an hour?

Stop filling your payroll with temporary employees who walk off the job, do poor quality work, or have no desire to maintain a high level of productivity. Hire quality warehouse staff so you don’t have to use your quality IT staff to do their jobs.

4. Build more and better relationships. Have you looked into forming relationships with partners such as Apple, Novell, Red Hat, AMD, or Sun? These companies offer a broad range of software and hardware solutions that could benefit your clients. What kind of relationships do you have? Where can they be improved? Think outside the box. Many of your clients already are.

I hope that Pomeroy is able to establish itself as a powerhouse in the region and that the company returns to a consistent state of profitability. You can no longer afford to do business as usual at Pomeroy and the solutions to your problems do not lie in any one particular person or committee. I would encourage you to hold an open forum for employees, not only at the Hebron headquarters, but at the Pomeroy offices and divisions across the United States.

While there are many employees at Pomeroy who are mainly negative and unconstructive, there are quite a few who do care and are willing to contribute towards your mutual success. I sincerely hope you and them are the ones who decide where Pomeroy goes from here.

Warmest regards,

Kenneth C. Vendler
Bright, Indiana

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.

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.  

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.)

If the rumor is true, then this December that will change when Mac OS X Snow Leopard is released. Yes, that’s right- 10.6 might be available this December.

My only concern is that the rumor also states that support for the G4 and G5 PowerPC Macs will be entirely discontinued. While the G4 architecture is a bit long in the tooth, the G5 still delivers sufficient performance. Bear in mind that an EMT64 only Snow Leopard would preclude certain Macs (iMacs and PowerMacs) that were only three years old. While I am not one for prolonging the life of legacy hardware, a quad-core PowerMac G5 does not quite meet the criteria of “legacy.” Midlife, yes. Legacy, certainly not.

Below is my suggestion for Apple’s transition away from the PowerPC with Mac OS X. I’m sure Steve is reading:

10.6 — G4 support is dropped entirely. All G5′s still supported.
10.7– Partial G5 support for Dual Processor Machines/Dual Core/Minimum Clock Speed ~ 1.8 Ghz
11.0 – No G5 support 

Oh and 10.6 is supposed to be all-Cocoa too

In unrelated news, there is an ongoing and lively discussion regarding the minimum system requirement for Windows 2003 Server among my class ( CIT 225 Windows Network Operating Systems). Here are a few nuggets of vision offered by yours truly on the subject of whether it is wise to use the minimum hardware requirements on a Windows 2003 Server:

 Here’s another example of this phenomenon [trying to get away with the base minimum hardware specifications] that I have personally witnessed- Windows XP installed on a low-clocked Celeron and only 96 MB of RAM. I have seen car accidents that looked better. Yet people choose to do similar setups with their servers and complain when performance is less than what they expected.

My response to the suggestion it was okay to use a low end drive and upgrade later:

The smallest hard drives you can purchase are 40 GB. If you find anything smaller in a Win2k3 server that was built even remotely recently, someone has decided to “recycle” a hard drive from an older machine- a hard drive that has several years worth of bad blocks, that is out of warranty, and may not support SMART III that would give you warning that there was an imminent failure approaching.

Hope your files are backed up somewhere…

I love being opinionated

I want to first say thank you for your service during the Vietnam War. As a POW, you deserve double-praise for your steadfast loyalty and devotion to the safety and security of the American nation and its people. For this alone, I would take you to dinner at St Elmo’s Steak House, reputedly the best steakhouse in the state of Indiana.

I know however you are a busy man and probably would not be able to take me up on such an offer. Your ambition of becoming the 44th President of the United States is understandably time-intensive. I will not burden you with any further sentimentalities. That’s not my reason for writing this letter to you.

I am writing to tell you that I would like to vote for you. I’d like to do so very much as a matter of fact. There are some problems though. You see Senator, I have a couple monkeys on my back- gorillas really. I’m a little mad at you as a matter of fact.

I am deeply concerned with your stance on border security. Regardless of what you called your proposal that was subsequently rejected, its a bit hard to swallow. Sure, I am down with the part about deporting illegal aliens back to Mexico. If someone breaks into my house, I certainly expect the police to remove these offenders from my home and send them… well elsewhere. Your proposal took one step forward and then one step back by allowing these individuals to have a chance to come back and possibly become citizens.

“Sure officer, this guy who came in my patio door has to leave, but he can come back tomorrow if he knocks and asks nicely.”

I understand the argument about illegal immigrants “doing the jobs Americans won’t do.” I also agree that it is mostly true. Does our laziness therefore justify the criminality of others? If nothing else, it should further prove that illegal aliens have no moral scruples with taking advantage of us and our broken system.

Furthermore, as I was driving to visit a dear departed loved one in the cemetery this Memorial Day, I happened to be listening to NPR. One of their stories was on college kids who were having difficulty finding work during the summer. While yard work and picking lettuce doesn’t pay much, having any job is better than no job at all when you are in college and broke. (Minimum wage will buy a lot of Ramen noodles, which are a staple for the broke college student.) 

So my question is, if we have so many college students finding summer work, why are we importing illiterate and undocumented employees to do agricultural work?

My next issue with your campaign is regarding the “Straight Talk Express.” I like the sound of it. I wish I had come up with that title actually and had copyrighted it. I could have sold a lot of T-shirts with “Straight Talk Express” on it. I just wanted to ask if the Straight Talk Express could run a little bit straighter and a little bit more consistently.

I’ve read up on some issues you have flip-flopped on, particularly the abortion debate. I believe a person can genuinely have a change of heart on the matter, and if you genuinely believe in the right of an unborn child to live, I congratulate you heartily. On the other hand, if you are just saying what the pro-life constituency wants to hear, I do take issue with that.

Withthat said, I just want to let you know that I’ll be watching what you say in regards to the issues during the next few months. We don’t have to agree on everything and I don’t expect we will. I would like to lend my support to you and endorse you to my friends, coworkers, and peers. That will only happen if you make sure the Straight Talk Express behaves a little more consistently with traditional paleoconservative beliefs.

Kindest regards,

Kenneth C. Vendler
Bright, IN

My take: x86 is a kludge, whether we are talking about x86-32 or x86-64. Yes, it works, but there are tremendous penalties paid, whether we are talking about TLB bugs or the fact that 20 years will make ANY architecture long in the tooth.

The machine itself isn’t too shabby either. The original configuration was a 2.66 Ghz Celeron D processor and 256 MB of RAM. Since the original RAM was missing, I opted to fill both DIMM slots with two 512 modules of PC-2700 RAM for a total of 1 GB. The original hard drive, a 5400 RPM laptop drive was shot, so I am replacing it with a 7200 RPM Hitachi Deskstar hard disk with a 160 GB capacity.

The textbook for the class includes a 180-day trial of Windows Server 2003. After this expires, I will probably put either Fedora 9 or openSuSE 11 on it and turn it into a Linux workstation.

As a summer graduate, the school is going to award me my Associates degree at the same time as the spring graduates (May 18). The only class I have remaining is Macroeconomics. I’ll be taking that during the summer session to fulfill my Associates Degree requirements.

So now that I have graduated, what will I be doing? I haven’t decided anything for certain, but a few ideas come to mind.

1. Find a job in my field. I have a few prospects at this point- one of which is the possible creation of a position at the school district where I currently work part time. This would be a full-time position and would have me working with people I already know and have come to enjoy working with.

I have also interviewed for a possible job in Wyoming for a firm that provides IT Support for the State of Wyoming’s information systems. I have also contacted another company in Cleveland, OH which had expressed interest in hiring me back in February.

2. Pursue more certifications – Ivy Tech has a Workforce Development center that provides certification testing for various IT certifications. The summer might also be a good opportunity to pursue some higher level certifications such as the MCP and the ACTC/ACSA. {RHCT when I save up enough nickles and dimes}

3. Take a vacation – My highschool buddy Ed and his wife mentioned possibly going to Myrtle Beach and asked Kerrie and I if we’d want to join them. It occured to me that North Carolina, my second favorite state in the union next to Colorado, is on the way to South Carolina. I could certainly use some R&R.

It’s been a long two years and yet it seems only like yesterday my wife and I moved here to Indiana. The road has been difficult as my wife and I adjusted to the routine, the living arrangements, and the birth of our second daughter Emilie. Hard as they have been, they have also been good. We learned a lot about each other during that time.

After hearing everyone in the family complain about the network not working and discovering the router had evidently decided to quit entirely, we took the opportunity to stop at Circuit City. I picked up a new D-Link router to replace the Belkin one that now functioned only as a paperweight and got things back up and running after some finagling with the Windows Registry.

Now everyone is happy, although I would have prefered to have just replaced the wireless router with a wired hub and been done with it. WiFi is nice, but securing a wireless network can be a pain.