We’re back online

Wow, that was an experience I’d like to avoid in the future. Yesterday, I was able to successfully connect our router to the new DSL circuit and get the house fully transitioned over. That makes the final count of ‘days without broadband’ 10. Granted, I was able to utilize a borrowed MiFi but that provided what was essentially minimal connectivity. Things would have been quite ugly if that wasn’t available.

The two heros to come out of the experience are Xochitl who is a customer service supervisor for DSL Extreme. And Mike, a field technician for Verizon. Both of them were genuinely interested in working through the problem and each were essential in getting to a resolution.

Now I need to figure out what to do with a considerable amount of Verizon FiOS equipment (router, UPS, Optical Network Terminal, etc.). I wonder if there’s an aftermarket for it? I’ll likely just leave it all in place. Hey, maybe there’s a chance I’ll be able to go back to FiOS?

Surfing like it’s 1999

I’ve been a DSL Extreme customer for years starting back in the modem days. When they made FiOS-based service available in my area, I was quite excited about moving from 3000/768 to 20000/20000 and jumped at the chance.

Unfortunately, Verizon changed their policies and decided to no longer allow independent ISPs access to their circuits. As a result, I was given a choice; move my FiOS service directly to Verizon (become a Verizon customer) or drop FiOS. Fortunately, when the fibre optic cable was run to my house they did so without removing my copper-pair phone line (they usually do) so I am able to go back to DSL. That is the direction I chose to take due to my desire to continue to host my server (the one you’re reading this on) which would be a violation of their terms of service. An order was placed for 7100/768 DSL last week and I confirmed that both circuits would be up for me to transition.

Then this past Tuesday, a Verizon service worker came by to install a dry-loop circuit for the new DSL service. Since I only have a single pair providing the phone service, we both agreed that disconnecting that to install the new circuit would be bad and canceled the work order so that it could be re-submitted correctly. The problem was, it still somehow got communicated/interpreted by DSL Extreme as a success so they requested the disconnect of FiOS (which they said they weren’t going to do, btw).

Now, I’m 5-7 days out from having DSL, have FiOS that is dark and cannot be re-instated without a request for new service which doesn’t fly (I was moving away from them, remember?). My only viable fall-back was to borrow a MiFi and get minimal functionality working so that essential services are available. That’s why the site is slow as you read this.

Next step, talk to DSL Extreme customer support management to let them know their business practice is busted. Oh, a credit to the account would be appropriate, too.

How do you do a parenthetical smile?

Smileys are a decent way to express emotion when communicating in emails or instant messages. However, what do you do when you want to use one in a parenthetical statement? This doesn’t work: (you know what I mean? ;-)) Square brackets? [kinda awkward, huh? :-)] Curley braces? {silly 8^)}.

I’ve ended up using the rather old-school and relatively-unknown <g> because that at-least works (for me, anyway <g>).

What do you do?

Alfred: Function and Style

While there have been a few quick launch programs for the Mac (Quicksilver is the most notable), I’ve generally not bothered with them as I was satisfied with OS X’s built-in Spotlight function (the magnifying glass in the top right of the screen). With Apple’s App Store being released for OS X 10.6.6 recently, I was poking around looking for the cream among the collection and ran across Alfred by Running with Crayons, Ltd. My position has changed.

First, Alfred is a well-designed piece of software that displays a nice big dialog when activated by pressing the pre-defined hot-key (the default is opt-space):

The main Alfred dialog

That dialog is where you can perform application and file lookups like you do with Spotlight but the real power is the fact that pre-defined functions allow you to not only do searches of other websites (e.g., Amazon, eBay, WikiPedia, Google, Facebook, etc.) but the ability to add search for any other site that uses a URL-based search method. That is what has sold me. In only a few minutes I added search strings for many internal websites I use at work which will be most convenient.

The application is free but a ‘Powerpack’ add-on is available which adds even more functionality (iTunes control, file manipulation, terminal shortcuts, and others). I’ll be getting that but will wait for it to be available in the App Store. If you ever use Spotlight, give it a try. Plus, the developer’s a LittleBigPlanet fan which gives me even more reason to like it. ;-)

For Christmas I gave myself nothing

I’ve been doing the GTD things for a few years and am a major fan of OmniFocus by the Omni Group (they got my money for my Mac, my iPhone, and iPad). A similar concept pertains to email and that is of Inbox Zero. The concept is basically keeping your email inbox empty by dealing with or deleting each message.

I’ve longed wanted to get down to an empty inbox. About a year ago, I went from a few hundred down to about 100 but getting past was more difficult than I would have imagined.

The last few weeks, I’ve renewed the effort and today successfully got both my personal and work mailboxes down to zero.

The trick, of course, is keeping it empty. I get enough mail both personally and professionally so I will continue to leverage the power of OmniFocus to capture anything I need to deal with but can’t at that moment.

I like finishing the year with nothing. Merry Christmas.

Managing IT: What RAID level is your team?

Friday was the last day for one of the members of the team I manage at work. It was under good circumstances as he’s relocating and moving on to a new opportunity with new challenges to solve. Jokingly, I tweeted about the team now being in a degraded state as one ‘drive’ has been removed. That idea has kept percolating in my head and I’ve realized that rather than just a cute way to refer to an IT team, it really is accurate.

For the uninitiated, RAID, which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a way to combining multiple disks into a larger collection to present one or more larger volumes, increase the performance, and improve the resiliency should one of the drives fail. Here’s an overview of the three primary RAID levels:

RAID 0 combines two or more disks into a larger volume splitting the contents evenly between them. The benefits are increasing the performance to much more than a single drive as well as increasing the overall capacity. The down-side is that if any single drive fails, all of the data is effectively lost.

RAID 1 combines two disks into a pair where data is written to both drives simultaneously. Capacity is no more than a single drive, but you can lose either drive and still have a complete copy of your data.

RAID 5 combines three or more disks where the data is split between the disks but parity data is calculated and also written to the disk. Performance is good as you can interleave reads between the disks. Resiliency is also good as if any single drive fails, the parity data from the remaining disks can be used to compute the data that is missing.

In any IT shop, you have a collection of skills and backgrounds provided by the members of the team as well as the collection of procedures, resources, and responsibilities that the team must manage. If your team is set up in a RAID 0 configuration, the responsibilities are divided between the members. Each member becomes more and more experienced in the skills they cover but can become more of a liability in the ones they do not. Like in RAID 0, if any one is not available, those responsibilities are gone.

Sure, you could have a team more akin to RAID 1 but I can’t think of any manager that would request (or director that would approve) having two people for every task with one acting as a ‘mirror.’

Personally, I try to strike a balance. Dividing the responsibilities between members, playing on their strengths, but ensuring that everyone is familiar enough with the other things the group-as-a-whole does allows for continuity. Sure, documentation can act as your ‘parity’ but it is exceedingly challenging to maintain complete, accurate, and current documentation.

The group is indeed in a degraded state at the moment, but I am happy to say that nothing should get dropped and it hopefully won’t last long. I’m truly fortunate to manage a group of guys skilled enough to take on almost anything thrown at them.

A handful of OmniFocus items

I’ve mentioned before how I use OmniFocus to manage everything in my life. It has been an essential tool for me for several years. So much so, I can’t say how excited I am about the pending iPad version which I believe will become very critical for keeping me sane. I check the App Store a couple times a day but so far, nuthin’.

If you’re not familiar with OmniFocus or David Allen‘s Getting Things Done methodology, please take the time to read ‘The Psychology of OmniFocus’ which is a better write-up than I would be able to put together on how GTD works and specifically

The last thought is that with this post (and the associated task ‘Write a blog post’), I will for the first time in longer than I can remember, be caught up with all of my overdue tasks. I’ve written about having challenges keeping up with tasks before and I have improved, but I seem forever behind. That’ll change when I wake up tomorrow and when I get to work on Monday, but if I can continue to keep due dates to a minimum, I may actually start getting to those things I’ve haven’t been able to get to. One can hope.

But I was liking FiOS

In January, I was fortunate enough to be able to move from DSL to FiOS at home and the extra bandwidth sure has been nice. Unfortunately, I just received word from my ISP, DSL Extreme, that the lovely Verizon has changed their mind and will not be allowing their circuits to be used by third parties. As a result, DSL Extreme, will no longer be able to resell FiOS. Worse than that is the fact they will have to discontinue the service for their customers by March of next year. While they promise to make it as seamless as possible, the problem is I don’t want to be a customer of Verizon.

I don’t have anything against them, personally. You see, their terms of service is the problem. I like the flexibility and control of hosting my own domain and host it on a computer in my living room over the home’s Internet connection. Any typical consumer provider doesn’t allow you to host servers and want to require you to pay more for a commercial account (if they even offer one). DSL Extreme had very reasonable terms of service and generally allow their customers to do whatever they want as long as you don’t make trouble for them (e.g., hosting a spamming service).

So, between now and March, I need to decide if I should go back to plain ol’ DSL or switch to Verizon and move my services off my home server onto a hosted one somewhere. Fortunately, Verizon left the copper pair for our phone when they pulled the fibre so switching back to DSL is an option that shouldn’t normally be possible. I’m not looking forward dropping the bandwidth to a third of what I’ve gotten accustomed to, but I’m also not liking the idea of moving my services to someplace else.

Thanks, Verizon, for causing me this trouble. Please reconsider your decision as there are others that are being inconvenienced by it.

Backups really are important

I was contacted tonight by someone who had suffered a drive failure and was hoping for some insight on how to resurrect the drive or rescue the data that has potentially been lost.

For the sake of those that may have not thought about backups, please take a moment to back up your data right now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

While you wait for your first copy to complete, don’t think you’re done. Make sure you follow the 3-2-1 rule of backup:

  • 3 backup copies of any data you don’t want to lose
  • 2 different media types
  • 1 copy at a different location (off-site)

Personally, I recommend CrashPlan for backups. It’s free software for basic use that lets you backup to any other user of CrashPlan (if they agree) over the Internet. Currently, I back up from my main server (the one you’re reading this on), to the upstairs computer, a machine at work, and to my mother-in-law’s computer. In the spirit of encouraging safe data, if you have a reasonable amount of data, let me know and I can be a backup destination for you (don’t worry, I’d be unable to read the data as it’s encrypted by the software).

Protect your data, folks.

A quick word on Readability

I’ve been a fan of bookmarklets which are javascript tools you can add to your browser’s bookmark menu (or bar) to extend the functionality of your browser without having to resort to a browser-specific plug-ins. One I ran across recently is called Readability and I find myself using it more and more often. It reformats the current page you are on to a single-column display with all of the extra advertising and layout ‘noise’ to make reading much more comfortable and enjoyable.

Here’s a quick demonstration of how it works. It’s free, easy, and quite nice.

Readability – Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome from Arc90 on Vimeo.