Look forward to

• Long term Kindle Test
• Sirius Stiletto  2 Review/ Long term test
• Intense School CISSP boot camp review

Look for updates in the next few days!

-The IT Guy.

“Cost shouldn’t ever be used as an excuse to have poor security and it won’t help you in court when you’re getting sued.”

Source: ComputerWorld UK

Tricks to a Happy IT Career

1. Schedule major events and issues as appointments on your calendar. You are less likely to forget them this way and the time needed to deal with them will already be assigned.
2. Make sure you have some sort of digital calendar that is in sync with your PC. If you are anything like me you find yourself traveling a lot and you don’t want to forget important meetings and appointments. I carry a Treo with direct push setup via MS Exchange so I get all my e-mails, contacts, calendar, tasks, etc. - Fyi if you are new to the IT game a cell phone from your company seems like just another perk of the job but it’s really a 24/7 reminder that your company has a leash around your neck. Talk to your company about turning the phone off on the weekends.
3. Don’t rush yourself! Take time to solve issues and don’t rush through all your work in a jam packed day because you have all week to deal with issues. I’m not condoning putting off things that you can solve now, I’m just saying pace yourself. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon and some things can afford to wait.
4. Don’t blow yourself out. I used to work for a consulting firm and the owner would always say “Don’t blow yourself out.” I never really took it to heart until I did blow myself out. Over working yourself and stressing out about things eventually gets to you and it will K.O. your morale. Next thing you know you’ll be looking for a new job when all along if you just slowed down for five minutes you’d be much happier.
5. Schedule at least a full hour a day to organize and sort things out. Put the time right on your calendar and make it known that during that hour you are not to be bothered. Take your new found free time to read up on the latest IT crazes or to read an IT Blog. While it may seem like a dumb thing to do when you are supposed to be “working.” This hour a day will save you from feeling over worked and as an IT person you are expected to be on top of the latest and greatest things coming down the pipe. The hour a day will help you keep up on the industry and give you new ideas on how to solve the issues you face. Some days you will miss your time but try to be vigilant and keep the hour a day.
6. Last and most importantly if you are not happy make it known to the higher ups in the company. I’ve seen this happen more than anything else. Somebody in IT gets angry about the way something is being done but they never voice their concern or issue and of course it goes unresolved until they can’t take it anymore. If you have a problem with the way something is being done or a fellow employee make it known so that management or C-class management can deal with it. They get paid to deal with issues and problem employees so let them handle it before it makes you look bad. Believe me, nothing hurts worse than having a COO or CIO coming to you about something you’ve been angry about all along and now they are accusing you of causing it. If your co-worker Jimmy has the IT skills of a half drunk chipmunk, let somebody know. It’s not always nice to put somebody on blast to the boss but Jimmy will do it to you when his ass is on the line every time, trust me.

Take your time solving problems and take time for yourself and you will be a much happier IT Guy. There are other things that help as well but they aren’t available at all companies. Like flex scheduling and condensed hours. If your company offers these options, take them! Working 9 hours a day and taking every other Friday off or something surely will make you feel better about doing your job.

As any logical thinking person should, I tend to invest some of my savings in the stock market. Usually I use a full service brokerage firm like Schwab, but for some reason I decided to test out the highly hyped Zecco Trading. Zecco apparently offers “free trading”, which interested me so I filled out all the paper work, waited a week, and presto it’s all setup. I transferred in a hundred bucks or so just to get the feeling of the trading interface. I wanted to buy a few shares of my favorite stock and test out the fill times, etc. Thus, I setup a trade, execute it, and Zecco spits back an error. It’s not very descriptive it just says “Only trades that liquidate positions are allowed.” Since I didn’t even own any stocks through Zecco I thought that kind of odd . I e-mailed support and waited 3 days for them to tell me I have pending account paper work, which I then filled out and e-mailed back. I waited a week, tried again and the same thing happened, no go. Once again I e-mailed support and they said the same thing, so once again I filled out paper work, this time I chose to mail it in. I waited another week, same thing. At this point I’m tired of playing games with these guys and I just want my hundred bucks back, so I try to transfer it out. Of course that didn’t work and they e-mail me a message saying they wont allow me to transfer the money out since I haven’t finished all of my paper work. Now I can’t even get my little test money back. I’ve been trying to get them to close the account and mail me a check for over a month. I may have to file a lawsuit if I ever want to see my money again. This is the most ridiculous brokerage firm I’ve ever seen. Anybody who considers using Zecco Trading beware!

So after posting on the Zecco Forums this afternoon to see if somebody was willing to help me. Zecco promptly removed my post. I will be adding the letter they sent me after removing my post and all e-mails I’ve had with them to this section.

Message Received after post was deleted:

Your post has been removed from the Investment Forums on Zecco.com

Hello ,

Thank you for submitting your post to the Investment Forums on Zecco.com. Unfortunately, we had to move this post because it did not comply with our posting rules. Here’s why:

Zecco Trading is subject to strict regulation, just like any other online stock broker. In order to be in compliance, the Editors of the Zecco.com Blogs and Forums can not directly answer Zecco Trading related questions. Instead, the appropriate channel for specific customer issues is customerservice@zeccotrading.com, as only Zecco Trading can access sensitive information to assist customers with specific account related issues.

Additionally, general feedback on Zecco.com or Zecco Trading should be provided through the Zecco User Group. This group is meant for dedicated myZecco members and Zecco Trading customers who wish to be involved in providing valuable feedback to improve the user experience at Zecco. The Zecco User Group has its own, restricted access Forum on Zecco.com. If you wish to apply to the Zecco User Group, you can send an e-mail to the Editor (editor@zecco.com), indicating:
- Your name
- Your myZecco user name

See you at Zecco.com for a lively debate, access to free stock trades, and more.

Zecco Editor

Check out the Next Page if you want to see the latest Letter from Zecco

• Age of your data center - If it was built recently than you will probably have to find reasons rather than money to upgrade. I.E. Moral Obligations, Company Image, etc.
• Size of the data center. - If your data center is only a few servers you wont see a huge decrease in cost by going green.
• A/C is the number one cost in data centers these days but that doesn’t necessarily mean that replacing your HVAC system with an energy efficient model will fix all your energy troubles. A lot of times the issue is with the design of the data center itself. Re-designing the layout of your data center usually costs more than just replacing an old HVAC unit. You’ll want to consult a company familiar with data center design to help identify the trouble spots.
• New Equipment isn’t always greener. - Blades and other high density products are terrible to cool. Often companies will stuff two or more blade centers in a single rack which creates an HVAC nightmare. Believe it or not traditional servers actually are the best bet to stay green, not packing a rack full helps too.
• New Equipment - You should absolutely consider energy concerns when purchasing new equipment not only is it better for the environment it’s better for business. Energy costs have a tendency to fluctuate. The new racks of servers you are purchasing that cost $600 a month in power might be $1200 a month in a year.
• If you can’t find a better reason to do it. Remember green is the new black. It’s in style to conserve energy and resources. It makes your company look good and your employees feel like they are doing their part by working at a compnay that recognizes environmental issues.

• Small office electronics (Personal Printers, Calculators, Lamps, iPods or other home electronics) - It’s not their job to look at why your iPod doesn’t work right with your work computer. It could also land you in trouble with your boss.
• Home Computer Questions - This has to be the number one complaint amongst IT Guys. Just because somebody is an IT Guy doesn’t mean they enjoy answering your home computer questions. If your IT Guy over hears you discussing something and chimes in that’s one thing, but don’t bring in your laundry list of questions and problems. It is not your company’s job to bank roll your IT mishaps- go pay the Geek Squad like everybody else.
• Pressuring your IT Guy into “doing work on the side.” First off it may violate his or her contract of employment and could wind up getting them in trouble or fired. Secondly, this ones a secret, IT Guys don’t like dealing with home computer BS. We’re very sorry your five year old computer you bought at Sam’s club doesn’t work right and “things keep popping up.” -Again take it to a computer repair shop or find somebody who fixes home computers for a living. We choose to work at a nice big company so we don’t have to go house to house and fix personal computer issues, deal with it.
• While your IT Guy at work may seem like the god of all things digital, IT Guy’s actually have job descriptions. If your company has an official help desk, take your problem to them first. Just because you know Mark in tier 5 server support knows how to fix your problem don’t bypass the system. Don’t ask the programmer to help with your e-mail issue or the network guy why your program doesn’t work. If you have a doubt about who to go to and you have a serious issue take it up with the higher ups. They get paid enough to deal with your lack of tech savvy and they can help you get in touch with the right person.
• Don’t be a nuisance. Unless the building is on fire don’t call your IT Guy repeatedly and e-mail him snotty e-mails. Contrary to popular opinion your IT Guy isn’t avoiding you, he’s prioritizing. That’s what IT Guy’s do. Your little e-mail issue is not a big deal when a server is down and thousands of people are without a resource. Personally I put my phone on DND(do not disturb) if I start getting an influx of calls. You can’t solve issues if you can’t get off the phone.
• Don’t tell your IT Guy a twenty minute long story. Tell him what you think is most pertinent to the issue at hand and nothing more. If your IT Guy wants more info he’ll inquire with you through call backs or e-mail.
• Don’t forget to get your IT Guy or Girl an awesome gift for the holidays. - If it wasn’t for the IT Guys of the world you wouldn’t have a job.

Although there are a lot of bells and whistles the average user can live with out these days, a good antivirus isn’t one of them. I’m not going to pick favorites here, but make sure whatever you are using it isn’t some no name knock off brand. When I was a consultant we had a home division and we would offer a terrible knock off antivirus to customers who didn’t want to pay for name brand stuff. It worked pretty well at actually detecting viruses, but an update came out for it one year and it started blue screening computers. I never worked in the home division, but I can remember them taking in about fifty or so computers over the course of only a few days, all due to this antivirus update.

Keep in mind that once your computer is actually infected by a virus or trojan  removing it becomes extremely difficult. It’s a very bad plan to wait until you have problems to buy an antivirus, because you might also wind up paying to have your hard drive re-formatted and re-loaded to get rid of it.

Source Sunnet Beskerming

Source: Physorg Science and Technology News.

• Verizon Business isn’t really one company or division. - Verizon sub-contracts out any work that they can’t handle to the lowest local bidder.
• Unions -Usually for the workforce these are good but when you are on the receiving end well that’s another story. Lets just say plan to wait a good two to three months if you need service moved or transferred.
• The number one reason. - Verizon buys out a lot of little telcos and some sizable ones, but they forget to ever integrate them.

I’ll give you a brief run down of our experience with this company. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty.

This whole saga began when our company was shopping for a new phone system. We aren’t a very large company, at least not in my eyes. We have about 6 locations and they are fairly small, about 15 people in each office with about 40 in the home office. So one bright sunny day Verizon Sales comes out and pitches this wonderful phone system to the brass at our company. Everything sounded great; it wasn’t the cheapest quote we had received, but it was well within budget, and because it was Verizon we would only have to deal with one company. That is, if there was trouble there wouldn’t be any finger pointing between the phone system vendor and the telephone services provider. The sales pitch included new T1 lines for every site including an upgrade in the main site to a bonded T1 line, Alcatel OXO phone system with digital phones, VOIP to every site, and the management to make it happen. It was pitched to the higher ups in our company in a way that they didn’t even think to talk to their current IT Guy. For the record the current IT Guy was an outsourced company.

Phase two of operation make my life hell began when Verizon decided to change IP addresses at our main location. Which just happens to VPN to about 100 hospitals and companies all over the world, oops. Once the task of re-configuring the entire network from an IP standpoint and integrating the point to point line that Verizon recommended to connect two buildings that are 100 feet apart was through we began contacting 100 pissed off clients that didn’t understand why they can’t get into our software. Next we had to actually make the phone system 4-digit dial work. You would think the guys they hired from Alcatel could figure that out, after all it’s their phone system, but Verizon managed to locate the only guys that work at Alcatel-Lucent that don’t know how to install a phone system. There were the normal growing pains at first: no voice mail, extensions were wrong, phones didn’t have certain features, when you called in our phone system might randomly hang up on you, 4-digit dialing didn’t work. These were to be expected for a day or two, once six months went by, yes you read that correctly, our company got angry with Verizon and started demanding things. At first this technique of demanding things and threatening not to pay produced results. Our only issue was the 4-digit dialing and some minor ACD issues in our call center. The 4-digit dialing took the Verizon/Alcatel team about 14 Months to fix.

Phase three of operation FUBAR was a good one! Random 911 calls started coming into the State Police from our location. I don’t mean a few here or there either, I mean 30-40 a week. After about the second week of this the State Police showed up with an electronics guru who had a giant pair of ratcheting cutters and he was ready to cut service to our building. After the higher ups in the company begged and pleaded with the State Police, and probably slipped them a few anonymous donations too, they left. Verizon was always sure it was a user at our site or a mis-configured fax machine dialing 911 by accident. This happened on and off for about 3 months until the CEO at our company threatened to rip the whole phone system out. Two hours after that threat they found the problem; Verizon had accidentally listed a number to a military base in NJ in their 911 lookup system and they listed us as the address. So if somebody got hurt at this base in NJ and they called 911, Police showed up at our location in PA. The police couldn’t figure out why calls kept coming in when they were already on-site, it’s because they weren’t on-site.

Phase four of this master plan hasn’t happened yet but it’s not too far off. When this whole contract was signed all the terms were 3 years, that’s pretty standard for T1 lines and stuff. The issue is that Verizon acquired MCI and with that came MCI’s backbone UUNET. In the past, Verizon would pay to use other backbones, ours was Qwest. So now we are a little over two years into this project and things are starting to work right, but guess what? We have to do it all over again in less than a year. Verizon refuses to re-term the agreements on our current data lines because they only sell these UUNET T1 lines now. We get to go through the whole 4-digit dialing, change our IP saga a second time.

The moral of this story is simple, avoid Verizon at all costs.