Just a warning. This is going to be a long one. I’ve been saving up stuff to talk about all week.

The first week

The first week of our new life went surprisingly well. I’m not a “morning person“ so I had apprehension about waking up at seven-something in the morning for work, but it has been working out okay. Sure, I’ve been struggling in the mornings with a general lack of energy, but I’ve been popping a few ephedrine pills a day for that.

I’m kidding about the ephedrine. My Diet Mountain Dew takes care of me.

The kids have been taking things in stride. On Friday, Maya complained about having to go to Lindsy’s house, but she won’t have to do that anymore next week because she’ll be back on track at school.

The way we’ve got things set up, it’s pretty good for the kids- they get a nice variety throughout the week. Lindsy keeps them all day on Monday and then only in the mornings the other days. My mom picks them up and watches them at our house on Tuesday and Friday. I bring them home in the early afternoon on Wednesday and Thursday.

Christine loves her new job. I really enjoy listening to her talk about it too.

Congratulations to Jennie Freestone

I guess Jennie got a new job at another IHC clinic which will match her current pay but give her more sane hours and less stress. Hopefully they’ll also surround her with better morale than she’s had at Alta View Hospital.

Mourning a loss

About two weeks ago, I logged into one of the Iodynamics NetGateway systems we manage and tried to log into a Linux file server behind the NetGateway to do some maintenance on it. I couldn’t get to it. This usually only happens if there’s a problem, so I called Mike and asked him to check into it.

Mike called the client and they said they weren’t aware of any problems - that everything looked fine to them.

I checked things out again a day or so later. Same thing. Mike called again. Same thing from the client.

Finally, last Monday, we called one of the principals of the company. He told us what had happened: The file server experienced a problem with the hard drive. They took it to a local hardware reseller who specialized in Windows systems. I’m guessing he didn’t know what to do with it. So, they had him build them a new server... a windows server.

Now, why they left us out of the loop, nobody knows. It’s all very fishy.

This client had a support agreement with Iodynamics where we would respond as soon as possible when there’s any kind of problem. In addition, all our servers are equipped with mirrored hard drives which means when a hard drive go kaplooey, we can usually just replace the fauly hard drive and get the system back up and running in very little time. Why they decided to not call us at all and why they took the faulty hardware to a Windows reseller... it’s just bizarre.

This experience thus far was a big flapping red flag. Mike made arrangements on Wednesday to meet with the client to get a better understanding of what had happened and to see where we were going to go from that point. I suggested he try to get them to take the Windows server back to the reseller because they would have spent a lot of money on that server hardware, the operating system, and the client access licenses for all the users int he company. We could have restored their Linux system for under two or three hundred bucks. The meeting went okay, but it seemed they weren’t going to budge on the Windows server.

The next day, Mike got e-mail from the principal he met with saying they had decided, basically, to terminate their relationship with Iodynamics. They were going to, instead, purchase two Fortinet VPN appliances to replace their Iodynamics NetGateways.

My jaw is still dragging around on the ground. I have no idea why they would do this. Regardless, they apparently have no interest in talking about it.

It’s painful for me to think about what time, frustration, and money they’re going to burn through in the next couple of weeks as they transition away from the NetGateways. They don’t realize the NetGateways are hosting their e-mail and the Fortinet appliances do not provide any kind of e-mail hosting capabilities. They have file server shares on both NetGateways which will be going away as well since the Fortinet appliances don’t provide that either.

The Fortinet appliances do provide firewall and VPN capabilities- something the NetGateways have already been doing... and doing rather well. We’ve never had any problems with the VPNs we’ve constructed between these two offices.

From what I’ve gathered from Mike’s discussions with the principal, they had some concerns about our handling of their business management software running on a Windows 2000 server. The server and the software were originally installed by a consultant who didn’t know what he was doing. We were brought in to try to figure out why they had to reboot the server multiple times daily. We tracked it down to printer drivers causing conflicts within the Windows Terminal Server. Our fixes improved things a lot, but they were still rebooting once or two daily because of lockups.

We suggested a reinstall of Windows and Terminal Server. We did this and configured the server correctly. After that, their problems were reduced to having to reboot the server once or twice a week- fairly normal for a Windows server.

In the end, the lesson learned from all this is that we need to be more consistently interactive with our clients. They need to know we’re there for them and they need to be constantly reminded that were are there.

Our Linux systems are so reliable, it’s easy for our clients to wonder what they’re paying for every month. They rarely have to call us for anything because the systems just work and keep working.

So, it looks like we’ve lost a long-time client and one we did some really amazing stuff with. It’s truly unfortunate this happened, but all we can do is move on and try to learn our lessons so it doesn’t happen again.

Nursery

Christine and I served our first Sunday together in the nursery today at church taking care of 2 year olds for a couple hours. We did this before in a ward we were in a ward in Hyrum so we knew what we were getting into.

Eli is going to be 18 months old in 3 days, so he’s old enough now to be in nursery. He’s a lot younger than all of the kids in our nursery because they’ve all been in nursery since last year, but he seems to get along with them fine.

Anyway, we had a good time today.

A couple new vices

I’ve got a couple new TV shows I’m watching and getting into.

I had heard bits of the grapevine chatter about Desperate Housewives, but wasn’t really interested in it. From what I had heard, it sounded like a weekly serial of stories from Danielle Steele novels: trashy, stupid, and weak.

The Monday Night Football publicity stunt pulled a couple months ago where Nicolette Sheridan stripped down in a NFL locker room didn’t help my impressions of the show much either.

Of course, when I heard the title “Desperate Housewives” I naturally thought, “Oh- they’re desperate for sex, right?”

A friend of mine watched some of it and gave it a little more credit than I had been willing to. I decided to give it a shot and downloaded the 2-part pilot episode from a favorite BitTorrent site and gave it a whirl.

Wow. I really liked it. It was witty, charming, endearing, and pulled you in. It’s a nice combination of drama, mystery, comedy, and thrill. The visuals are spectacular as well. I wonder if they got some direction from Buffy / Angel alumni...

Well, they got David Grossman listed as a director on one episode and he’s worked on Buffy and Angel. Hmmm.

Anyway, I’m hooked and I’ve watched 10 episodes so far. I’ll be honest and say I’m liking it less now than I did during the first 4 episodes because it’s beginning to feel more like your typical primetime soap opera, but I’m still interested enough to keep watching.

Now, the other show I’ve been watching is Point Pleasant which is being produced by Buffy and Angel co-producer Marti Noxon.

There’s some resemblence between the story presented on Point Pleasant and those I’ve seen on BtVS and Angel. Right now, I’d have to say Point Pleasant is nowhere near as fun to watch as BtVS or Angel. The dialogue is nowhere near as witty or clever. The acting is more wooden. The editing is a bit sloppy. The writing is mediocre. The cinematography is good for a prime time show, but still pales in comparison to Mutant Enemy productions.

Nonetheless, it’s still interesting. ;-)

But, because of these things and because of how difficult it was for Angel and Buffy to stay on the air, I predict Point Pleasant will live a much-abbreviated life and won’t make it past one season. We’ll see, I guess.

Enterprise stops. What now?

Speaking of abbreviation, it looks as if Star Trek: Enterprise is ending after the fourth season. Being a fan, I’m disappointed, but not surprised. I can’t help but wonder if it might be partially my fault since I have yet to watch an episode on live television. I’ve downloaded every single episode of Enterprise I’ve watched and I’ve seen them all. Because each downloaded episode did not include any of the original advertisement interstitials which accompanied the original broadcast, the advertisers which funded the production of the show did not benefit from my attention to the show. In an essence, I stole the show.

Heh.

This has got me thinking, though. As more people learn the tricks of downloading archived video from the Internet of their favorite television shows and as more people purchase TiVO and TiVO like video recorders which make it trivial to ignore advertisements, the relationship between advertisers and television production erodes. Who pays the high production costs associated with a high-quality weekly television program when the advertisers aren’t willing to foot the bill anymore?

Traditionally, television advertisers have acted as middle-men. They buy advertising during television programs with money they earn from the sales of merchandise. Television production is there indirectly paid for by consumers via the advertisers.

Obviously, if there’s no value in it for advertisers anymore, they’re not going to be interested (or as interested) in playing the middle-man role anymore.

Is the future of television nothing but reality shows?

One option would be pay-per-view or premium channels like HBO and Showtime. Sex & The City and The Sopranos have had notable success doing that. From what I’ve seen of these two shows (which isn’t much, really), they do have high production values. Maybe the good story-telling television is going to be forced to move to premium cable to survive.

Another option, or maybe just an added thing, is to change the dynamic of how advertisers play into television. Imagine, if you will, you go to the grocery store and you see a Coca Cola display which says, “Buy a 12-pack of coke and get a Desperate Housewives token.” Maybe you don’t normally buy 12-packs of Coke products, but you love Desperate Housewives, so you buy the 12-pack so you can go home and use this token to get one episode of Desperate Housewives for free instead of paying for it.

Everybody wins... including consumers/viewers because we’re not subjected to lame commercials anymore.

That’s my stupid idea. Somebody’s got to figure it out.