Work

So I’m on my 3rd week in Tier 4, AKA Enterprise Support, and I’ve been on the phones this week. I actually seem to be picking up the technical stuff I’m missing pretty quickly. All the various databases of circuit and customer info and all the other random stuff that we get thrown is a bit more of a challenge to learn. It could be that I keep getting crazy calls. It’s actually reassuring for me to look back at my coworker who I’m sitting with and see the same confused look on his face that I have when we get some off the wall calls.

So what exactly is my job now? Essentially, I’m the highest level of phone support for the MW Region of TWCBC. We only deal with “Enterprise” Business Class customers (Hence the name “Enterprise Support”), which are customers who have fiber circuits, or spend a rather large amount of money with us. We also pick up a lot of random support stuff, Things like HD over Fiber, which is running TV channels over fiber for hotels. All in all it’s a very fun job.

What’s also pretty neat to me is what all we work on. Some examples include Cisco, Brocade BigIron, Foundry, SMC, ZyXel, and soon a whole lot of Juniper equipment. In fact I’m looking some of the Juniper certifications now since a majority of our network will be Juniper based. I think I may try for that in line with the CCNA I also want to get.

So what does this mean for RomLabs? Well, I had a personal goal of getting our first app out the door by now, but obviously that did not happen. A lot of things worked against me, but the good news is I’m still working on it. My new goal is going to be first app sometime in early spring. I’m also exploring jailbreak and android development too, but I think in the beginning ill stick to normal apps.

In the mean time, RomLabs has its first 2 clients for other projects! After I get back from the honeymoon I’ll be going full steam into developing a website for a company called Fortunate Honeybee. It’s actually Melissa’s embroidery and crafts business we are trying to get going. After that it will be working on a site for Hot Air by Mark, my future father in law’s airbrushing business. After both of those are done, I’ll probably finally get RomLabs own site up too.

I know my past few posts have been wall o’ texts, but hopefully ill start posting more soon.

I got good news last week. On August 20th I’ll be moving over to the TWC Business Class department and getting a promotion to Network Support Specialist. It’s going to be interesting, yet another step up in this company, yet another growing department, and yet another chance to learn all I can. For at least the immediate future, I’ll have a regular 8-4 Monday through Friday schedule. There will be actual troubleshooting and fixing, rather than just monitoring like I do in the RNOC now. I'll also have more opportunity to hopefully obtain a CCNA finally.

Leaving the RNOC is going to be interesting. I spent most of this week migrating our internal website over to a new sever. Next week I get to write the guide on how to admin the server and website since I was it's only admin. I have a few other small projects and transition items to complete before the 20th, but migrating the website was my big hurdle. Other projects that were on my to-do list were not so luckily. It was actually pretty refreshing knocking 5 or 6 various projects off that list.

I'm the third in the line of employees to make the jump to Business Class. One of the new hires in the RNOC asked me a few days ago if it was that much better over there. I responded honestly: "The grass is not always greener, but it is different." I'm not moving to get a better job, I'm moving to leave a job thats no longer a fit for me. The RNOC has changed a lot since I first started there. It's filling roles I don't think any of use expected it to fill when it first went live. The more the RNOC changed, the more I realized it was not going in the direction i hoped it would. That more than anything is why i chose to move. Time will tell if Business Class will be better, but i can guarantee it will be different.

I know I've been meaning to post a trip report here for a few days. To be honest, I’ve been trying to fix a small issue in getting flickr images to display properly in my site with their descriptions. So far i have not had success, but I feel like I’m getting closer to fixing it. Unfortunately its just another one of those issues where trying to something seemingly simple is tough to pull off in Drupal.

So on to the trip report:

I flew out of Columbus on Tuesday. Parking in the red lot at CMH was not as bad as I thought it would be, in fact it was less than 5 minutes to park and take the shuttle to the terminal. I met Dave, my supervisor there and we grabbed a quick bite to eat. We made it though security just fine, even though apparently bumping the metal detector sets it off. The flight down was uneventful; I spent most of it reading the SkyMall Catalog. Dulles International was quite an interesting airport. To get to the main terminal, you have to take these huge bus vehicles called "Mobile Lounges". They are a cross between a bus and a monster truck. Apparently, some of them were designed to drive right up to the planes incase no jetway was available. This was state of the art back in the day. After getting our bags, we realized we had to catch a bus to get our rental car. Apparently no rental car offices are at the main terminal at Dulles.

We picked up the Hyundai Sonata Avis issued us and headed out. After a quick stop at the office, we headed to the hotel. Hyatt Summerfield Herndon gets my stamp of approval! I somehow managed to get the 2-bedroom suite when Dave was given a one bedroom. So I had 2 king beds, 3 LCD TVs, a fireplace, and these neat bathroom heater / vent combination. It was a quite nice place to stay, short of the kind of loud air conditioner.
Herndon, VA is odd, since it really feels busy but doesn’t look like it. To me, it felt like apartment areas, suburbs and commercial office parks were all stacked on top of each other then smashed down to this commercial/suburb feel of an area. Seems like the cost of living is greater too, 1br apartments in the area seemed to start at $1000 to $1200. Personally, its not near the top of my “Places to live” list

The training we had was at least semi-interesting, but what really was cool to see was the GNOC. It’s amazing how much they do out of such a small area. Everyone Dave and I met were very nice and outgoing, making sure our questions were answered. They really made us feel like part of a team. Our third night there, the GNOC communications manager took us out to a local steak place called “Sweetwater Bar and Grill.” It was great; too bad they are only in that area!

We flew back on Friday. The ticketing and terminal areas of Dulles are HUGE! And so are the security lines! Even at an off peak time, we waited in line about 10 min, I would hate to see it on a bad day! Also, terminal B is just as impressive. It reminded me a lot of Detroit Metro, except without the tram to get from one side to the other!

Overall, it was a fun trip, but I was happy to get back home. I do have some pictures posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rombus/ I would post them to the site, but I’m in the process of trying to figure out how to get the captions to show.

Flight tracker for the Flight home:
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/CHQ7827

More later when i feel like writing about it!

Since I'm sure someone would be curious or bored enough to watch, here is the FlightAware link to my flight:

http://flightaware.com/live/flight/CHQ7828

And the United Airlines Flight status page:
http://www.ua2go.com/flifo/FlightSummary.do?Check=&date=20081007&fltNbr=...

Strangely enough, there still is no departure gate posted. I guess ill just have to get that when i get to the airport.

I got about another 10-15 min before I'm going to leave the office, just enough to double check that i have everything. I wanted to get some more work done, but i really did not feel like diving into anything too deep knowing i would just have to leave it come 11am.

Remember, check http://www.twitter.com/rombus for updates during the day!

So tomorrow I head out to the Time Warner Cable Herndon, VA Corporate office.

Its not the TWC “HQ” per say. Our actual HQ is in Stamford, CT. Some research seems to show that it is considered the HQ of the Road Runner division. What’s funny is we have 3 “Corporate” offices: Herndon, Va, Stamford, CT, and Charlotte, NC. Confusing? Yes, and I work for the darn company.

In any case, I get to fly down there tomorrow and I come back on Friday. It should be pretty interesting since it’s a business trip so everything is taken care of. It’s also been about a year and a half since I last flew. For some reason, flying and travel brings out my greatest instincts of “Prepare for the worst, hope for the best” mentality. I like to be sure I have every base covered and be prepared for anything.

I’m heading down there for 2 days of training, and a tour of NDC1 (National Data Center 1) and the GNOC (Global NOC). The training will most likely be boring as heck! I’m more excited about the NDC and GNOC tours, and the chance to meet some people higher up in the company.

Over the weekend, Melissa and I headed to the Eddie Bauer warehouse store. Nice khaki pants were 12.50 and nice button-down shirts were about $15 - $30. The most surprising find were polarized sunglasses for $20. So I added 4 shirts, 5 pairs of pants to my wardrobe, and I finally replaced my Fossil cheap pair I lost a few months ago. If you’re in Columbus, and looking for good clothes, it’s highly recommended!

Time to get back to tying up loose ends around the office before I leave. Tomorrow ill post some links to the flight following tools for the flight I’m going to be on. I will also be Twittering when I can, and posting any worthwhile pics I take.

Today is day 8 of a 12 day streak of working for me. Overall the reason for all the OT was successful, just screwed my weekend plans, and now i wont get a break till this friday.

This all started on Thursday when my boss offered to let the divisional guys use our switch closet and rack space to put some equipment for training this week. Specifically some of the new Alcatel Lucent gear we will be using in the cell towers TWC Back-hauls for Verizon. The divisional guys needed to have Alcatel Lucent engineers come in to install the gear and get it configured. Gary designated me as the contact point for ALU to get everything setup.

ALU needed to come in during the weekend to do the install since the equipment needed to be up for this week. No big deal, i though i had plans for Saturday already, so Joe, the main guy who deals with the RNOC's network, said he could come in and sit here while the install team did there work. So all was well.

I spent most of Friday setting up the specifics of the weekend work. Joe and I also worked though some networking issues to be sure the equipment would be remotely accessible. Also found out that the team needed to be here Sunday also, No big deal, since it was only one day, right? Joe would take Saturday, i would take Sunday. We also got a delivery of the equipment that was to be installed. Its amazing that 14U of network equipment ended up filling over 31 boxes that were packaged on a pallet! After getting it all organized and checked in, I found out that James did not want us to come up due to him being "sick". Not a minute after my Saturday plans got thrown out the window, Joe got a phone call from his friend about his vacation this week. His friend wanted to start heading out early, and he asked if i could come in on Saturday. Having no real viable reason to say no, i agreed, and my 5 day week turned into a 12 day week.

Saturday was spent trying to work out 2 major issues the installers ran into, first being a grounding issue, the second being the lack of fuses for the racks breaker panel. After various calls to people, and running to get parts, both these were resolved and the installers got the equipment racked and powered. They came in on Sunday at 1 to finish up loading the software, and everything went much smoother.

Like i said, overall everything worked out, and it felt good to be to act like a project coordinator for a few days. Of course i would have much rather had the weekend off! Hopefully i wont feel too run down by Friday. At least our Cable came back on and we have the interwebs back at our apartment.

So i found out yesterday that ill be heading down to Herdon, VA for a few days with some coworkers for some training at the TWC HQ. Should be interesting to see our corporate offices and everything we have down there. Hopefully we can get a tour of NDC1, one of the 2 national data centers.

So that means I'm going to work hard on getting some form of gallery up and running and ill try to post pictures from my trip.

Stuff is still a bit up in the air on this one since its not fully confirmed yet, so hopefully next week everything will firm up since we are supposed to go down 2 weeks from yesterday!