Phillbo’s Blog Site

Well yesterday I got a call from my boss, asking me to come to Los Angeles ASAP.

With less than 36 hours notice, I am packing my stuff, and heading to LA. The going,  not going, and now going sea-saw is quite an interesting ride. So off to the ICANN conference e I shall go. A little late, but better late than never.

We have a few exciting things happening, so all should be good. There will be no rest for the wicked, and chances are, I will be buried down until the weekend. But at least I can enjoy a weekend in LA before heading home.  With a day and a half of spare time, where should I go?

Today is expected to be a long day. I start as the mentor, follow up ccTLD accreditations applications (we have many on the go now), and in the early hours of this morning, Adrian and I will be testing a new firewall and basically reconfiguring the WAN/LAN at our office. This should be fun, I just hope I don’t get too tired before the job is done. While it isn’t new territory per say, the hardware is unfamiliar to me, so there will be a learning curve to go through.

With the variations in my job, I must say I never get bored. But my next mission is of a social nature, get the Melbourne basketball team together.

So far:

Dr Danger (in by default - he doesn’t know it yet)
Chaplin Danger (in) - if he can get it on a Thursday night.
Immortal (confirmed in if public transport is available to venue)
Chloe’s Iron Chef (looks very promising, he is also tall too, but not officially confirmed yet)
Me (more confirmed than ever)

Now with this team, we would have three six footers, which is always good.

Now ideally I would like to find a sixth and seventh player. A six player team line is up is ideal, however having an extra person available to play would be most beneficial.

I have a few people in Melbourne I can still ask, but some of them haven’t heard from me in a while. Now to my quest:

• Find a central competition to these players
• Find a competition on Thursday night in Melbourne - or risk loosing a confirmed player
• Fnd a competition that is close to public transport - or risk loosing another confirmed player
• Find someone who can dunk and will dunk in a game (hehe)

With that said, time to get breakfast into me, and head into work. The day is long, but my weekend will be dedicated to finishing Eddie’s web site.

I woke up early, and way to early for that matter.

Although the last two days have felt extremely long and tiresome. I had a massive gut ache which needed attention, but other than that, I won’t discuss any more symptoms, as it will gross out too many people. I must admit that I am feeling much better now.

I’ve dropped in at the office briefly to give my office keys to Chloe, who is working very hard too.

I have been washing clothes all day long. I have also washed bed linen, even for my spare bed, as I have guests coming. I know shouldn’t leave stuff to the last minute, but some habits never die.

I can’t wait until my flight instructor gets back, as I have a heightened desire to get my GFPT too now. Todays weather has been outstanding. Flying solo in Tocumwal has been an awesome experience, so I am more than happy to pursue both my Recreational Aviation certificate,  along with pursuing my PPL concurrently. Flying any aircraft is all valuable air time experience. I have also been working on Eddie and Don’s web site in between everything else, and I hope to get it 95% complete by sundown tomorrow.  I want to see their business succeed, as they are the good guys in the aviation industry. I honestly believe they can revive Tocumwal’s reputation as a world renowned place for gliding. In fact, I can’t wait for my next visit there. It’s a great little town.

I am now baby sitting a server, as the hard disk has been replaced in the RAID. I hope all goes well at the data centre.

My perspective of the corporate world is difficult to explain. When I think I’ve seen it all (or heard it all for that matter), something unexpected crawls up behind you and bites your ear.

On these two past week I’ve had to address several different server issues, with a peculiar problem relating to SQL replication, to a complete RAID failure on another server. To add insult to injury, I’ve then had to follow up a compounding list of problems, which I am slowly going through the process of sorting, and then tackling them head on.

Craig the DBA from Seamless Technology provided me with a resolution in a timely manner. I was shocked by the level of service, and full points for the level of service provided. Fantastic service.

I’ve also had major issues with our company’s hosting company in the past two weeks, however they’ve reacted positively to my criticism, and I personally grateful that their company director has personally addressed my concerns. They should be commended too.

When dealing with the bigger companies such as PayPal or Google; getting even basic service is most difficult indeed.

Google appears to have major communication issues with their Adwords Front Of House staff and their technical team. Resolving a problem they have caused themself was most difficult for them. They could not provide an ETA to resolution when they were the ones that caused the problem in the first place. Speaking with both Google Ireland, and Google USA, and after half a day of down time (12 hours+) - the issue still wasn’t resolved until the commencement of Google’s Australian office operating hours. Our Australian based Google account manager got the issue resolved in record time. But it still doesn’t explain why I had to wait so long for a resolution. Although I was very disappointed by their service, Google doesn’t take top spot in my dummy spit.

PayPal are even more trigger happy to screw you up, and respond to you with standard answers, without even bothering to acknowledge your questions. Their service is lousy, and their staff need to go back to primary school; just so they can learn the basics of reading. But are they the leading dummy spit contender? Not quite.

This week a supplier of our products from Luxembourg has fucked up one too many times, and to date have not taken any responsibility in following up these recent issues. They have even billed us additional fees, and still provided us with a non-existent service. Their own staff have failed to acknowledge these problems, or even admit responsibility, and it makes my blood boil. I wonder if they will try and cover it up? Who knows, but I expect a big apology, and prompt action to resolve these outstanding issues. Errors of this kind greatly affect the reputation of your own business; as their stuff up directly screws over your customer. Now that is my dummy spit.

What lesson is to be learned?

Never let your business needs exceed the needs of your customer. They’re your lifeblood. The growing trend of bigger business is to ignore the customer needs, or to be more correct - to give them less priority. I will do my absolute best to make sure this does not happen where I work, however when your supplier doesn’t deliver on their promise, you almost feel like throwing in the towel, as it greatly affects your own reputation.

The customer should always come first. It sounds simple, a cliché indeed. but its true mostly.

My dealings with these bigger companies leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It reminds me of the Telstra BigPond days, where their front of house (FOH) staff are trained to get rid of the customer as quickly as possible. Although this philosophy wasn’t specifically a part of your training, as a previous FOH staff member, the business requirements ensured that this is exactly what you did, or face persecution from above. While that was a long time ago, I can almost guarantee it wouldn’t have changed. Like all big companies with a commanding market share, they’re too big to care.

Who will you boycott today?

Some days you feel like some people are out to get you?

Other days you feel like your a victim of spam.

But still, on other days, you’re expected to do everything any anything.  I now ask myself, why do I waste energy pondering such things.

Well today I ended up back in the office with Rob, doing final preperations on a work related project. This was mostly done in record time, but I had the sudden urge of panic to fix up a few issues with Google Adwords, which appear to have been neglected. I think all will be good with them now. Well I hope so anyway. But in the process I stumbled across at Google’s basic web hosting plans, so I had to create my own.

My friend Robert took me out to Glen Waverly tonight to eat more traditional Chinese food. It was mad, and I am sure it was packed with copius amunts of MSG. The key ingreidents were Chinese Mushroom, Boy Choy?, Tofu, Hot Chilli, Roast Duck, and Roast Pork; and they were all delightful.

I think I enjoyed spending time with my friend more than I enjoyed the food. My friend Robert is a quiet achiever, a man of extra ordinary qualities, and someone who loves his God more than he loves his own life. He always challanges me to be a better person, but not by his words, but by the way he lives his life. I don’t think I could explain that any better, but its always a pleasure to spend time with Rob. So today was quite productive, but the next few weeks are going to jammed up big time.

I must now stay focused on the job at hand. Got a lot to do, and I must manage my time effectively. In my old job at Telstra, this is something I was most adverse to, unless of course it involved so called paid slack time at work. My attitude has surely changed since then.

Working more and more in a system administration role, I find myself in the constant battle of taking on thousands of disturbances in the universe known as the Internet. Which also reminds me, its about time to update some other code too. But back to my story.

Tonight I discovered a bot hammering the BSD server that I am responsible for maintaining. Looking at various ways of blocking traffic with firewalls, Apache conf/htacess files, I decided to go with a PHP option - as the file being abused by this posting spammer was an active PHP script. Placing this code in the header of the PHP script has proven to be most effective, however Google will now get even more traffic. Maybe I should divert the traffic to my blog? *cough cough*

This little bit of code used at the top of my PHP script has been a saving grace, but I am sure I can improve on it once I get some much needed sleep.

// Abuse re-director

//$deny = array("80.86.84.65", "");
$deny = array("80.86.84.65",);
if (in_array ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], $deny)) {
   header("location: http://www.google.com/");
   exit();
}

// end of abuse re-director

Now maybe I should just re-direct it to 127.0.0.1? Once I have tested this theory, I may implement it, but I will definitely need to sleep on it. I hope Google forgive me for referring them unwanted traffic.

But after much consideration, I’ve determined that the person running this script has a default apache page running (their own web server), so now they are making querying themselves. This should buy me time until morning, as I am in desperate need of sleep.