Life is insane now.

I’m making a note here: I’M DISTRESSED!

It’s hard to work on this thing after work.

I am still alive and I want to complete the theme, but I have no energy after work the past few weeks – that’s kinda how my job goes. I get a few weeks of quiet and I have energy to work on the theme, and then I have a few weeks of INSANE and I barely have enough energy to feed myself and crawl into bed.

Don’t worry, I am committed to getting all your suggestions into the theme, get all the bugs fix, get out of beta and release on time.

Oh, and the cake is not a lie – it’s just so far afield it’s difficult to see right now.

I am looking into a PSA (Professional Services Automation) software package for my business. My company is an IT Managed Services Provider and our current solution isn’t quite up to snuff. I’ve been looking into AutoTask and ConnectWise. Anyone out there have any ideas, thoughts or experience with PSA solutions?Our MSP is quite successful, but I would like to make it more so. We are growing very quickly and I’d like to be able to standardize our offering and optimize the work flow so that we can scale up the business without adding more expenses.

AutoTask is the big name in the business. At the recent MSP conference, they were the suggested provider and had, overall, the largest market share amongst the other MSP. ConnectWise is the next big name in the market and quite a few of the MSPs were using it. I am going to demo both packages, but nothing is more important than actual experience using a specific solution, so I appeal to those who read my ‘blog who might know something about this sort of thing.

We’ve done very well the past few years and I want to continue building on that success. Any ideas from the “crowd”?

Just installed a new Netgear N router that I got for $30. Now I can play Windows Media Center streams from the Media-PC to the Laptop over wireless without skipping. YAY

Working on Saturday sucks, but it pays the bills. Trying to figure out some odd glitch on a client machine with Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5. Windows installer/LiveUpdate tries to install updates for the thing, and fails. The application itself fails to run. Right clicking in an Explorer window and selecting ANY function crashes the shell after a few seconds. WEIRD!

I want to set up the Inanis Sandbox, so you can see what I’m working on and I can play with WordPress junk without killing Inanis.net. I have a sandbox running, but there’s no content. I’ll have to work on that.

This has been the week from hell at work. Phone ringing every 6 minutes on average (I pulled the phone records and did the math, it’s insane), tons of walk-ins, lots of on-site appointments, new customers, quotes, policy changes, expansion.

*breathes*

I’ll get back on track soon. Looks like Inanis Glass 1.3.5 is running smoothly now that I ironed out a couple of kinks. When I get some time, I’ll put it up for download, unless I get any more objections.

Thanks to everyone who has used the theme and given praise, criticism, help and derision – it all helped make my contribution back to the WordPress community something to be proud of.

Sleep, Data…

Well, things are slowing down a bit at work. Can you believe it’s been 16 days since my last post, and over a month since I really did anything with the site?

I will spring back to life shortly. No promises on when, but I will soon.

I apologize for not replying to email and comments. I have been working 50-60 hour weeks lately, and when I get home around midnight, I have no energy or time to devote to the ‘blog.

Building a new repair shop, working on high-profile customers, expanding our business, ripping my gray hair out, coming home at midnight and waking up at 7am. What a life…

It will quiet down soon and then I won’t know what to do with myself.

*falls asleep*

Here’s why I haven’t been replying to e-mail and comments.

Been busy setting up computer labs and other crap.

*collapses from exhaustion*

I haven’t gotten anywhere with the Mac project I noted on before. It’s basically ready to go, but I haven’t gotten around to implementing it yet.

I was planning on setting up a development server for Inanis.net so I can make changes offline without upsetting the website. With that, I had an idea for rewriting the inanis.net theme to look even more Aero … but who knows if that will ever get done. I have too much crap to do that doesn’t involve computers.

I updated my WordPress plugins recently to newer versions. How mundane.

I also wanted to set up a LiveJournal account, or perhaps a feed, and crosspost this blog with LJ so I could be involved in a “community” without having to manually update multiple sites, and I would still have control and ownership over my content (i.e. if LJ ever disappears, Inanis.net will still be here with all the content). That probably won’t go anywhere.

The raspberries are good. I made ‘em up into a syrup and put it on cakes and icecream. Yum.

Myspace is stupid.

I’ve been playing around with a Lenovo ThinkPad R61i that a customer returned because it was BSODing. I think it’s problems were due to the hard drive shock protection feature’s drivers an management application being out of date… oh, and the setting was turned up to Shock-Nazi – the thing would completely lock the drive if you so much as metabolized air, let alone actually move. I saw it lock the drive sitting stationary on a table. I turned that down and updated the software and I have yet to see it have a problem. Not sure what I will do with it at this point … shop laptop or resell it at a steep discount to get rid of it.

I stated a long time ago about a merger between my company and another company. That merger is complete. My company not only does computer repair and networks, but now also printers, ink/toner, office supplies and office furniture. It’s got me stressed out – too much work and not enough people. Blah. It has doubled our profitiblity, however. It’s been a year in the making and has been a good thing for the company.

*yawn*

Here is a story. A story of how Murphy decided to pay me a visit and break me at every possible step.

One of my old but loyal customers called with a problem. He had purchased his computer from my company in 2002 with an onboard RAID 1 mirror. On Thursday he had an issue with the RAID 1 array of the non fatal but impending doom type and called for assistance. It sounded to me to be some minor inconsistency between the file systems, so I told him to bring in the computer and I take care of it. He let me know that he needed the computer back quickly because he uses it for his business, programming custom applications. I told him that I would look at it on the spot and let him bypass the queue, since he spent so much money on it so long ago.

Later on Thursday, he brought in the computer, and as a good technician, I looked at the guts of the machine just to make sure that everything was okay. Everything was not okay. The motherboard had a few bad capacitors, which means in a best case scenario, the capacitors were the cause of his RAID issue, we replace the RAID controller with a PCI card and send him on his way. In a worst case scenario, the mobo dies tomorrow and he has no computer. We erred on the side of caution, and decided to replace his motherboard. We discussed his options, and because of the age of his machine, decided not just to replace the motherboard, but the CPU and RAM too. We also decided to reuse as much of his other functional hardware as possible to save money. I informed him I did not have the parts in stock, but would have them tomorrow (Friday). He was okay with this, so I put the parts on order and let him know I would contact him Friday.

Friday morning comes along and the parts come in. The parts we decided on were the Intel Tower Lake motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo 6550, 2 GB DDR2-800, and 2 160GB SATA3 Drives. I took his current computer, a hoss of a machine built in a small upright server case, removed the old guts and built the new guts into it. And then pain began.

Because the customer’s case was an upright server tower, his Optical bays were really high in the case. The Intel Tower Lake board’s IDE port is on the absolute ass bottom of the board. I did not have an IDE cable that fell within the maximum spec. length that would reach his Optical Drives. Because of my somewhat limited inventory, I had to come up with a solution on the fly, which was to rebuild the computer in a smaller case that would reach the IDE drives to the IDE port. Of course, because this added more cost for the customer, I had to get his approval to do it. I tried to call him, but I could not reach him on either number, and there was no voice mail (?) so I decided to just do it. I could do some finagling with the invoice and get the price within the 5% estimate requirement Ohio has set. No big deal. Of course, this added more work because I had to unbuild his computer from the old case and rebuild it in the new case. Blah.

I got the machine built in the new case and all was well. Next, because he replaced his old build with a new one that also had a RAID 1 array, AND because he wanted his “system state” (install of Windows, programs, settings, etc.) to be exactly the same when he got the computer back, I had to somehow clone the old RAID array to the new one. Usually this is not an issue: you just “build” the new array on the new machine, and use clone software to clone one of the old RAID members to the new array. I found out that there was to be an issue. I tried to do this clone as stated above by booting the machine to my utilities CD, which has MS-DOS 7 and Norton Ghost for DOS on it. DOS is on an emulated A: drive, and the Ghost tool is on the CD-Drive partition proper. This wonderful computer, upon booting, decided that it did not want to detect the CD-Drive, unlike every other normal computer would, so I could not get access to my Ghost tool.

An option to this problem would be to create a very bare DOS floppy disk with the Ghost tool on it, boot to that, and do the clone. That was not to be, as the Intel Tower Lake board does not have a floppy controller. (Yes, I could have used a USB floppy drive, and I -had- a USB floppy drive available, but I did not realize this. As I become frustrated, I start to forget my skills and kinda collapse into a pile of useless skin.) So, I had to invent a new solution. After a quick consult with my technicians, it was suggested to add another hard drive to the computer that had a very basic DOS or Windows 98 install with the Ghost tool on it. I did this, attached the drive and got the clone going. The customer had about 40 GB of data, so the clone took about 2 hours. I took this time to do some other work and came back to it later.

Later has arrived. I detached all the crap and put the machine back into its normal state. At this point, because the installation of Windows on the machine is configured for another set of hardware, you have a 20/80 chance of having the computer boot properly, or dropping to a 0×7B BSOD. (It does this because the system HAL is configured for the chipset of the old motherboard, not the new one, and cannot properly mount the hard drive for full read/write access. When this happens, Windows DFO’s [done falls over]). What happens? 0×7B BSOD. The fix for this problem is simple: drop a Windows CD in the machine that matches the customers installation of Windows and perform a Repair Install.

I dropped the CD in the drive, and boot to it. The installer does it’s normal thing of loading all the storage drivers and file system drivers and all that jazz. When that is done, it will normally pop to a screen to give you the option of Installing Windows, loading a Recovery Console or quitting. What happened instead was a 0×7B BSOD. Yep. I got a 0×7B BSOD while trying to load the Windows Installer. In my entire career, that has never ever ever happened before.

At this point I am so frustrated that I cant think straight, so called my vendor and talked to Matt. (Let me take a moment to introduce you to Matt. Matt is the ubergeek to end all ubergeeks. He knows absolutely everything about every motherboard and processor ever released, every feature and failure of every operating system. He knows how to set up and maintain Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac networks on an -expert- level. He knows computer hardware, software, electronics, electrical, plumbing, and cars. He has memorized just about every technical specification or technology standard imaginable and can basically recite the TCP RFC. He plays video games fervently, and does everything a nerd would do. On top of that, he actually has a life and friends, goes out on the weekends and is generally a complete genius. He is the geek I always wanted to be, but never had the brain power to do.) I told Matt about my specific problem and he told me that the Tower Lake board does not have the IDE controller built into the Chipset in a standard manner, and instead has discreet logic accessible more like a SCSI controller, so the Windows installer loses access to the CD-Drive and BSODs in the same manner as if you had changed the mobo (which changes the hard drive controller… you get the idea.) Matt informed me that you have to attach a USB floppy drive and load the IDE controller driver and the RAID controller driver off floppies SCSI-Style before proceeding with the Windows installation, or it will do exactly what it did. (At this point I remembered that I had a USB floppy in the shop and realized that the Hard Drive trick I used earlier to do the drive Clone was a waste of time. Ugh.) So, I followed Matt’s advise and tried the Floppy trick.

I attached the floppy drive, rebooted, and started the Install. I hit F6 to tell the installer to load the drivers off the floppy. The installer stopped where it should and prompted me for the disc. I put the disc in the drive and hit enter, and the machine decided to lock up and “beep” the speaker continuously. It would NOT load the driver, and would NOT finish the Windows install. At this point I can actually -feel- my hair graying. I shut the machine off and tried every other USB port on the machine. Same results.

Now, frustrated to the point of brain melt, I called up Matt again and asked for some more help. He told me that he had never heard of the freeze/beep problem before, but a way around it is to use a tool called NLite to create a slipstreamed CD that has Windows and the Drivers together on the same Disc, so I don’t have to worry about the floppy issue. He gave me instructions and bid me good luck.

I followed his instructions, burned my CD, and booted to it. The Windows installer stopped fatally stating a file was missing. So I downloaded my drivers again, did the process again, created a new disc and tried again. Same error. I did this two more times, each with just one of the two drivers burned on the disc as a diagnostic measure. Same error. By now, I am ready to cry and have no way to get this machine up and running in any usable state. By now, it is also the end of the work day, so I made one final call to the vendor hoping Matt would be there. He had gone home. I otherwise made sure they would have some technician there on Saturday so I could go to the vendor and once and for all fix this fu**ing computer. I then went home and spent my night doing as much non techie stuph as I could because I had had enough of computers.

Saturday, I took the computer to the vendor and tried the floppy drive driver load trick I had tried before but failed. Using the vendors USB floppy, it worked and I was able to get the computer running. It seems my USB floppy was just incompatible with the customer’s motherboard. I finished the computer and headed back home.

But the story is not done. There is one final insult.

When I finally got home I realized one more problem. The Tower Lake motherboard does not have PS/2 ports. The customers uses PS/2 peripherals. I had to basically give him these peripherals for free because I failed to realize this during the estimate phase.

The good news is: the computer is working just fine and the customer’s installation is intact.

Now, excuse me while I go dye my hair back its original color and take a 2 week vacation to some tropical island full of beautiful people and no technology.