The legend of Dan

I recently brought all of my old yearbooks back from my parents house. Throughout my reminiscing, I’m realizing that yearbook messages can sometimes have a lot of insight into the future. Who knew the kid everyone called a “homo” in 7th grade would actually be gay (and president of his college’s GSA)? Who knew the guy who said “remember to always lie, cheat, and steal” would borrow several months of rent money from a friend, never pay it back and then flee partway across the country never to be heard from again? Nostradamus couldn’t predict that shit!

Also, sometimes the yearbook messages are hilariously inane. Therefore I’m going to start tweeting a random yearbook message every day until I run out of interesting ones! Check it out at http://www.twitter.com/danwpratt

Hopefully 10 years from now I can look pack at my tweets and blog posts and say “Man, I was really into irony.” Let me write about this in future-twitter.

Yes, I am living it up in California right now. But of course by “living it up” I mean working my ass off. Today is my first real full day off and I’ve really only used it to chill and recover.

But, for those of you that miss me, you can check out my adventures on twitter, which I’ve been finding entertaining to use on this trip since I want to stay away from the computer as much as possible when not working!

http://twitter.com/danwpratt

“…all the love that I found…”

I realize that one of the reasons I’m sucking at updating my blog is that I think I limited the scope too much. I was walking a fine line between making it interesting and trying to focus on a topic. My particular life in the IT/Telecom world is exciting for sure, but not blogworthy on a very regular basis for the uninitiated. So, as of today I will decree that this blog will expand topics to generally anything I find interesting, including music, video games, and other cool shit. I realize I wasn’t all that focused before, but now I won’t regret writing about other topics and won’t ignore interesting things because they didn’t fit into my plan.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to refer back to the beginning of this entry! I saw Pilfers* in what could possibly be (but damn, let’s hope not!) their last show of the tour in Hartford. It luckily coincided with me visiting my parents for Thanksgiving. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go despite the show in Boston being so awesome, mostly because I didn’t want to be that guy who goes to every show. Luckily for me 2 shows isn’t every show (though it is a whopping third of them!) and Coolie Ranx personally thanked me (while on stage) for writing my last blog post.

So here I’ll say it again: I cannot more strongly recommend Pilfers as a source of awesome music. I convinced at least one other person of this so far, and I’m glad that I did. As a special note, it was brought to my attention that Pilfers prefer to be referred to as such without the article, so I’m working on writing it that way. I hope my grammatical ignorance in my last post is not the source of Coolie Ranx’s announcement that there’s no “the” in Pilfers during the last show!

As you might imagine I’ve been listening to a lot of ska and punk lately and I think that whole genre has a bad rap for being a fad. There are some really talented musicians in those bands and I will admit what many might consider sacrelidge but Ska is what got me on the road to appreciating Jazz back in high school. Fusion genres are where it’s at and more genres are fusion than you might think! More on that later…

Anyway, hopefully I’m back! Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!

As I’ve blogged about, tonight was one of the few Pilfers reunion shows. I would rate it as awesome. Not only did I get to see five Ska bands for 15 dollars, but I got to see a band I’ve wanted to see and been unable to for years. And on top of that, I got to meet the lead singer and tell him he was awesome.

I signed up for their mailing list, bought a tee shirt, and had both of their albums before I had even met him. He could tell I was excited, and as I shook his hand after the show, he only said one thing to me: “Tell a friend.” I thought I’d do one better and tell multiple friends via the magic of the Internet.

The Pilfers are what most people would consider a ska band, but as you listen to their music, you can hear elements of not only Jazz and Reggae, but of Rock, Metal and more traditional music. The story is they are called the “pilfers” because they steal elements of almost every genre of music and blend it together. They do this well, and don’t disappoint live, even after a seven-year hiatus.

The other distinctive element of the band is that their lyrics have a positive quality that I would mostly expect to find in Disney movies, however, they blend it into their pilfered musc quite well. They have songs about being yourself, being fearless, and overcoming obstacles that as I describe them, I cannot help but feel lame. For some reason, it works in their music and it gives them an edge that other bands can’t compare to. As someone who’s tried to write a song once or twice, it’s much easier to write a cool depressing song than a cool happy songs, and the Pilfers pull it off flawlessly. I think that is what truly makes them distinct among their peers.

So, Coolie, I’ve held up my end of the bargain. I shook your hand and said I’d tell a friend, and I wouldn’t have even talked to you in the first place if I didn’t think your music was great. So, my loyal readers, I expect you to ask me to borrow a CD in the near future.

I’ve been taking a vacation from thinking lately. I’ve been vaguely sick and stressed, and the way I cope with this is by doing as little as possible. This is the first time I’ve even turned my computer on at home in 4 days.

Having said that, the thing that will snap me out of this funk may be Jazz tonight, but if not will most certainly be Pilfers tomorrow night! I remind you that you should come because ska is awesome!

More to come…

At work, at least among the IT staff, I’m known as one of two Apple fiends. I’ve developed this reputation mostly because I own a Mac and I know how to use it. Most of the rest of the IT Staff- at least the members that have been around a while – have the 90s attitude towards Apple thinking it’s just a crappy cute competitor to PC. Of course since the advent of OS X in 2001 and the comeback of Steve Jobs, Apple has changed considerably.

So, realizing the changes and enjoying the usability of OS X, I’ve been accused of being a fanboy. While this may have been true briefly at various points, I wouldn’t say that it is true in general. I think OS X’s greatest virtue is its Unix base. Before various linux geeks I know explode, I do think linux and in particular Ubuntu is awesome, but it still lacks the polish and compatibility of OS X. As much as I want to support open source, there are still some closed source apps I consider irreplaceable, at least for now.

In general my perceived Apply fanboyism comes down to think Unix is cool and that OS X blends that with compatibility that other *nxs don’t have. I’m not here to start one of those Internet thread holy wars, but, as usual, I just want people to be reasonable and admit there are some good features to the Mac platform. There are certainly some bad ones too, and I won’t dispute that: vendor lock-in, lack of hardware compatibility, and required kool-aid drinking are serious issues. So, coming from your local Mac expert, be reasonable.

The past couple of days have been very crazy at work, and have made me revisit a topic I often think about, which is the balance of information I provide to my users when explaining IT issues. There are some issues to consider, including appearing competent, maintaining the user’s trust of both myself and the technology I support, and educating the user without boring or confusing them. Of course, each of these aspects varies from user to user but I like to feel like I have an overall philosophy of how I deal with these sorts of things.

There are ways to say you don’t know without sounding dumb. This is key. I think one of my strongest IT skills is not knowing but learning quickly. I like to share my knowledge with the users. If people can understand their problems, they are more likely to be able to fix them on their own or avoid them altogether. The worst user for me is the one that wants me to come fix something and not ask me what I did or even ask why it’s broken. This person is often but not always a technophobe, and I honestly think that being a technophobe will not get you very far these days.

I don’t really understand the IT people that don’t explain things to the users, either. I have coworkers that will never email users to let them know of outages, or won’t explain what happened when a certain thing broke. On some level I realize that it is probably mostly them wanting to appear competent by not admitting something broke, but I think it’s better to lower the user’s expectations- and I don’t mean that in a bad way.

As an IT professional, I am well aware that IT is an art as much as it is a science and that nothing works 100% correctly ever. Obviously we strive for optimal uptime and the best possible user experience, but a good portion of IT is planning for disasters- backups, workarounds, and alternate methods. We have an expectation that things will fail sometimes, and I think it is unfair for us to have this expectation while convincing our users they live in a techno-utopia.

As things get busier, it’s harder for me to maintain my ideal of explaining things to users because of course it is much faster just to fix things. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to my old ways soon!

I didn’t post yesterday and for that I am sorry. I spent most of the day at work perfecting the phone upgrade and then was present at one of the more ridiculous and fun birthday parties I’ve been to.

All of the big projects of the last few months are past. I’m no longer worrying about baseball, the election, or the phone upgrade. What’s next?

Impov classes start on January 13th. Maybe that will provide some more interesting tidbits to add here, but we won’t know for a couple months. I guess now it’s the holiday season. I haven’t yet heard any Christmas music, but someone in South Boston was arrested for playing some already.

I think the point of this post is that I’m about halfway into this blog once a day every day business, and maybe I’m running out of ideas. It may or may not be related to the completion of these projects, but I’m probably just hitting a brief dry spell. I plan to be back for real tomorrow with something interesting to talk about. For now, I am off to sex and drugs trivia!

Well, tonight as you may know I participated in a phone system upgrade for my 300-person office. Since the Telecom department consists of 3 people including me, we had hired consultants to do most of the work for us. My boss researched to find the best ones around, and let me tell you, it was awesome.

Our group did a lot to prepare for the upgrade, most involving creating disgusting spreadsheets describing what every singe one of our phones did in what circumstances, what lines rang where, etc. It took a while and certainly wasn’t pretty, but the end result was a concise description of all of our phone lines we could hand over to our consultants.

They did the legwork and the staging, and tonight was the big night. We activated the new phone system and took the old one offline, and it worked. It worked right away. Immediately.

We spent the rest of the night drinking beer in the office and making sure that all of the special cases were taken care of appropriately. We just have to tie up loose ends and test test test.

But, my hat is off to our awesome consultants, who literally made the biggest project I’ve ever looked at seem like not only a walk in the park, but more like a walk in the park with some good friends and a couple of open containers!

Now we just have to hope that the end users feel the same way we do on Monday!

So, I guess I work in IT support. Lately I’ve been thinking about this field. When I first started really doing IT, I formed a company with a friend and we basically helped people to do things that were simple to us, but far beyond the person we were helping’s capacity. Some of these things involved closing a printer cover when the computer prompted the confusing error message “Printer cover open.”

That gets old quickly.

So, moving up in the IT world, you move away from helping people who can’t do anything, to helping people who can do some things. We help people who don’t have the time or the experience to troubleshoot problems quickly. You’re like the painter. Sure, you could paint your own house, but that would take forever, and you probably wouldn’t do as good of a job, so you hire the painter to come and help you out.

Depending on the context, that can get old quickly too.

So we move up once again in the IT world. Now, you’re working on new things- helping figure out how to deploy new technology and convince people that the new thing is better than the old thing. This gets much more interesting. Once you get to this point in a journey along the IT path, you realize that no new technolgoy is worthwhile unless people not only can use it, but also be convinced to use it and like it.

When you are first a technology fiend, you go after everything. You say “Wow, look, I can connect this to that and use my cell phone to control my stereo from another country!” But this demonstration of what technology can do does not reflect what technology should do. This extends beyond simple usability to both convenience for the end user to adopt, and ease of maintenance. Sure, you can get something to work once, but can you do multiple times in multiple situations? Probably, but do you want to?

This I think is the real crux of Information Technology: it’s not about doing everything that is possible, but moreso about doing everything that is helpful. I feel like this idea is often lost, especially among IT professionals. We are paid to paint your house, and think about what paints might help your wood keep its finish longer, not just to patch up the flakey spots and throw on a coat of the next trendy superpaint.

The next time you see me remote controlling my computer with my phone, remember: I’m a geek, and you don’t need that crap. It will come to you when it’s ready for you.