Vail Life

Quick update. I have been playing a bit with the Eberron pages and have our first three game nights detailed. I have one more night to put up as we have started a new adventure. We skipped roleplaying this Thursday as Justin went to Vegas for a vacation/aniversary.

Work is going good, Porsche is in the shop and should hopefully be out this coming week. First snow hit the pass and I am excited for winter to set in. And the Miami/Cinncinati game is boring as hell, although my Fantasy Football team in a local league out here is doing pretty good.

Other than that life has been pretty boring.

Oh I did go to a local club called 8150 onf Friday and had to leave after some guy walked by and made some smartass remark to me. It pissed me off so much I was going to punch the next guy that looked at me wrong. I decided that is as good as anytime to take off and avoid a trip to lockup. God I hate the bars.

Posted by Coign at 7:27 PM | Permalink | Comments

We had a tech meeting for Vail Resorts today. I found it quite humorous that they asked for input from us and all of my comments started with, "Well I have only been here for a month but..."

There are a lot of procedural things that VR does inefficiently in my opinion. For example, we use What's Up here too. But their What's Up (What's Up is a monitoring system for servers) is run very poorly. When the alarm goes off you look at it to see what's down or what has come up. The problem with VR is that they have a lot of webcams that are down during the summer and they have a lot of web cams. Also they have some back up servers that also show as down. So out of the 100+ servers you have to filter out the 20+ red servers that are always down to see what went down. I think I will talk to my manager about taking over their What's Up system to get my in to the engineering field at VR.

In the meeting I brought up the fact that in at least two cases a key system went down and I called the network support team they did not realize that the system was down. I was told that it was my job to inform them that and that it was not their job to know before me. That is what I will use as my argument to redesign the way we use the What's Up system.

Another example is that we are not being informed when a system that goes down or comes up. It is pretty easy to find out when a system is down as we get the calls on it but if it is not a system monitored by What's Up we don't know when it comes up. And the techs are not telling us when it comes up. Then our director launched into a story about how it is to tough to do updates when fixing the issue. I replied that coming from an engineering standpoint I can understand that but I am not asking for updates while they are combating the problem but am asking for a notification of completion. This will let us know if a user calls in, if it is a local issue or if it a problem related to a larger global problem.

So I had a couple of issues to bring up and I hope that my information is taken objectively and not as a criticism of the way they do things. I want to come of as being able to make a contribution and not as someone that is just complaining.

Posted by Coign at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments