Recently in The Pit Of Despair Category

They make an ass out of you and umption. It's true.

I made an assumption that the "firewall" was configured to actually be a "firewall" (as in "only the necessary services permitted inbound, to the necessary destinations, from the necessary sources.")

I was wrong. Spent the better part of a morning sorting out the attempts that had been made to hack the hell out of a fresh virgin Red Hat install.

As my last day at $ORKPLACE nears, the vultures have been circling for days around my office, looking for things they can steal for their own environments. Yesterday, the Marketing department demanded the return of a refrigerator that I had pilfered during the move to the new building. When I came in this morning, some co-workers had stolen the bookshelves that I had emptied out a few days prior. Yesterday, I heard people discussing the best way of acquiring my flat-panel monitors without anyone noticing.

But the final straw was when someone stole my fucking door.

They're building out a new office on the other side of the building. Apparently the construction crew brought with them a door, but it was defective (well, it's "as designed" but "inappropriate", as it is lacking an actual latch mechanism to hold it closed).

So instead of delaying the other office's build-out by a couple hours while they went back, got the right door, and did things right, they came down here, stole my fucking door, gave me the crappy broken one, and gave the FNG my perfectly functional door.

Guess I don't need any privacy in my final days. :-)

But, in all seriousness, that is the most bold vulturing I've ever seen in my entire career. :-)

There is one huge thing I hate in many offices. A lot of people have their phone systems set up so that if you dial an internal extension, instead of the phone just ringing until whomever you called picks it up, it rings once and then immediately puts the caller on speakerphone with that office.

I will accept that this may be useful in the secretary/executive context. I would argue, though, that in nearly every other context it is just completely annoying both for the caller and the called.

First, for the caller. Nothing worse than dialing, hearing it ring once, and then having absolutely no feedback as to whether or not there's someone on the other end of the line. So you invariably end up saying something like "Hello?" (which, of course, since it's on speakerphone, everyone in a three-state radius of the person you're calling can hear).

Then there's the called party... often when you're busy on important stuff, you may want to say "let him go to voicemail" or "oh, that's the boss, I should answer it" or "oh, that's the call from the vendor I'm waiting for". When the first person to reach you goes to the speakerphone, you can't pretend not to be in your office, unless you suddenly go all quick-quiet like on a nuclear missile sub or something.

Thankfully, I've had the TelcoGuy configure my phone to no longer be in using the annoying as hell configuration, but ideally, I'd love to get every phone in the building reconfigured this way, or at the very least have the phone system offer the caller the option of "if you're just going to dump me into speakerphone with no feedback, don't bother connecting me to their extension" so that I don't sound like a moron to everyone within 30' of the desk of the person I'm calling.

So NetworkAdmin read my post yesterday wherein I ranted about the sorry state of affairs in our network implementation. The conversation that followed went fairly poorly, but devolved to "send him any future requests through your manager" (to which I replied he should do the same), and that he would do so "professionally", (to which I replied I would do the same). He then got all snide about whether or not I could be professional.

It struck me as an odd statement, coming from the guy who -- instead of saying "yup, getting that QOS stuff done has been on my to-do list, maybe we should bump it in priority" (which would have elicited pretty much a "yup, know the feeling man, thanks for bumping it up" response) -- decided to instead just start making snide remarks about "those linux users". Instead of acknowledging responsibility for the problem, he turned to veiled insults and finger-pointing.

I don't want to speak badly of NetworkAdmin, because he's a good kid, but if that, somehow, is his definition of "professional", well, then I'm not sure what to make of it.

I won't claim to be the easiest guy on the face of the planet to get along with. I won't claim to be the epitome of "professional behavior". Hell, I can be a downright prick. But one thing I've always been good at is owning up to my mistakes at work, accepting responsibility for them, and then ya move on, learning whatever lesson and not repeating them. Finger-pointing isn't something I'm all that good at.

So anyhow, he's all upset that I apparently ripped him apart in my blog post, blah blah blah. His friends are e-mailing me telling me to shut the fuck up about their friend, blah blah blah. So I went back and re-read the post. I wanted to go back and check -- was I really all that harsh about him? Was it somehow over the top and had it crossed that line? I didn't -- and still don't -- think so. Maybe others will correct me if I'm wrong, though.

When I truly want to eviscerate someone in a public blog post, I've done it, and I'd like to think it's plainly clear that I'm in full on evisceration mode. I'm not going to link to archived posts that are examples, because in almost all of the really good "pimpsmackin'" entries, I've since apologized to the people involved for going off on them. The long and the short of it, though, is that yesterday's post doesn't anywhere near rank in the "top ten posts a person should be offended over" on this blog.

I mean, ... Be offended when I rail on you for something that turns out to not be your fault, or when I come out and say things like "oh my god this woman is a moron!", both of which are direct examples of things I've done. Be offended when I'm actually patently insulting about my complaints, or when I'm flat-out wrong, both of which are things that've happened. But don't be offended if I speak the truth about things within your responsibility that affect my ability to do my work.

Oh my god, I can't believe how piss-poor the network design is in some companies. Like, say, the one I work at.

NetworkAdmin comes wandering around the IT department asking "is anyone downloading anything?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm doing an up2date on my workstation."
"You need to kill it, it's crushing our pipe."
(it's worth noting here that due to poor planning and/or design, all contact with our CSRs' data-entry system happens over the public internet, so crushing our internet pipe means order-entry is impacted. Yes, it's a crappy design. Yes, I've asked NetworkAdmin to spec out a direct link between our LAN and the colo where the order-entry system is located... yet to actually see it despite about three requests)
"You gotta be fucking kidding me, you're telling me that my little workstation, doing as simple as an update of its packages, can take down our entire network?"
"Yes. If the sending site has ample bandwidth, our ISP will happily fill the T1 with your traffic to the exclusion of all others."

Christ. Not at all like most sane traffic-shaping where -- while my downloading might consume a crapload of bandwidth, it will NOT do so to the exclusion of other traffic.

Then, of course, NetworkAdmin starts off on one of those "I'll mutter but loud enough that the person can hear" rants on how he has to keep reminding "those Linux people" how the network works. At which point I reminded him that I just assumed that our network was managed competently, had things like rate-limiting, traffic-shaping, QOS, etc. He, naturally, makes the "you know about 'assume'" comment. So I told him, "I'll never assume we're run competently again, believe me. I'll work from a presumption of having our entire operation on a 9600 baud modem, and just never get any work done."

Of course, if my box was to get somehow compromised because I don't keep up on updates, you know that NetworkAdmin will be quick to say "oh, no, not HIS fault..." blah blah blah. It'd be my responsibility to keep up on updates, even though doing so gets me yelled at because we can't manage a network to save our lives.

Is this a problem unique to the Pit of Despair, or do other people have problems like this with their networks, too?

It's been a really crappy day, and I've got nobody to point to except myself for that. In the scope of my eight hours here today, I have:

• failed to notice that two of our six SSL certificates were expired. Failed to notice it because the code that looked for "upcoming expired" certs had a slight logic flaw in it.
• In the process of pushing out a renewed certificate managed to bone both the production servers so badly they were down for a few minutes, and SSL didn't return for about 20 minutes after that.
• Came about 6 milliseconds from accidentally overwriting the apache configs on all the production servers.

Seriously, I need to go home now. Before I break something else. :-(

Ever since I got a fridge in my office, I haven't had much use for the office vending machine. Basically only when I don't have what I want pre-stocked in my fridge.

Although, it's interesting to note that the last three times I've been "slumming it" at the vending machine, it has been trying to buy back my loyalty by having there be anywhere from $0.65 to $1.25 in change sitting in the return slot.

It's not like I can go around to an office full of people and say "can you please identify your coins that I found?" and get a straight answer, so basically my last couple vending machine purchases have been free of charge.

My loyalty is not so easily purchased, though, since the machine doesn't have Caffeine-Free Coke.

There's advantages to living and working out in the middle of nowhere. It's usually cheap to live, low crime, all sorts of benefits like that.

The downsides, though, are like today, for example. I'm starved, and have too much work to get done to go running around getting food. But nobody fucking delivers around here. No pizza places, no chinese food places, nothing. It's like a desolate wasteland for delivered meals.

Argh, this sucks.

Today, for the first time since August of 1997, I became the occupant of an office at work. The entire past nearly-eight years have been spent either in a machine-room, a cubicle, or working from home. The Pit Of Despair (and, since I haven't mentioned it lately, I should point new readers at this post from 2003 about the origins of "Pit Of Despair") recently moved from one-half a building in our office park to a full floor of a different building. In the process, I was upgraded from "cube-dweller" to "office-dweller".

There are things I have missed for a long time that I now finally have back in my life -- the ability to turn off the really annoying fluorescent lighting overhead, or the ability (obviously) to close the door when I really need to get work done.

I'm waiting for my big-ass whiteboard to show up, along with my new chairs (one for my desk two for visitors). I also just put in a request with my boss for a couple of flat-panel screens (with the bulky CRTs I've got now, they have to sit in such a way that whoever comes visiting, if they sit in the chair to my left, they're completely invisible behind the screens).

Now, I just need to decide what I want for wall decorations in my office.

Highs: Today was food-day at work. There are about a gajillion different things to eat and drink in the kitchen today, and lots of them yummy even.

Lows: "backup" is a poor password for the "backup" user... Predecessor's death already being plotted. 'Nuff said.

I should be working at this moment, but I have to interrupt that to say something about the new gig that just couldn't wait until tonight when I get home.

I was talking with a co-worker about how I have to call the Yankees box office this morning (that's what TicketMeister said to do) and my boss overheard me. A few minutes later, I approached him about what the "long distance calls" policy was (since some companies will fire you for it, but then at others, it's treated almost like a perk, "call whomever you want", etc.)

ANYHOW... he comes over to my desk and says "Here, if you're a fan, you can use these tomorrow night. You won't find better seats."

Field Championship Box Seats. They don't get better than that. Apparently, the company owns a set of 4 season tickets down there in the great seats. (See the image at the right for "what my view will be")

And, to speak to how cool the work environment is in general, another co-worker came over to my desk a few minutes ago, offering up 2 out of the 4 tickets he'd acquired for this evening's game. "Gotta share the wealth," he said.

This is the sort of thing you just can't make up. Or if you did make it up, it still wouldn't be as cool as the reality.

After returning from GenCon yesterday evening, today was the first day of my last week at the current gig. Next Monday is my last day. I'll have a brief respite, taking Tuesday off, with Wednesday marking the first day at the new gig.

I'm pretty excited, actually. I've been looking forward to this now for a while. It looks like I'll be a conslutant of sorts for a bit.

There's a bunch of people I'm going to miss there, but one thing I won't miss is the clutter in my dining room going away. Anyone who's been to my apartment has seen the "mass of boxes and sundries" in my dining area, almost all of which belonged to my employer. Good chunks of that are all getting shipped away, back to the office where they belong, where my replacement can work on them to get them into working shape.

Yes, they've hired my replacement. He's a good guy, someone I found on the MHVLUG mailing list. (I wonder if I should ask to stay on the books a couple extra months just to get the $1,000 referral fee?) His first day is the week after I leave, so they're sorta "up in the air" for a week, but that's how these things sometimes work.

It's going to be weird commuting into an office on a daily basis again. But at least I'll be a social creature again. Especially given recent developments on the social front today, it looks like contact with new people might be a good idea. :)

Now that it appears to be public at work, I can finally say something here. As of the end of the month, I'll no longer be working where I presently work. I received a job offer, basically out of the blue, from a company much closer to home that I simply couldn't refuse.

You know how when you go to interviews and they ask you that "where do you want to be in five years?" interview question... well, what I described, and what they then told me the job description was, had such a neat meshing (which is to say, "they were identical") that I knew right then that I had to take the position, so long as the financials could be made to line up, and they did that quite easily.

It'll be a bit of a switch for me actually having to get up and go to work each day, but I think I can manage. It's about a 45-50 minute drive for me (versus the 95-100 minute drive on the rare days I could commute down to White Plains).

It's a much smaller company (40 people), generating just obscene quantities of cash for its size (the phrase "hand over fist" comes to mind). I'm really excited to be getting involved with this organization.

The current place was always envisioned (for me anyway) as a stopping ground... it was the place I went after the Yahoo layoff, because finding a job in 2001-2002 wasn't all that easy. I had a lot of job offers along the way, but didn't take them, because I couldn't find the "right fit at the right time" the way this place seems right to me.

At the Pit, we have this server. It's an old server, and nobody likes it much. It's been a pain in everyone's ass for many years.

I built a new server to take over the tasks of the old server. We moved all the faxes to go out the new server instead of the old. And life was good.

I prepared to retire the old server, which based on an edict I got long-ago, meant there would be copious quantities of gunpowder, lead, and maybe some baseball bats involved in the retirement party, Office Space style. My retirement plans were interrupted by a co-worker saying, "We'll have to hold off until we figure out what to do with the NY Medicaid data that we use that machine for."

Huh? says I, what do you mean? Well, it seems we get data from NY Medicaid, detailing what they've paid us and for what patients, etc., etc., and it all comes to us on, wait for it, a 9-track tape.

So I call Albany to find out what other formats are available, so that I can have them start sending us the data on something a bit more recent, seeing as how 9-track reels haven't even been made, by anyone, in three years.

Turns out, I have options, plenty of them. OK, well, two. I can have my data sent on spiffy 9-track reels, or some other similarly obsolete 8-track format.

Jeezus... I mean, seriously. Is this how government bureaucracy works? When I asked, "Do you have any idea when you might have a tape format for which there are actually drives presently in production?" the answer was "We're told that maybe next year that will come to pass, but knowing the state, they'll probably standardize on 1.44MB floppy disks."

At least I can buy a floppy drive. That'd be an improvement over this.... :-/

I commuted into the Pit on Thursday. It was a commute I'd been wanting to do for a while. Why was I so eager to commute, you ask? Because Thursday, I emptied my cubicle. I officially do not have a cube in the White Plains office any more.

The fate of my telephone extension is even in doubt. Whether it will forward immediately to voicemail, or to my cell phone, or to my Vonage number... who knows.

All I know is that on the rare occasions that I head to White Plains now, I have to plan accordingly, packing the spare AC adapter in the laptop bag, etc., etc., as there is none of the things I normally left in my cube so I could work when I came in. I'll have to find an empty cube or office while I'm there and utilize that.

Words cannot describe my happiness level. :-)

No, I'm not unemployed. They've been hiring so many people at work that my cube is needed by people who actually come to work every day.

So now I'll be homeless when I go to the office, borrowing cube/office space to jack into on those rare occasions I go into the office.

I look at it as one step closer on my path towards just being 100% telecommute. :-)

I got an e-mail from a co-worker this evening wherein they mentioned (for perfectly valid, non-gloating reasons) that they were going on the "CEO Challenge trip to Jamaica", which is (apparently) for sales folks only.

I'm sorry, but I just don't get it. Yes, sales people are important, and rewarding them is important. No argument. But without the entire rest of the organization, salespeople are worthless. Without CSRs taking orders, those sales leads are worthless. Without collections departments, the sales from those leads never generate revenue. Without IT departments designing the order-entry, billing, collections, etc., systems, all of it is worthless.

At the same time, many companies (like ours) tie annual bonuses to "Sales making their numbers". In other words, I might have {x} goals to meet in order to make "my bonus goal", and even though I've met and exceeded my goals, if the sales folks don't meet their goal, too bad... I don't get squat. (Although, I won't get anything anyway, I'm the only employee in the company without an incentive program of any kind, but that's a whole different rant....)

It engenders an "us versus them" attitude in companies. "They" are no more important to the organization's success than any other part of the company, yet they get treated different, and they can impact whether or not other people get the bonuses they've earned.

Why do companies do shit like that?

As some folks may remember, one of the machines in the Pit is running on degraded power (long-story short, it's running on 110VAC only due to the fact that the older IBM power-supplies were auto-sensing on input voltage, and current ones aren't, and they require 220VAC, which is all the machine was ever rated for).

So, it's been running without its hot-spare power-supply for months. Sitting below it in the rack is 18U of RS/6000 report-server ready and waiting for juice, but also decidedly lacking in 220VAC.

Now, the long story is - of course - that we've been hounding our crappy-ass mega-corp hosting company to bring a 220 line to our cabinets for the last three to four weeks. They consider us "ungrateful" because we're pissed off that after four weeks we still don't have power, because "the normal turn-around on that is 60-90 days" (mind you, the receptacle they need to make live is already present, it's just a matter of lighting it up).

Oh, did I mention that the price-sheet lists a 30A 220V power line at $1200 per month? Yes, gentle readers, that's right. $1200 a month, $40 an amp.

So, literally, as the corporate bureaucracy was just kicking the ticket out to the colocation facility to "go work it", I personally called and halted the ticket's progress.

Why?

Because there's no sense paying $1200 a month and a huge-ass installation fee, when this latest round of "You'll get nothing and like it" with the mega-corp made us decide to kick them to the curb.

The current front-runner is a small company which near as I can tell from everyone I've talked to has great customer service, has taken over an old IBM manufacturing facility, so it has like five times the redundant power/air/telco that it actually will ever need, and - most importantly - will end up saving us literal rafts of cash per month from what the megacorp would be charging us.

F them, I tell ya. ;-)

Let me just say, that I hate our hosting company at the Pit Of Despair.

There's nothing worse than being a small company dealing with a big-ass gajillion-dollar corporation. We're nothing to them. A flea-speck. An annoyance they have to occasionally talk to if they want to collect their commission check. If it was entirely my decision, I'd've blown out of there six months ago and gone elsewhere.

As noted in a prior post, I was having a large issue with some memory in our machine. Well, today, it finally got all sorted out, and the memory is now installed, the machine purring along, and everything happy.

And, NewGuyCIO gave me permission to not bother with the commute tomorrow or Tuesday, so I won't get sick of driving every single blessed day

Time to go relax.

So, as I may have mentioned before, The Pit has a nice fat IBM RS/6000 7026-6H1 unit... 6 CPU, 2GB RAM... not too huge (I mean, I've had co-workers who were able to say they worked on a Cray with serial number "1"), but nothing to sneeze at.

Scott, of the original Pit Of Despair recounted to me a story years ago. He used to wander around the office, muttering under his breath, "fuckyouIquit, fuckyouIquit, ..." One of his cow-orkers approached him, asking "What are you doing?" "Practicing," he responded.

And, of course, as I related that very story to people at later jobs, I found them doing the same thing, when times got rough.

I sense a pattern in that. Something that occurred to me in the car to getting groceries tonight. It was the realization that although I had less stuff when I was in my early twenties, and I had trouble paying the bills month to month, and at its best I was sharing a basement 2BR apartment with a friend of mine that I could probably fit entirely into my present 1BR apartment, there was something fundamentally different between then and now:

I was happier then.

I left my crappy job at work. The biggest responsibility I might have had at work was "make sure the walk-in cooler got mopped before I went home." I had a schedule that was basically completely negotiable (need a day off, take it, get the hours some other day of the week instead). I had time to spend with my friends.

And most of all, I didn't feel bad ripping on my job. I mean, if you're working at a convenience store, even your boss is going to be cynical about the job.

Now, I'm paid reasonably well, and have little to complain about on that front. The job sucks (inasmuch as all jobs suck, really), but I feel bad about complaining about it, because it's a well paid career, puts things in the apartment, etc., etc.

I keep thinking to myself "If I sold off everything I owned, could I pay off enough of my debt that I could go back to that simpler life, get some crappy job with no responsibility whatsoever," and of course the answer is no, not easily.

I had a conversation with Brian a couple weeks ago, where I reflected that primitive man worked about two hours a week hunting and gathering, and the rest of the time he lounged around, played, danced, ate, drank, fucked, and basically enjoyed himself the entire rest of the time. Brian pointed out that he had a life expectancy somewhere around 30-40 years, and that certainly the extra time was worth the hassle.

But is it? If you assume that you're awake for 112 hours a week, and you spend 50-60 of that either working, doing chores, commuting, etc., that means you get (65 x 52 * (112-55) = 192,660) hours of enjoyment out of life. If you just slack off the entire time, spend a mere two hours a week hunting and gathering, you get (35 x 52 x (112-2) = 200,200) hours of enjoyment out of life.

In other words, if you go back to living like a caveman, you get a much shorter life, but you actually get the functional equivalent of more time spent doing what you want to do. There are 314 days more "fun" time, total, for the caveman.

Makes you wonder why we think the whole technology/job/career/money/possessions cycle is so freaking nifty. We've actually sucked nearly an entire year of "fun" life off our own lives.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate the IBM H50 (RS/6000) servers we have at work? No? OK, suffice to say that I hate them a lot.

I feel better just for venting that. Thanks for listening.

Well, to sum it up, it never happened. And that's ok.

In the morning, I went and chatted with CluefulVP, my former boss. We chatted for a bit about "what had I complained about", etc. etc. He then asked me "So where do things stand now with you? Are you and he cool?" I said I couldn't speak for NewGuyCIO, but that I was ok.

He then said he was gonna go talk to NewGuyCIO for a few minutes "before the sit-down" type of thing, to get "the other guy's opinion" (which makes sense).

Late afternoon, I go back into CluefulVP's office, to ask him what the plan is. Apparently, NewGuyCIO is cool with the present state of affairs as well. Basically, the miscommunication, etc., etc., of last week is being put behind us as if it didn't happen, and we're doing good. Having a sit-down just draws attention to "things best left in the past" was the basic gist of what he said.

I felt a lot better this afternoon than I did the middle of last week, that's for sure.

Although he did nitpick the spelling on an outage memo I sent out today. But I can respect that, since I'm the anal-retentive type who is usually pretty good at pointing out the shortcomings of others. *smile*

Yes, you read that right. Not WindowsCIO, NewGuyCIO.

We had a number of back and forth e-mail conversations this evening that did a lot to - as I indicated I was looking for - smoothed over my fear that "Windows was the solution to all".

We chatted about the SCO Linux Debacle (and about how they might've screwed themselves by releasing the code themselves as a Linux distro), touched a bit on OpenBSD vs. Linux as a solution, and he even turned me on to a VoIP solution that might be cheaper than my second (company-paid) phone line.

I'm still going to have the sit-down on Monday (we pushed it to monday, because it seemed important to do so), because there's still issues that need to be hashed out, but I feel a lot better tonight, heck, than I did this morning even.

This may have started out as "WindowCIO Day Five", but it ended up something completely different.

I'm going to take that as a very good sign, and I'm not going to let any of you stop me.

So I took today (and tomorrow actually) off. Today I had a trip down to NYC (more on that in a week or so, nothing earth-shattering or life-altering, just met some interesting people in the music industry), and tomorrow I'm going to go see The Matrix.

But on the train ride down and back from the city, I was able to just relax and contemplate this whole situation with WindowsCIO. I know I can be abrasive and annoying (anyone who knows me will confirm that), and I suspect he probably wasn't adequately prepared for my demeanour. I mean, it's entirely possible he might take things personally that are not intended as such (e.g., maybe he thinks "I don't trust him with system access to those systems" or something, when it's really "I don't trust anyone with system access, but I grudgingly give it to people who need it to do their job."

I'm scheduled for a commute day on Tuesday, so I think I'll schedule a sit-down (god this feels like a Sopranos episode) with myself, WindowsCIO, and CluefulExBoss, and we can get things out in the open. He can tell me what I'm doing that he doesn't like (and, heck, I'm sure there's some things like that), and I can hopefully explain why I do those things the way I do, and vice versa.

Because, for as much as I might call where I work "The Pit Of Despair", every company is its own pit of despair in some way*. There are no perfect jobs (well, there were, but then the dotcom bubble demanded that they make money as well, so that whole getting paid to do nothing thing went out the window) and as far as the current workplace goes, it's not as bad as others could be ... I get to telecommute, have a flexible schedule because of that, they recognize the value of the conferences I attend and the knowledge I bring back so they pay for one or two a year, and (I'm sure, after WindowsCIO gets his feet wet, and understands what I do), I'll be able to just go back to working on my own and concentrate on "getting shit done."

*The original "Pit Of Despair" was actually a company called CSI in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and it wasn't even me who worked there. It was a co-worker who had quit there to found the company I was working for, but got dragged back in as a high-paid consultant, where he constantly debated between "great pay" and "crappy defense contractor work". One night after playing far too much Diablo online, he said he had to go back to work, at which point, in my best Monty Python accent, I said he was being "...cast into the Pit Of Despair" .. and it stuck. Later, that just became generic for "the workplace", as we expanded the alt.sysadmin.recovery adage of "All Hardware sucks, and all software sucks", to "all workplaces suck", and it's been there ever since. ... There's a piece of Derek history you never thought you'd hear. ;-)

It was relatively quiet today, actually, and I'll take that as a good sign. There was a brief squabble over "No, the CIO does not automatically get an account on every machine, he gets an account on the machines he needs to do his job. That's a very basic security principle," but after I explained that basic principle, he let the matter rest, so it seems I made an impact. It's weird to me now, after a year working for MostlyCluefulVP, who "knew what he didn't know", and having worked a number of years at a place where I learned a shitload about security concerns, to have someone second-guessing my security decisions (especially when nitty-gritty security details aren't usually within the purview of someone as high in the chain as a CIO)

The only real issue seems to be that he's not really comfortable with the fact that my telecommuting schedule is flexible. Telecommuting is new to him, though, he admitted that much in our first meeting. So he doesn't get that, for some roles, having a set "in the office" schedule makes sense, and for others (especially folks who might suddenly need on-site on short notice and without regard for schedules) it makes more sense for it to be flexible.

But I'm sure that'll get worked out, and I can explain it well enough that it'll all be smoothed over.

So, it was a good day. Like I said, I'll take that as an encouraging sign. ;-)

That bruise you see on my forehead is from me banging my head against the wall repeatedly, trying in vain to silence the voices in my head.

Let's see, I was interrogated today about:

Today was the first day on the job for WindowsCIO. There's pros and cons, obviously... (and I'm not including the things I've talked about before, like the fact that it's infinitely more likely that Sr. Management will listen to him.. this is just the stuff that happened on Day One....

Pros:

We have a decent sized codebase of 4GL and other code. Once upon a time, Ray had built a Makefile that would let them make all and it would, as you might expect, stream across the tree compiling everything in sight.

It had one flaw. It was slightly broken in such a way that if, say, one of the 4GL programs failed to compile, the "4gl" target would fail, and it would happily continue on to the next directory and start at the beginning there, compiling forms or what-not. There was no feedback whatsoever that half the 4gl target was uncompiled.

QAManager opened a ticket on this problem yesterday. Yup, that's a bug says I, and I spend a short time fixing the Makefile so that the entire make all bombs out if a program fails to compile. Immediate feedback like any reasonable programmer would expect.

I close the RT ticket.

She re-opens it. Nope, what she wants is for it to fail to compile the code, but then continue on with the rest. In other words, she wants to have code randomly not compile and have there be no real feedback that they failed.

Ummmm, no.

Ticket re-closed.

For various reasons, previously mentioned, I had to roll back a CVS-to-Subversion rollout yesterday.

Now, I have to deal with the clueless people on our QA staff. Now, mind you, these people have zero programming skill (or next to nothing anyway), zero clue on UNIX, etc., but their job requires them to maintain both their own sandbox, as well as a common, shared, "test environment" (where beta-test CSRs beat up on it).

I had a user, QAManager, IM me today, asking "what she needed to do because things were broken" (it wasn't quite that remedial an explanation, but close). I go look at her home directory.

In her home directory are, no lie, 230 different source code files going back in date as far as 5/4/2002, as well as their compiled variants. I only hope those aren't mission critical since they're not in the source-code-repository. Then, in varying directories, I find no fewer than FOUR sandboxes, two Subversion-flavored, and two CVS-flavored.

She says "what should I do?"

I tell her honestly, "I have no idea. Your home directory is full of shit, and I can't make heads or tails of it. If I were you, I'd rm -rf * in your homedir and start from scratch."

A couple hours later, I get an IM about how BetaCSR can't login, they get an error message when they try. I go looking at the shared test environment. Now, yesterday, I should note, I moved the old SVN shared environment out of the way, and put the "old" CVS environment back, and told the lead QA person (who does most of the work in that environment) that she had to do, literally, nothing, because I had reverted it back to CVS.

Now, I find SIX sandboxes... three of each flavor. I swear to fucking god. How the hell do these people manage to achieve this? I mean this goes beyond standard incompetence, into realms where I can only imagine they intentionally screw things up solely for the purpose of making me despise the ground they sully with their footsteps.

Don't get me wrong... as people they are wonderful human beings, friendly, nice, etc., etc., but I swear upon all that is holy I wouldn't hire a single one of them to work in a company I ran.

Why not?

They have absolutely no desire to learn about the environment they work in (I literally had to tell one of them today "shut up, type exactly what I tell you, do not interrupt, just do it", because I'd reached the point where if I listened to them any more I was going to shoot myself).

Here's my helpful hint for anyone who reads this, even if (especially if) they're the cow-orkers I'm talking about. If you don't understand something, don't expect that your SysAdmin is a fucking teacher. That's not what he gets paid to do. If you feel you lack the training to do your job, get the fucking training. Don't just wander aimlessly through the job not knowing what you're doing, screwing stuff up and making other people clean up the mess because you don't even know what you did, let alone what you did wrong, let alone how to fix it.

This is the only company I've considered quitting simply because they won't pony up the money to train OTHER people. I know plenty of people who've left jobs because they themselves didn't get an educational committment in training or what-not, but only here is someone else's lack of support causing me to wonder if it's time to go.

So this weekend's "work from home" project was to convert our developers' CVS source-code-management repository into something using Subversion, because a lot of its features looked very useful to us.

I'd converted "my" repositories, those which are used for the web site and the one I keep all my sysadmin stuff in, a month or two ago, and had great success with it, updating and committing from my laptop, our development server, and from our web server.

So, this weekend I did the conversion, moved everything over, and set the developers loose on it Monday morning. Monday came and went, with very little said, good or bad.

Tuesday, I was in the office for my "Face Time Day". Turns out, near as I can tell, none of our developers actually did anything yesterday because one of them wasn't able to check out the code, the other was having issues of all sorts, our QA person couldn't get it done either, etc. etc.

In other words, all these people had problems, and the sole comment I had about it was at 5:30pm yesterday afternoon, when one developer pasted an error into an IM window to me, and then 27 seconds later logged out for the day.

Today, I wrestled with it for almost the entire day, before finally re-enabling commits on CVS, telling everyone "blow away your Subversion sandboxes, go back to business as usual" (which might be hard for them, considering some of them probably really torqued their CVS sandboxes by doing smart things like trying to crack open an SVN sandbox on top of it, etc.)

The problem, it turns out, appears to be that the crappy AIX box we do development on has shittier throughput than I might have using that Carrier Pigeon IP implementation. I'd always known that backups on the H50 take about 12 times longer than backups on the linux boxes do (and the linux boxen have about twice the data on them that the devel box does), but it'd never been a real "problem" until now.

I thought to myself, "I need to get drunk and forget today ever happened," until I remembered that I don't drink.

But, I thought, now I remember why so many of my peers are raging alcoholics.

I had to commute into the office today. There was a departmental meeting. It was to announce the WindowsCIO was officially being hired, starting May 12, that WindowsCIO would be reporting to NewCFO, who had also just been hired, and that my CluefulBoss was transferring to a different department where he is admittedly sorely needed.

So, in the scope of two weeks, the only person above me in the chain of command that will be the same is the CEO. I'm uncertain if I should be concerned or not.

So we have these UPS machines in our warehouses, which run this customized UPS software that will output report files, or, look for import files, in a certain directory. Naturally, since the machine is running WinBlows, it's running Windows sharing, and we use Samba from our AIX box to import/export the files.

In older iterations of this software, it ran on Win98, so we just did share-level protection. Now it runs on Win2K, with its NT underpinnings, so we have (allegedly, I don't know dick about windows, intentionally) to actually use a real username, etc.

In the past, I'd hacked up a pair of quick scripts, "smbgetfile" and "smbputfile", which took a whole list of arguments and then got or put a file accordingly. I had hardcoded a username of "guest" in there at the time, because it didn't need a real "username" at the time.

So the braintrust that I work with creates ANOTHER pair of files, smbgetfile1 and smbputfile1 (don't get me started on their lack of meaningfully different names), which have a DIFFERENT username hardcoded. That's it. No other difference.

The concept of "command line arguments" is completely lost on these people. Now, it's important to note that this code is called from like two places. It's not like there's a whole bunch of legacy places that you'd have to change the command syntax. Two places. That's it.

Now, for the kicker. Take a guess what user the new monstrosity has hardcoded in?

Yup. You guessed it, sports-fans. Administrator.

If you see me, walking down the street. Shoot me. Shoot me twice, make sure I'm dead and then burn the body lest someone get me to a hospital where I might be revived.

Healthcare companies, like law firms, are by and large stuck in the 70's when it comes to technology. That's why HIPAA was created in the first place - to force the healthcare industry to wake up and smell the new millenium.

One of the "standard practices" since the dawn of time is that of e-mailing paperwork back and forth. Create invoice as an RTF, or a CSV, or even just TXT, then attach it to an e-mail and send it off to the vendor/partner/whatever automatically. Happens dozens of times a day.

Obviously, HIPAA is changing all that. e-mail between companies isn't secure, so you have to have encryption involved now... VPNs, TLS, SSL, you name it.

So I'm told there's going to be a conference call tomorrow morning, to work out how to send e-mail back and forth between us and SomeVendor. SomeBureaucrat over at SomeVendor says he'll be on the call, and he'll have VendorTechGuy on the call with him.

Since we don't yet have our PIX box, I can't really suggest the "right" solution of a nice secure VPN, so I suggest rigging sendmail such that it will only allow mail to/from SomeVendor's domain if there's encryption involved. TLS is pretty simple to set up, and the average chimp can do it.

But then I notice in the e-mail that Bureaucrat is quoted as saying something like "PGP" is what they want to do.

Holy shit, they've got someone with clue over there. We don't need a fucking conference call, we need to let me and VendorTechGuy geek out for 10 minutes on the phone and this'll be done. So I call Bureaucrat and leave a VM asking him to put me in touch with VendorTechGuy so that he and I can solve the problem without involving everyone in this big-ass conference call wasting everyone's morning.

He returns my call a few minutes ago. I tell him "I want to talk to your tech guy, he and I can solve this without any help, trust me." He tells me he's able to talk about it, and tries to explain PGP to me, telling me he can send us the PGP executable (doubtful, since it'd have to run on AIX), and keeps talking about how he'd send us their "certificate" (uhhh, buddy, the word you're looking for is "Public Key"). I ask again to just let me talk to the tech guy and we can work this all out.

No, he says, he'd rather talk about this in tomorrow's call, so we can talk about a testing regimen, etc.

Now, precisely zero of the seven or eight people on the call other than VendorTechGuy and I are going to be involved in any testing regimen. I certainly don't need Bureaucrat, who is obviously only mimicking (inaccurately) what someone has told him about PGP, mucking about screwing things up.

But, I'm going to be stuck on this call tomorrow. I'm trying to decide if DerekWhoHasNoTact ^® is going to show up on the call tomorrow, or if I'll be a good little weenie and then just talk to VendorTechGuy after the call and undo whatever damage the call has done.

Today I get an instant message from one of my co-workers:

Her: wed 8-9 white plains is having the hipaa training/orientation - CluefulBoss asked me to let u know to be there
Me: in WP?! by 8am?!
Her: yeah. :(
Me: I'll talk to CluefulBoss. I'm not sure I can be in that early, that means being out the door by 6:10 for me :-/

Why is it that companies insist on scheduling their training "outside normal hours"? You want me to attend training, have it during the time I'm normally scheduled to be there. Don't tell employees they have to leave an hour earlier than normal just because you can't be bothered to staff in such a manner as to allow folks to take the training in a couple shifts during the course of the normal work-day.

Ever have one of those days, where just when you think you're sinking into despair, there's a little glimmer of light -- not ahead but sort of off to the side a little bit -- that makes you think your lot in life has a chance of improving a little bit? (sit down, Jeremy, I know you have)

That's how my afternoon went today. It was completely unexpected, came out of nowhere, I have no real idea if it'll work out, but at least I'm not so depressed about the ork-place any more.

.... don't solicit opinions and then ignore them, especially when the person doing the ignoring isn't even remotely qualified to hold an opinion on the topic at hand.

.... don't whine about the company "not making its numbers", and cut back on discretionary spending, etc., etc., but then still send your salesgoons on their annual all-expense-paid week-long trip to Cancun, or Barbados, or wherever the fuck it is they go. If it's "a reward", it's misplaced since we didn't make the numbers, and if it's "motivational", then by god I want to be motivated, too, so where's my ticket? I bet I saved the company more money last year than half these salesgoon brought in.

I so feel like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. I'm ready to walk into Burger King right now and say "I want a job with absolutely no responsibility whatsoever."

... your company is entirely UNIX based. You don't have a single NT server anywhere in the company
... your company is in the medical retail industry.
... your company is in the process of removing windows across the board, even from desktops

and your company decides, as apparently has happened, that it needs a CIO who ...

... has never worked in a UNIX shop before in his life, and in fact is quite obviously the typical windows executive, espousing the benefits of .NET, and how cool SQL Server 2003 is going to be
... has zero medical experience
... his most recent retail experience is about 12 years prior

I want this to work. We need a strong technology presence at the Pit, because Sr. Management doesn't get it. (we have a 42-to-1 employee to IT employee ratio, and upper management wonders "Why aren't you guys getting enough out of those people?")

But I can't help quivering in fear at the concept that the amount of arguing and fighting I've been having to do in order to get stuff done is just going to be doubled because I'm going to have to argue and convince him about the specific technology choices, that "SQL Server is not the answer" or "No, there's absolutely no need to replace our $700 linux firewall box with a big-ass Checkpoint firewall just because you like nice GUI interfaces", and then after that have a whole second fight about getting budgetary approval to do it.

If we were a .NET shop or something, I'd have almost complete confidence in this guy. People can learn a new industry's challenges, it happens all the time. But, I'm scared that he'll be so busy learning the industry that he'll insist on taking the path of least resistance (to him) when it comes to technology choices. It only makes sense, I mean people only have so many hours in a day, and can't learn everything overnight.

SrVPSales told me today it'd be up to me to educate him. Right! The last time I tried to educate someone I got bitchslapped around for it, with things said to my boss by CEO indicating that I shouldn't educate people anymore or I might be looking for other places to educate employees. So now I'm supposed to educate the guy who's gonna be my boss?

f(head,wall) while true;

So our Human Resources Director flew to MidwestCity yesterday morning (or maybe Monday night) to handle some unpleasantness out there that involved several people being told how long they had to continue to work for us. HRD has a laptop, purchased at a cost of about three times the cost of a workstation, because she travels.

I walk into HRD's office on Monday asking when I can install a backup client on her laptop, she says "Tuesday or Wednesday, I'll be in MidWestCity". "Won't you have your company laptop with you on the business trip?" asks I. No real answer is forthcoming.

So Tuesday comes, and I get an email from Employee_in_MidWestCity saying "SoAndSo is terminated effective immediately. Per HRD, turn them off." I reply to Employee that the termination has to come directly from HRD, because that's the way it works, and then compose another e-mail (following standard procedure) forwarding Employee's message to HRD asking for confirmation (because quite frequently Managers fire employees and don't tell HR for 2-3 weeks.. no, seriously, this is the hell that is my life). At the bottom is a short jocular note:

Might have been a good reason to bring along the company laptop on the company trip, eh? ;-)

My boss, VP-IT, was BCC'ed on the message, because we'd had a brief chat earlier Tuesday along the lines of "Why did we spend 3x as much on her laptop if she's not going to bring it on business trips?", e.g., trying to arm him with some ammo for trying to broach that topic. He responds:

Why do you find it important to consistently battle people?

A simple message saying "In the future this needs to come directly from you or VPIT. If you are without your laptop, please use webmail or my cell phone."

First off, I didn't feel like I was "battling" anyone, I was simply asking for an existing policy to be actually followed. In the age of HIPAA, security policies are the supreme mandate for healthcare companies. You design them, you write them, you follow them.

Meanwhile, I'm told upper management bristles at the mention of my name. Why? Because I actually enforce the policies that keep the auditors from tearing them apart on an annual basis. Yup, somehow that makes me a "bad" person.

Maybe I should have replied "I wouldn't have to 'battle' people if our employee base had a clue about security, but they don't, that's why I'm here, and it's my job as the guy in charge of security to battle folks on security issues?"

Dunno. I do know I'm rapidly reaching the point of not caring. Of just looking at the org chart and if the person is above me on it (even above and to the left, I don't care if they're not in my direct chain-of-authority), then I'll do whatever they say without question, lest I be seen as "uncooperative", and then just file away the e-mail request for reference. So next year, when BigAssAuditFirm comes in and says "we don't trust the IT systems as much as we have in the past, so we're going to require ten times as large an accounting sample for our audit" (something that loomed over us last year, which would have crippled accounting for quite some time dealing with them), I'll be able to say "Well, when I enforced policies, you threatened my job, so I decided I liked that you obviously didn't want the policies enforced so long as the request to ignore them was worded politely."

Not that that'll do any good anyway, they'll surely have a problem with that as well.

I need a new job.

At ork-place, as many avid readers know, we are predominantly CSRs. The average CSR has (or had) a crappy IBM 3151 dumb terminal. The only way they read their mail is, literally, via an a key-command which sends them to mailx, the single worst mail interface ever made.

There are so many reasons why, when we made our budget for 2002-2003, we budgeted for (and got approval for) completely replacing every single dumb terminal with a corporate-standard PC (which, these days, is a flat-panel iMac).

We're in the process of deploying a new server specifically to run reports from. A programmer, who did some significant rewrites of much of the existing reporting code (it was written in ACE, it's now converted to Perl), improved the reports so that they'll be generated as a PDF and mailed to the user who runs them after they complete (some can take a while, so they run in a batch style).

This is great, especially since half, nay three-quarters of these reports are run just so that the user can see one or two figures and then pitch the report. In other words, they don't need to be printed they just need to get a figure or two off of it, and then they move on with their day.

So, as we're getting ready to roll this out, I ask the question on Thursday:

Where do we stand on replacing the dumb terminals? How many remain, and can we just bulk-order a shitload of iMacs to make them go away?

Turns out, in a Friday staff meeting, my boss found out that "Nope, you can't." The only way to make the numbers is for us to not finish our desktop migration. At the same time, those performance improvements management has been demanding? Nope, they've got to wait til July, when the new budget is approved. (Anyone want to bet if management will shut up every time the system runs slow until then? I know my money's firmly on "Hell, no.")

Argh.

It annoys me to no end, not just here at the Pit Of Despair, but at other companies as well, when you have a marketing department who doesn't "get" the web, yet insists on having this huge web site.

I used to think the vacation policy at the Pit Of Despair was useless, to the point where I largely ignored it, took time off, didn't file the paperwork for it, and just called it a wash in the end.

But, they took a bad policy, and made it even worse.

On 1/1/03, everyone was given 1 week vacation + your three floating holidays. The 5 vacation days must be taken prior to 7/1/03 or you will loose them.

On 7/1/03, the regular vacation policy goes into effect.

If you have been here 1-4 years, you will get 5 days 7/1/03 and 5 days 1/1/04 and all 10 days must be used by 7/1/04

If you have been here 5 years, you will get 10 days on 7/1/03 and 5 days 1/1/04. all 15 days must be taken before 7/1/04.

So, if you read that, you might have "two weeks vacation per year", but unless you want to take those two weeks in the spring is impossible to take two weeks in the second half of the year (for, say, a Summer Vacation with the kids, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or New Years).

Anyone got a spare Tactical Nuclear Warhead they want to loan me? Come on, you "Operation Iraqi Freedom" guys... you know you got them in theater just in case, ship one back to me FedEx,... please.

We got a memo last night that a Senior Vice President was leaving, effective 4/15. Now, when an employee gets terminated, we blow away all their accounts, and then set their mail to give a sorta standard "old_employee no longer works here, direct all things to replacement_employee".

Now, partly because I didn't know who replacement_employee was going to be, but mostly because I figured maybe it might be really complicated for a Senior VP, I asked the CEO and CFO (the two people I figure would have clue on the topic) what they wanted in the autoresponse.

I get a terse response from the CEO saying "nothing is to happen at all unless I direct it".

I sent a response back to the effect of "So I'm clear, that means if I haven't heard from you by EOB on the 15th, mail to $VP will simply bounce as undeliverable"

"No," says he, "nothing is to happen at all, period, including deleting his e-mail account or anything else. Don't turn this into a debate."

So now I have an official doctrine from He-Who-Is-Above-Everyone that effective 4/15, until and unless he deigns to micromanage system security, the Sr. VP will continue to get potentially company-confidential material from vendors, partners, etc., who have no idea that he's been terminated.

I'm half-tempted to drop the issue completely, wait for the IT audit at the end of April, and when E&Y asks about "employee termination procedures and how they are processed by IT", point out to them, so it can appear in the official audit report, that Sr. Management is excellent at arbitrarily creating security holes and potential HIPAA violations because of their desire to micromanage.

I mean, maybe this is premature, maybe the CEO really will pony up with a decision by then, but I shouldn't as "the guy upon whose ass the security buck stops" be micromanaged by someone like that.

If you see me somewhere, walking down the street. Do me a favor: shoot me, put me out of my misery.

... Is a dangerous thing.

I just had the most painful conversation on the face of the planet with a cow-orker. He tried to equate spam-filtering techniques with "fracturing the net", attempting somehow to compare "my company server blocking mail from email-offers.net" to "What if AOL decided to block mail from Yahoo?"

He insisted, then, that customers of ISPs had to be given choices by their ISP in terms of filtering, etc. I told him, "No, the ISP owns the servers, they make the rules. It's nice if they give you options, but they shouldn't be mandated to do so. If you don't like their policies, you're free to find a new provider."

He then said something about not always having competition, to which I pointed out "Even if you don't have local connectivity options, you can still get mail service, or whatever, from an ISP in Germany if you wanted, that's the beauty of the net."

He then responded that I "assume a choice where there may be none."

"There are tens of thousands of providers in the country, that's a pretty good definition of 'competition'"

"Again," says he, "you assume a perfect market, and choices that may not exist."

"You're right, maybe I'm stupid, because I assume that in the presence of tens of thousands of companies, there's competition. I thikn that falls into the realm of 'pretty fucking safe assumption'"

Ugh.

JR pointed me at SteveO's blog... now, that particular link is to a category of his main blog dealing mostly with Moronboss. I wish I had conversations that funny to relate, but the truth is that my boss is really quite clued, it's the people up above him who are clueless, so most of my conversations with my boss are simply talking about Clueless_CFO or Clueless_CEO... I mean a typical conversation, in SteveO style, would be like this....

They're hiring for a CIO at my present job. My present boss, the VP of IT, was passed up for the gig. They claim it's because he wasn't "getting it done", except that every time he sent up a budget that "got it done" he was told to sit down, shut up and take what scraps they gave him.

So, they're hiring from outside and planning to essentially demote him, moving him one step down the ladder. It's not rocket science to conclude he'll be updating and shopping his resumé. I'm told also that it's likely that since the VP of IT is becoming "VP of Application Development", it's likely that I'd be reporting to the new guy when all is said and done.

Now, senior management in the Pit Of Despair is about as lost when it comes to IT issues as Oral Roberts would be at the Adult Video Awards. They're completely fucking clueless. To this day, our CFO looks at me, then asks his boss "What does Derek do to make us money?" ... If you're not a sales-guy, you're useless in their eyes.

So, who's interviewing the guy who'll be in charge of all IT decisions, and to whom I am destined to report? Is the current VP of IT getting some input? Nope. Are qualified candidates that the IT department forwards upward getting even called for phone pre-interviews? Nope.

Is Derek reactivating his profile on Monster and Dice? You betcha.

Hope for the best. Plan for the worst.

This is classic, from the RT ticket I opened for cleaning up Peter's stupid "everything is a *.4ge file" logic:

I don't see any "reasons" up there, just pointless vague allusions and denials. "The real world" is a personal favorite of mine... Not much to work with, though. And still no reason to believe any of this matters one whit (or will matter for the forseeable future).

to which I added the comment in the ticket:

I guess it's fortunate then that we don't have Peter in charge of making these
decisions, then.

I informed my boss and his boss that he is dead to me. I've set up a filter to autodelete any of his messages. If he needs something from me, he is to pass his request through the circuitous chain of command as I will completely ignore him.

I hate him. May he die and rot in hell ... slowly.

The (crappy) Informix 4GL programming language has source files in *.4gl, and compiles to *.4ge. So, if you're building a makefile to compile source, you might have something like:

clean:
  rm *.4ge

No, not with my Idiot Savant cow-orkers. No, there are perl scripts, ksh scripts, you name it, all with the 4ge extension.

But then again, this is the same monkey-crew that if I was to delete /tmp/* on reboot would have a conniption fit, because (no lie, not making this up) there are mission-critical executable files stored there. Or that has every portion of the application's batch jobs in root's crontab. Or that the application will break if the entire directory structure the application sits in isn't set to mode 0777.

I sent a message basically saying "file extensions mean something, and these need to be fixed", whereupon this guy who I'll call Peter^* started getting all defensive about how "no rules are absolute", never mind that it doesn't seem like our developers believe that any rules apply to them. Never mind that when we had our E&Y audit, I came away smelling like a godsend because I corrected the most aggregious security errors. (and yes, they were worse than the annoyances above, frightening, eh?)

I give up. Waiter! Check, please?

^* His real name, why would I protect him, he's not innocent?