Tone Parsons

Around 11pm last night I was just getting ready to go to bed… then my phone rang.

It was Amy, the woman who works the graveyard shift in my department. Apparently, she’s quite ill and didn’t know who to call.

There must be something wrong with me because I said I’d take care of it. I’m second on the list to call, the guy who’s first on the list has tomorrow off as a personal day, so she didn’t want to call him (we need our days off from time to time).

So…. I had a quick 2 hour nap, brewed some wickedly strong coffee, and got in my car. I arrived here at 2:10 am (nearly hitting 2 deer on the way in… what’s with the deer playing chicken with cars at that time of the morning anyway?).

*sigh*

I don’t miss doing this shift. It is the giant pile of suck that I remember it to be.

Working this shift also screws me for next week. I had planned on taking it off. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to finish the FTPS install and test the firewall for the servers I flew to Boston for by the end of today, and our network guy is off on Friday… so I need to do it on Monday. I also have to come in on Wednesday to do an upgrade to another server (that’s the day it has to be done).

Of course, I keep trying to schedule a week off, and it keeps getting bumped (I’m the one who bumps it… I have work to do). Scouts honor… I will take some time off this year. I’m to the “use it or lose it” point with vacation hours…. you can only carry over 240 to the next year. I’m currently just below that and acquiring another 4.62 hours every two weeks.

*ugh*

I need more coffee.

My laptop has been less than pleased with the world since my trip to Boston.

While connected to the hotel’s network, it appears that it became infested with all manner of evil. I was having issues with popups, something trying to modify my registry, etc.

After installing and running 4 different spyware programs (Spybot, Ad-Aware, Defender, and Ewido) as well as my anti-virus, it became very clear that things were bad in laptop land.

After doing all of this, I thought I had it… I thought it was clean and I was good to go. I thought wrong.

Whatever was having it’s way with my laptop was hidden well. It appears that they used the Sony DRM rootkit to hide the source and I was only picking off the files that were infected (thanks a lot, Sony….. you fuckers!). I would clean it, it would stay that way for a couple of days, then all hell would break lose again.

Yesterday, I decided I’d had enough of it, backed up my documents, and re-imaged the laptop back to the way it was when our IT department assigned it to me. I was able to save everything with the exception of my archive .pst for 2006 (there goes all the email I’ve recieved for this year!). It could have been much, much worse.

The 3 main things I found while scanning the drives were:
Backdoor.Sensive.51 (who ever wrote this needs a kick in the gonads)
Downloader.Zlob.ja (aka: SpyAxe… those bastards!)
Dialer.Rpcnet.b (which doesn’t show up on google at all)

Things appear to be good now. I spent most of yesterday and last night re-installing my applications and getting it back to where it needs to be so I can do my job. Hopefully, I didn’t forget to back up anything too critical.

Today was my annual review at work.

The company is finally doing well again (we had some hard times and a lot of layoffs in previous years) and I was hopeful that I would get a reasonable raise. I did ok in that department (not exactly what I wanted, but within half a percent of it).

I also found out that they’ve changed my job title to more accurately reflect what I do for a living: from “Senior Applications Engineer” to “Solutions Engineer”.

You’ll notice that the “Senior” bit didn’t follow me to my new title.

It shouldn’t bother me. My duties are still what they were when I came to work this morning and I make more money now than I did when I came to work today… but it does. I feel like I’ve been stripped of my authority, that my value has somewhat diminished. I guess it’s all in perception.

I told them it didn’t bother me, but I’m finding after a little time to reflect, it does bother me… quite a bit. Of course, I’ll never say anything about it at work (that’s not my way) and will continue to keep doing what I do. Perhaps I’ll earn it back next year.

We’ll see.

I flew back to Spokane yesterday.

My day started at 4:00am on the east coast.  I was all packed and ready to hail a cab by 5.  The cab I ended up getting in was a little beat up (one headlight was pointing in a different direction than the other) which should have given me a clue that the driver took risks.  This was without a doubt the scariest ride I’ve ever had.

The driver was all over the road (he was talking on his cell phone for the entire drive), followed other vehicles with mere inches between the bumpers, and generally scared the holy living crap outa me.  He did, however, get me to the airport rather quickly.

After finishing “Death Ride, 2006” (and yes… I tipped him), I went about checking in with the airline, getting my suitcase weighed (it was 5 pounds over the limit… but they took it anyway without charging me extra), going through the security checkpoint (both my carry on bags were searched because of all the computer stuff I had in them), and finally finding my gate.

The flight left on time and was fairly uneventful.  First class is nice (and the only way to fly!), but all the planes I few in looked horrible on the inside.  The seats and carpet were very worn and all the surfaces looked dirty.  Even the plastic covers for the recessed cabin lighting looked like they haven’t been cleaned since they banned smoking on flights around 10 years ago (they were yellow and dingy).

My connection in Minneapolis was on time (one hour layover) and I was on the ground in Spokane at 12:20 pm (pacific time).  The total trip took about 8 hours (7 hours of which I was in the air).

After taking the wrong shuttle to get to my car (and ending up miles away from the Airport) I called my wife and she picked me up, drove me back to the airport, and I got my car.  We then met up for lunch and I drove home.

I started doing laundry when I got in (all my jeans were in my suitcase), played with my dogs (oh man… were they excited to see me!), and downloaded the Euro Force expansion for Battlefield2.

I did manage to stay awake until 9pm, but it was a real challenge, since my day began at 1am local time.

Today, I’m back at work (and damn tired).

On a positive note though, the company I went to work at in Boston called the project manager here and told them that I was very friendly, professional, and brought a lot to the table (she relayed that to my manager as well).  That’s great to hear, especially since my annual review is on Friday 🙂