So I finally splurged on some stuff the weekend before last. I got a $25 gift card from work for being awesome with an issue that had been harassing the IT department as a whole, and I got a 10% off coupon for Best Buy. Armed with these, me and Helen headed down to southcenter on Friday to check out TV’s. After browsing through their display TV’s, I settled on the Toshiba 32AV500U. I went home and did some research on it to make sure it was a good buy, which it sounded like it was.

Armed with this knowledge, I came back on Sunday to get it. The first rep who came up asked if we wanted anything, I pointed to the Toshiba and said “I want that one”. I’m guessing he wasn’t expected someone to be so decisive, so he said he’d be right back after pausing for a second. Unfortunately, we he came back, he told me they were out of stock

But! Instead, he gave me the Samsung LN32A330, which was ten bucks more, for the same price. I was really antsy about getting something else on the spot, since I haven’t gotten an LCD TV before and wasn’t sure what the big differences were. I decided to go with it since I could just bring it back, and Helens parents had a Samsung and it was damn sexy.  After we picked it out, we went up to the front with the guy, and they rang us up. I got the 4 year service plan (I get the extended one with expensive things), so it was 679+199, a total of $878, take off 10% to make it $790.2, and then another 25 off that, $765.20. Which was a damn good deal.

We took it home and set it up, I put it on the dresser so I didn’t connect the cable at the time. I hooked up my laptop and we watched Banlieue 13, in 720p. It looked so damn good

More later, as it’s dinner time.

My life has pretty much been taken over by work. I get up, go to work, come home, sleep, then wake up and repeat it all again. On the weekends I hang out with Helen. Work has been going pretty well, learning new things every day, meeting people, and learning important lessons along the way. Looking back I can tell I’ve grown quite a bit just in the past two months. I was talking to a Kiwanian a month ago who runs a Technology firm in Seattle, I was talking to him about what I’ve been doing these past couple years and how I’ve been working for my current company.

He said that while you may not enjoy working for a large corporation and supporting thousands of people, it’s an important, if not vital, experience that everyone needs to have. You can tell when someone has worked for a large corporation, their work ethic, how the interact, plan, and work, is different. He didn’t really elaborate on this. However I think I get what he was talking about. The company I’m at has many different systems, lots of internal applications and services that I’ve never seen before. Working with all of them, I have to think on my feet. In order to do that, I can’t just go off the same old check X settings. Now it requires I have an actual understanding of the system itself and how it works. I need to see what’s going on, what’s different, and what I can do to fix it.

Sometimes it requires I call up other people to ask a question about a specific function of an application. I’ve run into a lot of roadblocks with this, and actually had some people complain about me asking questions. I didn’t quite grasp the concepts of going through the proper channels for asking questions. I do now, and still think it’s stupid. I’ve run into situations where I’m needing to know how to configure a citrix application, going to the man who works on that, I have to speak to another tech, then speak to the lead, then the manager, and finally the manager refers me to someone in the application support department. After that, I speak to that person, who refers me to the man who works on it.

I’ve noticed there are a lot of processes in the company that are out of date, and it requires jumping through a lot of hoops to get those changed. There’s a lot I want to do there, and I’ve tried to get the ball rolling on some things, but despite what I’ve tried, I won’t be able to do anything. There are a lot of things that are preventing me from doing so, the biggest one of all is that I’m a contracter. Despite the day to day interactions I have with everyone, the relationships I’ve built, at the end of the day I’m still a contracter. I’ve tried to get employed direct, however they have their own internal employement process which is geared more towards hiring existing employees then outside employees (which it should be).

I’ve become a bit jaded by all this, and despite my desire to keep working there, it just doesn’t seem to make sense to stay at a company that won’t give me a real career path. It is really frustrating when I come to a company looking for real employement only to be tricked into accepting. When I decided to join this company, I was told by my agent that there was a good chance of being hired direct after 3 months. But this is incredibly unlikely. The reason this company hired contractors was because several people were promoted out of the department. They needed to hire some people to help with the workload while they found replacements. I was one of the contractors hired to help with the workload. Since then they have found replacements. Right now I’m just treading water.

I’m essentially just waiting for my contract to end.

So I figured out why Bluehost did a sudden server migration on me without any warning.

I sorta forgot to add a flag and exclusion to the full backup script. I didn’t tell it to ignore symbolic links and the backup directory. On the account site, it backs up all the directories in the home directory. There are a couple links to logs, cache, and then there’s also a link called www that points to public_html.

So not only did it backup public_html twice, it also backed up the backups.

I noticed this last night when I started the weekly backup on my machine that pulls down the backups and the full backup was 27GB.

A couple weeks ago a board on my dads site was hacked and pretty much demolished. Apparently it was hacked into on Tuesday/Wednsday. I didn’t find out until Thursday night when my aunt mentioned it in passing.

Friday after work I went and took a look at it real quick. I opened up the url to the board and it wasn’t functioning at all, php errors all over the place. At right about that time I got a call from Helen asking if I could pick someone up from the bus station and give them a ride down to tacoma for a board meeting they had this weekend. Faced with the decision of what was obviously going to be a long process that would stretch late into the night vs hanging out with Helen and the Circle K district board, I opted to go hang out with them.

Saturday morning rolled around. I got up extra early to work on it, I remoted into the server and started poking around. Files were moved around, odd names were all over the place. A quick check of the bash history showed they hadn’t gotten the password for the account. I changed the ftp password on the board account just to be safe. Right after that I got a phone call. Was an odd one, the number was 12 digits long. I answered it anyways. Turned out to be the man who ran the forum, he was in the UAE. I spoke to him briefly, he had a database backup from May 9, he was going to upload it so I could do a restore. I emailed him the new password (not very secure, but what the hell) and he started
to work on uploading it. I had a full site-backup from April 27 that I had made for kicks, since we didn’t have anything really backed up, it included logs, built-in mail account, site backups, databases, everything. I considered using the database backup in that one, but didn’t, since he forum admin had a more recent backup.

I continued to poke around the files, everything was in complete disarray. I restored the board files using my April 27 backup, so all that was needed was a database. I poked around a little, then bummed for a bit while I waited. I got an email from motasim, he was having trouble transferring the file up. the ftp client kept timing out. I recommended a few clients and he tried them all with no luck. Finally I suggested he compress it with winrar. He grabbed the client, compressed and uploaded the file quickly.

This is where the fun began. Everytime I tried restoring the database, I would get a duplicate line error message from mysql. I spent literally 2 whole days trying to get that database to restore. Finally Sunday night I grabbed my April 27 backup and tried that one.

Worked flawlessly.

Suddenly we had a perfectly functional forum. But motasim wanted to have the most up to date backup, so I tried merging the two databases. It sort of worked. The threads were all there but there were more php errors caused by incomplete tables and entries. Finally, I restored the April 27 database, uploaded it somewhere motasim could get it and let him play with it.

He finally settled for the April 27 backup. I posted on the forum softwares support site, contacted their support, after speaking with them it was apparent that Motasims May 9 backup was corrupt, there wasn’t anything we could do about that.

After having dealt with all of that, I started reading up on creating backups. I setup my own backup procedures overnight and implemented them. I quickly found out that bluehosts cron doesn’t like the $ $(date). I posted on their forum and someone helped me whip up a perl script. I’ll post it here in case someone stumbles upon this post devastated by their website having gone down without backups:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $fileOrFolder = $ARGV[0] or die “You forgot to specify a file or folder name!”; #The name of the file or folder provided during execution of the script
my $upper = “U$fileOrFolder”; #Convert the file or folder name to uppercase for the label

my $date = `date +%Y_%m_%d`; #Store the date in a variable
chomp($date); #Remove the new line that gets added at the end

print `tar—cvvzhlf “/foo/backups/$fileOrFolder-$date.tar.gz” /foo/$fileOrFolder—atime-preserve—label $upper`;

Simply put, I set it up to backup the individual sites based on the folder I specified when the script ran. I use another one slightly modified for full backups, and another for sql backups. There were a few hiccups with getting them running, but they’re working beautifully.

Unfortunately, one side-effect I hadn’t considered was that when these backups ran, they created gigabytes of backups. Our account was on a server that had a 50GB limitation. We had setup this account several years ago, and Bluehost had since upgraded the plan we were on with more generous limitations. The most recent being unlimited disk space. If we had wanted, we could contact bluehost and have them move us to another server.

The disadvantage of that would be downtime, so I never bothered with that. However, apparently when the backups ran, they got an alert of some sort. So without any warning, they moved us to a new server last night around midnight. All our domains went down for a good 8 hours, and when they finally came back up, php wasn’t functioning properly for another 4.

So the moral of this story? Schedule your backups, and make sure your host doesn’t decide to randomly upgrade you without warning by making sure you don’t randomly create gigabytes of files in the course of a day.

I went to the west seattle garage sale, on saturday. They had something like 140 garage sales going on the entire day, I whipped up a little circuit of them using google maps (I discovered that you can have a maximum of 25 locations on one map, only goes to Y). Me and Helen were supposed to go, but she ended up working, so I got up at 8:30, whipped up the map, and went hunting for two hours, then drove her to work and then returned for more yard sale hunting.

I got a couple sweet things. I got some fabric for random uses, a bookshelf, some plant stands and a couple pots, and a coast strawberry plant. There was a lot of stuff. After I picked up Helen, I took her back to the first place I went to, which was this woman selling a bunch of stuff because she was moving to Morocco, I grabbed a couple organizing bins from her and Helen found a really kick ass backgammon set with glass panels in wood frame. I took her to pegasus pizza where we had some really tasty pizza. While driving back we spotted another garage sale so we stopped there. I found some bindings that Helen could use on my spare board, so we grabbed them. I also spotted an Atari 2600 which I almost bought (had been reserved).

My room now looks a lot better since I put the bookshelf in, I unpacked 3 of the boxes I hadn’t unpacked yet (still have one buried in the closet) and we discovered that I had an outlet above the dresser. For the past 6 months or so me and Helen had been wondering why they didn’t put an outlet up there. Well it had been there, I just had a box sitting in front of it for the past 6 months or so.

I’ve also decided to start a little fruit/veggie/herb garden too. I’ve currently got Cucumber, basil, strawberry, and tomato. As you can see, I have no idea what I’m doing. I used a really cool little soda crate I got from a garage sale for the plant bed. I’ve since moved the tomato plant to a larger pot that Ann gave me when she and Cal found out I was starting my own garden.

So far, I’m not very good. For some reason I had figured that the recent rain was enough, so the leaves near the bottom of the tomato plant starting going yellow. I moved it to the big pot and since then it’s doing a lot better. Before it was sorta leaning to one side, not it’s growing really strong and straight up. Someone from something awful linked me a bunch of pdf’s for each of the plants I’m growing, so I’m reading them and learning how to care for them all. The native coast strawberry plant in it’s own little pot doesn’t bear fruit, it’s sorta there for play I guess. I haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do with it. Probably have another little garden for random play.

I finally reinstalled Kubuntu from KDE4 RC. It was pretty much broken to all hell and I hated it. KDE3 is working a lot better, but I’m still getting crashes :/

I also realized that I should really start backing my config files, as I had to setup samba all over again at least 3 times, which really sucked. So without further ado, here’s another random how to:

Configuring Samba for Public Access

Read the rest of this entry »

Today is my last day at Tommy Bahama. I’ve been training my replacement this weekend for Glen, he’s a pretty capable guy. I showed him how to work everything, where all the shares were, and all that Jazz. He’s a net admin during the week, from the sound of things he’s just looking to save up.

I’m glad to finally be done with this place, My life has pretty much been at a stand still since I haven’t been able to really do anything with Helen since I started working here, during the week she is in class, on the weekend I’ve been at work. Next weekend we’re going to go to a Drive-in theatre to watch Ironman, which is going to be tons of fun for us! I’ll at long last be able to sleep in, and have a day off (haven’t had one at all this month).

I’m currently sitting at the desk behind the new guy with my laptop, apparently he didn’t quite comprehend what I meant be 15-20 calls max over the weekend :p

Oh, and we had an ice cream social on Friday at Alaska Air, was awesome.

It’s take your kid to work day at Alaska. There’s kids all over the place.

I’ve been working basically non-stop for the past few weeks. After I turned in my resignation letter, I started work, since then I haven’t had a day off. While I don’t really mind that much, it would be nice to be able to have a night out with Helen sometime. The Job has been going really well, I’m getting along with everyone great, there is an absence of micromanaging, so I feel a lot more productive.

Last week I wrote a script for running a general system maintenance. It’s just spybot, ccleaner, and jkdefrag, but everyone loves it. At first it was really basic and you had to copy it over, but I’ve been reading up and I customized it a little to where it works really well. I presented it at our staff meeting on Friday (which I was late too. The one day I’m late!) and the helpdesk manager basically went squeee over it. It was interesting having the meeting, especially since there’s no table, just a bunch of cushiony chairs which is pretty darn cool.

I’m starting to ramble a little bit since it’s kinda a late, so I’ll just leave the post at this for now. I’ll post more about everything later this week.

Things got a wee bit busier then I would have liked. I’ve been working at Tommy Bahama on the weekends, so my personal life has been practically non-existent outside of Helen and a couple other people. My work with the Ubuntu US Teams has been put on hold too because I can’t attend any GSLUG meetings to stay on top of things.
I’ve finally finished my on-campus classes. I’m currently taking CCNA classes online, so it’s a bit easier. I’m taking a quarter off while I finish up some stuff from last quarter.
To add on to that, I’ve finally handed off Circle K to some pretty capable people, I’m still there though, just serving in advisor capacity, but they’ve got a good handle on things.



That’s a really brief overview of how things have been. For some more up to date stuff, I’m leaving Tommy Bahama, I want my life back, and I don’t want to end up working in retail support for the next few years. A good chunk of the experience I have gained from there is in retail systems, and I want to be working in technology systems, or at least something that’s a bit more widespread or has more security.

I enjoyed working with the people there, I just didn’t see them, if ever. I only saw them when I came in on my own time, so that doesn’t even count. All my communication was through phone and I’ve seen less then 30 people on the weekends since I started.
So a few weeks ago I decided to start job hunting. It started out as just looking around to see what was out there, but when I realized that for only a slight variation in job duties, I could make significantly more. Plus I was really not challenged at all by the job, everything I did was incredibly mundane and basic, the tickets I got that were more interesting, I couldn’t complete due to lack of resources. And to add onto it, I’ve slowly been going into debt since I have been making barely over rent+bills.


Anyways, after interviewing for a few weeks with little results (was even interviewing with Google at one point, but the interview process was 3 months), I got a call from a staffing agency I had interviewed with a couple years ago. I chatted with them on the phone a little then came in for a quick update on things then I had an interview on Monday with Alaska Airlines, and I got the job!
I’m really excited to be working there, today was my first day and everyone I’m working with is really awesome. Everyone I work with really knows what they are doing and it felt wonderful to actually be able to speak to them without having to dumb things down, I loved it. I also didn’t have to be reserved and quiet until I got my bearings, I pretty much hit the ground running and was chatting it up with everyone within my first two hours there. So far it seems like it’s going to be a great place to work.

There’s going to be a learning curve though, they use different software for pretty much everything, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to learn it all quickly, Lisa, one of the people who works there, walked me through some of it and I understood it fairly quickly. I even got to go out in the field and do a repair on my own. My manager, Matt, seems to have a lot of confidence in me already, which feels absolutely incredible, there’s no second guessing or asking if I can handle it, when the issue came up, he just said “Let Ahmed do it, I know he can handle it.”



That’s what has been going on so far, I’m really hoping this becomes a permanent job for me, I’m currently a contractor, but I’m going to do my best to make myself known and to impress them more then ever before.



By the way, here’s a picture of my in the cockpit of a flight simulator. That’s right, I got to do a take-off and landing of a 737 jet at sea-tac airport, and then a landing at the Juno, Alaska airport.