Older blog entries for ErikLevy (starting at number 168)

Frustration.

Well, it has been a bit. In the time since the last posting, the company has launched its e-business services that I, as the chief architect, designed and built. It is amazing to see your project actually get to the clients. The response has been incredible and things are going much faster than we originally anticipated.

Sure, I didn't get all the features into this release as I may have wanted (beware feature creep!), and I wish the testing period could have been as long as the development period. But the fact is, those two issues and many others are always there, and you need to get products out the door.

I'm busy. But I'm waiting.

A decision has to be made to switch things from our current servers to the new servers. I was hoping it would be finalized today but that doesn't look likely to happen. Which is too bad, as the sooner they get real life hits the better.

Otherwise, it looks to be a busy but good weekend.

Work Daemon

Things have been moving quickly at work. Today I created all the needed MX and SOA records for the switch over to the new production servers.

I have to finish setting up the UNIX Mail Servers next week, but I'm not expecting any major problems. We shall see.

Outside the Office

Of course, I have been hacking when I get the chance.

I'm back from Europe.

Paris, Brussels and London.

It was an excellent vacation. I definitely needed it but by the end of its 10 days, I was ready to come back. I left having a networking problem on my back. Luckily, I figured out what the problem was this morning when I got back.

There are three busy weeks ahead.

This is my first post since the 4th of Sept. Well, things have happened without me talking about them, but I guess I should get back to writing.

Last week, was, in fewer words than can describe the horror of that Tuesday morning, terrible. I was at work when it happened. I think the accountant had the radio on via the 'net. The whole office came into the accounting office and sort of just sat there stunned.

You could feel the fear in the air. The astonishment. The anger and hurt.

It was cold.

Luckily, all my loved ones are safe. It is silly to think that any of those people deserved it. Terrorism is about fear and the fact that the terrorists have to hide means they live in fear too.

This is a bad time for the US economy. Things probably will get worst before they get better. However, we have survived awful times and we will survive more. The US will one day likely cease to exist, but it is highly unlikely to happen any time soon, no matter how much any one group wants it in theory.

I feel for all those that are suffering now and those people how will feel the burden of economic choices many of them had no part in. I'm speaking of further layoffs.

I work in the aviation industry, and I know how badly it is doing now and probably for the next year at least.

I'm looking forward to optimism returning and fighting to be over. I wonder how long I will need to wait.

This weekend was relaxing as I had hoped. I finished the company's second ebusiness product and I'm pretty happy with it's performance. There are a few more things to take care of but I'm not expecting anything crazy to happen. If everything happens on time, next Friday should be a pretty big day (well, Thursday really...but for most users it will be Friday when they notice the new products).

Testing has gone pretty smooth with mostly feature requests and a few minor bug reports.

Home life has been good. Doing lots of reading and thinking.

Things are going pretty smoothly on the work front. Deadlines are getting tight but things are on schedule.

This weekend should be relaxing I hope. Maybe I'll head out with the girlfriend to the country at some point and get away. Or maybe a lake or falls.

Work

So, my first product for the company passed all its tests (with 2 minor bugs found and corrected) and is now ready to be bought for large sums of money. The second product is about 60% done. It has to be finished by the end of the week, but it might run into next week a bit.

Life Outside Work

Mainly doing social things. And a lot of technical reading and thinking. I'm pretty sure this is just the beginning.

I'm currently running a Q & A session at work. Trying to make sure there aren't any unknown bugs in the systems.

I'm also working on a new product which is coming slowly but surely. Working with marketing has been taking a bit of my time too.

Home life is good. I wish I was a bit calmer, but with major deadlines coming up I feel overall a bit pressured.

Oh, and Code Red was smacking against Apache last night and this morning. Seems the company's Singapore business didn't upgrade their servers. Also found some other businesses being exploited and contacted the correct people to fix that. Not running IIS helps in cases like this.

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