Category: Life: Work and Techy

Last month we had someone disputing (with their Credit card company) a payment that made to us for over a few hundred pounds! Quite a bit of money – and now the CC company (Visa) was trying to claw it back from us and then hit us with an additional charge.

I spent half an hour composing a nice letter to them, pointing out a few key facts (the customer called us, 1471 gave us their number, all email addresses trace back to the customer etc etc) and sent it to them.

Today we received a nice letter back from our bank saying that we were right and we could keep the money!

Ha! Don’t try and screw the company I work for – we fight back and win! 😀

Just spent the last 20 minutes rebooting all our servers after upgrading their kernels (the “main brain” of the Linux OS). Then updating corresponding software and making sure they were all nice and stable.

Made the final tick on my checklist and, lo and behold, the DataCenter team decide “30 minutes late, let’s reboot all the servers to activate the new kernel”…

Grrr! Now I’ve got to wait until they all come back up and are stablised before I can go beddy byes. As if 14hours at working isn’t long enough, I’ve now got to…..

Fha!

Reading Jeremy Zawodny’s entry about mobile/cell phone coverage, it reminded me of a site I came across a few weeks ago when attempting to diagnose problems with the new service we’ve just introduced this week at work.

Basically, and I hope I’m not breaching any NDA’s by posting it here, the site webmap.o2.co.uk allows you to see the exact coverage (planned and current) and location of any of O2 (technically mmO2, but before that Cellnet and before that BT Cellnet) transmitter, the type of transmitter it is, and any scheduled maintenance in that area. You can search by postcode, town/village (it even knows my parent’s village: which is extremely small!), motorway junction (only “map site” I know in the UK that offers this), cell transmitter reference number and “sounds like” street places.

Why can’t ALL map sites offer the town/village and motorway junction lookup? And amount of detail you can toggle on and off – and the zoom level.. Plus it works in IE AND Mozilla Firefox!

I actually think this is one of the “best hidden sites” I’ve come across in a long time.

Many thanks for the two people who said “Happy Sys Admin Day” to me today (cheers Neil!): I wasn’t too sure about it myself as when I received the first one (around 10am), there wasn’t any “news” about it on Le Reg or Slashdot…

Anyway, I just needed something to perk me up. Work’s been extremely busy (we’re expanding into a new office which I had to help setup today: and we’re keeping old office as well as we just need double the space), but I’m absolutely knackered. We’ve got a brand new “product range” in the hosting arena launching on Monday (brand new=not offered anywhere else in the world to my knowledge) which I’ve had to develop practically from the ground up-along with all my other work: this week, I’ve done 32 hours overtime in the office (plus, when I get home, I’m usually checking the servers, testing things etc etc and basically being on 24/7 call in case of emergencies – luckily this week has been reasonably quiet on that front).

What’s the new product range? Well, keep an eye out for the press release that’s going to around 12,000 journalists and news organisations on Monday – complete with my name as the Chief Technical Officer (or something like that): yeh, swish title innit 😉