Another one comes down

Another building is disappearing into the history books on the Buffalo general campus.The multilab and the parking lot are being cleared to make room for a parking ramp.

Jim's fish, Daddy's office, oh the sites...

I stopped by work with the kids today. Ben got to feed the fish in the office of the the president of the company. Up in my area, Ben was able to get a good view of the construction and the big equipment through on of the windows. He then went through my office. He made sure everything was working properly and then left a note on a pad on my desk. He had fun and they were both worn out. They both went right down for a nap when we got home.

Network Issues

"When a Fail-Safe system fails, it fails by failing to fail safe." - John Gall

I come into work today, and on the elevator someone from another department says to me that I will have a fun day today, all the computers are down. Okay, whatever. I get to my office, and yes the entire network is down. I cannot get to any internal sites nor to the internet! Then I find out that the shipment of COWs just showed up in receiving. Well, that at least gives me something to do. We bring the herd of 51 up to our area, and then I go to the computer room to see how things are going. They were still trying to figure out what had happened. It looked like all the servers and applications were running, but the was no communication. They have been trying to bring things back slowly and there has been stuff up and down throughout the system. I just got internet up and am still waiting on the internal stuff to be up. What happened to the redundant systems that are suppose to prevent this. 5-6 hours of downtime is a long time.

Update: It looks like the redundant system that was suppose to prevent this was the cause.

Flood!

A pipe broke in our office area today. It was pouring in like crazy. They clamped a hose on the pipe and stuck it out the window to stop the flow into our area. As soon as I saw it, I grabbed a couple techs and started pulling equipment from our stock room which is close to where the pipe broke. What a mess.

New herd of COWs

We have a fresh herd of COWs(computers on wheels). We are getting 69 this week, 32 came today. Does any one remember Johnny 5 from Short Circuit? NO disassemble, Johnny 5 is alive. These aren't as cool as that but that is the joke when we pull apart and recycle the old COWs.

Construction

They are getting ready to re-grout the bricks outside of our offices. All we can hear for the past couple of days is their saws working out the grout. Then on top of that, the building is shaking from the polls being driven into the ground for the new building. What fun.

Ground Breaking

They had the ground breaking for the new building at work today. It will be a ten story building attached to Buffalo General. Half of it will be the Hospitals and the other half will be UB's.

http://buffalo.bizjournals.com/buffalo/stories/2009/06/01/daily201.html

New Chair

They rolled a new chair into my office yesterday. No more hand me down.

At last a Hard Drive

The tech from yesterday to the case number of the hard drive that I was waiting for and made some calls. I guess he got the story from them that it was delivered (in Indiana) and he convinced them that that was a couple of states away and got the ticket placed in his queue. He hand delivered the hard drive to me this morning. Finally.

Lost in Transit update

I had another call yesterday from HP looking for the hard drive I have not sent back yet. He was confused why it said it was received in Indiana, and tried to give me a number to get another one shipped out. I asked if he had the ability to order it himself, and when he said yes I asked why he would have me call somewhere else. He said he would take care of it. I had to log a ticket for another device yesterday, and I have the tech here replacing that system board. He just repairs laptops and cannot do anything for the missing hard drive. That is what I normally get, one to three day turn around. I wonder if I will ever see that hard drive.

Lost in Transit

On Father’s day I was called into work for a computer that had the “Blue Screen of Death.” It ended up being a bad hard drive. The following day I submitted it to HP for warranty replacement. Replacements usually come the next day, maybe two at the most. On Thursday I went down to receiving, because no one had brought it up yet. They said they would have brought it up if it had gotten here. Early the next week, I got a call from HP to see if the part resolved the problem. I told them I had not seen the part yet. They then said it was signed for a gave me the name of the person that signed for it. I told them I would go check with receiving again and they said they would call back later in the week to make sure I got it. I went back down to receiving and they said they did not recognize the name but if I had a tracking number them would find out where it was for me. HP finally called me back this week, and I was able to get a tracking number from them. As I was talking to them, i asked what the address was where it was sent, this should have been right since it was submitted online, and I have done a lot of equipment that way. It went to somewhere in New Paris, Indiana. I gave them the correct info and they are going to send it out again. I check my profile on the HP repair site and the info there is correct. I have no idea how this got messed up. I still have not seen the part. Hopefully it will be here soon. 

Employee Appreciation Luau

They had a employee appreciation picnic at work today. It kind of had a Hawaiian theme to it. They handed out plastic Leis as we walked through the door. They had a band there.

Struck again

The computer and printer were trashed again in the same psych ward as last Friday. http://djpayne.blogspot.com/2008/04/crazy-weekend.html

At least this time they did not call me in the middle of the night. I do not know if it was the same patient or not. They got one of the last CRT monitors we had in our area (I wasn't going to give them another flatscreen). The mouse was able to escape damage this time, but that was about it.

Crazy weekend

I got paged about 12:40 Friday night. I managed to get myself out of bed closer to 1. One of the psych patients had gone on a rampage and destroyed a bunch of equipment. I had to replace the pc, monitor and phone. I also had to get them a loner printer. I ran into some issues and ended up getting home somewhere around 5. I managed to wake up in time for Saturdays game, but the pager started going off about 10. I was able to fend them off for a few hours but eventually had to go in. Pager did not go off last night, which was good because lisa was not feeling good. This morning it started about 8:30 and I think I got three calls already this morning.

Dust Bunnies Anyone?

I was cleaning up old and parts computers in our area, and I came across this. A nice layer of dust throughout... It is common to get a bunch of dust with this model (bad air flow), but this is a little more than normal. I pulled out some useful parts and then sealed the dust inside and put it in our recycle room. When the recycle company comes they probably do not want to open this one.

Laptop reload

I reloaded Windows on my laptop this week. I spent most of Monday morning reimaging and reloading Apps. I think I have about everything I need back on. Yesterday afternoon I realized that I needed one more and loaded it this morning. Yesterday evening I reloaded AOE, but I still need to load hamachi. Digger has yet to make it back as well.

Looking like an easy week

This is the kind of week I like... It is the second week in a row that I am not on problems during the day, so most of the problems had are resolved and I just have a handful of requests in my queue. I decided that rather than pull a bunch of request into my queue, I will mostly help other techs this week. I will probably end up pulling some request in my queue, but not too many. They tend to let me do what I want, so I want to see if this will help out everyone this week. Sometimes I like the really busy weeks, but these weeks where I do whatever are good change.

Cerner Upgrade

There was an upgrade of one of our major programs at work this weekend. I had not been involved in the prep, but on Friday, I went through some things to make sure those at my site were ready, and set up a meeting place or command center for our site. I then got one of the application teams worried by asking them about something they had not tested with the upgrade up to that point. We were going to start upgrade devices, we had about 70 at the General, at 2:30 this morning and finish all the computers by 6:30. They were going to page us half an hour before we could start upgrading to give us time to get in. My pager went off at 1:30 and I was in and starting the upgrades at 2:00. I had assigned the three that needed to be done first to me, and two of them needed to be installed manually. There was a problem with the manual install, there was a rights issue on the server. I was able to get that resolved with the server team, and everything went ok after that. The go live time kept getting pushed back, and was finally up at about 8. At about 6:30 or so we were told that something was added to cerner and we had to run something on all the computers we already hit. I was able to run that remotely on most of them. After the go live I went back to the ER to make sure those devices came up like they should. The general was all set and I was out of there a little after 9. It sounds like the other sites are having some network issues a while longer to finish, even though those site had a lot fewer devices than the general. Now it is time for me to get some shut eye.

Mid - Night Run

The sound of that pager in the middle of the night is so terrible. Once it enters my dream, I start slapping the clock to shut it up. Then when I realize that is not working, I start slpping everything else on the night stand. I think one of the pagers I had before lite up when it went off so it was easier to figure out what the noise was from. Once I find the source of the noise and shut it up, I see what the text says and call back to the data center. After mumbling stuff to them I decide if I can talk the user through the issue or if I have to go in. If I can talk them through it, its great and I do not even have to get out of bed. Usually I end up having to go in. So I find clothes and start to get dressed. I close my eyes for a second and when I open them and look at the clock, oops, it was more than a second. I put the rest of the clothes on and drag myself to the truck. I slowly make my way to the problem, proping myself against the wall of the elevator, etc. The staff there are generally way too awake for my liking, and since I am there to fix their problem they are very happy to see me, even if it was an hour and half since they called or so. I doesn't take long to fix the issue almost every time, and them I make my way back home. I am finally wide awake by the time I make it home, and have to try to get back to sleep. As you can see by the fact that I am typing this at 1:40 am, that sleep may evade me for a little bit. Then in the morning I will have to try to remember what I did to resolve the issue and throw that into the ticket. Oh well, good night.

What a way to start back to work

I was driving down Main street on my way to work yesterday, and all the electrical goes out and then the truck stopped. Luckly it was very light traffic because of the holiday and I was able to push my truck across three lanes into a driveway. I gave Dad a call and had him give me a jump. Then he followed me as I headed towards work and it died again, so we decide to head to a shop. The place I usually take my truck to is in North tonawanda, but the one Dad goes to is in Buffalo so we head there. After a couple of jumps, we made it. I tell him what was going on and he says that they probably will not get to look at it that day. Dad drops me off at work and it looks like things have been pilling up and it is a busy day. After work I tried out the Metro Rail. There is a stop right by the hospital and then there is one about a mile from my house. It costs 1.50 one way, so it is not too bad to take it. I will try to start taking it on nice days. I took it back into work this morning. I got a call this Morning from the shop and it was as we though.. a bad alternator. It should be done sometime this afternoon.