September 19th was my last day of work at (company a). As I looked at my desk, now empty, I felt a strange sensation. It wasn’t regret, happiness, nerves, or nostalgia…but some odd combination of them all.

Most employees at (company) didn’t even know I was leaving that day until I sent my final goodbye email. I told my boss who went to his boss and HR, but for the most part, a limited number of people knew. Robin knew, Aaron knew, and Ryan knew. I kept it low key; no need to introduce more drama into a workplace filled with a plethora of it.

During the previous few weeks, I had been quietly scoping out other employment opportunities. In a chance encounter with a roller hockey buddy, he told me that he was leaving his position at (company b) to work for Lockheed Martin, and that (company b) was looking for a good IT guy. He asked me for my resume, which I happily provided, and waited.

I started at (company a) about four years ago. I was originally a part-time employee assisting Modo with the Broadcast portion of the company’s technological resources. I was still in college, and my internship with Comcast had just ended when Modo approached me asking if I was interested in working for his company. His co-worker had just quit, and he was having a difficult time managing everything on his own. He couldn’t take days off or go on a vacation as he was the only IT resource at corporate. Seeing as my source of income had just come to an end, I agreed to come in for an interview. Leaving out a bunch of superfluous details: I got the job offer fairly quickly and thus began my tenure.

I didn’t dislike (company a), nor was I unhappy while I was there. The degrees of freedom offered by the position and the cool attitude of most of the people made work fun for the most part, as long as there was something to do. Sure, a lot of the time, I was dealing with minuscule user issues that were “urgent emergencies”, but the rest of the time was either free time or project time. In reality, I could do what I wanted, come and go as I please, work from home if I needed to, and my drive was fairly short (minus I-76 traffic, of course).

I didn’t dislike my co-workers, despite some differences in how we did things. There was always a difference in what was considered “best practices” between Core and corporate. For the most part, while discussions would get heated over stupid shit, nobody held a grudge (well..hopefully, I can only speak for myself) despite both sides being stubborn and insistent.

For the most part…life was good, but; it was time to move on. My position never really had any kind of official title. I was the jack of all trades; the everything IT bitch. If it lit up, made beeping noises…hell, if it used electricity, it somehow fell under my domain. I felt that it was time for a change…to move into a position that has more clearly defined goals and responsibilities…something that (company b) offered.

To the peons at corporate: Was cool hanging out and talking to you on a daily basis. You will be missed…and I still owe you donuts.
To the towers peons: Good luck…damn, you’ll probably need it (your words, not mine!)
To the peons in Austin: Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

Damn…no posts in September. I’m really slipping here. I have some posts started, but I haven’t actually finished any writing.

Lots of new news involving cars, jobs, friends and other randomness…just no time to write anything in detail about it.

Soon…

I added another log to the fire. Fuck, my intricate pyramid of half burned logs, embers, and fresh wood collapsed under the weight of one of the legs. Sitting there alone, I didn’t feel any dire need to immediately rearrange the logs. It’s past midnight and everyone had already gone to sleep… Pussies. “This fire will burn till morning”, I said to myself as I took another sip of Sprite Zero. Why not, right…we had all this extra wood that we bought, and it was our last night camping.

“What the hell are you going to be doing out there?”, I was asked on many an occasion. It’s not something that can easily be explained: the attraction of sleeping in a tent on uneven ground in the middle of nowhere. But why explain myself, or try to rationalize to others the appeal, as I looked down the road and saw an entire line of tents.

It was time away from home, away from the office. I’d say away from the family, but they were right here with me. I took two days off from work and as a spur of the moment decision, made a reservation for a campground spot just days before I left.

What does one do…beside eat, drink, go to the beach, play volleyball, and sit around a campfire….sometimes most of the above at once? This is the life…away from everything and everyone that pisses you off on a daily basis, away from the business of day-in and day-out monotony; Away from the mundane repertoire that is repeated every day for no real rhyme or reason other than maintaining the status quo of the appearance of normality. Out here, I don’t need to think, I don’t need to care, I don’t need to worry or stress. I will have plenty of time for that when I return, so I might as well enjoy a few days away from it all.

I haven’t taken a real vacation in a while. Most vacations that one takes, require another week of rest after returning because one does not ever “relax” on vacations. No, typical vacations involve going somewhere and doing stuff. Last year, I went on a cruise to Canada. A cruise, one might expect, to be full of laziness and booze, but in reality, I was busy for every minute aboard the ship, and even moreso off it. With shows and swimming, between boat rides, walks, shops, and other typical touristy shit, I came back more exhausted than when I left. At least I didn’t have to be at work….but fuck it if they STILL didn’t find a way to get in touch with me because of some mess that they made that nobody else could fix.

I need a vacation…

Ok. I was just watching True Lies, and there was a commercial for Aussi hair gel or something like that. The WTF part: the method of procuring this hair care product was by assulting a purple kangaroo while it was getting a massage and having a bottle of Aussie fly out of its ass. Yes, a purple kangaroo and bottles flying out of asses. No I was not dreaming. W…… T….. F.

So I caved and bought an iPhone to replace my broken blackberry. So I also became an app whore and downloaded a bunch of apps including the wordpress app. So here is a test post from it. I wish more apps supported landscape view
, especially these: ones that involve a lot of typing.

“Mind if I sit here as I wait for my to-go order to come out?”
“Sure, please…”, I said as I motioned toward the chair across from my table at Po-Boys Factory.
“So, where are you from?”, she asked.

Is it that transparent that I’m not from around here? Well…yes, of course it is, but the thought still struck me as a tad funny.

What ensued next surprised me, being a seventeen year citizen of Philadelphia; a friendly conversation with a complete stranger. This says something about the people around here: They are friendly. This is not exactly something I’m completely used to, living in Philadelphia all these years. From the moment I arrived in AL, I haven’t met anyone that is rude, pushy, arrogent, or even not smiling. I’m beginning to like it around here.

Anyway, back to Asterisk, as that is the primary reason for my being here.

Today, as the rest of the week will be, was an early day. Instead of the comfy 9:30am arrival time of yesterday, and in order to accommodate the amount of material that needs to be covered, training now begins at 8:30. Even though AL is a timezone behind, I did not feel like leaving my bed at all. The snooze button is your friend….numerous times over.

Finally, I managed to convince myself that I actually DO have to get up. Splashing some water on my face, I finally sprang to life. Due to the previously mentioned snooze-button-fest, I didn’t have time for breakfast (Oh, but that Waffle House down the street looks so inviting!) before leaving for the glass house that is the Digium HQ.

Ok, now to Asterisk…really this time.

Today we started to really dive into the core of *. We set up voicemails, learned how to deal with prompts and inputs, and setup some SIP and IAX (that’s pronounced eeeks, like geeks) trunks. The technology behind VoIP is actually quite wonderful, albeit somewhat flawed, especially when it comes to NAT setups.

This makes me wonder, actually, how our phone system at work functions at all. The ASA we have is pretty locked down, yet taking a linksys or Polycom phone home seems to work without needing a VPN. Either the ASA is pretty smart, or Scott opened up all UDP traffic to the Asterisk box. I’m going to have to check the access-lists when I get back, because if all UDP traffic is wide open, somebody is going to have some words.

The day was long; we didn’t finish the training until about 6:10 or so. At the end of it, though, I was not bored of sitting in a classroom, nor was I tired of Asterisk. Twelve step program, here I come.: “My name is Luke and I’m becoming an Aster-holic”. I realize that it takes a very specific kind of geek to actually enjoy writing code for phone systems. It’s unique, although C programmers, web developers, et al would also argue that their art is unique. I digress, however, arguing that programmers and developers have typically written code to serve one particular purpose, whether it be a financial application, a video game, or a web site. In turn, they would argue that I am “just” configuring a phone system, but I think it’s so much more. Asterisk doesn’t have a singular purpose; it’s not just a call router, just an IVR, simply a mechanism to send outbound calls over, or just a voicemail system. It’s all of that, and more. I don’t think that in a week, I’ll come close to realizing the full potential of it, but in just two days I have gained a completely different appreciation for it…and we haven’t even gotten to the fun stuff!

The key difference is the fun in learning. Anytime I learned a programming language, it was very systematic, and each one was for the most part similar. Phone systems are a different beast; their code isn’t like any typical programming language, although AEL helps people with programming backgrounds (like myself) ease into the role. Sure, developers can put some easter eggs in their code, but how many IDEs have a built in sound that says “weasels have eaten our phone system”, or “our phone system has been overrun by iguanas”, or a collection of monkey noises? How many of them would actually be willing to put that into production code? Rest assured that my extension at work will soon be filled with fun stuff (until some stickler VP decides to ruin my fun). I can only imagine what Allison was thinking when the Digium folks asked her to record some of these prompts, but the on-site hilarity must have been incredible. Come to think of it…who the hell actually even came up with some of the things for her to say…if I ever meet this person, I need to buy them a beer or something.

Anyway, that’s all for now. As I learn more fun Asterisk stuff, maybe I’ll post some code segments, or try to dissect our setup at work based on what I am learning here.

Read more from the Digium guys themselves at http://blogs.digium.com. Some of it may not make sense to normal people, but it’s a fun read nonetheless.

Also…I apparently have a nickname now at Digium…Luke the Blogger. I guess somebody there has an alarm setup for any WP posts that have asterisk/digium in the title :)

The beauty of having a blog with no set purpose is the ability to write about anything I want. I don’t have to confine myself to tech articles, sob stories, essays or stories from my past.

Today, I write about a little something called *.

Asterisk is an open source PBX that runs on top of UNIX-based operating systems. It is developed primarily by a company called Digium, whose headquarters are in Huntsville, Alabama.

While the state of Alabama isn’t exactly known for its technical prowess, I must say that I was more than impressed with Huntsville. It wasn’t all farms, plains, or BBQs. The buildings in Huntsville are all very modern…very “techy” looking. For example, look at the Digium headquarters…looks pretty nice, eh?

So why Asterisk? My work has been running an Asterisk phone system since January, and until recently it was maintained by one of our peons in Texas. This particular peon no longer wanted to have anything to do with the phone system because he is busy with everything else (aka, Core network, WoW and consulting for other firms [yea, I know...]). So basically, since this transition was still done under the old Regime, he got away with dumping the administration of * onto Ryan and I. Neither of us knew anything about asterisk at the time the project was thrown onto our laps. Studying peon’s config files and using some quick documentation he wrote (simple doesn’t even begin to describe it), we managed to keep the old system alive for a decently long time. The server, however, was never meant to handle the call center AND the corporate phones, and was in dire need of an upgrade. Since it was still running asterisk 1.2, we wanted to have the current 1.4 version running on the new server. Not knowing much about asterisk would have made this particular project close to impossible. Ryan was sent for training first, taking my spot because of my prior conflicting arrangements. Using his newfound knowledge, my ingenuity, and some late nights, we were able to transition (fairly) smoothly to the new server. All the problems that we had in 1.2 went away; no more echos in the phones, no more crashes of the box. We did, however, introduce a couple of new problems, but those bugs were quickly squashed.

Fast forward to today. The current asterisk implementation is running. We have queue_metrics setup and running. However, as in any great company…or any company, actually; redundancy is key. We needed a second person to have enough asterisk knowledge to be a primary for the system. That…would be me.

So here I am, sitting in a Holiday Inn in Huntsville, Alabama. Day one of training is over. Asterisk is compiled on my machine at the Digium HQ, a simple dialplan is active, and I’m full of hot wings and pulled pork from dinner.

Huntsville isn’t so bad after all. I expected much worse…but I must say two things:
1. Southern belles DO exist (Hey, blond from the plane…call me. Blond from the Digium HQ…you too).
2. Being alone here; I’m pretty fricken bored.

Here is a good read that I found on the internet about SQL Injections.

HP has a nice tool available to scan your sites for such vulnerabilities.

http://www.communities.hp.com/securitysoftware/blogs/spilabs/archive/2008/06/23/finding-sql-injection-with-scrawlr.aspx

Looking around, it was your average drab dorm room. It being an Ivy League school, perhaps I expected plush carpeting, diamond chandeliers, and my own personal butler; it was not the case. It seems that no matter what the school, and no matter how much money you throw away to get that lousy piece of paper, it never really changes…every school, no matter how different, is exactly the same.

The walls were gray, the ceilings white, with paper thin grey carpeting all around. The windows barely opened, perhaps a safety precaution to the inevitable drunken person that would attempt to lean out that window. The windows barely opened, but people still found ways to kill themselves that year by “mistakenly” falling out of their window from one of the top floors at Towers, or by stumbling over the railing on the roof of the frat house across the street. Arriving early in the morning on move-in day, I managed to snag the second largest room in the suite. The largest was occupied by Mike, our asian suite-mate who had a fetish for school books and microwaving chicken, since he moved in a week earlier due to his duties as campus IT. Ry and Bill got shafted even more, since their rooms were about the size of a county jail cell. The idea, as it was originally envisioned, was that the person with the largest room would switch mid-year with the person who had the smallest room. The people who had the other two rooms, likewise, would switch. In reality, this never occurred, and the end result was that most of our suite mini-parties would end up taking place in my room.

Tonight, however, four of us found ourselves in Bill’s room — the smallest room. This made sense at the time…somehow, although I could not begin to fathom what our train of thought was that night. I’m fairly certain that alcohol had something to do with it. I mean, hell, Firn was 2 cases in, and everyone else was having a good time as well. Tonight, Matt from next door wasn’t joining us; I don’t remember whether it was because he was recovering from his vodka+Mt. Dew (”Never again!”), or whether he was scared to repeat it.

“Grab the chair, Firn”, Bill egged on as I sat down on the bed next to Ryan. There really was no room in there at this point, so I figured that moving a chair would be a good idea…I said nothing. Bill points to me and says “you won’t drop it on his head”, to which Firn responded with a resounding “oh yea?”.

to be continued

At brunch today, Ry and I had a discussion about “the list” and how it has evolved over time.

To the uninformed, “the list” is a list of five people. These five people, as they appear on the list, have a “get out of jail free” card toward your significant other. You are free to have sex with anyone on “the list” without any repercussion from your S.O.. Your S.O., in the same fashion, can have a list of their own.

The list is usually composed of celebrities, or at least of people you are pretty sure you will never have the chance to have sex with anyway, but still….it’s fun.

Currently my list stands as:
* Christina Aguilera
* Adrianna Lima
* Mila Kunis
* Megan Fox
* Rachel Bilson

The list, as I said before, has evolved. Eight years ago, for example, Britney Spears would have been on that list, and Megan Fox wasn’t even legal. Updates to the list are permitted with one clause: If (by some god given right) you have actually had sex with anyone on that list, they are a permanent addition.

What is your list?