I just started my new job on Wednesday. I think everything is going to be alright from here on.
I was originally supposed to start this upcoming Monday, but I told my old employer to take the 2 week notice I gave them and fuck theirselves with it. Conveniently my new employer asked if I could start a little earlier so I could spend some time with my predescessor.
I got to enjoy a little bit of time off, which I spent getting a driver’s license and new plates on my vehicles. Getting a driver’s license in Nashville is a huge pain in the ass. When it came time to get plates it seemed there were no lines any where. The state was happy to take your money.
So I’ve spent 3 days so far at my new job. I think I’m going to turn out just fine here. I get along with everyone. Everyone is so relaxed and we can kind of just chill. We took a field trip yesterday to the data center where alot of our servers are housed. It was pretty cool since I have never been in a data center in the civilian world. I’m glad that there are other geeks there since they actually have a real IS department instead of one guy doing 6 jobs. It feels kind of nice to be able to hang out with my own kind for once.
This has been a huge relief for me. My last job was my first job in the civilian sector and it left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s nice to see that not everyone fits into the corporate american grind way of work. I’m a huge believer that employees will be happier and stay longer if they can have a decent work/life balance. You just can’t work the piss out of someone for over 10 hours a day and then wonder why they aren’t happy or want to quit.
First things first, what is backscatter? Backscatter messages are non delivery notices sent to you without your request. These messages are usually directly related to spam issues. A few examples of backscatter would include “out of office” messages, bounced or rejected email notifications, messages from virus scanners, and challenge and response requests from anti spam software originating from addresses you never even sent a message to.
How does it get to your inbox? These aren’t just unexplainable mistakes. Backscatter normally happens when someone uses your email address or domain in the “From:” field of an email. Spammers are notorious for doing this for the simple fact that most mail systems do not deliver mail where email addresses or domains in the “From:” fields are non-existent. Depending on how much spam the spammer sends out you could be receiving hundreds to thousands of NDR (non-delivery receipt) messages.
From the Exchange system administrator, how do I stop backscatter from congesting my exchange server? Here is a solution that I use on my Exchange 2003 server.
You can also specify an address to send NDR messages to. I would recommend setting up a postmaster email box or alias to collect these messages. The instructions for specifying the address to receive the NDR’s are outlined below.
This is one way to stop backscatter. This solution will only block the NDR type messages. There may be other solutions that would stop the other types of backscatter you may receive, but I feel the NDR type responses are the most common. For those of you running other email servers like qmail, postfix, or sendmail. There are fixes available out there for you to and we will address some of those in the next post.
I’ve been thinking about starting my own little web hosting business for the past few months. I finally said screw it and put together a small business plan and started working on it. I just moved illcommunications.com over to the new server. I haven’t launched the hosting site just yet. I want to test a couple things and tie up some last minute adjustments before I make it public. I will be sure to let everyone know once we go live.
I just landed a job interview for this thursday. I am really hyped about it. It is with a local IT consulting company. The position is full time. The dynamic enviroment should do wonders for my shitty mood. I can’t wait to get out of this corporate bullshit. I’m tired of looking at the same 15 dumb ass people everyday. This place has to be the most technically challenged place in America. I have to singlehandedly take care of about 9 offices so alot of my troubleshooting consists of walking an end user through something over the phone. Just the other day I got a call about a bitch not being able to plug in her wireless fucking mouse. I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. They got me. I put out all of their fires so they should be good until they can find another sucker. I feel bad for them because they need to replace about 65 6 year old workstations and a P3 server. I’ll be sure to leave a note for them somewhere.
Don’t get the wrong opinion of me. I am pretty much negative on everyone of my posts. This doesn’t reflect how I am in person. I’m actually pretty laid back. I tend to bottle up the things that bother me. Once I’m pissed I usually come here and bitch about it. Maybe, some positive posts will come in the future. I’ve had a pretty shitty attitude over the past few years. I’m just tired of getting jacked around by the corporate world.
I just realized the job, I was so hyped up about starting, fuckin’ sucks. I am just now reaching the end of my 90-day probational period. If I knew 10% of what I know about these people now I would have passed on the offer a million times. Anyways, lets put together a little list of reasons to start looking again.
1. Any company that makes employees put all their business expenses on their personal credit cards doesn’t give a rat’s ass about them.
2. Any company that makes it’s employees pay for the insurance on company provided cellphones and blackberries can fuck a goat.
3. An employer claims they pay for part of the employees medical benefits and then once your hired and make your elections you notice the price for health insurance alone is $256 every two weeks. How much are they paying? 3 cents?
4. An employer makes you work 3 weekends in a row and then you need part of a day off and they make you take it without pay. Not to mention you are a salary employee.
5. An employer uses you to fix employees’ personal computers because they make good money for the company. I don’t give a fuck if they make a bangin’ baloney sandwich. Tell them to call the fuckin’ GeekSquad.
6. You bring forward a proposal letting the employer know that the IT department is severely undermanned and they tell you they will keep acquiring new offices and you will be the single-handed IT department forever. I was told I could bring a friend in for contracting when needed. I asked “At what rate?”. They reply “$15 an hour”. Where can you find an IT consultant for $15 an hour and how do they survive?
7. Your employer wants to keep brand spankin’ new equipment as backup and use the old shit until it craps out. Where is the common sense it that? Let the new shit go obsolete just to get every last penny out of your Pentium 3 800mhz? Use the god damn old shit as a backup. Hell, computers are so cheap now days just order on overnight if it’s that much of a concern. We work a fucking mile away from Dell’s shitty shipping facility.
8. Your company’s gay owner needs a new laptop so you spec one out for him and he needs 7 different choices so he can pick the prettiest one. I’m not going to order you some bullshit. This is business class not some pink and yellow piece of shit laptop that we can’t get parts for tomorrow.
9. Contractors and consultants come to do work and warn you of how fucked up and how much they hate the company you work for.
10. Your told to do something and then your 10 bosses want to change every fucking detail of the damn project all the way until it’s time to actually execute it.
The network administrator before me should have left some kind of text file or something on one of the servers notifying me of the fucked up-ness of this piece of shit they call a company. No wonder she left after only being here for 3 weeks. I will make sure I leave some clues for the next network administrator.
Well, just got back from a project down in the Greensboro, NC office. We redid their whole network. Now I’m getting ready for a trip to Philly to install a few workstations and run some new phones. After that I will be going over to Detroit to do a network assessment of the assets located in that office.
Doing a project to clean up someone else’s mess is pretty shitty. All the data cable were wired in the “A” standard. We redid all of that and even re punched all the ends on the patch panel in the “B” standard. My guess is that the people who did the wiring must have been phone people. Anyways they are good to go now and I am really pleased with they way everything turned out. I will post some pictures of the job up later.
As you might remember I ordered a Magicjack a few weeks ago and reviewed it decently. Well I have come to the conclusion that Magicjack sucks, after a few weeks use. It works great from my end, but everyone I call hates talking to me when I am using it. They get choppy audio and sometimes can’t hear me at all. I would say it would be alright for traveling and using every now and then. I WOULD NOT REPLACE MY PHONE WITH THIS LITTLE PIECE OF PLASTIC SHIT. I was actually thinking of disconnecting Vonage when I recieved this. I’m glad I didn’t Vonage’s quality is a bajillion times better than this. Both of them have shitty customer service, but atleast the people I am calling can hear what the hell I am saying. The up side of the magicjack is that it is very small, portable, and cheap. Otherwise, all other aspects you would expect in phone service suck. I will probably just leave this in my laptop bag and just use it when I’m traveling or something. I guess you get what you pay for.
If anyone knows of a really good SIP provider let me know. I am wanting to start playing around with asterisk.
Why the fuck do you have to pay extra to have a god damn veteran plate on your car? I am not asking for a free hand out or anything, but what the fuck is wrong with the government? You have to pay $20 or more extra to have a veteran plate over a regular one! That’s straight up bullshit. I forfeited 4 years of my life and 1 of those in combat and I have to pay extra to have a god damn piece of metal on the back of my fucking car? Thanks for remembering those who served you corrupt self centered bastards. I don’t want any special treatment just let me get a fucking license plate for the price of a normal one. What the fuck are they doing with the extra money from the tags? If anyone is reading this from the Tennessee government, get your fucking heads out of your asses and pay some respect to those that made sacrifices for the damn country so you can fuck off and be “free”. Oh, I’m sorry they do have a “free” tag. You have to be straight up fucked up and maimed to get it though. I think a fucking license plate would be the least of my worries if that were the fucking case. How the fuck is it “free” if it costs your health? This country is quick to ask it’s people to help them out, and we always come through and sacrifice to help, but they end up fucking you in your ass after it’s all over. The VA needs to get the shit straight. You mother fuckers aren’t helping anyone your just there to get your damn paychecks and go the fuck home. No one I have met from the VA has even been the least bit sincere. They always act like I’m causing an inconvenience by asking for the benefits that I was promised and even payed towards. They even have the nerve to research everything to find a loop hole to get out of giving you your benefits. You can go fuck a goat you greedy fucks. I believe in karma and karma is a bitch. You will get yours.
Out.
I just got my comcast cable hooked up on saturday and I come home from work today and the shit doesn’t work. I call comcast and the bitches say that it shouldn’t be working because I don’t have cable internet service through them! What the fuck is wrong with these people? I told the bitch that I have the service order in front of my damn face and I do have service. I even spoke with some broad from comcast on saturday to get them to accept my fucking modem. So now here I sit internet-less and back to leeching wifi off my neighbors. They told me someone would call me in an hour to tell me my modem is out of walled fucking garden. They even had the nerve to tell me my modem was not on their supported list. Bullshit! I had comcast at the last place I lived for 2 damn years with this modem. It even worked saturday and sunday. These fuck heads are lucky they are the only cable provider where I live. I would get dsl if I wasn’t forced into getting a damn phone line that I won’t even use. That’s enough of my rant they said they would fix it and gave me an upgrade from 6MB to 8MB for no charge. We will see.
I never really was one to drink much coffee, but lately I’ve been kicking them back like crazy. I really like the house blend from starbuck’s. We’ve been buying their pre-ground shit. I just can’t seem to get enough coffee.
I just read a great post from The Ed Techie about CoComments. I installed this tool and it’s awesome. Finally, I can stop browsing around for all my long lost comments. Anyways, check it out.
You can check out The Ed Techie’s post on CoComment here.