Kirrus’ Blog

Another day, another post

Today, I pushed through some paperwork for a server migration I’ll be doing this weekend. Tweaked dns, tweaked cong files, etc etc.
Monitored Stephen Fry’s cluster closely whilst he was live-streaming a talk about social networking. Pretty much it.

Another day, another post (18)

Today, I, tweaked a domain name, helped talk a customer into upgrading, changed a few passwords, advised a user on a script I helped write, to add apache vhost, user, email, mysql db & user to a server and closed a few support tickets. Oh, and talked to a customer who is leaving. Fun fun.

Note to self, when cutting up chillies, loose the seeds.

Fun tweets today (sorry if you follow me on twitter!)

• Dear customer. Please don’t complain that we’re rubbish, when you break your own email clients! We can’t control your computers! :/
• Thank you psudo-random password generator. No, I’m not going to send this to a female customer: hei9deer
• Pens! Why do they randomly appear on my desk? I swear, I only had one at the start of the week, now I have 3 :/ (Apparently I’m stealing them from James and Paul. Bonus points to whomever can explain how they flew over the atlantic from James’s desk )
  

Sports headphones Review

I’ve been looking for a really good set of headphones to use while doing extreme sports (Bocking) which has got to be the best test of how well the headphones stay in your ear!

I’ve tested a few different sets headphones designed specifically for sports (jogging) and ones that are not (in ear/noise isolating silicon ones.
Here’s a short review with ratings 1-5 (where 5 is best) in various categories. Scroll to the bottom to find out the overall winner!

Sennheiser Mx55 ((£15 from HMV)
Comfort 4 (can get a bit unconfortable after a few hours in)
Sound 5 (excellent sound quality)
Volume 4 (Not as loud as i’d expected, but also doesn’t leave my ears ringing after listening with my player on full volume)
Quality 4 (the snap on interchangeable covers designed to let you bling it up a bit are pointless and come off too easily. I’ve superglued one already, but at this price, who’s complaining?!)
Hold/fit 5 (they stayed in for hours while i bounced around, amazing!)

EDIT: Superglue the rubber bits on too, they fall off in pocket!

Skullcandy in ear
Comfort 4 (pretty comfortable until i took them out then found my ear holes were quite sore)
Sound 3 (good, but lacking something, and no matter of EQ tweaking could give me that…too crisp)
Volume 5 (ear blisteringly loud )
Quality 2 (poor, the metal mesh on one of them fell off after about a week, and then the speaker on that side got kind of bent in and the volume halved)
Hold/fit 2 (fall out often, not suitable for jogging/sports)

Sony Active MDR-AS20J Ear Clip Sports Headphones ~£12
now it’s been a little while since i used these headphones so forgive me if i’m a little less specific. These have got to be my second favourite since the Sennheiser MX55.
They disappeared a while back and I can’t seem to find them anymore lol.
Comfort 4
Sound 4
Quality 5 (survived being chucked into my bag with various implements until they disappeared)
Volume 4 (not as good as the in ear ones obviously, but louder than the MX55′s)
Hold/Fit 4 (the stay on, but its a bit fiddly to get them on)

Sennheiser CXII300 In ear noise isolating ~£30
These were quite expensive for me, but sounded greate and lasted ages. The hold while Bocking wasn’t too bad (it helped taping the cable to my neck with a plaster to prevent tugging).
I killed them by accidentally snagging the cable on a street sign and turning round. The cable separated at the connector.
Comfort 3 (got a bit uncomfortable after an hour or so)
Sound 5
Quality 4 (good, rubbery cable didn’t seem to kink and was easily wrapped but the rubber cable ends on the buds slid down after a good few months of kicking around in the bag)
Volume 5
Fit/hold 4 (not best suited to sports, the cable always caught on my clothes and dragged them out of my ears. Better fit than the skull candy though.)

My recommendation? Get the Sennheiser MX55. Great hold and sound quality for an amazing price. I don’t miss the volume, my hearing seems to be improving now (i think a volume rating of 5 is excessive!!).

The in ear/noise isolating ones especially the sennheiser were pretty good, but i quite like being able to have some sound from the surroundings. Even though the hold was pretty impressive for something not secured to your ear, the cable always won and ended up yoinking them out of my ears.

Edit: added comment to Senheiser Mx 55 section.

Day 14

So, got futher this year
Still another nothing happened day, nothing to post about. Now you know why I don’t post so much

Walked past the poster at the bottom of this post the other day. What a load of rubbishy ramblings. What is the point of pasting that up outside a train station? It won’t get your (daft) point across to anyone. Good way to vent I guess. Apart from that,and being slightly offensive

People are strange

We have a lot of customers. A few, whilst emailing us at tech-support can be rude. It’s interesting, visiting their sites, and seeing whether that is just because they’re stressed, under the effects of caffeine, or are just naturally rude.

Take one example… one person just kept ignoring what I said, treating it as if I didn’t know what I was writing about. Turns out, I did, and I fixed the immediate problem (if not the whole one, but that’s something different altogether). He still insists on treating me as if I’m not worth listening to.

Surprise surprise, if I am given the choice (and at the end of the day, when I’m just doing support tickets to stop them needing to be done tomorrow, I often am,) I will delay answering the tickets of those who have been rude. They’ll get done at some point, but I won’t prioritize them; what’s the point? I’d rather help someone who will be grateful! I will go all out in my own time on a problem that interests me, or a customer who is kind. I will go all out if you are rude, but you are stressed and have an excuse. I may force myself to go all out if you pay us a lot of money (but it won’t be on my own time )

I’ve stayed in the office till 10pm, on a ‘I’m not getting paid right now’ problem, because it interested me, and I liked the people running the website involved. I will gladly spend my free time trying to help them.

If you talk to tech support, be nice! Say thank you, treat us with respect, and you’ll find we’ll be inclined to help you a lot more. Ignore what we say, treat us rudely or as if we don’t know what we’re talking about, and we’ll get dispirited. The last thing you want is dispirited sysadmins. They tend to go home on the dot, and they won’t go out of their way to help you.

If you’re angry, worried, stressed, take a deep breath and a calming moment before speaking to us. We, like anyone else, don’t like people shouting at us for something we can’t help. If your website goes down, because the server it’s on has blown up, and you didn’t pay for a fail-over system, we can’t help you any faster by you shouting at us, and you shouting at us will not make us like you

In the end, just remember, we’re human too! That person you call up because your email is broken has emotions, and they’re likely busy fixing problems, or helping others already. Don’t let the frustration of the problem blow into anger at the people who try to fix it for you

America – Wake up

James pointed this out over twitter: http://is.gd/4MV1s

Doesn’t surprise me, it seems that the US has taken the line the ends justify the means for a while, including torture, and the (slightly) indirect causing of torture.

Just one thing, America. You really cannot complain when your troops are tortured. There is a reason everyone accepted the Geneva Conventions, but it looks like the US has decided to ignore them. (Like the UK is ignoring Human Rights in some cases now, and is trying to eat away our privacy.)

The effects of sleep deprivation

Or what happens when you have to stay up for 22 hours, because a server has suddenly decided it doesn’t like life, and would rather die, as I had to this morning.

Managed to recover it in the end, but this would be the downside of my job

Weak, managed to strain my legs, so both were aching, but oh, did bed feel nice when I got to crawling in!

In my case, sleep deprivation results in:

1. getting sillier
2. getting grumpy
3. trouble accessing memories
4. eye-hand co-ordination beginning to degrade

I guess, that over time, you can train yourself to deal with these sort of symptoms (though for me, being silly is a bit strange )

LPIC exam 101

Well, it’s arrived again. A little later today, I’ll be taking the Linux Professional Institue’s exam again. With any luck, I’ll pass this time (failed by 10 points last time ) Hopefully, I’ll be able to update this post with good news. Who knows.

I hate exams, especially these, which require rote learning. Rote learning I am rubbish at. Sit me in front of a computer with a task within my abilities, the use of man and google, and fine, I can muddle my way through. But learning all the command flags of rpm? No. Hard. Gastly, indeed. I had hoped I was done with exams when I left school. Seems I was wrong

Did I mention, I hate exams?

I passed

In less depressing non-news.. Day 5 of NaBloPoMo, and I’ve yet to falter. Let’s see what happens this weekend, when I get a wonderful couple of nights of disturbed sleep, and short ‘stuff needs fixing!’ deadlines

Reporting Problems

Have you ever had to talk to tech support? Ask for help, when your computer, your email account, or your internet connection isn’t working?

Ever wondered what’s going through the mind of the person answering? Quite often, it’s this: “I’m not a mind reader!”

Working at a web-host, at least once a week, I get an email that goes “My email isn’t working” or “Please setup a new virtual host for me”. Those questions, whilst they make a lot of sense to the asker, who has the context in mind, make very little to me. What is wrong with the email account? What domain name do I need to add to the server, what server do I need to setup the hosting on? Hence, I’m not a mind reader

So, if you ever need to report a problem, give us as much detail as possible. What happens when you check your email? Do you get any error messages? Describe the steps you take, so that we can replicate your problem on our machines – fixing it is a lot easier when we can see it happening.

Day 1: NaBloPoMo

What a strange name for an event. Anyway, yes, this is my second attempt at the interesting experiment, of posting once a day, every day during this month.¹ I expect quite a few of these posts will be small, random and useless. Sorry about that, just to warn you!

Anyway, onto more interesting things. Book review

Completed the “The Business” By Iain Banks the other week. Good book, though not one of his best… Gripping read from about ~60-70% of the way through. Predictable up to that point.
All about a large, democratic company, and the machinations and politics within it, as it looks to buy a small country, to attain a seat on the UN council.

Interesting and enjoyable enough read, but not spectacular by any stretch. I’ll not keep it for my book collection

Some other thoughts I had whilst talking to someone at church today… Working with the people I do, it’s easy to forget the fear and lack of knowledge a lot people have with computers. For me, they’re simple, far easier to understand than a human by any stretch of the imagination!

If you are ever afraid of a computer, the best thing you can do is to make a backup of all your files onto a USB stick, and then just play with your computer. Don’t be afraid of breaking anything, let your fear go. Just explore all the menus, options and settings, see what happens when you change things around. Right click on everything!