FeralBlog

So, the hot new rumor about a former employer of mine is that they’ve installed monitoring software capable of keystroke logging on everyone’s computers. Since I left this particular company, I’ve seen things there go from bad to pretty much horrible.

One of the first things that went was the use of instant messaging software. Not usually a big deal, seeing as how it can be a big time-waster and all, but the reasons given for removing the software were, frankly, stupid:

1. “It’s a big security hole.”

1. “We don’t want company secrets getting out.”

   Point number 1. If you’re worried about security, you might as well just shut off your email system, since that’s where 99.9% of the viruses that are going around these days are coming from.

   Point number 2. Puh-leaze. This is not a company that works on government contracts, or financial applications, or even proprietary software. They make fucking dogfood coupons. Get over yourself.

   Now the potential for keystroke logging comes along. I tried to imagine what the justification for that might be, and I just come up blank. If you’re trying to see what your employees are doing, so they don’t go to time-wasting internet sites, then just block them at the firewall. Plenty of places do that. Then I thought about the whole trade secrets thing, and again I refer you to the “fucking dogfood coupons” paragraph above.

   The implications for watching your employees that closely are so sad. Are you planning on logging into their Hotmail accounts to see what they’re writing about the company? That’s at least unethical, and probably extremely illegal, as well. Checking to see how many spelling mistakes they have to correct in a day, so you can fire them in favor of someone whose typing is less error-prone?

   The basic issue is trust. In order to have a tolerable work environment, there needs to be a level of trust between employer and employee. It’s not like you’re going out into the street every morning and picking the first 30 people that walk by and say “You there. You are going to make my dogfood coupons today.” These are people that you interview, you try and learn about, and gauge their character. Instituting such draconian measure in an environment where employees already are fearful about being let go on a whim will just make your employees that much more likely to bolt.

   If you’re trying to make absolutely everyone quit, then you’re probably on the right track. If, however, you would like to have some measure of employee retention (doubtful, since turnover while I was there was over 100% in a year and a half), then give them some measure of personal freedom. As long as their work is getting done, there’s no need to make everyone feel like they’re in the Gulag.

   Sorry about the rambling… I’ve wanted to unload about this for awhile, and there are plenty of other things that are not appropriate for me to discuss here, but as I still have friends at this former employer, and I really just want their work environments to be better. Life is too short to work at a shit job.

    

Changing offices today, in case you haven’t been noticing all the rearranging going on at the new office. Computer gets packed in 2 hours, and who knows when it’ll get unpacked. And even when it does, I don’t think we’ll have our T1 up yet, so who knows when I’ll be able to goof off work again.

Some of the other developers at my job that work on another unrelated piece of software pulled some serious all-nighters over the last few days. All fine and dandy, except that they drank all of my soda that was in the mini-fridge in the process. It was only slightly bothersome, but what I really didn’t understand is that they drank all the caffeine-free diet Coke! There’s no caffeine in it! Or sugar! No stimulants whatsoever! Why?!?

I picked up another 12-pack of caffeine-free diet Coke today, and decided to be a little bit more proactive. I got some Post-It notes, and affixed one to each can when I put them in the fridge. On each one, I wrote “I put my genitals on this”.

One of the fun side benefits of all this rain we’ve been getting this week (as opposed to all the rain we were getting every other week) is that now the power has decided to randomly cut out at least 5 times a day. I can’t even tell you how fun it is to be in the middle of something one second and then be staring at a bootup screen the next. Not only is my concentration broken, but a non-clean shutdown in Win2k causes it to grind away for about 10 minutes upon booting, trying to recover lost data or crush Linux or whatever it is it tries to do.

Both of the people I share this room with have laptops, so they’re covered. I’m trying to find an extension cord long enough to reach the server APS that’s in this room, but until I do I’ll just be saving my work every five seconds, and hoping I can get stuff done under these conditions. I actually had made a bet yesterday with one of the coworkers that I could get a particular bug fixed, tested, and checked in before the next time the power went out. I made it, but just barely, and a crisp $1 bill is a symbol of my triumph.

Through my job, I got a ticket for a luxury box at the Pirates game last night against the Red Sox. It was “turn back the clock night”, a throwback to the last time the two teams had played, the 1903 World Series. They had all sorts of neat touches at the park, retro uniforms, old-timey music, etc., but the weather just didn’t want to cooperate. We still crashed the luxbox and had a great time. That is a cushy setup they have there; you get your own room, your own covered (and heated) seats outside the box, your own bathroom, and all kinds of “free” food. I say “free” because it works like a hotel minibar; they know how much food and how many cans of beer they put in your box, count up after you leave, do the math, and charge you. My company’s law firm was the one picking up the tab, so I didn’t feel to bad about having 2 $5 cans of diet soda, or an $8 hot dog or whatever it cost.

After getting tired of waiting for the game to start, my one coworker (who shall remain nameless) and I headed over to Club Elite. I got the sense that he really wanted to go, and all the other guys who had expressed an interest had bailed, so I didn’t want to leave him hanging. We were only there a short while, and then the SLF got out of work unexpectedly early and came and had a drink with us! It was a nice suprise, although I think it might have made nameless coworker a tad bit uncomfortable, but oh well.

This is what my connection looks like to everyone else:

(Yes, that’s a cartoon AIM icon. You can snag one here (under “Extras”)).

The connection at work is still completely fux0red... very frustrating. Other than that, everything is fun so far. Rode in again yesterday, and probably will do so again on Thursday, if the weather cooperates. Trying to get ready now for a database update for one of the clients, which involves loading a copy of their database, trying to figure out which of the scripts that were previously run were blown away when the client overwrote the test database with the production one, and what order they need to be run in. Whee!

Update: Some guy from Nauticom was just here to replace the router, and so far everything seems to be working like it should. Fingers crossed.

Update to the Update: Nope. Still not working right.

Alex Trebek: The answer is: “Unknown Socket Error”
Sean Connery: You mother didn’t have any suck it errors, Trebek!
AT: That’s ”’Socket” error, not “Suck it”
SC: Aaah, you’re one of those nancy-pants network fairys, aren’t ya?!
AT: [sighs] Mr. Connery, if you don’t know the answer I’ll have to move on.
SC: Perhaps you should talk to your mother about moving. She just laid there like Catherine Zeta-Jones suffering from nicotine deprevation.

Yeah, so… network connection has been extremely lame the last two days at work (as I’m sure my friends who keep seeing me pop on and off of AIM can attest to). They thought they had it fixed yesterday (bad cable), but the problem still seems to be lingering today.

I work in a small building that looks like a dentist’s office because, well, there’s at least two dentists’ offices in it, as well as the little software company that I’m now working for. Over the last 2 weeks or so, the roof has been in the process of being reshingled, which has been fun on many levels.

We’ve had to dodge falling pieces of roof while getting from the building through the parking lot, as well as listen to the pneumatic hammers hissing and popping outside our 2nd floor window.

The culmination of this fun had to be earlier on this week, when it sounded like they were dropping 50 pound bags of cement mix onto the roof directly above our heads. Repeatedly. I’m not quite sure what they were doing, but it was loud and scary. I’ll be happy when they’re gone. It’s hard enough to concentrate at work, harder still when you have to worry about some toolbelt-wearin’ yahoo crashing through the ceiling and into your lap.

My adventures with SharpReader continue. First off, my sister has created a LiveJournal feed out of my own site’s RSS feed. It almost looks like I have an LJ(LiveJournal) account and everything.

I’ve added a few more feeds of interest, and now I feel like I’m in control of a huge flow of information. It’s nearly overwhelming, it’s so huge. I sort of feel like Joey Pants in The Matrix, “I don’t even see the code anymore; all I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead…” The auto-refresh goes off every 1/2 hour, the little systray icon goes yellow, and I have new items to look through. It’s sort of like TiVo for the ‘Net.

I’ve also been trying, over the last few days, to bring some of my music collection into work. It’s a decent amount of work; running through existing mp3 folders with Tag&Rename, making sure the folder/file names are short enough to fit on a cd, and getting them burned and in. (As an aside, my next car stereo head unit will definitely have to be able to play burned mp3s.) I also downloaded and (ahem) liberated a copy of Forte Agent newsreader, so I could start plucking “backup” copies of tunes from A.B.S.M.*.

I see Mark Pilgrim has released his site’s MT(Movable Type) templates. Some of them definitely look worth copying, especially the one for the full-page calendar.

I would also like to state why my new job rocks so far:

• I don’t have to do timesheets.

• I don’t even have a phone on my desk (well, it’s not really a desk, it’s a door balanced on two low filing cabinets). Keeps the interruptions way, way down when people can’t call you and disturb you. Heck, I didn’t even get my email set up until about a week after I started.