Go On Home And Git To Work!

Back in the late '80s or early '90s, the Neotimer read an article in the now defunct Communications Week magazine entitled, "Save The Planet - Stay Home".  It was one of the most common sense approaches to doing information technology related work I ever ran across.  Work here referring to work where the workers only tools are a computer, a telephone, some documentation and a coffee pot. System administrators, database input people, technical support, there's a bunch of jobs that do not require the entire workgroup to commute to a centralize job location just so they can sit together.  The Neotimer was working in one such job for a company who would make money by providing remote access for teleworkers.  But, not only did they not stress this capability and encourage non-travel work capabilities in their advertising, they was a lot of reluctance to telecommuting within the company.  I never understood this.  Fortunately, since the Neotimer worked in a dispersed group with people in Nashville, Charlotte, Jackson, Atlanta and South Florida, and for a manager who trusted his people, he was able to telecommute full time from 1996 until his retirement.

Now there is legislation, HR-1722,  before congress to ensure that at least part-time teleworking is not only encouraged but mandated for federal employees.  With the non-functional, partisan, bickering group that we now call congress, the Neotimer wonders if it will ever be made into law, or even if it should since it only requires managers to determine the eligibility of their employees to telecommute and allow the ones eligible to work up to 20% of their hours in a two week period from an alternate location.  This isn't much.

Here is the bill the Neotimer's would write on this.  If you work in a job which can be done from home, government or non-government, you will do it from home, all the time.  That's it.  Take out all the other stuff and simplify things. 

Some jobs require you to drive to be physically present at a location such as work at a manufacturing facility, food service provisioning, providing services at customer locations and building and maintaining our national infrastructure.  Admittedly, they are the majority of jobs, but many, if not most, information technology jobs can be done from home. With VoIP, VPN and USB headsets, remote access has never been simpler.  

If you are a manger and can not manage a dispersed workforce because you don't trust them to get the job done, the real issue is your own shortcomings in the area of trust.  As the old saying, often attributed to Confucious, goes "He who trusts least is least to be trusted."  So if you're in a job that only requires reading, typing, thinking and talking on the telephone, go on home ... AND GIT TO WORK!

It's VOS Hoss! They Rhyme And Don't You Forget It.

Mayor used to call everybody Hoss.  It was one of those nicknames that applied to anybody, regardless of height, weight, sex, color, race, national origin or any preferences they might have.  Hoss, the universal nickname suited big Mr. Cartwright just as well as the small older gentleman with the thin mustache who tried to sell you suits at Larry's Men's Shoppe.  I thought of Hoss yesterday because I got an inquiry askin' if I'd be interested in contracting in a SysAdmin job on a network of VOS computers used for network monitoring and analysis.

Me? The Neotimer? Sixty five years old and still in demand?  Still a Hoss who knows VOS?  Wow!!

Now the Neotimer's actually been around computers for a long time.  My first association with a computer used in a business application was in the 1970's while I was a Toll Testboardman in Jackson, Tennessee.  Some folks from the State Staff office brought in this machine they called a Call Disposition Analyzer, CDA for short.  It had a DEC, (Digital Equipment Corporation), PDP-8A computer as the brains, a relay panel, and a bunch of patch cords to connect to the T&R and E&M leads at the two wire board on the incoming trunks from the class 3 office in Memphis.  There was no "monitor" as such, all I/O was from a 35 Model Teletype connected to it.  You typed stuff in and it typed stuff back out to you.  It had its operating program, i.e., the CDA software on an 8" floppy drive.  Ever see one of them?  

The Neotimer has always been intrigued by new and leading edge stuff, so he dove into the CDA like a beaver into a snake infested swamp.  In very short order he had twenty four toll trunks connected and the CDA and was looking at them all for supervision, calling number, call"ed" number and call disposition, i.e., completed, busy, reorder, high and dry or no answer.  It was great.  The CDA ran a daily report of the problems it encountered and we were able to provide info to the Step by Step office that helped them to find some bad connectors.  They thanked me profusely and I loved their gratitude.  I was hooked.  Not long after that Ms Helen and I and the whole rest of our growing family were in the Apple Store in Jackson financing an Apple II C with a printer and the whole works.  This all led the Neotimer to embrace computers in his career any time he had the opportunity.  

In 1985 the Neotimer and family moved to Middle Tennessee so he could take one of those aforementioned State Staff jobs.  FCC Compliance we called it.  The rules and regulations of Part 21 of the Communications Act of 1934 were so hard to figure out that a full time job in every state was the guy who went out to all the microwave stations and read the FCC Log entries, checked that the station was licensed and that all radio maintenance people who were making those log entries were licensed too.  Better that I should find our discrepancies than someone from the Federal Government.  But alas, microwave had rapidly begun to die off, being replaced by those infernal optical fiber carrier systems.  The Neotimer figured, for the longevity of his career, he better grab hold of those fibers just as Tarzan did that next vine as he was swinging through the jungle. 


And that's just what the Neotimer did.  But.... "there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not" the Neotimer (Exodus 1:8 KJV with apologies).  The Neotimer could see Radio and Lightwave staff support slipping from his hands even as the new pharaoh brought in his own favored people.  The Neotimer jumped off the "maintaining of equipment" bandwagon to a slowly emerging process of analyzing alarm messages that equipment generated.  These alarms could be sent to a remote location and correlated with other simultaneously occurring events.  And that eventually lead to my learning VOS.  Virtual Operating System, an OS from a little company called Stratus.  It was enough like DOS to not be totally unfamiliar, it was unlike UNIX enough that the UNIX purists hated it, and, besides liking it for that reason, I also liked the fact that you could issue commands with real words or chose any word or acronym you wanted as an abbreviation to be that command.  In the course of his time, the Neotimer did not become a VOS guru, but he held his own well enough to become a Senior Performance Engineer with a company whose software made VOS a household name among telephone companies' network organizations and he held a couple contract jobs after that for another four years or so.  The Neotimer likes being retired, but he also likes the fact that he's still thought of when VOS is mentioned.  (A VOS Hoss as it were.)

Oh, and The Mayor, well that is Jerry Lee Daily, one of the most talented and down to earth telephone men I ever had the privilege of working with.  He was given that nickname by The Great Nicknamer, Elmo Rushing, (W4UBA).  Richard Daily was mayor of Chicago when Jerry Lee transferred into our Toll Testboard group from Copperhill.  "Daily?", Elmo asked.  "Like the mayor, we'll just call you Mayor"?  Mayor replied to Elmo, "Hoss you can call me anything you want to!"

When The Stream Dries Up, We're In Trouble

Aha, the Neotimer is back.  He didn't intend the time between his postings to be so long but life's been rather rapid fire around the Neotimer's place lately.  You see, Ms Helen took a nasty fall off Houdini, her Peruvian Paso, at the end of June.  Although she was injured pretty severely with a pelvis fractured in two places and ribs that sorta pop in and out with any twisting motion, her initial diagnosis was, “Ah you're just bruised, go on home and take some Tylenol and suck it up”.  But after about a week of multiple X-rays, CAT scans, etc, we had a good diagnosis.  Nothing really changed but at least we knew that she would have to severely limit her activities for the next six weeks or more.

During the time from the initial mis-diagnosis to the CAT scan, we'd had a trail ride planned at the Midwest Trail Ride at Norman, IN, that's a few miles southeast of Bloomington in what the locals call the "Indiana Smokies".  We were signed up in an American Competitive Trail Horse Association competition on Saturday and there was an "Extreme Cowboy Competition" by the locals on Sunday, the Fourth of July.  Well I figured that was off for sure, but Ms Helen, crippled as she was, insisted we go on the ride anyway. It was a weekend of misery for her but she served as the photographer when the "Official Photographer" didn't show up and I managed to squeak out a sixth place ribbon on old Treasure.  Helen felt that Houdini didn't deserve to get out of the Extreme Cowboy competition so, not having ridden him in anything like this before, and having ridden him very little at all, I entered us.  I thought we were presentable.  Ms Helen made a video of us an posted it on her Facebook page where you can view it if you'd like.


Now, by this time, I know you're already saying, what in the heck does any of this have to do with streams.  Well let me tell you something.  When you get out of the "Neo" life and into the "timer" life, there are certain body parts that can wreak havoc with you.  One of them being the old, shall I say it, PROSTATE.  The Netotimer has always been a moderate risk taker, I mean Houdini was running full speed and bucking when he managed to dislodge MS Helen, who did I mention, only has one good arm due to serious tears of the rotator cuff muscles in the other one.  So asking him to do those things in that competition while having the picture of her trying her best to get him reined in with one arm, then falling as he took a hard left and stopped was still in the forefront of my mind all during my ride in that video above.  But back to being a risk taker, after a week or two of trying my best to keep Ms Helen's needs met, we talked about how it might feel good to spend some time in the pool.  When you got horses you never get rich.  The rich who have horses were rich first, so therefore, our pool is one of those 18' Intex Easy Set models.  It had been in a period of disuse and the Neotimer figured it would be easier to vacuum it out from inside the pool.  I'd then get the chemicals readjusted and it'd be good to go for Ms Helen's hydro-therapy.  BIG MISTAKE!!  There are little invisible critters called bacteria that live in improperly treated swimming pools, and there are appendages, (which are much more relaxed on Neotimers), which have orifices where those little critters can explore, and when they get to swimming around in there, they find the aforementioned PROSTATE, and find it to be delicious, roomy and comfortable.  They move in and set up housekeeping and the stream dries up folks.  I mean it dries up.  And what little of the trickle that does remain feels just like the throats on those old cows must feel.  You know the ones you see standing in the Winchester drawings as the stream barely trickles by.

Well now the Neotimer believes in doctors … up to a point.  He tries to stay a long way away from them at all times, but when you are feeling great on Sunday afternoon and by bedtime feeling as if you are going to die and wishing you would so you can get some relief, you're on that doorstep with the snakes wrapped around the sword at the crack of dawn.  We start off trying to be delicate in trying to describe our condition but nothing works besides saying "The stream has dried up".  There are drugs that can fix this, but it's a guess as to which one.  (To which the Neotimer would add that all medicine is guesses based on other guesses that have worked in the past.  That’s why they call it “practicing" medicine.)  The Neotimer is a strong believer in the National Institutes for Health and their wonderful website.  I get all my in-depth medical information there.  They'll talk to you as long as you want to search and read, and it doesn't cost you a dime.  You just have to back off a little bit and not be one of those kinds that say, "That sounds just like what I've got.  No wait, THAT sounds just like what I've got…. NO WAIT......

The Neotimer is on Cipro, but on day six and a half, he started spiking a fever again.  Waited the weekend and called the doctor's office.  Don’t have a thermometer, can’t tell the actual temperature, but the screening nurse, who wanted that actual number before she would acknowledge it was a fever, says, “He will tell you to continue taking the antibiotic and take something else for the fever”.  A fever still? After eight days of antibiotics?? Time to go see the man with the snakes on the sword and say, "Guess again".

Hot Tubs, Hot Weather And Great Expectations.

I gotta tell you, the Neotimer is impressed by new and innovative technology and is quick to share when something is a stand-out product.  One of the most recent projects the Neotimer has been involved in was upgrading Ms Helen's hot tub to current technological standards.

Now I have to tell you that the Neotimer, in his old timer vein, tries to be pretty thrifty.  I think hot tubs are way over priced and, until last year, had successfully resisted Ms Helen's suggestions of adding one on the deck off the master bedroom for quite a while now.  But ... Son JR bought a home that had a hot tub in the back.  He and Stacy didn't care for it that much and he offered me a good deal on it and help with transporting it from his house to the Neotimer's back deck if I'd consider it.  Thinking it was a good way of staying in or getting back in the good graces of Ms Helen, I took him up on it.

Well needless to say, it took some serious maintenance to keep the controller going, this being an older model with all mechanical relays and air switches.  First I had to replace the circulator pump, then one of the air switches, then the water heater, then one of the heater relays.  When the 110/220V selector relay burned out, I just bypassed it and kept going.

All the while, as I was Googling for parts, I kept getting hits on a site called SpaGuts.com.  They had everything I needed, were reasonably priced and had inexpensive and quick shipping.  They also had something else on their web site.  A statement that said, "If you're having to keep replacing parts in your controller, you will probably come out cheaper to replace you old electromechanical one with a new all electronic controller".  When that last heater relay burned out, I gave up and ordered the new controller.

The Neotimer is a pretty good jack-leg plumber in addition to his electrical/electronic skills so I figured I would be able to do everything required to put this thing into service.  It was easy, I did have to replumb my low flow side to the new low flow heater required with the new controller and had to drill a couple holes in the fiberglass of the tub to mount the temperature sensor and the new keypad control panel that replaces the air switches.  But it is in, it looks good, it works great and Ms Helen has never been happier with the hot tub.

A couple weeks ago Utah Terry, the farrier, was over trimming the horses feet.  I told him about the the new controller, about my skillful craftsmanship in the installation of it and insisted he come and take a look at, what I think is, one of the most beautiful installations of a SpaGuts.com hot tub controller in the world.  He looked at it, rubbed his chin a little bit and said, "Well where is the remote control?  It does have a remote control doesn't it?"  I said, "Dang it Terry, it's people like you that just break the Neotimer's heart."

Who Is The Neotimer?

The Neotimer named himself one Saturday night while sitting at the supper table with Ms Helen, Lizzy Clayboss and Gary Barker.  We were at a Best of America by Horseback trail ride at Leatherwood Mountains in North Carolina.  The discussion had centered around iPhone use amongst old people.  Gary had seen me the night before looking at my iPhone.  He said he thought to himself, "That old timer over there must be looking at a picture on some younger person's phone".  When I told him I was doing a status update on my Facebook page he was astonished.  I told him there are more and more old folks embracing new technology all the time.  And some of us old folks have grown up with technology and just don't let it get ahead of us.  I told him that I was a New - Old Timer, then thought of Keanu Reeves' character Neo, in The Matrix and the name just popped out like a Neo'n sign.