just the job
Note to self: Dust off CV and apply for this job on Monday morning.
Any client who is interested in people 'running projects from cradle to grave' intrigues me.
helping people write things down
Today, a gentleman approached me and politely asked if he could ask me a question.
Normally, this dialog is a little more protracted and goes as follows:
'Excuse me. Is your name Norman Brightside ?''Yes.'
'Do you work for Siebel ?'
'Yes.' (although strictly I work for Oracle on the Siebel CRM product)
'Are you from Expert Services ?'
'Yes.'
'Do you mind if I ask you a quick question ?'
'Not at all. Fire away.'
Anyway, what was unusual and striking about this approach was the fact the gentleman was carrying a Reporters Notebook and a pen.
When we sat down to discuss the various strategies for gathering, refreshing and (in obtuse cases), dropping statistics on objects in the Siebel schema, he actually asked me if I minded pausing briefly while he wrote things down.
I am not very clever. I am always writing things down mainly to avoid forgetting them. I tend to gather a lot of data when I visit a customer. Some of it is important, some of it is not. At first, it is not always obvious which is which.
As I usually have to produce a formal report, I find it necessary and useful to jot things down. My jottings are normally in a text file which I take away with me as input into the report. This is another reason I almost always exclusively use SQL*Plus to script test cases and take away a wad of spool files on a memory stick.
I am not overly organised. Sometimes, I may have a pristine pad of A4 paper but more often I am scribbling on the reverse of my flight/hotel itinerary or a Google map.
If I am talking to a Siebel administrator, project manager, Oracle DBA, in a meeting or a conference call or just chatting with an end user, I will ensure I have a piece of paper available. Just to write things down.
However, the fact I actually noticed this gentleman was equipped with a pen and paper for our brief chat and also made notes and jottings, merely served to reinforce how rare this seemingly obvious and eminently sensible practice is.
Or am I just mixing in the wrong circles ?
don't believe the truth
I am currently trying to assist with a couple of long standing Service Requests. This type of work is interesting because the issue is normally pretty deep rooted and complicated. These escalations are also very challenging because lots of very intelligent people have already spent a lot of man-hours investigating the problem.
Anyway, one of the first steps is to review associated Service Requests and try to determine whether they are indeed related to the issue under investigation.
The opening paragraph of one such SR contained this bold assertion from the customer: 'As you can see, we have populated the interface tables correctly and EIM still doesn't work.'
This was a interesting statement and was directly related to the problem I was looking at. This statement went unchallenged by Technical Support so I took it at face value and continued my analysis.
There was further empirical evidence that this data load would fail as changes to the corresponding meta-data in the Siebel Repository had been made in version 7.8. A user key definition on this table had been inactivated which was previously present in 7.5. Interesting.
A few hours later, I returned to this SR as I was about to actually try loading data into the same Siebel tables. This seemed rather pointless if it wasn't going to work. However, I started from scratch, read the documentation and created my own simple test case for a single record.
Sure enough, the customer was correct. Even though, I had populated the correct columns in the correct interface table with the correct data, Siebel failed to populate the target tables.
However, when I reviewed the EIM log files more carefully, the errors were the conventional (foreign key lookup failed) type. I fixed the test data, re-ran the load script and sure enough data appeared in the target tables and was visible in the Siebel application.
So, the customer was actually mistaken and I suspect his bold assertion including the four little words 'As you can see' also misled the technical support engineer.
Last night, my son told me that playing World of Warcraft was much, much quicker since the recent broadband upgrade from 4Mb to 10Mb. This made sense as online gaming presumably needs lots of bandwidth and Virgin customer services told me the upgrade would be effective from last Friday.
Out of curiosity, I downloaded a 100MB file (twice) and looked at the download speeds which were in the range 360-390 KB/sec. Quick but less than you would expect for a 10Mb connection.
I called my friends at Virgin Media to check the status of my broadband upgrade. Sure enough, contrary to what I was told, the 10Mb upgrade will only be activated on 23 March when the engineer installs the V+ box.
So, unless you see it with your own eyes, it didn't happen.
out of office
Thank you for your email. I am currently working in a bunker deep underground in the heart of Brussels (near Belgium).
I would normally say 'Please call me directly on my mobile'. However, this secure facility is so secure that no mobile communications are possible.
I would normally pledge to replying to your email on my return. However, I am not quite sure precisely when (or even indeed, if) I ever will return. While I am not literally chained to the desk, the security officer is holding my passport which fills me with a sense of unease and practically equates to the same thing.
The working environment is not ideal. Massive ceiling mounted fans in a server room make for a cool, uncomfortable and noisy environment. Still, this is my punishment for living in an ivory tower far divorced from reality, waving my arms about and drawing architecture diagrams on a whiteboard and I must accept it.
This particular customer insisted that, as a followup to a recent architecture workshop, I return in person to install, configure and test what I foolishly claimed was 'straightforward and trivial'.
the unbearable coolness of VOIP
As part of my job, I often have the pleasure of walking around call centers where agents use headsets to enable them to interact with a computer while conducting a telephone call with a customer.
I have often wondered whether it would be cool or nerdy to use such a headset myself. To date, where possible, I tend to use my mobile phone on speakerphone so I am free to continue to type. For lengthy conference calls (abroad), this isn't a particularly cost-effective option but please don't tell the CFO.
With the increasing adoption of VOIP within Oracle and the recent delivery of my deluxe headset, I am typing this while listening to a team meeting using Cisco Communicator. This is really neat technology, the sound quality surprisingly good and even better, the telephone call is free, completely free. So please tell the CFO.
As for cool or nerdy, let's just say I will only be doing this from the privacy of my own home or possibly my office.
My kids think my adoption of this technology is absolutely hilarious. They keep smirking whenever they come into the kitchen for a snack and if I happen to be actually speaking on the device, they simply can't contain their hysterics and have to leave the room.
In addition, my wife keeps smiling and repeatedly asking me whether she can get a motor insurance quote.