So I have had some cool stuff, and some not-so-cool stuff happen since I have last updated.

I took another round of beatings from Volt/Microsoft. This time from the Exchange Hosted Services devision. I think that a little bit of background to this team would help.

The link below tells the tail of how I went from battered rejected soul, to happy full time worker for a company even bigger then Microsoft.

There once was a company with high aspirations. They wanted to take all the worry away from poor email system administrators, and the constant deluge of spam they are constantly fighting. They put an email server on the internet, and told IT departments that all they had to do to fix all the spam problems they have is to point all email at this server. It would then filter and filter and filter that mail, and return it to the customer email systems squeaky clean, without spam, or viruses, or nasty things of that kind.

Enter Microsoft. They wanted that service. They wanted it bad enough to buy the entire company, along with all the technology the engineers had put the requisite blood/sweat/tears into. Microsoft didn't really care what the technology was built on, but they did want the customer base that depended on the service, and a way to break into yet another market. Perhaps they should have looked at the company a little more closely, because the entire system was built on Open Source software.

Whatever. Microsoft decided that they wanted to take the easy road first, leaving the existing product in place, and building up a new one using Microsoft technologies like Exchange server. They had an entire infrastructure up and running, and the day they swapped over the email traffic, all the brand new shinny Exchange servers melted a hole in the ground (they are still descending on their way to our earths core if estimates are correct).

There was just no way Exchange was going to fit in this role. No matter how much they over engineered and re-over-engineered this product, it was never going to keep up with the demand placed on it. The Exchange product is just not built the way they needed to handle this type of traffic at this kind of volume.

So, plan B (actually plan R or something) was put in place. Lets leave the currently working product in place, and systematically rip pieces out of it, and replace them with Microsoft tech. They spent the better part of 4 years coming up with this brilliant plan. Failure after failure had taken a heavy toll on the people that came over from the old company that Microsoft had purchased. They witnessed first hand how cruel Microsoft can be to well engineered products. After scrapping every attempt they had of shoe-horning in a technology that would never have fit in the first place (most of the people I talked to while there expressed to me that the entire thing was doomed from the beginning), they had to not only watch their baby be molested and raped multiple times, but were expected to help in doing it. Every project planning meeting was a chance for Microsoft to pull functioning portions of the product out, and replace it with a horrible hack job. Over, and over, and over.

I spent 3 weeks there, before I not-so-politely told them to get bent.

During the last week I was there, I was approached by a rep from another contracting firm in the Seattle area. If you are a contractor, look up Apex. They are awesome. They stole me from Volt, took me in, put some comfortable pajamas on my battered soul, and held me while I cried. A little bit of exaggeration, but the way it felt was very welcome nonetheless.

Apex put me at AT&T. I had a few interviews, took a piss test, and started working in the MNOC right down the street from the Microsoft main Redmond campus. What I do, in a nutshell, is watch huge monitors for problems on the national cellular phone data networks. If someone has a problem downloading something from the web on an AT&T mobile, chances are, I know about it, and have been working on it for a while. This is NOT an excuse to call me with every little problem you have with your mobile. My scope is NATIONAL, so unless your name is GOVERNMENT, jog on. AT&T has some of the best single user issue CSRs of any mobile phone company in the US, so if you have a problem with your phone, please call them first.

The work is hard, and every day there is some new thing that is fucked up on the mobile platforms. There could be some better ways that things are handled, as with any new guy coming into a complex environment will tell you. Sometimes when I get an issue across my desk I just sit back, slap my forehead, and make a note of how I would do it differently. I have been turning some heads where I work, as I usually do. They gave me a full time job not only because I have a good grasp of all the technology we work with every day, but I also actively seek better ways to handle our network. Some things I have run up the flagpole are easy, some not so much, but I seem to be able to find better ways of doing things where ever I go. I hope that AT&T will be receptive to at least a few of my ideas, but that is never a guarantee.

I think that is just about current. Oh, and one more thing. I got an iPhone. It really is as cool as they say it is. Not "my life is going to change because of this little bit of awesome I am holding in my hand," but it is definitely a damn cool device.