IT Legends - Tech in Connecticut

At Nutmeg Consulting corporate headquarters (haha, that makes me laugh - I don’t know entirely why), when we hooked ourselves up to Comcast Internet service for business, we decided we wanted to manage our own firewall and routing services. So we disabled all of the features on the modem Comcast provided for us and installed a Sonicwall TZ170W. When we decided we wanted a VPN, we upgraded to the Enhanced OS for the Sonicwall so that we could use L2TP/IPSec tunnels for our VPN on Windows desktops without having to install the Sonicwall Global VPN Client. Well the Sonicwall has been restarting itself multiple times a day. We have called Sonicwall tech support and we have our support incident elevated all the way to level 3. However, 3 months later, the damn thing still reboots itself all the time and its “still at level 3 tech support”. I’m not happy with the level of service here. (more…)

I upgraded my laptop’s wireless adapter, thinking that perhaps this could have been part of the problem with hulu.com’s performance. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that way. I did notice that the imperfections are seen less when not in full screen - but they are the same imperfections. They are just more visible when in full screen mode. One thing I sincerely dislike about hulu.com is if you take focus away from the browser while in full screen mode and want to type something somewhere else, (more…)

A few weeks ago, one of my clients reported he had a bounced email to his client. It looked to me like it was a standard server-based spam misidentification; these things happen. So I followed the instructions I was led to in order to remove my clients’ email server from AT&T’s blacklist, which involved checking to make sure the server wasn’t on a few public DNSBL servers. His server was not, so I submitted it on an AT&T website and asked to remove it. I didn’t start to make a connection between AT&T and One Communications until a second and third client reported the same issue. Finally, my fourth and last One Communications customer client notified me of the same problem. So, since none of the servers were ever published on any of these well-known public DNSBL servers, I can only assume AT&T decided to blacklist all email (more…)

OK, so I was pretty excited for the premier of Battlestar Gallactica Season 4, I actually purchased all of Seasons 1-3 from iTunes and the mini-series movie thing that started the series’ off. The quality on those is alright. But I just watched the season opener for season 4 off scifi.com and the video was really choppy. At first, I thought maybe it was my old refurb IBM Thinkpad - I have it hooked up to my TV via S-Video cable. But I’m able to watch my NetFlix member videos online fine - no chop. This was choppy! So I decided to check it out on my desktop, dual core, 256 MB video, 2GB RAM… nah, that was choppy too! In the same spots! Man, SciFi needs to learn a couple lessons from NetFlix or even NBC.com (I watch Chuck and Heroes online, too) on how to do this! No ads on the show, though it looked like it was partitioned up and ready for ads. Maybe if they could sell ads to the online viewing they could get better video encoding.

That being said, I enjoyed the episode, just not the experience of watching it online.

As you may know, I have a lot of clients. I work with Dell on their behalf a lot. I have a great sales rep, he bends over backwards for me. So when a client of mine asked if they could get dual monitors, I thought sure - this should be pretty easy. I happened to be at a conference last week, and I got the alert on Thursday (March 27) morning that they needed to spend the money stat before the end of their fiscal (March 31) or they won’t be able to spend it. Alright, my guy to the rescue! I figure, its a Dell desktop and if there were anything “funky” needed to get dual monitors to work they’d know. My emails were pretty clear: the client needs two monitors and doesn’t know what he needs to order to accomplish it, please take care of it.

Unfortunately, my usual guy, only dealing in new system sales and not upgrades, passed it on to another of his teammates. I don’t find this out until Thursday evening, that I should be getting a phone call from someone on Friday. Well, I never received a phone call, so I sent another email letting them know I couldn’t take a call because I was at a conference and to please just handle it. So the Jerk calls me during my conference session (I don’t take the call… hmmm… wonder why) and leaves a message. I’m thinking he’s not going to take care of this, so I email my colleague to step in, but he happens to be in a meeting and can’t take care of it either. Great… well let’s see what happens after I get out of the conference session. (more…)