Text Chat

I work from home now and text chat is the glue that keeps our team together. We use skype, sametime and jabber to chat with each other and other teams. I’ve started using chat acronyms like brb or LOL or afaik. We also use voice chat over skype or via real phone lines (voip of course). These also work very well but text chat is my favorite. It is real time but requires less attention because a few min delay is OK most of the time. I frequently have several text chats going on at once. I use the exodus jabber client because it lets you customize the fonts to be big enough to see and it lets you specify alarm words where you get a buzz when one of your magic words is typed. I don’t know how we would all work remote without text chat but it would be much harder I’m sure.

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VPN Comedy

So earlier today I had to reset my vpn pwd and have a new temporary password sent to my old boss (got a new boss recently but the email system hasn’t been updated). Then after logging in and having everything work, I had to reboot my pc for some unrelated issue. Then after the reboot I logged back in and it connected but did not fully connect because I could not get to the company intranet. I disconnected and reconnected and this time it told me that I had tried to connect too many times with an incorrect pwd. I called and had the pwd reset again. Again, the new one was sent to my old boss. I logged in again and again I cannot access the intranet. Today’s vpn story is a tragic comedy where I’m an unwilling actor. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Poderosa

I run cygwin on my work machine (a windows machine). Most of my work is done over the vpn to linux or solaris machines. I was just using the cygwin terminal but it kindof sucks for paste and a variety of other simple common activities. I had used putty but it wasn’t tabbed so I went looking for a tabbed terminal for windows. I found Poderosa. Nice. It is very easy to use, works with the cygwin term but adds paste and such and is very easy to customize font and colors. I recommend it to anyone looking for a tabbed terminal for windows.

More VPN Problems

I had to uninstall/reinstall my company’s vpn client. This is pretty neat since I didn’t change anything and it has worked for nearly a year now. After the pwd reset, my boss sent me the new pwd. Then I used that to change my pwd to something I know because the client forces you to. Then I still could not connect. I called the help desk and we did a little dance and ended up uninstalling and reinstalling the vpn client. Then I had to add the right dns suffixes to the list and ta da, everything is ok again. Aren’t computers wonderful?

VPN Problems

So I’m having trouble logging in to my employer’s VPN. I call the helpdesk and use the automatic pwd reset and they mail the new pwd to my work email that I cannot get because I can’t get on the VPN. They also email my boss so I’ll eventually get it but still it seems like a better strategy could have been put in place. Auto generate a pwd, give it out over the phone and make it only work for 1 login or something like that might have been better. I guess I can’t log back in until Monday when my boss gets his email.

Lotus Notes Deleted Rules Update

Update: spoke to the help desk. They had me do some Lotus Notes replica update thing and now they think it will be fixed. I’m not sure I believe it but I’ll wait until tomorrow to see how the messages are filtered (or not filtered). I hope it works because it’s pretty annoying to have invisible rules filtering my mail.

Lotus Notes Deleted Rules Rant

I’ve had this same problem at 2 different employers (with 2 diff. versions of Lotus Notes). Who know so many companies still used Lotus Notes? The problem is that after I delete a lotus notes rule it continues to filter mail messages. It has been deleted and doesn’t show up in the rules folder but it still seems to filter incoming mail messages. I read some crazy description of this problem on the Notes site and couldn’t make sense out of it. Now I need to call my company’s help desk and see if they have a fix for it 😦