Wed, August 9, 2006 - 7:41 PM
Holy cow. Today sure was quite a day. Alright we had some upgrades planned for a computer system and I'll tell you it caused late a lot interesting things to happen.
Alright we began by upgrading or scheduling product to a new version. We've been putting this off for a long time but finally we're ready to do it. So I had two guys going to the office at 2 a.m. in the morning which is the time we call new day. This is the best time to do an upgrade of scheduling software as it is the time between the completion of the last job of the day and the start of the new job of the next-day.
So they done in the office about 1:30 a.m. and they upgraded product and it worked fine. It took about an hour and it worked perfectly. That was probably last thing of the day that worked perfectly.
Now we did another upgrade last night. This involved installing new software on all of our warehouse systems there are 11 of them. One of the people it works for me work most of the night to install a new software. It went very well. Unfortunately about 5 a.m. my phones very ringing off the hook the warehouses couldn't get their product. So poor Carlos only had two hours of sleep got woken up and had to fix the problem. It took him in a couple of consultants most of the morning to get it corrected. In the meantime the warehouses couldn't receive or deliver product to the stores.
Then installed another update on the system; for the last few months the general ledger records have been moving to our accounting system very slowly so slowly that one day's worth of GL records couldn't get into the accounting system in one day. It's obvious there was a problem. The programmers came up with a solution and we installed it in the morning. Unfortunately it didn't work. So one of my other employees had to intervene in the morning and work with another employee to fix the problem. So for about 80 hours the general ledger records didn't get into the accounting system. But he eventually fixed it in it as it turned out the programmers had indeed corrected the problem and thus the GL records went into the accounting system much much much quicker.
All right to make things even more fun, the program which generates boils information which also goes into accounting chose this particular day to explode unexpectedly. So I had another person in a programmer working on that. By the end of the day that was fixed as well.
The most critical process that runs on our system is called the order process. It runs every 15 minutes. Our orders are done on an algorithm called just in time. This means that the product is ordered from the stores and then ordered from the warehouse and then delivered to the stores and under a few hours. In other words, the stores were the product in the morning that they need the afternoon. That's the name just in time.
So of course on top of always other explosions going on the system the order process chose to explode as well. So I had a person working on that for an hour or so and he finally got it fixed.
The warehouse problem from the morning required a new installation at night so that had to be uploaded to all of the warehouses well tonight. Does the same person who was busy all morning long working on correcting the warehouses has to be up all night long installing the software. Sigh.
To make matters even more fun, we had a major system upgrade planned for 6:30 p.m.
So is very important that all of these issues were resolved by the time that upgrade had to began. So things which were normally at lower priority suddenly became very urgent. Hand on top of that the accounting people were trying to close out the year so the general ledger problems were also urgent.
So that was my day at work. I was running around all day long fighting fires basically.
But the cool thing is, I've been dictating this entire blog entry using a brand-new product that I got deduced voice recognition. This product with about 30 minutes of training has actually typed in this entire blog entry with a minimum of errors.
This is really cool. I installed it on my computer both at home and at work so that I can help my carpal tunnel syndrome. Now I can do blog entries e-mails documents and right and all kinds of other things without worrying about the stress on my wrists. This will help my wrists clear up and should enable me to cure the carpal tunnel syndrome much more quickly than other wise.
I also discovered that using my Blackberry phone makes my carpal tunnel syndrome in my left hand much worse. So I ordered a new Blackberry with a Bluetooth connection to the phone. So now how will things stuck in my ear was a speaker and an earphone on it which lets me talk on my Blackberry and not use my hand hold up to my ear. This was causing a lot of stress on my wrists and it made my carpal and my left hand much worse. I talk on the phone a lot several hours every single day.
I also got a new mouse pad which holds my wrist up makes things much easier on the carpal tunnel.
So right now I'm exhausted. I think I will eat some dinner and go to bed.
The next couple of weeks should be loads of fun. Going to spend this weekend at the big bear Renaissance fair. Yes the entire weekend. I expect to get probably five to 6000 pictures. Plus several videos.
I also want to take pictures of groups like the bells of bedlam, the Merry wives of Windsor, and all of the other groups entertaining at this fair.
The weekend following in planning to go to a bellydancing fair and on Sunday and planned to go to Disneyland Gothic day.
Alright it's time to eat get some dinner and go to bed.
Deena (Wed, August 9, 2006 - 9:02 PM)
It looks like your voice recognition still needs a little training and some editing, but it's doing better than I would have expected for so short a time.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.