Warning: this post is pretty long but hopefully should be the longest one. (I don't want to spend more than 30 mins on a post ever again but I felt this is relevant)
This will probably be my first post on the blog. Sadly I've made about 5 or 6 posts already that I haven't released. I must be waiting until my mind can make sense of the topics I'm trying to talk about or something.
Here's a little background information about me for those who are interested:
Name: Jeremy Brayton
Age: 25
Sex: Male
Residence: Marietta, Georgia
Occupation: LAN Administrator but really about 8 jobs in one
I currently still live with my parents at home. Yes, you heard right. I didn't understand the concept of working and saving so that I could leave the house. What's worse is I work for my father at his human resources/employee benefits business (http://www.omegahrsolutions.com). It's bad enough that I live at home and get to hear my father there, but when work screws up I not only get it at work but a nice dose of it at home too. For some of you, including myself, working for a parent can be incredibly taxing. Our problem is we're so much alike yet the differences seem to annoy one another. My dad seems to expect things a certain way and if I don't do them that way, things go wrong. I am like him but unique, my own individual with my own outlook on things.
My intro to technology:
I started getting into computers roughly at the age of 15. My father bought me a 386/25 MHz complete with monitor, 4 megs of ram, and an 80 meg hard drive (yes you heard right). At first all I had on there was Windows 3.11, a Dos menu program to easily navigate through things, and a need for communication. I initially started my journey to the net through BBS systems. Some of the ones I were on are surprisingly still around, mostly existing through telnet as well as local modem calling. I spent most of my waking moments on the computer, figuring out how it works and doing various homework related things. I did of course have my kick ass sierra games like Police Quest 1 and 2, Space Quest, and a number of other classics. I learned a lot through the BBS and I don't know how this happened but I somehow got turned on to warez BBS'. I would go on them mainly just to post but I could also have the option of downloading some really cool titles. Back then games weren't much more than a couple of megs, so a 144 could handle most of my needs. As time progressed I found a bigger hard drive (not much) and surprisingly put Windows 95 on this machine. I had to upgrade the memory to 8 megs but 95 actually did run and the minimum specs were a 386/33. It was slower than dirt but I could be like the rest of the crowd in my Windows 95 coolness.
Then I upgraded from BBS to AOL. Back then AOL had just released 3.0. Phishes (<><) were common in those days, as well as programs that hacked the crap out of AOL. I also had accounts where I would send warez emails (back then when you went into a channel you could request warez emails and get them in your inbox). AOL started their crack down and I learned from various friends that other ISPs were far better for internet usage. I had a couple of friends teach me about IRC and I was on my way to becoming a full blown Internet user at that point. Screw AOL chat rooms with A/S/L, I could talk to people a lot more freely on IRC. I then graduated from AOL to Netcom. Looking back I realize Netcom was about as worthless as a 2 dollar whore but it was an ISP slightly better than AOL.
Past work experience:
From there I graduated to bellsouth.net, a local ISP which offered far better services. I loved it so much I even luckily got a job working at their Network Operations Center. Working there opened me up to new technologies and ideas about the Internet. While I worked there ADSL was in it's infancy, only covering a small percentage of people in the metro Atlanta area. I now have DSL with them and probably wouldn't change. The cool part about working there is I still know some people. If I need something fixed alerting them skips a lot of steps because dealing with ISP call centers never really direct you to the people actually fixing the problem. If you're a modem user you're treated next to dirt at almost any ISP. Pay good money for a T1 and you're treated like royalty. Sadly this is common practice in most ISPs today simply because they believe the 20 dollars a month cost doesn't really cover anything on their end.
Through the years I upgraded machines slowly until I came into possession of my 2 machines I have now. I am using a Dell Inspiron 5100 right now, 2.4 ghz and 512 MB of ram. I thought I pimped it out only to realize if I waited another year I could have had more for a lot less. I bought my desktop back in 99 from Dell refurbished. It's an 800 MHz beast that I've customized a lot over the years. The only stock thing it has is the motherboard, CPU, and case. The video card is new, hard drive is 80 gig instead of 20. I do have the DVD-ROM still and slapped in my own 16x CD burner. I prefer my laptop simply because it's 3 times faster. The desktop has had no major problems despite being a refurbished model. I may be able to continue using it for a good couple more years at least, worst case as a Linux firewall when I finally move out of the house.
I have the job I have now simply from taking the time to learn computers on my own. I realized that I could do most of the IT work for the company and luckily got paid for doing what I know. My job has mutated tremendously over the years. At first I was doing only network and systems maintenance. We then upgraded our network from coax to using ethernet and hubs. I left my job here to work for bellsouth.net where SalesLogix first got introduced to our company. After getting fired from bellsouth.net I rejoined my dad's company to do many of the same things I was doing before. I had gotten my CCNA at this point, thinking that I would jump back into an ISP position but I think it was more wise to stay here. As I returned there was an urgent need for someone to learn and know SalesLogix. I was up for the challenge since it required some programming skill to master. To learn more about SalesLogix I then started working for the company who put our SalesLogix system in place. I learned basically what it took to build a SalesLogix system from scratch and applied many of the techniques in what I do today. I've not undergone any formal training (I'm not about to pay $5000 to learn software I can figure out on my own) but I can safely say I can handle my own in a SalesLogix environment. Learning SalesLogix really didn't stop with SalesLogix. It requires a database back-end which at the time was interbase. SalesLogix 5.2 and above absolutely cannot use Interbase so we upgraded to SQL Server 2000. I then had to learn what it took to maintain our system and do administrative tasks. Using examples and the Internet I started to pick up a little bit about SQL, just enough to do what we need it for.
Then came the next facet of my job: our portal. We use portal software from a company called CrossLogic (my head boss' brother owned the company which recently got bought by someone) and since I needed more hours I offered my services yet again. This meant learning HTML (again enough to be dangerous) but quickly graduated to XML and XSL translations. The reason I use XML now is because our portal is a series of templates and variables. XML makes the best use of templates with HTML so it was only natural that I learn this technology. The portal itself takes some learning as well. Everything is GUI based and there is no console or administration on my part. CrossLogic handles the majority of the back end while I simply build each necessary portal instance. This is the most tedious job I could ever think of and to top it off we're simply giving away the portal to customers who have insurance with us. It's not a big enough slap in the face that making a portal takes forever to make, but I get to live with the fact that the majority of the portals I've made are not in use now. I also get to live with the fact that even though I am getting paid, I'm essentially doing a lot of work for nothing. That thought still echoes in my mind every time I make a new portal, regardless of how quickly I can get it done with each new portal upgrade CrossLogic comes up with.
Current major projects:
Currently I'm working on fixing our portal on a new server for an upgrade. We migrated servers because CrossLogic got bought out so I get to tweak each instance and make sure it's working correctly. There have been a lot of changes to the templates that I haven't made on the other instances either, which I'm now taking the time to do. Sadly my co workers don't realize that every change to the template has to manually be replicated on every portal. This means transforming the HTML files and uploading them one at a time. Yes there is no batch upload and every portal has at least 20 or so files associated with it. Tedious? You bet.
Also I'm working on upgrading us to 6.1. SalesLogix 6.x introduces VBScript as a scripting language which is far better than the old Enable Basic used in the past versions. I'm currently recoding all of the customizations to a more uniform standard and making sure all of the database fields are accurate. Redoing things have brought up some very cool innovations too. I sometimes will redo something from scratch simply to see if I can find a better way to the end result. Without fail every time I redo something, I find some way to make it faster and more efficient. At some point I have to stop tweaking and start living with whatever I'm making, which is extremely hard for this perfectionist.
My purpose for this blog:
I want to express a lot of technical aspects of what I do and hopefully post a lot of useful articles about SalesLogix administration. SalesLogix has left the majority of the administrative tasks up to us administrators. Apparently they don't see the value in building applications that support their product for free, so I'll be doing my best to do just that. My company pays an outrageous amount of money for SalesLogix and I firmly believe that the majority of what I'm left to do on my own, should exist in their base price. A lot of us SalesLogix administrators are in the same boat. Most of us program our own apps to do what we need them to do, not really relying on something that could benefit us all as a whole.
I'll also post a lot on my ideas of a distributed control system. I'm currently looking to build a product like Microsoft Operations Manager except far cheaper and hopefully a little 'smarter'. I of course don't have the type of support Microsoft would have so I doubt I could charge much for the software but I know without a shadow of a doubt at least one person will use it: me. My hope is that it's a time management piece first, and a real life information gatherer. The introduction of WinFS in Longhorn will make this idea easily accessible but for now I will use a database back end to mimic the meta data that WinFS is capable of storing. I need one place I can go where I can store all of my information for easy retrieval and updating. Having 500 favorites that I manually recheck just doesn't seem to be efficient any more. I'll be including a lot of smaller application functionality into something that can hopefully be a control panel. From this one application, I hope to control the entirety of my computer. Remember HAL 9000 in the 2001, 2010 movies? This one super computer controlled everything. There is security issues with this but if done right it can be extremely useful. This program will also be able to track everything done to build accurate time management reporting. I often wonder where my days go and this should hopefully help me track it down to the minute (as I see it no other software products really offer this. I would have to tweak them severely and depending on the software, update my tweaks every time they decided to change a little code).
I will also write about personal topics. The majority of my posts will probably be personal, as I often need a place to vent and see no better place than this. I observe a lot of crap in this world and I have to tell someone about it, so it might as well be you. I'm also a pretty devout Christian so a majority of my posts will involve some kind of Christian aspect. I'm not judgmental nor do I try to put anyone down. I wasn't always a Christian and I realize this more now than ever. There are a ton of issues I have with Christianity in general which I will express openly here. There are some things people are doing in the name of Christ that are just plain wrong, and I'm not afraid to say so. I will not put anyone down in the process though, just openly discuss problem areas I notice in any aspect of life I choose. If you can't handle Christ being openly discussed you shouldn't subscribe to my feed or read my blog. I will not shove Christ down your throat but I will talk about Him in a respectful manner. If you can't do the same about any opinion you have I also ask you not to comment here. I don't have time to deal with people who disrespect others, no matter how heated the argument is. I can respect your opinion even if I don't agree with it so I honestly believe you can do the same. I will do my best not to mix personal and technical posts. That way people who are here for pure technical aspects can read pure technical posts and people here wanting to know the more personal me can read the personal side without much technical jargon involved in it.
P.S. - Any comments on my writing style or layout is greatly welcomed. My mentality is coming from a BBS where all the text was the same. I'm not much of a visual 'ooh lookie here' guy so I sometimes need a little feedback to produce something the majority of people will like