Author: Jake

Lotus Notes 8.5 Is Using Obselete Timezone codes

As part of this week’s email debacle, I had to manually forward a bunch of meeting requests from my LN account to my Outlook account.

In doing this, I discovered a time-zone abbreviation that not even timeanddate.com, my go-to for time-zone converting, recognised.

Some Google-Fu turned up this page from IBM, which describes these time-zones. The search also turned up this Bugzilla bug report, wherein I learnt:

RFC 2822 clearly says time zone like ZE5B is obsolete

Which should come as no surprise.

Today in IT-Fail: half of my email went missing for a week

We won a big tender this week, which is very exciting! But then people started congratulating me in the corridor which surprised me because we hadn’t issued a press release or anything. So I asked around, and there was an email sent to the whole company that I didn’t get.

A little but of sleuthing discovered that the email hadn’t made across the Lotus Notes – Outlook chasm. And lo and behold, neither had any of the email sent directly to the LN email address. For a whole week. Including stuff from customers, my boss and corporate training.

Yay.

You see, I have three corporate email addresses, and only one of them is directly delivered to Outlook. The other two I have had forwarded by using LN Mail Rules, which mysteriously stopped working sometime this week.

I created the highest possible priority ticket in the helpdesk system, because I’m travelling all next week. No response yet.

Hat Tracker

Boss: “What are your near-term objectives?”

Me: “Have you heard the expression ‘wearing many hats’?”

Here is my current Hat Tracker:

 

Activity End Date Hat Worn
Dev Manager SME Product Owner Scrum Master
Product Launch ongoing √
Major Revision to product March √ √ √ √
Major customer migration March √ √ √ √
Major Revision to product not scheduled √
Product Launch Feb √ √ √ √
Technical Design End of Q2 √

That’s a total of 15 hats.

MacGuyvering a Drain for a Failed Hot Water Heater

Back in the house we were renting, the hot water heater failed, and began leaking onto the floor.

Unfortunately, the floor drain was not located in the low-spot, and the water was not draining into it. To make matters worse, I didn’t have any garden hose that I wanted to cut up, or anything really.

So here’s what I did! Water Heater Drain Franken-Hose#1

Duct taped one of Ella’s place-mats onto a cardboard tube, supported by a garbage bin, and surrounded by towels.

Water Heater Drain Franken-Hose#2

The only bit of hose I could find luckily had the right fitting, and attached to the drain. Once I figured out how to open the drain, I then had to sit there and keep the hose raised so that the water would drain.

As the tank slowly drained, I discovered that the shutoff valve on the inlet to the tank had failed, and so the entire house was draining out through the stupid tank. So I shut off the house water, and waited and waited.

The landlord had it replaced very quickly, and we were back in business.

Site Trip with Co-worker Summarised in One Image

Trip to EDM with HH - summarised in one picture
Sorry for the bad photo. It was taken surreptitiously with the potato blackberry.

I was driving, and therefore sitting on the left. He was the passenger, sitting on the right. The dual climate controls were maxed in opposite positions.

Pretty much describes our working relationship as well. We rarely found common ground on anything.