Category: Geekery

Workflow Redux

As a quick follow-up to yesterday’s adventure, ConnectWise Support called me yesterday just before close of business to explain what went awry. In short: The third condition failed on thousands of tickets because prior to 2016, status changes were stored differently in the database. So the condition for “last ticket status update not more than 1 hour ago” was checking for the new kind of status change flag, not the old kind.

We had almost no way of knowing this would happen, short of memorizing every feature and function change over the course of a decade’s worth of software updates to this platform.

By the by, at one point we hit 3000 open tickets. Fun.

Two upsides: One, this should never happen again (on this particular service board) because, well, we’ve now re-closed all those tickets with the new status change flag. Two, my performance metrics for the month are through the roof:

The other four-digit bar is the Operations Manager who decided to pitch in on the ticket-closing efforts.

Do I get a raise for this, boss?

29 March, 2023
Workflow Overflow

It seemed like a simple request.

“If a technician closes a ticket without attaching a Configuration (device), reopen it, send them an email, and change the ticket’s status so they know they need to remedy the lack of Configuration before closing it again.”

Cool. I can do that.
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28 March, 2023
Fire Emblem Engage – Story Thoughts

Over the weekend I finished off my first playthrough of Fire Emblem Engage, and I’ve been sitting with it for a little bit to percolate my impressions. Overall, in general? It’s a perfectly serviceable tale. There’s nothing groundbreaking in it, nor is there anything absolutely awful.

I don’t want to spoil specific details, but I can’t really talk about my reactions without giving some general things away, so… bail now if you aren’t done with the game and want to avoid anything spoiler-ish. For that matter, I’m also going to talk about some comparisons with Three Houses, so… again: Beyond this point there shall be spoilers-of-sorts.
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19 March, 2023
Meme Snark – Anime Edition

I don’t have anything to say, today, I just wanted to get this Space Battleship Yamato 2199 bit of silliness posted somewhere for safe keeping.

I liked the show well enough, but it wasn’t a nostalgia hit for me because I wasn’t a Star Blazers kid. I was a Robotech kid. Look, either you were one or the other, that’s just how it went.

Thank you, and please don’t forget to leave a plate of knives out (as it were) for Brutus and his boys to use tomorrow.

14 March, 2023
Fifty-One

Right smack dab in the middle of the week, here we are at another birthday. It’s not a round-number birthday, I’m not doing anything special to celebrate (beyond taking the week off from work), and there’s definitely no party planned.

The weather decided to give me a present this morning anyway:

There shouldn’t be any sound, I was doing my best to remain silent and fortunately nobody was revving their car’s engine or walking any barking dogs at the time.

It didn’t last or stick, but seeing snowfall while sipping cocoa on the couch certainly cheered me up.

Oh, and Vyx got me a little something:

That’s Edelgard von Hresvelg from the Fire Emblem: Three Houses (and Three Hopes) game(s). Behind her is the From The Earth To The Moon DVD boxed set, alongside is a little bit of Fullmetal Alchemist merch in the form of a tiny mug, and all around are CDs, Blu-Rays, and manga.

Her Imperial Majesty fits neatly on a DVD shelf, which she’ll continue to do until I need that shelf space again some day. (Speaking of media, I also received a Blu-Ray of Princess Mononoke. Excellent!)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I shall return to my vacation plans… mainly goofing off. See you next time around, I hope.

8 March, 2023
Backups & Archives

It’s 7pm on a Monday night. Do you know where your data is?

OK, good. Where else is it? Which is to say, if “where your data is right now” goes kaput for some reason, is your data somewhere else as well?

Are you sure about that?

I spent the afternoon of the first “real” day (not a weekend day, which I’d normally be “off” for anyway) of my vacation making sure my backups are pointed at the right folders and are working, complete with testing file restoration.

(Rule One of Backups: Assume that if you haven’t tested them lately, they’re broken somehow.)

Then I updated my archive drives.

My what, you ask?

I have a pair of high-capacity solid-state external drives that I use for media files archiving. Two of them, so in case one goes kaput for some reason I still have another to copy from. These don’t get used regularly for enjoying media (I have other devices for that), they’re just archives to backup (& potentially restore) music and videos. While the process of keeping them updated is a bit cumbersome, it beats paying for the kind of online backup storage I’d need to keep all those gigabytes of shows and songs “professionally” safe.

My music library also gets a couple other copies made, including an upload to a virtual private server I control, because it’s kind of important to me. Okay, a lot of important.

Anyway… backups are good. If nothing else, a tiny bit of peace of mind can’t hurt in these chaotic times, now can they?

6 March, 2023