I’m sitting here doing some work on VMware view listening to Historical Apollo 16 Audio recordings. These guys communicate quite well. It’s amazing how professional and well these guys communicate.

John Watts Young (johnny) and Charles Moss Duke, Jr. (charlie) have been working on the surface of the moon for the last hour. Drilling holes, fixing air hoses, taking pictures, etc. The culture of my world is different from these guys. I’ll make a conscisous effort to be more like these guys in the future. Even Houston is impressive. They are blunt when they need to be, passive at the right times, and generally able to show the excitement of standing on the moon.

Hah, “sound doesn’t travel too good in a vacuum but it jumped”, they are taking some pictures.

Soma.fm is an online radio station that I use sometimes. One of the streams is Mission Control audio. I’m here in my chair living this event for the first time along with some ambient chillout style music. You see, I was not even born when these guys were making history. Some 238,000 miles from earth and 9 years before I was born. I’m sure they never thought anyone would be listening to this in their homes 29 years later.

Mr. Young & Mr. Duke, I really appreciate all you have done for the space program. I hope you are both enjoying retirement. I am enjoying listening to the fine job you guys did. Would love to meet you if you are ever in Houston.

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I loved this show. Why did they have to cancel it. I recently watched the season again and remained as entertained as ever. My wife and I rented the movie based on it called Serenity. We have seen it a few times and it is still good.

Firefly was a space western. A space western! What an awesome concept, one that has even influenced shows such as Star Trek and Star Wars. In Firefly a crew on board of a space ship struggle to survive in a post war universe. I highly suggest checking it out.

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Many things have been changing in my life and they have kept me from being able to create content on this site for some time. Hopefully this is changing. I have been promoted at work to Manager of Systems Engineering and have a team of two systems administrators working for me.

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While troubleshooting a problems with circuits provided by AT&T I’ve had to deal with a number of people. If I end up building a simple tech support relationship after a few hours I sometimes ask where in the world the tech is. I also sometimes will ask if I don’t recognize as accent or if I think I do know the accent and want to verify it.

In some cases though, I ask out of frustration. Frustration caused by not being able to understand the person because English is not their first language. Today was one of those days. The support person was from Singapore. I was troubleshooting errors on a T1 circuit that was provided to a city in Arkansas. This troubleshooting was being performed in the middle of the day. The office had been running on the backup circuit so intrusively testing the main circuit was ok.

Now I work with vendors a lot. I realize that it is cheaper to provide around the clock support by using call centers in other parts of the world during prime times. By doing this you can have employees working ~8am to ~5pm local times. I am ok with this. However if it is 1pm Central Standard Time. Why am I speaking to singapore? Is there no one in the United States of America who can troubleshoot a T1 circuit?

ATT, why am I speaking to Mr. Gonzales in singapore? To add to the situation, we are talking over each other because of the lagged out voice call. It feels like we need to say “over” each time we complete a statement.

From what I can gather Tier1 is in India or Pakistan. and Tier2 is in Singapore. There is a tier3 but you can only talk to them if ATT manages the router. I know the implementation and designer guys are in the USA. New York actually I believe. So setting up the circuits I get to speak to people in the USA. For everything else I am having to deal with Singapore and India. For what I pay, I want someone in the USA during business hours of 8am-5pm Central.

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My line of work seems to drag me in many directions at once. One of the biggest challenges I face daily is staying on task. People seem to be one of my main distractions followed by computer distractions such as web browsing, email, and IM. I love answering people’s questions via IM and Email but sometimes I have to close the clients. At home this is fine, but in the office I need to remain reachable, so the clients cannot be closed. In order to stay focused I seem to always rely on music I like.

I’ve been lucky so far that my companies have always allowed me to listen to music I enjoy. I’ve also been lucky to have ended up with nice speakers at the companies within a few months. Keeping the volume at a level that does not disturb others and trying to make sure that there are no questionable lyrics has ensured I stay under the radar. For the past few years I have also been making use of closed ear headphones.

Headphones seem to really be a great way to block out the office noise and replace it with some of my own. This works great for creating a work environment that is quite productive and allows me to stay in the zone for hours on end. Staying focused on what I am doing becomes a breeze and my mind doesn’t seem to wander around everything that is happening.

I listen to mostly electronic music. This broad genre contains many different styles with various tempos. This makes it extremely easy to have music playing that fits the task. If I’m on a roll and knocking things out I can listen to some fast paced beats. If I’m moving slow and working on someting delicate I can listen to some slow paced chillout or triphop music.

I’ve recently purchased some new Ultrasone HFI-780 closed headphones. These sound great so far. Next time you find yourself not being able focus, try some music. If you already listen to music to stay focused, I’m always looking for new music.

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After the Creative/Daniel K. fiasco, Daniel has decided to move on from modifying creative drivers for the general public. This is likely the best choice for him and I for one do not blame him for choosing this path. I’m sure many Creative customers would prefer to continue to get updated support packs. Daniel has posted a goodbye message on the Creative forums.

Daniel says:

"Although I still have my doubts, they've said I would not be threatened if I provided patches instead of the actual binaries, because of licensed technologies built into them (Dolby/DTS).
While this could even be true, most of the disabled features are Creative's own technologies, which means they've disabled them on their own choice.
Daniel goes on to say:
They were after me and, on a chat session, they asked me what I'd like from them, as if I were expecting something.
They've promised me a free X-Fi 2, but I told them it was not necessary, because I was getting a couple of cards from other companies that contacted me.
Well, at least they are getting flammed all over the web and they are certainly mad about it and I could feel it while chatting with them. That is an enough reward for my hard work."


In the goodbye post Daniel has put links to his forum posts with the driver support packs. I’m going to go ahead and link to the filefront pages as well as post the file hashes.
SB Audigy series Vista Support Pack v2.15.0004EQ with Equalizer (02/24/2008)
Download from Filefront
File hashes:
- CRC32: C99B3CF8
- MD5: 133B743BAAFADD9D681C56B0A0E0DEF2
- SHA1: D8C979C6E1BED6C3C3AB1C6FB425AD417D74A09C

SB Live! series Vista Support Pack 2.10.0001A (03/07/2008)
Download from Filefront
File hashes:
- CRC32: 15AFA064
- MD5: BBED0409A6941767ED263634B7A420EC
- SHA1: B84E8E37DDA0504204DA79AA8B8B585FD37D8461

Gameport support pack for Vista 32-bit (x86), updated on 02/01/2008
Download from Filefront
File Hashes:
- CRC32: 44585B0B
- MD5: F52B755900825968C4F5687CBA0E4C08
- SHA1: 9C4D1016DD79570F5BCA56C9A651148883532271

SB Audigy Value/SE/LS & Live! 24-bit Windows Vista Pack 1.04.0077B (02/06/2008)
Download from Filefront.
File Hashes:
- CRC32: 2218C974
- MD5: 3087EBB1C27F0DE19459F9FEECA1E7B7
- SHA1: 6C95377A0777D39ADC99193A43D43B2F764E68DD

SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio Windows Vista Pack 1.04.0078A (02/06/2008)
Download from Filefront.
File Hashes:
- CRC32: 837372DB
- MD5: 0FF904877BA557E8E4DDBBE04F89EDEA
- SHA1: A2CF2FFF4816DBBC005A24D4E5E6BBA89A12AD05

Hopefully the above links will survive the test of time. I have stored the above files safely but do not have the bandwidth to host them. Should the filefront links fail I will find mirrors.

Daniel, I wish you the best. Publicity like this doesn’t come everyday, I would not blame you a bit for exploiting it a bit to get your foot in the door at Creative or a competitor if that is what you want to do. Who knows, you may be very happy with your current employment. I can’t help but wonder if your Paypal account is tipping the scales with donations…

Good Luck Daniel!

UPDATE: 07.01.08

Well it looks like Daniel has edited some of his original posts. The drivers are also no longer on filefront. I have found an alternate location here.

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Does Information Technology affect the stock price? If zero help desk issues were to occur would the stock price of your company go up? If you have a catastrophic system failure event in your infrastructure would the stock price go down?

Obviously if your company is involved in e-commerce or some other high-tech public facing business then publicly visible downtime affects your ability to make money for the duration of the outage. I fully believe that your stock price is affected by the technology that provides your money making ability. Your company likely has many polices and systems in place to minimize, if not remove, the risk of downtime all together. In this example I think it is safe to say that without a doubt e-commerce or your technology that is public facing affects your stock price.

What about the other companies? Lets look at an oil exploration company for instance. They likely only have a generic website. No other public facing technology. Lets say they have a major system outage for email. No email in the whole company for 24 hours. Do you think their stock price will be affected? How much will it be affected? If it was affected, lets say 0.1%, will it recover after email is working again?

What about email viruses and spam? Does the time lost to employees finding good email in the pile of spam amount to anything on the stock market? How about an executive not having a computer that works for a day or two? How about if an executives phone fails to function for a day? And if his mobile phone fails? What if any of it was down for a week?

What if the company never had the technology? Are they not able to realize their full earning potential? I have vendors trying to sell me on technology all of the time based on how much more efficient my company could be. If we are are more efficient then wouldn’t we be less efficient when the technology fails? Does more efficient mean higher stock prices? Does technology provide efficiency or convenience?

I would love to think that all of the hard work that I put into my companies infrastructure systems somehow makes for a better stock price. In the end I think it all comes down to what your company does. It also depends on when that system outage occurs. So where do you invest in redundancy and fault tolerance? In your convenience’s or your efficiency? Who makes the decisions on what is redundant and what is not at your company? If you made the decisions yourself did you do so with any input from your executive management?

More and more as technology is evolving in the workplace I have found the number one system is E-Mail. As unified communications becomes more popular I think we will find that communications in general is the single most important system for most companies. Ask around and let me know what is important at your company!

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I have been a long time user of Creative Labs Soundblaster line of sound cards. I am currently running an X-Fi MusicExtreme on Vista x64. Many users who have soundblaster sound cards have only basic functionality on windows Vista. An individual, Daniel Kawakami, on the creative forums had modded the creative drivers to work perfectly on vista. He had enabled many of the features that apparently Creative disabled on purpose.

For Audigy owners he had successfully provided working drivers for things like the equalizer, CMSS, DVD audio, Dolby/DTS encoding and hardware midi in windows Vista. These features are available in XP. He simply made them work in Vista. Many think Creative disabled these features to force end users to upgrade. The Vista Audigy support pack was removed from creatives forums. Within 24 hours the community was outraged by their actions towards Daniel.

Here are list of the forums posts from Daniel with support packs. The files are property of Creative Labs.

SB Live! for Vista
Audigy for Vista
Gameport for Vista

Here are direct links to the support packs at filefront.

SB Live! for Vista
Audigy for Vista
Gameport for Vista

I will try to keep these updated as the posts are restored to creative’s forums or I find them elseware. If I am officially contacted by Creative I may be forced to remove my links. I’m sure they will be gone from filefront by that time as well.

Creative had an official statement to Daniel Kawakami released by the VP Corporate Communications, Phil O’Shaughnessy. In this statement creative threatens legal action against Daniel. They also forbid him to accept donations for his work.

The bad publicity creative is getting for this won’t soon be forgotten. They are quickly changing their statements, possibly already feeling the effect the community has. Many suggest they give Daniel a position at creative. I doubt he would accept after they way they have treated him so far.

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Microsoft’s recent desktop OS, and I call it desktop because I do not currently consider it a viable workstation OS, is almost 15GB installed. I’m currently running Vista on my workstation and laptop at the office. I also have it running on my home workstation. Previous to SP1 for Vista the windows directory was a whopping 14.9 GB in size. The largest directory was “winsxs” which apparently holds multiple versions of dll’s and such used for compatibility. I have had many issues with Vista and was hoping SP1 would solve them all for me. Now that my windows directory is up to 20.1 GB with SP1 installed I’m disappointed to say that none of my issues were resolved.

Some current computer specifications are in order…

Processor: Intel Q6600
Memory: 4GB DDR2 PC8000
Motherboard: ASUS P35
Hard Drive: Raid0 SataII 200GB

As you can tell I do build my own home machines. At the office I have a Dell Precision T7400:

Processor: Intel Xeon 5482
Memory: 8GB DDR2
Hard Drive: Raid0 SataII

Neither of these machines are what I would consider as under powered. However Vista always seems sluggish. At home I have a very annoying issue of just about anytime I open explorer the window is white and not responsive for about 30 seconds. After which it is perfectly fine. If you wait another 10 minutes to open explorer again then you will experience the same issue. At the office I have an issue with adding folders to my taskbar. I usually add the desktop to the task bar and use it as a menu system to quickly open items without having to minimize to the desktop. I’m fine up to this point, however once I lock my taskbar items a tiny bit of the first icon shows in the taskbar for the desktop. Unlock and it goes away. Very annoying.

Being a Systems Engineer usually means you get to manage some Microsoft products. One product I’m sure a lot of us get to manage is Exchange. If so you may have already found that you are unable to install the Microsoft Exchange Systems Management Console on Vista. It doesn’t install with some missing features, or say that it cannot be installed but still let you, It will not install, period. Another issue I found recently was that I have to call Microsoft for a hotfix to get the DHCP admin working in Vista. How am I to manage all of these Microsoft products when I cannot install the consoles or use the consoles on my workstations?

I was hoping SP1 would fix these issues that seem to bug me the most. However after waiting the hour for SP1 to install on the 2 machines I use the most, I’m just about right where I was. Eventually I’m hoping Microsoft will get Vista running as good as XP. For now I’ll fight the urge to switch back to XP.

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Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Trace and I work for an Energy company in Information Technology. I am Manager of Infrastructure Systems. A bit of a fancy title for what I actually do. I ‘manage’ every single bit of gear except for desktops and handhelds. All network gear, servers, and phone systems. I leverage many new technologies to allow me to be able to do my job with little to no staff. The company is worth over $4 billion and has under 400 employees. I feel I am a hybrid between management and technical. Previously I was with a large mobile telephone carrier with over 80,000 employees. My range of experience has been in enviroments that were a small room with a few servers on a table to multiple sites with datacenters the size of a house.

I would like to let you all know what to expect here. First of all I’ll try to keep everything as G rated as possible so that you can read it from work. I have a vision of posting many technical snippets of information that will help others who arrive at problems I have already faced and solved or found solutions for. Let me say that they may not all even be technical. I also would like to begin building a social network of people who are in the field. Eventually I should have some links to either blogs or sites for other engineers and administrators. I may also end up talking about non-technical office issues and other items of interest as they pretain to information technology. In conclusion, I’m sure some views into my thought process and ideas will be here for the world as well.

I appreciate you stopping by and please check in from time to time.

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