Chris Meller

OK, since I’ve been sick, I’ve realized that while staying out of work and goofing off is usually fun, it’s not nearly as much so if you’re sick and stuck inside the entire time. I’ve also realized that sickness and I don’t get along… at all…

In order to waste a little time after I got up this afternoon, I swiped my mom’s digital camera and took some video introducing you to the upstairs of our house, where I spend most of my time when I’m at home.

Note: Please excuse my appearance. I’ve been sick and miserable, and this was before I showered today… Also excuse my lack of a shave, should you not like facial hair (I do).

These were my first attempts at video and related encoding. Most of it’s pretty dark, because I’m anti-overhead lights. Also, you’ll probably need the XviD codec, if you don’t already have it. I would personally recommend one of the versions of the K-Lite Codec Pack found here, but that’s just me. For those that don’t have it and don’t want to get it, I’ve included the original Quicktime .mov files they were generated from.

Part 1
XviD version [9.19mb]
Quicktime version [22.57mb]

Part 2
XviD version [17.94mb]
Quicktime version [39.94mb]

UPDATE: When I changed permalink structures, it broke the above links. Upon request, they have been updated and should now be valid.

OK, I know I’ve mentioned that Scoble’s been getting quite boring lately, but it’s true…

Out of the 40 some odd number of new items Onfolio showed for his feed, I’ve been through about 10 and found 1 story of even limited interest to me, and not because of the actual content, but more the idea behind it…

I don’t much care why Bill Gates might want to be on Channel 9, or what he’d be talking about there. The only part that amazes me is Scoble telling Bill to “S+” him (ie: schedule a meeting on their Exchange server using Outlook, from the original Microsoft Scheduling program “Schedule+”).

I can’t even imagine what it would be like to look at my meeting invitations in Outlook one morning and see one from Bill Gates, even if I were to work at Microsoft. I can’t imagine that even among employees at Microsoft that many at all could have had meetings with Bill Gates, and it makes me wonder if people like Scoble have ever even met him…

Anyone out there ever met the man, or know someone personally who has met the man? Anyone know how I could get to meet him? :)

I can hardly believe it, but there’s finally going to be a single book that contains every single Calvin And Hobbes comic ever!

Now honestly, one would have thought that this would have been more appropriate to have been announced / published on April 4th…

BTW, thanks a million to Derek for posting this on his blog and letting the world (and more specifically me) know!!

I’ve thought about the HIPAA issues I mentioned in my last post for quite a while now. Rather than making any hasty decision and blasting my boss for it, I thought it would probably be best if I were to think on it at least 24 hours, and then only comment if I still felt as strongly about it as I did at first.

Well, in all honesty, I still feel as insulted as I did at the very beginning, but I’ve also come to the decision that I’m fine with it. Even if the entire intent was to get it off my plate because I’m incapable of handling it, it’s for the best. Not only is it not my butt in the legal sights should anything happen anymore, but after getting another email from my boss today, I’ve decided it’s not worth it for me to do it.

You see, Monday before I left to go to the doctor’s office, I made a small change to our domain’s Group Policies. According to HIPAA, and company policy, all computers must have screen savers configured to lock the machine when the user is away for more than 5 minutes. Well, even though I set the default on all new machines to the company-standard of 5 minutes, as I go around to various machines and check to fix various problems, I notice that they’re set to 15 minutes, 60 minutes, or even 99 minutes.

As a result, I decided that one of the first and easiest things we needed to change was the screen saver policy. To that end, I configured a Group Policy on our domain to enforce the 5 minute timeout, with the default “Logon” screen saver (you know, the one that bounces the Windows logo around the screen). Simple enough, right?

Well, I didn’t think at the time about the machine that projects statistics for our phone system on the wall in our Customer Service department. Logically, there’s no point in having a screen saver on this machine, because it would kick in at 8:05 and be useless the rest of the day. Fair enough, I forgot one exception to the rule out of the entire company, so sue me. My boss emailed me with a subject something to the effect of “This looks like you’ve been messing around again…”. Now, knowing his sense of humor, it’s hard to tell if he’s really genuinely trying to be funny, or if this is just his way of taking a jab at me without trying to be too obvious about it.

In either case, I calmly explained to him that we’d talked about me changing some security settings previously, and that this was simply the latest in that long string of changes. I explained my reasons for doing it, that it was the simplest of the changes we needed to make, and why it was necessary (no one in the company observes the company policy). Well, today I check my email, and there’s a reply, asking why I thought people shouldn’t be able to use screen savers and saying that one person had said she had to restart “some program” every time it came on.

Now this is my problem. Needless to say the fact that he was specific enough to tell me “some program” (literally, word for word) had to be restarted every time the screen saver came on was incredibly helpful. Add to that the fact that it’s a bloody screen saver, and shouldn’t (and doesn’t in 99% of cases) any effect on anything what-so-ever, and I’m already perturbed.

But the real meat of my problem is the first part. At no point in my very simple explanation did I say people weren’t allowed to use screen savers. I said quite the opposite, in fact. People HAVE to use screen savers, and they’re not, hence my enforcing them to do so. Not only did he say the exact opposite of what I’d said, but he did it in what seemed to me a very insulting and derogatory manner (yeah, read that subject line again…). For some reason, it seems that every incredibly simple thing I do (such as setting screen savers on and to 5 minutes) is not only met with an extraordinary amount of resistance, but is also looked at as if I’m being insanely over-reactive, or that I’ve got some kind of nefarious motive.

Now, I know that some of this is probably just inter-office politics and personality conflicts, but COME THE FUCK ON!! My explanation couldn’t get any simpler, and this isn’t rocket science here people. I’m simply enforcing a policy that MY BOSS set, and this is the flack I get for it? You can take this HIPAA security stuff and shove it up your ass, because I’m not going to deal with this shit every little fucking step of the way!

I’ve decided that my conversation with my boss will go something like this:

“OK, about screen savers. I never said people couldn’t use them, in fact I said the exact opposite. People WEREN’T using them, so I set a policy to give them no choice but to, and this kinda works into my second point.

At first, I was a bit insulted that would work on the HIPAA stuff, then you’d come give it to me, and then when I was 80% done (if not more) with it, you’d go and give it back to him and tell him to use me as a ‘resource’… But then the whole screen saver thing kinda changed my mind on that. I’ve decided that I’m tired of being met with this kind of resistance every time I make a change that is so insanely simple and that should have been done all along anyway, and of being treated like I had some kind of nefarious purpose, and that quite frankly it’s not worth my time and sanity to sit here and do it day after day.”

OK, maybe I’ll cut out the “it’s not worth my time” part. I just figured that it would be easy to segway from that into “give me more money or else”. When I read over it again now, it occurs to me that it’s probably not the best combination of complaints…

Who knows. Maybe it would just be easier to send him an anonymous email with a link to my two most recent blog entries. Either one probably stands the same chance of getting me fired, and the email idea takes a lot less effort on my part…

I actually got up at what would be considered “on-time” today. I ran by Hardees on my way in to work, and actually got there about 5 minutes early. I got a few random things done before I had to call and make an appointment at the doctor’s office because my allergies were so bad I could hardly go 20 seconds without wiping my nose, and my entire head was about to explode all over my nice 21” monitor.

After I got out of the doctor’s office, i decided not to go back in to work, but to stay home and rest some instead. Unfortunately, I had to make myself check WebCT and see what school work was due this week. My exams don’t become available until tomorrow, but I realized I had an enormous amount of last minute and make-up work due in the next two days. I spent the entire day working on homework and taking tests, except for the hour I took to run over to Quiznos.

Unfortunately, I’m not even half way done with all of it. hopefully by tomorrow, I’ll actually have time to go back to work, assuming I’m feeling good enough to go back anyway.

So anyway, I check my email at work a little while ago, and see once from my boss to several people, including myself.

I know I’ve talked about this on IRC a couple of times already, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it here. About a week ago, my boss came over to me at work and told me to look up the HIPAA regulations that all companies were supposed to have met by April 20th. So, I spent the week delving into the regulations. Multiple hours a day were spent reading the regs and making notes about what we needed to do and document to be fully compliant (you know, that extra mile that most people probably fudged over).

So I spend all this time preparing everything, getting ready to give a very detailed step-by-step guide to my boss. At this point, I’m probably at least 80% through the regulations, if not more. So I log in and check my email, and there’s this email from my boss, sent to me, all the “executives”, and one of our managers (the only semi-technical one we’ve got, who is over our Customer Service Department). In the email, he explains that he wants this manager to become our HIPAA Security Officer, and says that I’ve been looking at “some of the data objects” relating to this project, and tha the should use me as one of his primary resources.

So basically what we have here is my 80% of the work, almost ready to give my boss this step-by-step plan, and on the day I’m out of the office sick, wishing I could die, he hands the project over to the guy who doesn’t do jack on a daily basis and makes four times my salary.

So now I have to come up with some polite but forceful and passionate way to tell my boss how insulted I am that he obviously thinks I can’t handle this project on my own, and at the same time show him that I amore than capable of doing so, if he’d just let me.

I mean, honestly, all of this is really common-sense stuff. Don’t let hobos sleep in the garage next to boxes of old claims, don’t give random people on the internet access to lists of social security numbers, etc. There’s absolutely no reason I can’t go around and tell people the few simple procedures we need to change, if I were just give the authority to do so.

But no, instead, I’m stuck being a “resource” for this manager, which basically means I’m the one doing all the work (most of the security-related stuff is on the domain anyway, so I’ll still be making the changes one way or another), and I just hand it to this guy so he can go hand it to our boss and take all the credit for it. I mean, why involve the middle man here?

I’d love to know the reasoning, but perhaps that’s not for simple minds to ponder (or know).

I am, however, very proud of myself. Not once have I bashed anyone in this entry, and not once have I used any sort of profanity. Instead, I’ve kept my cool, reasoned this out, and come to the only conclusion someone in my position could come to.

Now, if I really wanted to add salt to the wound, I could point out that this manager was originally the one put in charge of this thing, before the deadline passed and our boss gave me the job. Now apparently he sees work being done on it, and he’s back in the game.

Now, on the bright side, this does mean that it’s not my butt on the legal chopping block anymore. I’m once again just a meaningless peon (oh, I meant “resource”) for someone else. Unfortunately I can’t help but feel insignificant and insulted instead. This was a chance for me to happily take the bull by the horns and get many things that I’ve been saying needed to change for over a year now actually changed.

So what do you think? Am I over-reacting? Is this just a convenient excuse to give this manager something to do?

Again, I’ve surprised myself with my restraint thus far. I didn’t send back any nasty note to my boss, I didn’t randomly shut down one of the servers I manage, and I didn’t set fire to the building. In the morning, should I still feel jilted by all of this, we’ll just have a calm, reasonable talk. At no point in our meeting will I shout random profanity, make comparisons to the Nazis (or other fascist dictator groups), nor shout “That’s it, I QUIT!!”

What about you? If you were in my shoes, would you be offended?