What a mess has been made of this day. Fought little fires around the office and on the phone with users this morning.
Then our phone vendor called us in the middle of the day and told us that they made an error on the price quote for our phone system upgrade, so we will have to pay them $3000 more. I was shocked. I sputter a reply that I had to talk to my manager.
Both he and I flipped out! Excuse me? You're telling me I have to pay for your mistake?!? What planet did these guys come from?
My manager and I quickly briefed our cheif counsel on the fallout of events, he then agreed, we are not under obligation to pay for thier mistake.
So we sent them an email reply, we had an agreed upon price and we were not going to pay more than that.
I left the office stewing over it; but then I suppose our vendor is stewing up quite a larger kettle of worry than I.
And we have Monday off for a three-day weekend, good, let them worry a little more. They would be fools to let me $50k deal go over this.

Dear me, very little progress on the fax project has been made except the realization that a lot more work needs to be done than I realized. Sigh.
Most of the day was intensly occupied by planning one of the two new offices' dial tone and internet circuits. Multiple digital connection vendors telling me, DSL no, then DSL yes but static IP: no, then DSL with 1 static: yes! Is a vpn over ADSL's 768bps up going to be too slow? We think not, as we have the same scenerio in two other offices which seem to run just fine.
Lunch was the most delicious Thai curry basil noodles I have ever had. I going back there and bringing my whole posse.
Then the afternoon decended into madness as we dealt with our phone system upgrade vendor claiming we had to pay for one of their mistakes, which, logically, we refuse to . Our company lawyer is backing us, which bestowes some small hope.
My boss is ready to find a new vendor.

Turned off my alarm and promptly fell back asleep this morning.
Got to work late but juiced up from the tasty fruit of the jamba.
Tackled a few early morning helpdesk emails and tried to dive into
the fax project but got completely sidetracked by Steve Jobs keynote
at Macworld. Spent the next 2 hours with my pulse racing seeing the
news and new products announced. I love Macs, always have, always
will. Thats not a popular opinion in an industry dominated by
redmond drones. But I was thrilled when OS X was introduced, as it
merged my other favorite OS into Macs, unix.
I love that Linux too.
After pledging my wallet to Apple's chic new devices, I jacked into
one of three conference calls with our vendor today about the
impending phone system upgrade. Still no solution to the ACD call
forwarding frustration.
Drooled over the iPhone once again as I showed my buddy in marketing
the slick new device, now he wants one too.
Logistics are getting swampy. We've got two new offices opening but
also equipment to pick up from two closed offices, all in different
states. Not to mention phone and data circuits to order and install
dates to coordinate.
Towards the end of the day we got the conference calls handled and I
finally made some good progress on the fax server. I'm hoping if I
can spend some quality time with this baby tomorrow, it actually
might stand up on its own legs and walk by tomorrow night or
Thursday. They sure do grow up quick.

Had the hardest time waking up this morning; was in a thick london
style fog until the coffee finally brewed at 9:30am. I may have to don the cap of barista if the usual suspects don't get it done earlier.

Browsed through yesterdays firewall logs: video streaming up the
wazoo, whatever a wazoo is... not sure, I digress, Googlevideo, YouTubers, eBaums, on and on. We have a policy, but enforcement is lax, everyone wants to watch a funny clip now and then, but there are some obvious offenders.
Slogging my way through the email changes that must be engineered before we start dumping faxes into folks inboxes; must try to think of all the special cases before we do the switch over. I finally finished calling all concerned parties to resolve their fax sharing issues and ran out into the warm wind for lunch.

Spent lunch caving the recesses of my brain for 'the idea'. That one singularity, a web based business, the next MySpace, the next YouTube, its out there...somewhere.

Back into the fray and the phone call load this morning has been mercifully light. I am thankful.
Scanned through the summary of this mornings firewall logs, and there it was, the number (or name) of the beast, sextracker.com. Yet another user surfing the pr0n wave. With one swift stroke of keys I shunted the username and appropriate firewall logs over to HR. They love handling that stuff. With so many different departments visiting so many different sites, and that doesn't take into account all the different sites the agents visit, we blacklist sites instead of whitelist, otherwise I spend all day fielding calls asking why someone can't visit www.blahblah.com (this is not a plug for blahblah.com, I have no idea who those people are)

One of the managers informed me that the call forwarding system we setup on Friday didn't work, his agents are not getting the calls. Upon investigation, lo and behold, he's right. Darn it, thought I had it wrapped up that time. Went overtime trying different experiments but none of them worked.
The phone system refuses to send an ACD call to an external number, probably by design.
Must call phone system system support in the morning.
On a bright note, we are only a few weeks away from the phone system install, and therefore I know what I will be spending the majority of my time on once I finish this fax upgrade: the phone system upgrade!!
One fun part will be using my newly aquired CCNA skillz in making sure all my switches all play nice with the new system!