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4/26/2008

We Serve and Protect

I have mentioned, in the past, that I own a small company. I work a 'regular job' these days, but I've kept my little business going, on the side. In the summer of 2001, the company for which I had worked the previous nine and a half years went into receivership. Of course, this happened in the middle of the Dot Com Bubble Bursting that blew up the consulting industry in the early 2000's. Along with a lot of other IT centric businesses. Anyway, in an effort to keep all of our bodies and souls together, and fed, and sheltered, I started a company of my own to do what I know how to do best - make computers talk to each other. No matter where they are. That means I deal with Switches and Routers and Firewalls and Wireless Access Points and all of the attendant protocols. I can build a network from scratch - and have. If you have a business with multiple locations, and you want the computers at those locations to share information, run a shared database or just 'see' each other, I'm your man. Anyway, today I spent 4.5 hours of my time (and my customer's money) educating the technical staff at AT&T on the proper configuration of the routing protocol they use as an ISP (Internet Service Provider). Their stuff (in Chicago, anyway) is working as it should, now. Another small piece of the Internet has been made safe. Sometimes I feel like Don Quixote. It's just one windmill after another. As long as I keep my lance sharp .....

5 comments:

Elizabeth said...

I bow to the IT gods regularly. You have my respect, O Great One.

Anonymous said...

I am with Elizabeth on this one - I bow my head in admiration :D
I can do a bit of tricks with Computers but networks have always been beyond the little I know ;)

Momisodes said...

I too bow to your IT greatness.

I am so technically challenged, the only person I could possibly teach a thing to about computers is my grandma. That said, my techie husband really does complete me :)

Unknown said...

I just had a little heart palpitation thinking if I had to do all that. But for you, it probably makes you happy. When I was in "that field" I tried really, really hard to stay with the software side and when something didn't talk nicely to another something... I called the "boys" at the office, begging for help. Now my mom calls and talks about Ethernet cards and DSL and I wonder "Where the hell did she learn that?"

Emily/Randomability said...

One of my cyber friends named her blog fightingwindmills over on WP. :)

We figured out my problem of the disappearing H Drive from ym desktop. I had enough of a cache of our old server on my machine to power my H Drive on my desktop. That'll teach me to not back anything up before i Boot and nuke the next time.