CalATERS Crawl

I work for an obscure part of the accounting department within the California Department of Corrections (CDCR). We have three computer systems used for various accounting functions. None of the computers can talk to each other. At best data from one system can be batch dumped into another system.

The mainframe system seems like it was state-of-the-art when Ronald Reagan was President. Much of accounting is done via a program from SAP. Travel expenses are done via a custom application designed for Windows XP. This program runs in a Java sandbox.”

Recently, the “sandbox” has gotten filled. Hundreds of man-hours are wasted just trying to log-on to the system. This program is the primary application that people in my unit are supposed to be running. Lately, many in my office have gone a day or two at a time without being able to log-on or process travel claims.

The ultimate organization that controls this program is the State Controller’s Office (SCO). Unfortunately, SCO is caught with their cyber pants around their ankles and a look of bewilderment. Instead of being prepared for a department wide implementation of the program by CDCR, they have been caught unaware.

Now this program has been in its current form since 2001. Requiring all institutions to use the program was a deliberate decision and I’m confident that SCO said no problem when they heard CDCR would begin requiring the use of the program. Only about 26,000 people in the department are even registered users. That’s less than 1/3 of CDCR employees.

SCO supposedly upgraded their servers and maxed-out RAM in the system last week-end. It has resulted in no noticeable improvement in the functioning of the travel program. The bottom line is that there are too many users trying to connect simultaneously and the system—no doubt built with millions in tax dollars by the lowest bidder—is unable to handle the real world conditions.

It will be interesting to see how the long this situation persists.

Happy New Year

I haven’t blogged much laterly but plan to get back to it in 2010. I will finish my MBA from University of Phoenix in mid January.

Random Thoughts
Best Electronic Toy of 2009 is Google Android phone by Motorola.
Best Radio Talk Show host is Rush Limbaugh.
Avatar will win some awards from Oscar next time.
Most over-hyped show on SciFi Channel was Battlestar Galactica.
Worst first year term as US President goes to Barry Obama, I never thought I’d be missing Jimmy Carter.
Worst Republican in 2009 Dierdre Scozzafava in New York’s 23 Congressional Race
Worst Democrat move is following Harry Reid anywhere.
Dumbest environmental move of 2009 was decision by California Democrats to recycle Jerry Brown as the anointed candidate for Governor in 2010.

NEWS FLASH! HELL HAS FROZEN OVER AND THE WORLD HAS TURNED UPSIDE DOWN!

Today the following email greeted me. If you want to know the history just Google Barbara’s name. This is too rich!

I kid you not.  The Republicans of River City (RRC) have endorsed, and I can hardly believe it myself, Barbara Alby for Board of Equalization.  Please see the forwarded press release below from none other than Carl Burton.
I have heard of politics making for strange bedfellows, but Carl Burton and the RRC endorsing Barbara Alby for anything is beyond belief.  This is either one of the greatest practical jokes of all time or I have entered the Twilight Zone.
UNBELIEVABLE!
Name Withheld

 

Barbara Ably endorsed by RRC for BOE

SACRAMENTO—- The members of Republicans of River City (RRC) unanimously endorsed Barbara Ably to replace Bill Leonard on the Board of Equalization (BOE)at their regular monthly meeting on Tuesday, October 20.

Bill Leonard currently represents BOE District 2 but is prevented from running for reelection due to term limits. Bill endorsed Barbara to replace him on the board. Barbara has served with distinction as Bill’s Chief of Staff for the past seven years.

The members of Republicans of River City recognize that there are four outstanding Republican candidates for Bill Leonard’s BOE office. However, because of her experience as Chief of Staff, Barbara is viewed by RRC members as the outstanding candidate for this office.

In addition to her experience as Bill Leonard’s Chief of Staff, Barbara served in the California State Assembly with distinction.  Finally, Barbara served as one two California representatives on the Republican National Committee. There she was elected to several positions and made California’s voice heard.

Carl Burton, President of Republicans of River City said “the volunteer club is one of the largest Republican clubs in Sacramento County and Northern California and has a long history of endorsing candidates who later win in the primary election and go on to win their office in the general election.”

For those that don’t know the history of the love between Barbara Alby and the Republicans of River City, this would be much like the Palestinians nominating Israel for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Teddy Kennedy

Teddy The SwimmerKennedy finally passed away yesterday.

He was a symbol of all that is wrong in modern American politics. He was one of the more successful Machiavellian liberals. Kennedy often treated the US Constitution as a suicide pact. He never met a terrorist or a communist that didn’t occupy a warm place in his heart. He perverted the values of America to expand the welfare state and erode the rights to own private property. He worked to thwart a parents’ ability to pass their values to their children. He spent his whole career trying to destroy the values the made our country great. He was always a defender of murdering the unborn and in his later years he worked to establish a national framework for euthanizing the infirm and aged. Kennedy hated Truth and Justice and anyone that stood for those values. He made a mockery of his faith and his family. He was at least guilty of manslaughter and to many he was a murder that got away with it.

His legacy is one of moral failure both personally and in his legislation record. Any success touted by Kennedy was a diminishment of the American people. His gains were our losses. How a man who so totally embraced wickedness could be called a role model for anyone is a commentary for just how corrupt we have become as a people. The only sad part in all this is that I am sure the people of Massachusetts will give the rest of the country another Senator just as worthless as Kennedy.

I have a mental picture of Kennedy experiencing his eternal reward and begging Father Abraham to let Mary Jo give him one cup of water to ease his suffering. Enjoy reaping what you sewed Uncle Teddy ‘cause you worked hard for it!

HPA Dell Hard Drive Upgrade

I agreed to upgrade a laptop for my wife’s friend last week. I have Acronis True Image Software and a USB connected external hard drive so I figure this is easy money right? NOT!

I took the laptop home and went to work. The laptop is a Dell that is about three or four years old. I made a full backup of the drive, inserted to 160 GB drive that replaced to 36GB drive. My first indication that all was not well was when the system was booted via the Acronis disk and the software could not see my removable drive. I had to copy the image file from my removal drive to my desktop computer. Only in one of the Public folders in my Vista machine could the backup file be seen via the Network option on the Acronis software. After the backup was completed, I booted up the computer and was greeted by a 36 GB hard drive that should have been 160 GB!

After much research I found that I was the victim of proprietary and hidden software that Dell stuck on their hard drive! I was not a happy camper. Acronis has an article on their support website called “HPA Makes the Cloned Drive Display Wrong Capacity.” While this is great information, it does nothing to fix my problem.

Most of the solutions that I found on the Internet were dangerous and/or dubious. One family of solutions involved using the Windows Repair Console. The owner of the laptop could not provide the master Administrative password so I was stuck and could not use most solutions. For those not yet familiar with this problem, when Windows is first installed it prompts you for a password. Whatever you type will be the only password that you can use three years from now to access the utilities on your Windows installation CD. Otherwise you get to wipe your hard drive and reinstall everything in your computer. Refer to http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm

So what I knew at this point is that any solution involves fixing the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the laptop. The other part of the solution involved killing the HPA software that made my new hard drive exactly the same capacity as the old drive. Once this size change is made on the drive, both the BIOS and the Windows installation program see the drive capacity as being the same as the old drive. You can even delete the partition and reformat and the new disk will still be the same size as the old drive!

Some Internet solutions say you must find a hexadecimal editor and edit the MBR on original disk. If you do this and screw-up you just lost all the data and you know that the owner of the laptop has never made a backup CD of all her vacation photos from her trip to Europe last year. After editing the MBR then they say make your backup and restore on the new disk. Yeah, Sure!

So the Master Boot Record must be killed, fixed, replaced or otherwise deal with to fix the computer. Then the drive size must be repaired. To repair the drive the only option that seemed to work was from Hitachi. Download the Feature Tool from this page. Get the ISO image file and make a CD. The program is bootable and simple to run. I will tell you when to use the disk in a moment.

The Hitachi tool will let the computer see the whole drive but what then? I found the answer on this discussion thread. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?s=984536e28c3c7ee064a0e7d6e054dc57&t=167401&page=2 The solutions proposed on this page mostly don’t work but there is a nugget in their that rang a loud bell in my mind. To get the space back on the drive one of the postings references Acronis Secure Zone. They said create a Secure Zone of any size and then delete it and pick the option to allocate any unused space to the partition that you select.

What I’m telling you now took me five nights staying up past one in the morning to figure out. Yeah much of the time was waiting for my Vista computer to send restore files via my home network to the laptop. I did 12 to 18 restorations during the period to find a fix.

I kept refining my attempts and this is what finally worked:

1. I restored everything from the old drive to the new one: C:\, the MBR and the two hidden partitions that Acronis found on the Dell laptop. Elapse time for this step about three hours.

2. Then I got my old DOS 6.22 bootable CD with Windows 3.11 and Norton Desktop on it and booted up the computer. Any bootable DOS disk that you can get will work as long as FDISK is on the disk. At the DOS prompt type A:\ FDISK /MBR and press enter.
(Even though it says A Drive, this command knows to run on the C Drive.) Remove the disk.
Insert the Hitachi disk, reboot computer and start via this CD and then follow instructions to resize the new hard disk.
To restore the drive to its full capacity you need to remove HPA on the target drive:

5. Click on the “Features” menu or press Alt-F keys and select “Change Capacity”;
6. You should see “Manufacturing values” and “Current values” on the appeared window;
7. Click “Options” and choose “Maximum Capacity” from the list. The appropriate value will be automatically entered in the “New Capacity” field;
8. Click OK.
http://www.acronis.com/r/support/en/kb/907/Removing_HPA.txt

At this point if you want to start Windows and look in Disk Management you will see the balance of the drive as unallocated space.
Warning: Don’t delete the other two partitions that you see via Disk Management Console. If you do the computer will not boot because your boot.ini file will then not match your computer configuration.
Elapse time for these steps is about ten minutes.

3. Lastly, get your Acronis CD again and boot the computer. Create a Secure Zone on the unallocated space on the drive. As you go through the process DO NOT SELECT ANY DRIVE OR PARTION. Leave all check boxes empty. Keep going Next. The program will automatically select space on the unallocated portion of the disk. The partition can be any size.

4. After the Secure Zone partition is created restart the wizard for Secure Zone again. This time delete the partition you just made. As you go through the screens you will see one with your disk partitions. Select the one that is labeled as C Drive. On my computer the other two partitions had no drive label. This selection allocates all unused space on the entire drive (not just the Secure Zone you are deleting) to your C drive. This is what you want. Click on Proceed. In fifteen more minutes you are done.

That’s it, enjoy your upgraded machine.

SEIU Threatens Strike

KOVR TV is reporting that

Yesterday, SEIU 1000 President Yvonne Walker told members that the union’s council voted “voted unanimously authorizing the union’s officers to seek member support for concerted actions up to and including a strike to protect our members’ pay, benefits and job security.”

What a gift to Governor Schwarzenegger. Now all he has to do is fire the Union when they strike and start over. The Governor could do to SEIU what President Reagan did to the air traffic controllers. This way the Democrats get to whine about the evil Republicans and the Governor gets the most sweeping civil service reform in my lifetime. The Republicans can finally fix the system.

Hey MS Walker, go ahead make my day.

Budget Baby Games Continue

While their buddies at the state capitol are dragging their feet on getting something resembling a balanced budget for California taxpayers, state workers are fretting about the economic hardship that three furlough days a month is inflicting on their lives.

Please note that despite any publicity to the contrary, not one state worker has lost their job! Local and county governments have been lightening their load but the state has yet to do anything meaningful to cut spending. As anyone in the private sector knows, payroll is the largest part of any large organization. Compared to the punishment inflicted on the private sector, the state still thinks it is fun and games as usual. In fact the state is still hiring new employees in July despite the fact that any solution will have to involve reducing payroll.

Now that a third furlough day is added, state workers are being offered courses during working hours on “Coping with the Stress of Economic Uncertainty.” This three hour seminar will “explore healthy strategies for managing stress and increasing resilience during tough economic times.”

What do state workers with cushy jobs and great retirement know about stress?
Try running a business in an environment designed by the state employee’s union and still make a profit; now that IS stress!

Meanwhile Karen Bass is whining like a little baby. Hey Karen, if you don’t like your job quit and give it someone who can get it done.

State of California is Still Hiring

I realize that California is experiencing a fiscal meltdown. Layoff notices are flying all around the ranks of government workers. In the midst of all this drama would you believe that I got a job with the State of California? No I didn’t land a cushy appointment from the Governor. I started as a lowly paper pusher for the Department of Corrections. Yes the same department that just sent out over 1,500 layoff notices!

I interviewed and was hired a week before the notices were sent out in May. I did part of my pre-employment paperwork in May; most notably the Form I-9. I had to speak with four different people before I could convince them that a passport was the only document required, (I only spent 15 years doing HR and payroll and I know what documents you need to check to hire someone.) The third week after I reported to work, I finally got fingerprinted and filled out the IRS Form W-4.

Interestingly, I signed the form with the oath required by state employees to uphold the constitution twice but neither time did anyone actually administer the oath to me. The second time, the person helping me with the paperwork even signed the portion saying they were a witness to the oath being administered—even though they never administered the oath. Go figure!

The conditions in the office were surprisingly Spartan. There are virtually no office supplies in the supply room. Employees are cannibalizing empty cubicles for supplies. The supply cabinets consist of odd sized Post-it Notes, red pens, typewriter ribbons and tractor feed labels. After trying two calculators that were both broken, I ended-up bringing my calculator from home.

My four year old has a better computer than I was given at the government office. The HP that I run at work is a real dinosaur. It is slow. I’m sure the video memory is shared with RAM which makes it even slower. The user rights are fairly locked-down and I can’t install any programs or run Windows Update. My son’s computer is dual core with 640 MB of video memory. It is very fast running XP Professional.

Every copy machine in the office is either dead or on its last legs. I have difficulty getting my work done when I can’t make copies. I thought about bring in my flatbed scanner just to run copies but I don’t have rights to install any programs.

Contrary to what you would expect in government service, there are no procedure manuals for the work I am currently doing. I am processing paper forms that are then entered on a mainframe program that was probably new in the 1980s. It takes days to process the forms for payment. Partially this is because the people filling out the forms don’t follow directions. All the places they leave blank or incomplete I have to fix. I then have to check all math on the forms. I must then hand-code all entries and write them on the form. I have to check vendor setup in the mainframe and then check for advance payments prior to authorizing A/P entries into the system. After several more tedious steps, I have to do some more antiquated procedures. The copy of the paperwork that is sent to the State Controller for payment is literally held together with string. I had to salvage a three-hole punch and rig it as a two-hole punch to get holes in the paper for the string to go thru!

There is a system that employees can use to do this online and deliver folks like me from as much paperwork but the computerized system is only optional. This system is also obsolete but the new accounting program used by the rest of the state is not yet compatible with what I’m doing.

Barry Obama in Wonder Land

And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” Barack Hussein Obama

Just for the record, I ran the numbers and the United States ranks 56th in the world and has a population of 0.78 percent Muslims. Yeah, less than ONE percent. Hey Barry WTF? Obama is not only lying, it’s a whopper that is reminiscent of Bill Clinton in his heyday.

Niccolò Machiavelli would be proud of Barry’s brazenness. Does this guy really believe this stuff or just think people with towels on their head will believe any BS that is said for their consumption. Obama probably thinks he is giving an olive branch to the Middle East but he is actually double-dog daring them to call his bluff. We will regret his stupidity and arrogance.

Sorry, but can we really afford four years of this fascist buffoon?