Emil's Wicked Cool Blog

I came home today to find a UPS 2nd day air envelope at my front door. Not expecting anything, I went ahead and opened it up to find a letter from Verizon trying to get me to sign up for their FIOS service. Well, I already have FIOS, it works pretty well now that I think I have the kinks out of it, and so I'm not sure it was worth the crazy amount it probably cost to do a direct mail solicitation using UPS 2nd day air.

Of course, I'm blogging about it, so maybe it wasn't a bad move?

That's how long it's been since:

1. A router reboot
2. An IP address change on Verizon

I found out the other day that the reason my IP address kept changing (and subsequently knocking me off the phone), was that I didn't have Verizon's VDI-624 router as the first router in my setup. The VDI-624 is the same as a DI-624 router from DLink but has specialized firmware for Verizon. The interface looks the same, but they must truly have done something different to it.

Anyway, after fixing the IP address change problem, my old problem of router reboots came back. I run both eMule and Bittorrent, and so I have an insane number of connections open. For some odd reason, the router could handle the connections when my Vonage router was closest to the Internet (even though it was in the Vonage router's DMZ), but not when the VDI-624 is closest to the Internet. Odd. I didn't really need Bittorrent running so I shut it down completely and all is well, although it would be nice to have everything running, so maybe I'll play with it another day. Not today. Today, everything is working as designed. That's a good thing.

I usually try to refrain from posting work-related stuff since you quickly start riding a fine line for what content is acceptable, but today I'll go ahead. We are (still) in the middle of our "restructuring" (a.k.a. 10% downsizing). Quick update from my seat of visibility:

• April - first "efficiency" announcement internally and to wall street. Announced to complete in 90 days (August).
  
• June/July timeframe: Number of "redeployments" affected several groups. A few friends of mine were affected by this. Since this was the first action, everyone I know was able to find another job inside Intel.
• July: 1000 Manager reduction. My manager and my 3rd level manager were both laid off.
• August: Announcement that analysis was complete on time, but execution on that analysis would take until the end of the year. Redeployments would occur in September.
• September: Redeployments will occur WW39 for managers and WW40 for other employees. In normal terms, WW39 is the week beginning September 25th and WW40 is the week beginning October 2nd.
• Last week: My admin was "redeployed" and I'm told that our group will have a 20% reduction. Another group I work closely with will have a 75% reduction.

I'll keep a lot of my analysis of this to myself for the time being, but will mention that a redeployment at Intel means that you are given several months where your job at Intel is literally to find another job at Intel using our internal system. Alternatively, you can opt to leave immediately and take a severance payment. There are some internal positions open, but not many, so a redeployment effectively means a lay off right now.

For those reading that think that the process is very long, I agree, but will offer that it appears as though management is trying to work the logistics of the process in such a way as to make sure that people that are affected are eligible for a few bonuses. If true, that's a nice silver lining to this particular cloud.

So I've just finished making the switch for my default browser on my work system. I wanted something other than Internet Explorer primarily for tabbed browsing purposes, but secondarily to help reduce the amount of memory that IE takes up.

My first switch was to Maxthon, which internally runs IE but handles tabbed browsing and mouse gestures. I now pretty much expect my browser to handle mouse gestures and get frustrated if holding the right mouse button and moving down and then right doesn't close the tab.

Maxthon was really very good, except that there was no plugin available to handle Google Bookmarks, which solved another thorny issue for me.

Firefox sounded like a great solution except for the number of sites I use (primarily inside Intel) that require ActiveX controls and other IE specifics. I bumped across the solution to this recently when running into an extension called IE Tab. This allows you to load IE within Firefox, mostly taking care of those issues. It hasn't worked with Test Director (and neither does their plugin from 1999), so I'm not entirely off IE, but I'm nearly there.

Oh, and NTLM authentication for the tons of Intel sites that need it? Yeah, it's got that...