Posts by mwicker
I actually host this site myself – Do things yourself!
0This is not hosted on a Bluehost or Squarespace or WIX….or whatever…This is my own AWS linux instance. No preinstalled apps. Nothing. Just a regular, vanilla EC2 Linux instance in AWS US-West.
I downloaded, installed and configured the LAMP stack on it myself and installed WordPress on it myself. I also manually migrated my old WP Database and content into it myself. I configured Apache for SSL and installed letsencrypt for my automatically updated SSL certificate. I also manage my own DNS, manually, in a different place. This includes creating all of the DNS records that make my site and domain good and searchable by google and also email services. No AI, I did it.
If I was to give one piece of advice to people – I would say that the very definition of freedom is learning and doing things yourself and not relying on others to do it for you. Just like I repair my own cars, computers, HVAC, plumbing and electrical. I do it. I save money and I cannot be held captive by scam artists.
I also built my own, off grid solar backup power system. I didn’t buy some pre-packaged Ecoflow or other pre-built system. I researched, learned, sourced and built everything myself. Between the panels, inverters, solar charge controllers, batteries, wiring and grid chargers…I spec’d it all and did it all….myself. And I save money with it by running my garage fridge and chest freezer completely off grid on it most of the time. It pays for itself…and I have backup power available from it in an outage. Unlike an on-grid solar system that many people are on the hook for $50,000+ for on their roofs that will immediately shut off in the case of a grid power failure (and some may not even realize that). This is also not to mention the manual power transfer switch that I installed off of a sub panel in my garage that I can use to connect my home built solar system to a strategically chosen electrical circuit in my house during an outage.
On the HVAC subject – I get saddened every time I see one of my neighbors getting scammed by an HVAC company into spending $15,000-$20,000 to replace their entire HVAC system upon a simple part failure. More often than not, it is just something simple that failed. Such as a run/start capacitor on a compressor or fan motor…or a contactor that went bad. These are $20-$40 parts on Amazon that you can buy and replace yourself if you just educate yourself and use logic.
Or it could be the main circuit board of the Forced Air Unit/Furnace as recently happened to me. I ended up troubleshooting and figuring out that a small capacitor on the main control board (PCB) had shorted out. I was able to find, identify and replace the failed capacitor on that PCB, plus a burned trace leading to it for 0 dollars. Just some sweat, knowledge and elbow grease and I was able to sleep in nice, cool, conditioned air again….on a weekend.
It failed on a Friday evening during 105 degree weather. If I didn’t know how to do things, I would have been at the mercy of an “emergency” dispatch by some HVAC guy that would charge me 3x normal just to do a service call the next day on Saturday. I would still be sleeping in the heat for a few more nights while he ordered up my new $15,000 system and installed it. I would get to suffer the heat for days and be out 15-20K for a $.01 part.
Attention – My Partner Companies – From your customer –
0To all folks in the sales arena and to the top leadership of the companies that you work for, I respectfully offer my insights based upon my experience as your collective customer for over 30 years working for many different companies/customers of yours (this is generalized and not a reflection of the particular company that I happen to be working for at this moment).
What is most important to me as your customer is the relationship, the partnership that we have, if you will.
To my primary Account Manager – You are my main line to your company. You are my main contact, my main partner. This is a partnership and not just another new sales opportunity. Turnover is an issue, however, as I seem to get new AM’s much too often..
It is also nothing new in the industry to have different, operational/day to day sales folks on the team that deal with our “maintenance” or “normal” requests, I get that. But, you as the main AM should still be intimately involved and concerned with our day to day needs as well. This should actually be where your main attention should be. This is, after all, the main reason we are doing business with you and your company in the first place. Please don’t divorce yourself from the day to day “nitty gritty” of our needs/issues and solely focus on just developing new business from us, only.
I also don’t want to be pushed to your “portal” for every single thing (sales or support), you are my partner. You should be able to handle these things for me every once in a while. I need help sometimes and don’t always have the time to do all of these things myself. This is not to say that I do not like a portal or self service, I definitely do, I am just saying that the portal should not solely replace the relationship that we have for day to day items.
Another thing, and this is one of the more annoying developments/trends of the last 5-6 years that I have noticed/surmised – Your hiring/use of third party companies to gather leads and them unknowingly contacting existing customers of yours. There is no worse look than when somebody that I am not familiar with contacts me out of the blue from your company (supposedly), trying to sell me services from your company that I already have/use…this is pretty terrible and is just a bad look. These third parties should at least be sent a list of existing customers/services by you that they should not cold call upon being contracted.
Anyhow, mini rant over, I really appreciate you all and your partnership…and I know many of these items are structural and this is why I really aim this more at the top leadership of your respective companies – Just (hopefully) some constructive feedback from one of your long time, collective customers of 30 odd years. Here’s to 30 more!
Congrats to My Dodgers!!
0In honor of the first full season championship for My Dodgers since 1988, I put on my players jacket and World Series Championship hat from back then. I have had these since I was 12. Still got the pins from the season in the hat too! Jacket is a little tight but surprisingly I could still put the hat on my giant head LOL. Thanks to my Uncle Kim Wicker for buying these for me for Christmas back then! And of course, for taking me to many games including game 6 of the NLCS against the Mets that year as well!
Monster Machine is Done!
0Finished building her last Friday!
Time to build a new monster machine!
0Time to build a brand new monster machine…my old machine is 6th gen and won’t support Win11…I guess it’s about time. I am looking forward to running some local LLM’s on that 4080 Super!
Steve Garvey #6
0Ran into Mr. Garvey the Dodger Icon in front of the Omni Hotel in San Diego, CA back in July. He was in front of the hotel putting his luggage into his trunk at the valet station. Later I found out that the reason he was in town was for a pre-game event at Petco Park (SD Padres Home Stadium, right next to the Omni) in which they gathered the members of the last Padres Teams that made it to the World Series (1984 and 1998). Garvey was on the 1984 Padres Team after he left the Dodgers toward the end of his baseball career.
Anyway, myself and my co-workers were inside the hotel lobby and they pointed him out to me as he was loading his luggage into the trunk of his car outside.
I quickly went outside and approached him. I asked if we could have a picture and he was nice and gracious and we grabbed a picture together. He even helped me to compose the shot better! Nice guy and great to meet this L.A. Dodger Icon in person…..after all, I have been a Dodger fan all my life.
P.S. – He is also running for US Senator this year for the State of California..
Spark Plugs at an antique shop??
0Found this pack of 8 spark plugs randomly at an antique mall that we go to. They are legit Motorcraft plugs new in the package from the late 80’s and fit my 70 Mustang perfectly. Only cost me 10 bucks. If I were to buy the equivalent in the regular auto parts store today it would be over 50 bucks!
Always keep your eyes open, you never know what you will find… I love the old Trak Auto price tag still on there…I got them for 9.95 and Trak Auto wanted 10.32 back in the late 80’s! LOL
History – Boy am I gettin’ old!
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Back when I first started in this industry ~30 years ago, I started as a guy who built PC’s. I troubleshot the whole stack. I was responsible for the hardware, OS, networking and applications that ran on the machines that I built. It didn’t matter if they were acting as a “server” or as a “desktop”. They were all just PC’s to me, with various hardware configurations and OS’s.
I knew the whole stack. I also learned about assembly language and C/C++ because that allowed me to be better at my job at that time. I used the “Alta Vista” search engine on a regular basis. There was no google. There was no yahoo. Apple was in the dumps. My first internet access was with Earthlink via the good ole winsock. Before that I was dialing BBS’s on my 9600 baud modem.
I remember installing one of the first distros of linux back in ’98/’99 using rawwrite to write a custom boot floppy in order to install it. I remember recompling the kernel to add additional hardware support as well as various other tuning that you could only do in the kernel.
I worked with DOS and Win 3.1 on a regular basis. Autoexec.bat and config.sys were my best friends. I worked with Novell 3.12, then 4.0, then 4.10, then 4.11 then 5.x. Yes, I was proud when I earned my Novell CNE 4.x cert. This, of course included Novell NDS which predated Microsoft’s AD by several years.
One day, I was handed a blue box that said “Cisco” on it because I was deemed to be the “hardware” guy and nobody else wanted to deal with it. That turned out to be a huge opportunity for me. That began my career as a “Network Engineer”…