Last night further updates were made to our server.  I wanted to check on it, but unfortunately my connection to the remote desktop has been blocked by the upgraded firewall.  I find the whole thing rather ironic, but certainly not expected.  Of course they did at least do better than my original bet that we’d walk in and all of our websites would be down, so I guess on the whole, they’re impressing me?  I suppose that happens when one has such low expectations.

DDA has high expectations of its staff, not only placed upon the staff by the principals, David and Elizabeth, but most of us take great pride in our work and do not want to settle for anything short of perfection.  Sometimes this means that we have to question what it is that we’re doing, even if it’s already been mandated.  I guess that’s why some of us feel more like scientists than anything, we do not blindly believe anything, we have to see all the evidence and then make a conclusion.  When we go to quote the latest and greatest DDA Medical Interactive Website, we need to have all the evidence of what kind of project it’s going to be before we jump in.  We have to question what the user wants to achieve and why in order to give them the best end product.  We can’t always “just do as we’re told” because we are creative thinkers who would go above and beyond what is required because it’s the right thing to do and what becomes of the final output is a reflection of us, and we want that vision to be the best, naturally.

So when you want your corporate image to show a high amount of effort, creativity and knowledge, you can find that right here at DDA.

I walked into DDA this morning late, as we opened later due to the possibility of poor roads, just to keep us from feeling frantic when traffic was bringing us down.  Upon entering, it appeared that our intermittent network issues from yesterday had spawned into an all-out negative connection.  Those of us who arrived earlier than our 8:30 a.m. open, arrived to find no computers able to access the Internet and thus, unproductive people.

So as usual, Mick and I scrambled to figure out what the issue was.  After rebooting all of the boxes in the back, it seems some had connections and some did not, which then led us to believe, thanks to Tyler’s suggestion of last night as told by David, that one of the routers was failing.  What I instead found out that seemed to be a key element was that we had canceled our backup DSL line, which was still feeding into our VPN Router. It wasn’t anything that was failing, it was the fact that we didn’t know we no longer had the service and everyone forgot that we had the two lines feeding into our system for failover.

So once that was unplugged, all was well again in the world.  Actually, it was better than well, the Internet seems to be flying today where yesterday it was annoying at best.  So hopefully thanks to some quick thinking and generally good response, like we always provide at DDA, our staff is back up and running, doing their writing and programming and building the interactive websites and medical videos.

This weekend was a short and strange one.  My usual Friday morning pajama fest was replaced by spending the day at work.  Saturday was the most odd of days, we woke up to four police cars in front of our house.  We still don’t know what was going on, but I saw officers head into the other half of our duplex with the purple gloves on, and shortly after cars of family members filled the street.  It sort of put a damper on the weekend, considering it doesn’t seem like good news for our friendly neighbors.  While people were in and out of the house, we continued on our day, from a wonderful basketball game that Luke did very well in, to a spontaneous trip to Atlantic City.  It’s funny, they jack up the prices so much since it’s Valentine’s Day Weekend, but we managed to find a relatively great deal on hotwire for the Sheraton.  This gave us the opportunity to have a leisurely dinner at Wolfgang Pucks and do a good deal of people watching.  So other than the strange and sad start, the weekend turned out pretty good.

So then here we are back at work managing the usual workload.  We have the interactive medical website projects that need the final touches and some webinars are happening again this week so there are a few preparations for that.  There is definitely not a lack of things for us to do, especially considering we’re going through a little bit of a server change to make me nervous.  My computer is asking me to reboot to install the latest Microsoft patches now so rather than be annoyed at the constant popup, that needs to be done too.  See, no end to what I need to accomplish today…