VPNs and old bosses

Today I went over to the District Office to again attempt to troubleshoot the problems with their ability to log into the network through a VPN tunnel. Not seeing anything wrong with the server or the setup in the router I did the only thing logical, I printed off the page listing all the ports they had open on the router and reset the router to factory conditions. I then proceeded to set up the router again from scratch.

This did accomplish the task as I had hoped and the VPN access to their network is now repaired. While I was there I discussed with several of them the upcoming District Conference. I’ve been to the last 2 district conferences and I’ve been asked to again go and aid them with their audio/visual needs during the conference. The conference will be in mid September in Midland, TX.

Ok, I’m quite annoyed by the fact that everything after this point was lost when I posted my article a few minutes ago and so I am now having to write this again… So what follows may not be exactly what I wrote before

This past week I have found myself in contact with John Savage, my old boss from GetOnTheAir, Inc., the wireless ISP I worked for for much of 2003. While I am glad to talk to my old friend, and I’m certainly glad to help him out in what small ways I can, this renewed contact with John has served to continuously remind me of the fact that this month marks a year since the Western Carolina Wireless project went under.

Times have been tough for John the past couple years since he was called up to active duty in Iraq the very week I moved to North Carolina to run the WCW project for him. While he was away he was injured in the line of duty, and he’s received little compensation now that he’s been medically discharged. Also while he was away, the mortgage company that had the mortgage on his house did some shady dealings and started harassing his wife threatening to foreclose on the house unless she paid the entire balance of the mortgage. And then of course the lack of communication with my boss and the fact that the WCW project was running under a grant made it difficult to keep the granters happy and with about half of the grant payout money never paid, the RIAA retracted funds, terminating the project, leaving me unemployed and with no choice but to return here and work for Harold.

John is now working hard to rebuild his life, which is hard considering he has almost no use of his right arm due to the injury he received in Iraq. I pray he is successful in rebuilding his business.

Tomorrow (today, as now, in the second rendition of this posting it is now almost 2 a.m.), I will be running sound for a Vow Renewal ceremony at church, so that will be interesting. Sunday morning I will be in the sound booth at my normal post of the video matrix, but instead of doing it myself, I will be training a new member of the A/V team in how to work with the video matrix.

Sunday night however will be quite interesting. Mom signed herself, me, and my brother David up to be in an American Airlines training video training AA employees on what to do in the event of a terrorist attack. It should be quite interesting.

I’ve started reading Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne. I’ve never read it before and was not really that surprised that it is shaping up to be quite different from the recent Disney Movie (which btw was quite good and I enjoyed it a lot).

Well, I have a busy day tomorrow, so I will end this article, especially since I have now written it twice and am thoroughly not amused at having to write it over again. There were things I said in the previous version of this article that I haven’t written now, but I will save them from another posting, perhaps tomorrow night. Goodnight all!