Hello all,
As many of you may be aware, I've been absent for quite some time now from Twitch and much of B2O.
Unfortunately I find myself currently lost in the "Perfect Storm" of challenges that have eaten away at what little free time I have.
At my day job I've accepted a promotion not so much because I wanted it but more because it was a devil you know situation. The early days of my past boss and I were not so rosy and it took some time to get him to see the light when it came to various production processes under his control. I just don't have the energy to go through this again so I took the promotion at the urging of the Production Manager and in doing so stepped into the hornets nest.
I got along famously with my previous boss but he was a bit stubborn in some areas. We always managed to work past it but sometimes he'd just veto something for no good reason that I could determine.
Over the past few months I've received a lot of feedback from his peers and found out he wasn't the most popular of Managers. He excluded all of them from his daily routine choosing instead to work his way regardless of the negative impact it had on other Departments and their Staff. I was aware of his disdain for the Production Manager but clearly not aware of the level as he apparently refused to work with the Production Manager at all which apparently had a drastic effect on employee workload scheduling.
I've since taken over the scheduling of course but to call it a disaster is far short of what it truly is. Jobs are input into the system daily by the truckload many of which are requested 3 weeks down the road but projected for 7 - 8 weeks time to completion. Seriously, every job input into our current system is projected to be completed a month late and nobody is batting an eyelash, wtf?
I've been making the best of it, increasing transparency with Sales, Customer Service, fellow Managers and the Production Manager. Until a few weeks ago I was sort of keeping up and then...
...one of my key workers fell ill. He was apparently sick enough to miss a full week of work throwing the schedule way off.
Normally I like to be as close to a full week ahead of projection but losing an employee that long makes it impossible. Added to this were other Production Issues requiring my Staff's commitment all in all costing me the better part of 2 - 3 weeks worth or Production Shifts over half my Staff.
To make matters worse the sick guy uses my phone nightly (he's a night-shift guy) and must have deep throat my phone receiver as I too got sick as a dog.
For a week I was freezing to boiling instantly, dizzy and unable to rest. Of course it was impossible to miss work so I was working through it but doing half days just so I could ensure all my Staff were scheduled properly.
Now that I'm back on my feet I've a lot of work to do to ensure my Department is the best it can be for a major audit the week of Apr 10 - 13. Since I've never been audited as a Department Head I'm a bit nervous and doing all I can to be prepared.
...
From a home perspective things aren't much better.
A few weeks ago I was streaming as usual then at 6:30 PM I started dropping frames by the thousands. I tried everything I could stopping and restarting the stream, changing XSplit settings, messing with my router, etc., but nothing I tried made any difference.
The issue I'm experiencing is massive ping spikes every few seconds making it impossible to live stream and difficult (at best) to stay connected to iRacing Servers.
As you can see, my Ping is all over the place and Jitter is in the red.
In speaking with my ISP they felt that possibly a new Modem was in order so they came over replacing my modem, my cable connection in the wall and the cabling to the modem.
Great service, great effort, no difference whatsoever.
I'm not even sure what I can do at this point to correct the issue?
I'm confident it's not my Computer as I've replaced the cabling to it, re-ran the most recent update for my Motherboards on-board Network controller, ran Spyware and Virus Scans, turned off background updating processes requiring internet connection, etc., all to no avail.
So yeah, there it is and to say it's been far from ideal is a massive understatement.
Hopefully I can be back on some sort of schedule after the audit mid April but if not I'll be sure to update.
Until then please expect me to be hit and miss.
As many of you may be aware, I've been absent for quite some time now from Twitch and much of B2O.
Unfortunately I find myself currently lost in the "Perfect Storm" of challenges that have eaten away at what little free time I have.
At my day job I've accepted a promotion not so much because I wanted it but more because it was a devil you know situation. The early days of my past boss and I were not so rosy and it took some time to get him to see the light when it came to various production processes under his control. I just don't have the energy to go through this again so I took the promotion at the urging of the Production Manager and in doing so stepped into the hornets nest.
I got along famously with my previous boss but he was a bit stubborn in some areas. We always managed to work past it but sometimes he'd just veto something for no good reason that I could determine.
Over the past few months I've received a lot of feedback from his peers and found out he wasn't the most popular of Managers. He excluded all of them from his daily routine choosing instead to work his way regardless of the negative impact it had on other Departments and their Staff. I was aware of his disdain for the Production Manager but clearly not aware of the level as he apparently refused to work with the Production Manager at all which apparently had a drastic effect on employee workload scheduling.
I've since taken over the scheduling of course but to call it a disaster is far short of what it truly is. Jobs are input into the system daily by the truckload many of which are requested 3 weeks down the road but projected for 7 - 8 weeks time to completion. Seriously, every job input into our current system is projected to be completed a month late and nobody is batting an eyelash, wtf?
I've been making the best of it, increasing transparency with Sales, Customer Service, fellow Managers and the Production Manager. Until a few weeks ago I was sort of keeping up and then...
...one of my key workers fell ill. He was apparently sick enough to miss a full week of work throwing the schedule way off.
Normally I like to be as close to a full week ahead of projection but losing an employee that long makes it impossible. Added to this were other Production Issues requiring my Staff's commitment all in all costing me the better part of 2 - 3 weeks worth or Production Shifts over half my Staff.
To make matters worse the sick guy uses my phone nightly (he's a night-shift guy) and must have deep throat my phone receiver as I too got sick as a dog.
For a week I was freezing to boiling instantly, dizzy and unable to rest. Of course it was impossible to miss work so I was working through it but doing half days just so I could ensure all my Staff were scheduled properly.
Now that I'm back on my feet I've a lot of work to do to ensure my Department is the best it can be for a major audit the week of Apr 10 - 13. Since I've never been audited as a Department Head I'm a bit nervous and doing all I can to be prepared.
...
From a home perspective things aren't much better.
A few weeks ago I was streaming as usual then at 6:30 PM I started dropping frames by the thousands. I tried everything I could stopping and restarting the stream, changing XSplit settings, messing with my router, etc., but nothing I tried made any difference.
The issue I'm experiencing is massive ping spikes every few seconds making it impossible to live stream and difficult (at best) to stay connected to iRacing Servers.
As you can see, my Ping is all over the place and Jitter is in the red.
In speaking with my ISP they felt that possibly a new Modem was in order so they came over replacing my modem, my cable connection in the wall and the cabling to the modem.
Great service, great effort, no difference whatsoever.
I'm not even sure what I can do at this point to correct the issue?
I'm confident it's not my Computer as I've replaced the cabling to it, re-ran the most recent update for my Motherboards on-board Network controller, ran Spyware and Virus Scans, turned off background updating processes requiring internet connection, etc., all to no avail.
So yeah, there it is and to say it's been far from ideal is a massive understatement.
Hopefully I can be back on some sort of schedule after the audit mid April but if not I'll be sure to update.
Until then please expect me to be hit and miss.