I'm a pimp slut.
I slut and I pimp. Its quite challenging. I'm literally working my nuts off.
I sell a product that makes people high. I like my job because I get paid. I don't like my job because I have to work with other people. We don't do happy ending here.
I just bought a new used Nissan!
Its for FOUR DOORS MAN!
FOUR!!!!
I collect government checks and smoke a lot.
Wow, this thread went downhill quickly.
I work in applied statistics for a major jet engine manufacturer. I pretty much get to solve other people's problems all day. If there is a manufacturing/producibility issue, I'll do a lot of 6 sigma type stuff and data mining to track down root causes. However, I find risk and life analysis projects to be more interesting. There's a certain allure to lifing a critical rotating part from crap field data and knowing that an engine can literally blow up if you mess up.
If I've learned anything, it's that there's tons of data out there, no one ***ever*** looks at it, and even if they did, most people wouldn't have a clue what to do with it. Big data seems to be the new buzzword, but it's just as hard to convince people that they want it as it is to do the actual analysis.
I work in at the NOC (network operations centre) for the local telco, we service our own territory and a few partner ones as well as managed service customers' servers and network gear. We deal a lot with DMS100, DMS200, DMS10 etc telephony switches. We monitor pretty much everything from the switches themselves, fiber transport, environmental conditions of COs, etc.... Things like if there is an extended power outage somewhere, we track it, monitor battery voltages, coordinate generator deployments if the outage is too long, etc. We also get lot of oddball stuff sometimes to deal with. Basically anything that other departments don't do, comes to us. It can sometimes be interesting, but also sometimes frustrating, especially after 5 when you're the 12 hour day shift guy as all the weird stuff seems to happen then. If we don't know something, we have to know who to call, and go from there.
It's kinda like the fire department. You're pretty much sitting and waiting for something to happen, but when it does, it can be chaos. I love the job, especially because of the shift work. I get lot of time off. For example, I've been off for 6 days, but other times I might work for 4-6 days in a row, 12 hour shifts. So it's balanced. But having all those days off is worth it imo. I prefer nights so I usually ask to get like 6 nights in a row then I get lot of time off.
Our office is in the "hub" regional CO so it's an extremely important building. Security is pretty high and it has a pretty high end fire alarm system. It's also manned 24/7 even on holidays. You actually CAN break the Internet in this building.
This is a completely random site I found that has some of the stuff we work with: http://www.e-c-group.com/~lindsey/beast/04.html
Is this for mobile telco or land-line telco? Also is the NOC internal to the telco company or outsourced? can one NOC be used for various telcos or only one telco?
In our case it's landlines and cellular. Also internet and the other services mentioned. Unfortunately we do not monitor HSPA though but we do monitor CDMA. We monitor our own telco and two others that are part of the same company but separate operations. One we only monitor in the day, and one at night. It's kinda an odd setup but it's the way the contracts were setup I guess.
The way it works is our CO is the hub, but then there are other regional COs that are basically fed from this one, and so on. It's like a big star network. There are redundant fiber links between the bigger towns. The other telcos are separate from us but still part of the same company.
I'm a Signal Inspector for a railroad contractor. Basically repair, maintain, upgrade or install all the electronics and electrical systems on the wayside of the railroads.
I enjoy it because most days I'm free to go all over our territory and perform whatever tasks I see fit. See new places/projects all the time. Don't like sitting in my office for more than a few minutes, and would hate to go to the same place day after day. I'm the minor boss too, so I can tell others to take care of things etc.
Things I don't like would be shit malfunctioning at 1am that others can't figure out and then call me. This job is 24/7, although it's really not bad for me anymore.
I see. A lot of my deals is actually in the telco sector in South East Asia (mostly mobile telco and telco infrastructure.
This one company I am looking at is deploying a vast new 3G network and they claim to use IP based switching technology (which is newer than TDMA) and they are also installing their own fiber between nodes. I heard IP switching is still fairly new technology but supposed to be much superior. Do you have any knowledge/expertise on this?
Cool! Do you have cars that have special tires to run on the tire tracks? (like in the movies)
Ok I will start:
It really opened my eyes on the power of networking in this line of business. Basically your reputation precedes you and deals get done simply because you have the network or know the contacts.
Not too sure of specifics, TBH. (only been there a year), The transport systems we use are Alcatel and Optera. (OME 6500etc). I think there's also some Newbridge stuff but not sure how much of our traffic is on there now.
The switching of the DMS is all Nortel proprietary, CCS7 etc. T1's are also widely used between different equipment and smaller cell sites. Bigger ones get fiber. Not too sure what is exactly used at for the transport, it might be Optera for that too.
Not too sure of the cell equipment itself how the switching works. I think some of it is IP based as there are Cisco switches at the cell sites, they need to be reloaded whenever they lose power, some kind of glitch. I forget why they can't fix it but there's a reason. So I imagine it is IP based at least for HSPA.
It's actually too bad that Nortel is gone because they really did make solid stuff. The DMS switches for example are over 30 years old, lot of the cards and parts are original, and it still hums away. Cards need to be replaced here and there but it's a very robust and highly redundant system.