A new begining

I’m hired!

For those of you that know me well enough, you know my current job slowly morphed from something that I was absolutely excited about into something that I ended up dreading on a daily basis. This was not due to a dastardly boss, or horrible work conditions, but due to the ever changing needs of the business for which I’ve been working. As the business grew & changed, what they needed from me grew & changed as well. Unfortunately the resulting needs ended up being something that I don’t particularly like doing and something that I constantly felt a failure at.

In case you don’t know the history, here’s the short of it.  I was hired to wear multiple hats.  Network Admin, Manufacturing Equipment Technology Planning, ERP Implementation Lead, etc… Those first 2 were the ones that got me excited. The last one was expected to be a mostly plug-n-plan experience where my job would mostly be technical in getting things to work. As time went on the ERP Implementation did not go as planned & hick-ups abounded, so the manufacturing technology stuff was pulled out of my grasp to allow more time for the ERP stuff. Then another gentleman was hired for the Network Admin duties so I could free up ALL of my time for the ERP Implementation. I was good with the technical side of things here, but I was in a position to manage this project without any authority to do so. I felt like I was in a lose-lose situation. I never could “rally the troops” so I ended up being the guy trying to do it all, and that will never work (and never did).

Anyhow, that’s where I’ve been for the last 3 years. Yesterday I received a job offer (after 2 AWESOME interviews!). I put in my notice and accepted the job offer.

The short:

  • More money
  • Even closer to home (Walking distance! Crazy, I know!!!)
  • Doing what I LONG to do
  • Bleeding edge technology (not bleeding to death as I’ve been used to)

The job:
http://ccra.com/
Network Administrator for a fast growing company that provides services to the travel industry. It’s a pretty small company (just under 100 employees) with an even smaller main office (about 12 employees in the office, the rest telecommute from home). The majority of the telecommuters are part of the company’s call-center.

They have 3 divisions serving the travel industry. Call Center Solutions so travel agents don’t have to personally provide 24/7 call centers, they just outsource it to us. Supplier Solutions that offer marketing solutions to the travel industry. And a Reservation Solutions Portal that is where a large part of the new technology & fun stuff is going to be.  They are developing some new products in the avenue that have not been done before and will make them a force to be reckoned with in this market.

My duties will be to take care of everything with a cord or antenna attached. This includes the server room with a couple dozen production servers, the Asterisk phone system for the call center, and all duties revolving around keeping the systems alive, expandable, backed-up, and disaster recoverable.

I’ll be getting to play with some new technologies   (Virtual Machines, Open Source Phone Systems, etc..) as well as learning some of the things that have eluded me to-date (Cisco routers, Exchange Server, etc…).

I’m excited!

I start February 15th.

Yippee!!!

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Christmas 2009 pics

Christmas 2009

Christmas 2009

Random Christmas 2009 Pics (19.11.2008, 25 Photos)

Click image to see all images in this album

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Pics posted elsewhere…

For those of you who don’t make use of Facebook, Trouble defined... or who just don’t keep up with all the changes on there, I uploaded a load of pics from the last few months on there… I’m fiddling around with how & where I upload pictures online so there will be a handful of posts that all access pictures from different places online as I figure out what I like best & what works best for me/you.

For this latest batch of pictures, click on the rebellious Taven above… It should take you straight to the album.

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Free Apps To Be Thankful For!

Here’s a pretty good list of free software (online & desktop) that covers a lot of the “best in class” options out there. After going through the list, I currently use or have used 90% of the programs on there at some point in time.

http://lifehacker.com/5412886/

These are the staples on my computers that I use regularly from that list:

  1. FireFox (The Best Web Browser)
  2. VLC (One Media Player to Rule Them All)
  3. 7-Zip (Simple file compression [zip files, etc...])
  4. OpenOffice.org (Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Slide Shows, etc…)
  5. Google Chrome (Alternative Browser)
  6. µTorrent (Torrent Downloader)
  7. Gmail (Email)
  8. GIMP (Photo creation & manipulation)
  9. Thunderbird (Email Client)
  10. Audacity (Audio Editing)
  11. Picasa (Picture Management)
  12. Pidgin (IM Client)
  13. Ubuntu (Prefered Linux Distro)
  14. iTunes (Music Library)
  15. FileZilla (FTP Client)
  16. Google Reader (RSS/Feed Reader)
  17. TeraCopy (File Copy Manager)
  18. PuTTY (Remote Access)
  19. CDBurnerXP (CD Burning App)
  20. HandBrake (DVD Ripping App)
  21. Google Calendar (Online Calendar)
  22. Google Voice (VOIP Related…)
  23. AdBlock Plus (Down with Ads!!!)

I’ll try & put together a list of the other free software I use that didn’t make it into that list. I don’t think there’s going to be TOO much in this one though… The above list covers most of what I need in a computing environment.

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When you find a big kettle of crazy…

This punchline is priceless, and exactly why I love Scott Adams.

Dilbert.com

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