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!!!

Well, I finally had to do something about SPAM…
You (my loyal & faithful followers) have never seen the on-slaught of SPAM that hits this blog because I am diligent at keeping the comments clear of crap. However, now that I’m getting in excess of 20 SPAM comments every day, I decided I needed to put up some sort of prevention.

I decided that a simple Math Quiz would be easier than one of those impossible to read CAPTCHA messed up word pictures.

Let me know if you ever have a hard time submitting a comment.

- Thomas

Well, I took Taven to the clinic Monday afternoon to get his stitches out. I thought that maybe, just maybe, he’d let them take them out without the same fuss he gave getting them. I was wrong.

We ended up doing almost the exact same dance with one minor exception. He let me lie him down on the papoose & he even let us strap him in with a silly little smile on his face. We made it a biit of a game by calling him a silly wiggle worm. He never admitted to being a wiggle worm though. He kept saying “no, I am not a wiggle worm”, the only thing he’d admit to being was “a Taven”. (That’s my boy! He is what he is & you’d better like it that way!)

Of course all the smiles & giggles stopped when the shiney metalic objects started coming around his eye. We had the same struggle to pin his head down while the Dr removed the stitches, but we made it through.

He’s still got some little bandages on there that are supposed to fall off after 2-4 days & they’re starting to peel up. Over-all I’d say he’s been a real trooper through all of this craziness (or did I mean crappines?).