September 14th, 2008 Yvo
Starting this Monday my already adventurous but short career is going to take me in a new direction. For years I’ve been building up my skills on the *NIX platform becoming increasingly better by the day to the point where I feel comfortable hacking up C code in order for it to compile on say… Solaris 8 (not by choice :-)). I remember it was only 3 years ago that I was answering phone calls and performing tech support and since then have been doing system administration, with the last 6 months being more storage (Netapp & Hitachi USP) re-implementation & administration.
After my relationship ended in May I thought to myself “If a company offered me a job to travel 50% or more of my time, I’ll take.”. It would be the only reason I’d leave Classmates. Such an event happened in August. An usability study in June turned into a job offer by August after various delays on my side. So this Monday I start. First I need to get acclimated with the product (which is called Likewise) and hopefully I’ll be soon traveling all over. This is a big change career wise for me. Going from system administration to deploying software is a pretty big change but it’s a huge challenge for me. My fear is that I’ll get rusty when it comes to system administration but I’m going to do my best to keep my “A” game.
One thing I hate from all of this is way my resume is starting to look. Sure my last two gigs were over a year but not anywhere near 2 years and that makes me fairly unhappy with myself. That will be my next thing to improve…..
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July 22nd, 2008 Yvo
Life would be boring without change and lately I’ve gone through a lot of it. Other than my lack of updating of this blog, things have changed.
Some of the things that have changed, in no specific order:
- In May, after almost 4 years, Cam and I broke up. While she may have written extensively about this in her blog, I feel that there is nothing left to say on it. She cheated on me and that is just simply a deal breaker. Attempts to justify this is simply wrong as there is no excuse for that type of behavior.
- The colors of my condo have finally changed. The living and dining room was this nasty mustardy dark dark yellow, bordering light brown, now its bright yellow with a tint of orange. The bedroom went from a dark brown (with green) to a ice blue. Yum. Pics will be made soon.
- As of today a new couch. This thing kicks ass; fantastic to lay on.
My focus at work has also changed. Previously I was doing just system administration stuff but over the course of the last few months I’ve taken on more responsibility in the area of storage. So now I work with HDS, Netapp and a few Sun X4500s. Each have their own specific uses and it truly is exciting stuff, especially since who used to administer it left room for some major improvements to be made.
I have realized that I’d like to travel more. I am definitely not looking for a new job as I’m actually having a good time at Classmates with the one exception that if a job landed on my doorstep that would require me to travel a good amount (like 50%+) then I’d go for it.
Welp thats all for now.
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April 14th, 2008 Yvo
So with a certain fruit company announcing Exchange support for their one button phone 5-6 weeks ago, I signed up my department and we got approved even though I sponsored myself on everything (corporate didn’t and they did all the proper sponserships, heheheh. I guess the fruit company still likes the rule breakers :-)).
I can’t talk about it specifically because I can’t talk about it so it. However so far so good but it definitely is *beta* software. Some quirks like it wiping out your existing contacts when you enable the exchange calendar and contact sync (the calendar sync works great… the contact sync it self not so much). However the ability to get your email and acknowledge pages without opening up your laptop is fantastic. Once I disabled contact sync and forced sync my contacts back over I was good to go.
Haven’t tried the Cisco VPN yet, have to find my profile file to load that one.
All we need now is landscape SMS and MMS support :-).
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March 4th, 2008 Yvo
So it took a week longer then anticipated but last night we booked our vacation to Aruba at the end of this month. Mmmmmm 7 days of glorious Caribbean sun.
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February 9th, 2008 Yvo
I am glad some of my faith was restored in the voters of some US states; today Barack Obama won all Democratic party caucuses and primaries being held in Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington State. Afterwards he gave a very electrifying speech quoting former great presidents (not necessarily Democrat either) such as Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR and Kennedy. Unlike the South Park episode a few years ago where the general population could either vote for a “big douchebag” or a “turd sandwich”. I hope come November we won’t be repeating those choices.
PS. In my 3 years of being a digg member this is the first time a submission of mine made the front page.
read more | digg story
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January 17th, 2008 Yvo
It occurred to me that I should write more on this blog. Alas a lot of times I don’t have something interesting to say or I have to rant about something. Then there are those moments where I truly do want to post something up but another event pops up. I guess this will be a post where those that check in once a year or blue moon will still see I’m alive and doing well.
So what’s going on with me lately? I’m still working at Classmates. Its a good job. Its different working in a larger team then I’ve had in the past. I can definitely see some good things that this already has taught me. The biggest being that everything needs to be discussed and reviewed before implemented or changed. You also have to appreciate criticism instead of hating it. The job has also taken me to Virginia twice already since I started in August. One ended up being a three week trip, the other only 3 days. I can definitely see myself continue to grow there.
Cam and I are also doing well. Christmas came and then passed leaving us with only a small debt as opposed to larger ones in the past. I gave her a nice digital SLR like camera and she got me a TiVo HD. I was finally able to retire the Comcast cable box and replace it for a $1.79 per month cable card. The relationship Cam and I have is certainly a lot better then it was in the past. I’m glad we overcame our difficulties and problems we had earlier this year.
I hope that this year I can start taking part time classes at BCC or some sort of school. While I am gaining a lot of hands on experience in working with systems and year over year I see a dramatic improvement in my skills. However I really wish to improve my communications skills and managerial skills plus I’d be nice if I could get a degree out of it eventually so I have a backbone to my experience.
Hopefully I’ll be successful in my goal and I’m sure I’ll write about it here eventually. For those that do their yearly checks to see what I’m up to… hope all is going well in your life.
Yvo
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December 5th, 2007 Yvo
Going back to good ol’ Virginia for 3 days this time instead of 3 weeks. Hopefully HP will get their sh… I mean act together so all the parts I need are there when I get there. One thing is for sure, navigating the HP support tree is helluva lot harder then getting someone from Sun on the phone.
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November 20th, 2007 Yvo
The last 3 weeks I’ve spent my time in Virginia, specifically in one of the Equinix datacenters in Ashburn. I was there to help build out a datacenter. When we arrived it was a box galore everywhere (165 HP DL365s, 50 Cisco 3750s, 30 Cisco 2960s, 2 Cisco 6500s) and the accompanying accessories for everything (supervisor cards, memory, the works). The racks and pdus had been setup, nothing else had. So over the course of 3 weeks we basically unboxed, racked, cabled and did basic configuration on everything. Hindsight is a bitch and the fact that pictures were frowned upon made it difficult to make a photo journey. However I do have 6 photos that represent what has been completed in the end.
All in all a very good trip. Got to see some of Washington DC too. WSDOT could truly learn something from VADOT concerning the implementation of roads, highways and what not.
Read the rest of this entry »
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November 3rd, 2007 Yvo
All in a day’s work. A cart full of 24 port Cisco 3750s… the 48 port variety is in another area.
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November 3rd, 2007 Yvo
I’ll be in VA / DC from November 1st through November 20th building out a new data center. Fun fun.
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