October 10th is my last day as an Oracle DBA. After that – I start working as a person who provides technical resources to all of our staff over seas.
When a lot of people hear IT – they immediately think help desk. I’ve never done help desk. I’ve been a developer and done lots of application admin type stuff over the years – but no help desk. I end up in that role on an informal basis every so often, but I think everybody in my line of work runs into that.
The team I am joining, the Global Technology Office, is not all that big. So everybody pitches in wherever they are needed. It can mean lots of things. But what I’ve been told will be my little niche is providing help to developers outside the US that want to interface their systems with ours. An example would be someone out there trying to get WordPress or Drupal working with our identity management system.
This means I get to spend a lot of time focusing on stuff I really want to do – working with open source software. I can’t wait. It also means lots more working with MySQL. You have to take the bad with the good I guess. I’m stoked though – this is going to be really cool.
Browsing Posts in Work
I’ve been meaning to give F9 a spin for some time, as I mentioned a bit back. Just haven’t had time to knock it out. But yesterday I picked up a new-to-me machine and that will become my new linux box. It’s an HP home entertainment type system. It had XP on it, my net install of Fedora 9 is almost half done.
Tropical Storm Fay is supposed to be blowing through some time today so they shut down schools and my office. So I’m working on my laptop over the VPN while the install chugs along. Kind of worked out nicely.
The new tower is an HP Media Center Photosmart PC m7170n. It was a work machine for a co-worker but he just upgraded to an new one. It’s got a 4 gHz processor, 3 gig of ram and 250 gig of storage. The machine it replaces had a 2gHz processor, 2 gig of ram and 25 gig or so of storage – so this is a nice step up on every front.
It has lots of media oriented extras that I will probably never use – this will be at my desk in the office. But it should run Fedora very nicely, give me all the dev tools I need and even let me host stuff I’m working on nicely.
Well – I am working too. Trying to get some Jesus Film databases all set for them, so I guess I’d better get back to that.
Ingrid was bugging me today because I haven’t posted in my blog in a long time. That’s just how dorky we are.
We’ve all been sick so I feel I have a good reason. And work has been keeping me pretty busy.
The biggest events on our calendar right now are my parent’s visit and our trip to Mexico. My mom and dad get here tomorrow night. Hopefully they wont get sick, that would be a bummer. They are staying with us in our house.
We leave for Mexico on the 30th, Mom and Dad will stay here with the kids. It is going to be a full week. We are doing campus ministry, community work and somewhere in there I’m supposed to help them whip up a contact management system of some kind (don’t have a lot of details on that yet.) We are only there 5 days (2 days travel make it a full week) and I’m sure they will be a blur.
I just finished a 2 and a half day ITIL training class. Took a test to be certified at the Foundation level. We’ll see how that turned out in a few days.
I have a desktop machine at work that runs Linux. I’ve had Fedora core 5 on there for some time. I decided that I wanted to bump it up to Fedora 7. I jumped on over to the Fedora Project site with the intention of downloading cd images for the install. Apparently that is no longer how they do it. I could only find images for a dvd, live cd or boot cd. I guess you can install from the live cd – but I decided that instead I would try a net install. continue reading…
I’m getting more involved at work – which is good as it is why I’m here. It’s not as good for keeping up with the blog. NaNoWriMo really killed things off too. But the big thing is that in the last few weeks I’ve really started getting more involved with work stuff. I’m glad, it’s good to finally be able to really contribute to the team. For a long time, my team lead was on his own and shouldered a huge amount of work. He still does, but I’m hoping that maybe he can finally start getting some breaks if I can help out more.
We got a few new servers. We are greatly expanding our capacity and taking on some new projects that should be pretty cool. It’s a fun time to be working here. Busy, but fun.
