Last Time For Big Blue

2012-01-08 23:29:16

I am about to embark on my last travel week for IBM. I’ve got one week to turn over my responsibilities and then I’m finished. The hard part will probably by “excavating” my IBM laptop and pulling out all of my personal information from all the rest of the garbage that I’ve carried around – some of it for almost 10 years. It will be good to get a laptop without all that stuff – with an empty “My Documents” folder. Of course, I’ll instantly fill up the “My Pictures” folder with all my digital pictures, but that’s okay I suppose…One of the many things I’ll miss at IBM is the IBM hardware I get to play with. I’ll probably have to borrow my friends’ Employee Purchase Program periodically to keep my computer fetish satisfied.

At least I’ll get to sit in the front of the plane this week…

One More Week

I am just about to wrap up my penultimate week at IBM. The moving process is going to be accelerated and probably quite a bit uncomfortable – especially for Laura as she has to do quite a few things by herself while I’m working in DC. The trick will be to get everything squeezed into the time alloted. It looks as if we will have to be moved out of Houston by the first week of July.

This is a bit faster than I expected… but I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

Ah, well: time to get back on the plane…

Going Over To The Dark Side

2012-01-08 23:29:15

Now I’ve gone and done it. Big changes are coming down the pipe. I’m not sure I’m prepared for so many changes all at once, but I’ll have to deal with it, I suppose. “What have you done?” you ask. I have tendered my resignation to Big Blue and will be departing the company soon. I will now go “over” and work for the “Evil Empire” of Microsoft (as my Mac friends usually put it). The biggest change, though, is that for this job, Laura and I will have to relocate to the Washington, DC area. It’s not a bad area, and I’ve been getting used to it on my current project.

This is one change that’s very two-sided. I will enjoy the ability to be outside in the summer without melting, but will miss the vast quantities of Tex Mex restaurants. I will enjoy the luxury of being home with Laura on a daily basis, but we will both miss our Texas-based families dearly. [I already miss my Wyoming-based family since I only get to see them once a year or so…]

Work-wise, I think this move is very necessary since at IBM, Microsoft specialists are limited in how far up the chain they can go. Not so at Microsoft, of course. Plus, in my almost 10 years at IBM, I have become so familiar with the system and the way of working that I have become somewhat complacent. This change will shake me up – make me uncomfortable. And that’s just where I need to be: challenged. I’ll be challenged in all kinds of ways. Now, I will not be at the top of the food chain, but somewhere in the middle and forced to strive harder for recognition. I will not be intimately familiar with all the rules, so I will have to learn more to make sure I know where my boundaries are. I need that kind of challenge. I need to get off my butt [and off the plane!] and stimulate my brain more. I can do that better at Microsoft.

So, IBM: “So long, and thanks for all the fish!” [Douglas Adams]

The Windy City

Sure is windy here… The lake-effect wind is blowing rather briskly through the streets here in Chicago. It’s almost like another winter, which is fine with me, but not quite so wonderful for Laura.

We’ve arrived here safely in Chicago at the beginning of our much-needed vacation. I’ll be showing her some of my favorite restaurants and we’ll go touring here together – something I really didn’t get to do before as I was here to work.

I know what you’re probably thinking: “Hasn’t this guy complained endlessly about the amount of travel he does? So what does he do on vacation but hop on yet another airplane?!?!” Yeah – I think I’m crazy, too. One reason I liked the job in the beginning is that I love travel – I have discovered that I want to do it on my terms. So: barely a day’s turnaround and I’m back out of Houston and off to Chicago. I’m hoping to take some really good pictures of the city with the new wide-angle lens Laura got me for our anniversary. I know I’ll be playing with my new toy…

Of course, the real difficulty I’ll have here is choosing which restaurants to go to and which of my old favorites I have to pass up…

Soon To Come: Vacation!

That much-needed time of relaxation approaches for the first week of May when Laura and I take a two-year anniversary trip to Chicago. That’s right: two years! Congratulation, Us! Two years and still in love! That’s a record so far – one I intend to break every year.

I haven’t really had a vacation in quite a while as the last vacation I had was interrupted with the death of my good friend Jason. So, this time we hope to relax both mentally and emotionally – but probably not physically. Chicago is a walkin’ town. We certainly won’t rent a car except maybe one or two days. So, we’ll be walking to dinner, walking to sight-see, walking to… well, anything. The walking should help us digest the local cuisine.

Yum! Chicago Pizza! And, yes, Robert: Goose Island beer.

Slow Month… Sort Of

I know you’ve been eagerly awaiting my next post, but I can tell you that not too much is going on. Or: maybe I’m just too busy; or even maybe all of my complaints are the same and you’ve already heard them before. Whatever the reason, I’ve not posted much this month. In fact, after last month’s record number of posts, I’m down to two for the first half of this month. I must have hit writer’s block.

What has been going on with me, you ask? Well, I have taken some good pictures of the cherry blossoms here in DC and did that again this morning in better light.

I’ve also been experimenting with network-wide anti-spam products so that I can keep my mailboxes clean. After working with Laura on a slide-show presentation eulogizing Jim Kiley [another friend of ours who passed away recently], we’ve decided that I need to re-install her machine fresh so that we can rid it of it’s legacy of Windows 98 and old software as well as the infestation of spy-ware that is on it. After cleaning and reinstalling that machine [as well as my own desktop which had a serious bout of “crash” this weekend], I will look into transferring my firewall to a Linux box and maybe adding some anti-spam filtration on that [since it’s free…] instead of the setup I have now. I haven’t quite decided what I want to do, but I know I want to do something to keep the garbage from coming into my network.

So: if anyone knows of some good free-ware or open source anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-spy-ware, firewall products out there, post a comment…

The Blossoms

They are comin’ out now. Those famous little cherry blossoms of Washington, DC. I drove by one of the groves tonight on my way into town and saw several trees all… well, blossomed. Most, however, are being lazy. I suspect that I’ll be able to get some good pictures mid-week or so. It was dark, so I couldn’t really tell what the state of “blossoming” really is, but a least a few trees did have a bit of a “glow”.

I must say that the weather has warmed nicely for just such an event as taking pictures of trees outside. It’s much more mild than it’s been in a long time here. I guess that’s what they call Spring. Living in Houston, we just kinda skip straight on to Summer, so I don’t really have too much experience with it. It’s rather nice.

Happy Easter!

I hope everyone is having a happy Easter today. Me, I’m having a good day – especially since I’m not leaving for DC until tomorrow. I get a full day more to spend at home with my wife. For such blessings as this I am truly thankful. I hope you, too, are spending some time with loved ones today.

Server Downsize: Part II

2012-01-08 23:29:14

I have now transfered my second server into a small form factor case. The web server now resides in a cube taking up about one fourth of the space that the old tower did. I must say, I like it. My next move will be to downsize my desktop case into a small box. Then, I’ll have just scads of room. Of course, it wasn’t all easy this time.

Last time, I had trouble finding Windows 2003 drivers for all of the hardware devices so I decided to take that box and use it for the Linux web server as there was more support for the chipset in Linux. First, I got a different Shuttle case for the Windows box and swapped the innerds [that’s how we say it in Texas, you know] into it. Once it came up, all was wonderful – all devices were identified and drivers found. That done, I then moved the Linux box parts into the previous case, which sports an nVidia chipset. Linux loves these. On install and boot-up, Linux discovered the changes and all went wonderfully… until: Bam. Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t load the site from my laptop. I wondered what was happening, so I switched my KVM over to my Linux box only to find strange error codes on screen. I restarted and the machine promptly decided to turn itself off.

After trying to figure out what the cryptic messages on screen meant, I walked over to the machine and noticed that it was quite warm. I thought that maybe something wasn’t configured right or my hard drive was just about to spin itself off it’s spindle. Upon opening the case, I began to disassemble everything. The poor little box was way overheated and I didn’t know why. It didn’t do this last time. So, I though that maybe I should re-seat everything and apply new thermal grease to the CPU heat sink. As I was removing the CPU fan I noticed a very strange thing: the fan WASN’T PLUGGED IN! Doh!

The fan is plugged in and all is cool now. It just goes to show: even people who do this a lot sometimes forget the simple things.