It has been quite a month. There is a lot to tell, but I think I just get it out a little a at time.
Once again the renewals for a number of domain I hold have come up. Whenever this happens, I always get a little depressed. Not because the registrar always seems to squeeze me for a little more, or because handling the registration for family and friends means I have to invoice family and friends (distasteful). It always bugs me because most of the domains are just sitting idle.
Each one was registered with a specific idea in mind, and each on is still not much more than that idea. Most of these have a couple of pages in my LittleBlackBook, and some even have code and design work done, but I have not yet put anything into the wild. I think it’s because I’m a bit of a baby.
As soon as I release a site that is all mine, it’s out there. There’s no taking it back. It will be a representation of me and the quality of my work; A reflection of my talent and ability. Generally, I’m not sensitive about my work. I’m pretty confident that I know what I’m doing and that I’m reasonably good at it. For some reason, when It comes to my personal projects, I’m just a big baby. Well, baby, no more.
Time to get my shit right. Check this space for a first release of my first release.
You know you’ve been neglecting your duties when people start to ask “Are you done blogging?”
No, I’m not done, just busy…er.
I Just wrapped up my 3rd week back at the University, and it has been pretty good. Still running 1 monitor (boo!) but I haven’t brought any work home yet (yeah!). It has been interesting being back, though it’s not really “back.” The place has changed a lot, and so have I. Both of us have seen a bit of growth over the past 18 months. Plus, I in a different position than I was before. I’m actually working with the guy who replaced me: Eric. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday was my last day at what is now my PreviousJob. The scheduled team farewell lunch was canceled (too much work), but my boss wrote a poem entitled Ode to Charles. It was nice. I’ve got some stuff to take care of these next few days, and I’ll be starting my CurrentPosition (at Cardinal Stritch University) on Monday.
It has been my experience that when a person leaves a company, (some) people that remain use their absence as a way to either cover up their own mistakes/failures or to boost their own image. This is just a crumby way to be, but it does raise an interesting set of issues and challenges if the person who left comes back. I expect to have to deal with some of this at my CurrentPosition.
I started work there in April of 2002 with the useful instruction “Build an Intranet.” That was it… that was the whole job, and so I did. Here’s the situation at the time:
We were running this terrible email server [IMail]
The Windows Domain+Active Directory was very new and not really ready for prime time
We had contracted with a small local company on a few projects… they elected to use ColdFusion (yikes!)
I was not provided any information about the web-based student information system we’d purchased but not yet implemented
ASP.NET was still 1.0 and was not being used anywhere else in the organization
I knew some Classic ASP and knew that is sucked… bad!
I new a fair amount of PHP
And so, I built the intranet suite with PHP and MS-SQL, eventually integrating it with the new MS-Exchange server, the new student information system, Active Directory, and the financial aid systems. I knew that my boss had taken a chance hiring me and I wanted to make sure that he did not regret it, so I turned this project around in a few months. It was still being used 5 years later, though it had needed a lot of attention.
Somewhere along the line, the University decided to redesign their marketing website and needed a CMS solution. The site was pretty complex and required integration with a number of internal systems, so a custom solution seemed in order. PHP and MS-SQL had served well for the intranet and there was a bit of a time crunch, so the new custom StritchCMS was built onto the Intranet. Almost as soon at that was finished, the new version of the student information system was released, shiny and new with .NET, and so we had to get this up and running. It was not a bad system, but it was a big change in the way the University did business. This was good news and had the potential to really move the University forward. The bad news was that the head of my department decided that this new system would not be supported by the PC Support area. Instead, all support calls related to this University wide, paradigm changing, not-entirely-welcome application would be supported by one person: Me.
And that, dear friends, is when things started going downhill. More hacks where put in place to address short term needs, more projects were delayed and delayed as more and more time was spent supporting this application (not to mention the Intranet and the CMS, neither of which were supported by the PC Support area). Sleep was lost… hair was lost… motivation was lost. It sucked, and I ended up leaving an organization I believed in and had genuinely enjoyed.
But, you may be asking yourself, why would I go back to that? Here’s why:
New boss; Right before I left, the University had hired a new head of the technology department. I participated in the selection process, and I thought she would be great… but I left before she started.
New position; I’m returning to the University in a new position, doing more front end, consumer facing stuff.
Same mission; I always thought that the work the University did was important and it was difficult to leave.
Gotta get back to school; My PreviousJob didn’t really allow me the time or $$$ to get back to school.
I think it’ll be good… and maybe people took the high road.
If you don’t know, now you know: I’m headed back to my old employer (though in a new position). My 18 months in the advertising and marketing world have been interesting, but in a few short weeks, I’ll be headed back to the high-minded work of getting more butts in seats at Cardinal Stritch University. It was a difficult choice on a number of levels, but I’m confident that it’s the RightThing[tm]. I’m going to consult with Versant for a while, but once I’m back in school (a very sweet benefit) I’ll probably need to focus on that.
It’s an interesting thing to return to a previous place of employment. I’ve begun the process of reconnecting with people I used to work with. Some people have new jobs, a lot of people have new bosses. Pretty much everyone is in a new location on campus. I expect my first day will be a surreal mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. I have no illusions about things being as they were, and frankly, my confidence that things will not be as they were was a major factor in my decision making process. The good news is that I am not as I was, either.
A lot of growth can happen in 18 months.
Oh, and here’s a little Kweli:
That was the 1st Kweli I heard on Channel 8: the Box.
Every couple of months I get it in my head that Linux is the OS for me, and every couple of months I end up spending a couple of days getting Windows re-installed on my PC (in fairness, you could reverse those and still have a correct statement). Last week included one of those days…
This time I’d decided that getting OSX running on my PC would be neat (somehow I forgot about the huge amount of actual work I need to do on this, my only computer). I spent a couple of days researching, and another day or two downloading a completely legitimate and wholly legal version of x86OSX. This install went very smoothly, if a little slow, and I was all set for all of the Aqua goodness that awaited me. The only issue was that the dang thing locked up on the first reboot.
Power off. Try again.
No love.
This was just enough to remind me that I was wasting time jerking around with an OS designed for a specific set of hardware, which I do not have, for s specific group of people, to which I do not belong. Good thing I made a quick restore backup before I jumped into this ill-advised mess.
Power off. Power on. Blue ThinkVantage button. Utility partition gone.
W T F?
So, after forcefully not throwing my unreasonably expensive tablet PC across the room, I remembered that the newest version of Ubuntu was coming out in one day. A quick search through the piles of optical media in the office turns up a v7.04 install disc. The current version is 7.10, and the new version will be v8.04. So, I went ahead and started the install and settled in for a long install/update/update process (I had to get to v7.10 before i could get to v8.04)
As Saturday, I am running Ubuntu v8.04 and I’m feeling pretty good. I’ve got the critical stuff working (WiFi, Bluetooth, trackpoint w. scroll button, browser, Eclipse w/ Aptana, Subversion stuff). The pen works, but not the pressure sensitivity, the WiFi is 100%, but the little LED indicator on the display stays off. Oh, and suddenly the battery life is for crap. Performance is good, and the mail client (Evolution) hooks right into Google Calendar! Neat.
