Just a quick entry (so I can look back on it one day if nothing else) to say that I've had to leave the States for my job for the first time. After 8 1/2 hours of driving yesterday, I made it to Bowmanville, Ontario, Canada. This was an extremely long and BORING drive. Holy crap, there is like nothing to look at while traveling the 401 from Windsor to Oshawa. Well except for the Toronto skyline as I zipped past it. Really nothing to look at though.
By the way, if you want to come up here doing work, don't tell that to the border guards. They will turn you around and send you home. I was tipped off about that and so I didn't make that mistake.
Cheers, ~ Steve
Finally! I can use Leopard. I bought it back when Apple released it. The one and only thing that kept me from using Leopard up until now was a problem with the system freezing randomly. It appeared to be something that involved my ATI X1900XT that came in my Mac Pro from the factory. Well, now that 10.5.2 was out and I also noticed a core graphics update had been released, I decided to try Leopard on my system again. Even did an upgrade this time (after backing up of course!) instead of a clean install. Guess what..... ZERO PROBLEMS!
Needless to say I am very happy.
Just got home earlier from one trip, and I've just finished packing for the next. I have a 6:00AM flight to New Hampshire out of Columbus (Ohio). Which means I need to get up at 2:30AM so I can leave by 3:20AM (I'm slow in the morning). This way I'll arrive at Port Columbus Int'l Airport about 4:30. That gives me an hour and a half to catch my flight. I could probably cut it closer, seeing as I usually have time to spare (CMH is not a particularly busy airport at 4:30-6:00 in the morning), but why push your luck, right?
I get back late Thursday night, and Friday I am taking the next core of the MCSA/MCSE (I will eventually go all the way to MCSE, but just need to get MCSA out of the way first. It's hard to work exams into my heavy travel schedule).
Oh and next week I head to Vermont for 4 days. That Friday I'll actually be on business in my home state (yay!).
One more note: New Hampshire and Vermont will be states number #16 and #17 respectively that I've been to in the last 11 months. Here is the breakdown of the states I've been to this year not including the one I live in (Ohio) and the number of times I've been there is in parenthesis.
In alphabetical order:
As I said I will be adding Hew Hampshire and Vermont to that list in the next couple weeks. Also, I'll be incrementing the number next to Kentucky the week of Thanksgiving. When I get back from that trip, I'll be taking the last core of the MCSA the day before Thanksgiving.
~ Steve
I stumbled upon a pretty decent article covering a review of Mac OS X 10.5 Server (Leopard).
On of my favorite parts of the article is a reminder about how all versions of OS X reside on the same disk. In fact, every installation is all things: Intel/PPC/32bit/64bit. From TFA:
The installation DVD contains 32- and 64-bit code for Intel and PowerPC Mac platforms. In fact, every in-place build of Leopard is 32/64 and Intel/PPC. To test Apple's claims, we built a server on a dual G5 server using an external Firewire drive as our boot partition. We then successfully booted and ran Leopard from the Firewire drive on a six-year-old dual G4 Xserve and a 13" Macbook (32-bit platforms) and Xeon and G5 Xserves for 64-bit goodness. All platforms had wildly different hardware configurations, yet the OS ran without a single issue on each box, all server functionality intact.
Anyone out there willing to try that with Windows 2003?
Muahahaha!
Well, I upgraded to Leopard. In fact I'm writing this journal entry on my freshly upgraded MacPro right now. I remember a comment on a forum ( I don't remember which site I was reading at the time ) where some people were afraid of Leopard running slower than Tiger. I remember one person say something along the lines of "every upgrade was faster for me from 10.0 through 10.3, but 10.4 was a slight downgrade in performance. I wonder how Leopard will run?". Well for me (and take note that I do have a system that is less than a year old) the upgrade has not resulted in a performance slowdown. Actually I think my system feels snappier than it did before - if that's even possible. It was already down right quick. For those who may have forgotten or don't know, I bought a MacPro quad core 2.66GHz with 2GB of RAM back in April.
I love spaces first off. I always liked having multiple desktops on *nix and finally OS X has this functionality. And Apple added their magic touch to it. I love being able to see a bird's eye view of the spaces and being able to drag'n'drop an application from one space to another. Sure, on some *nix window managers you could drag an application window to the edge of the screen to move it over to the next space, but on most WMs you used a menu on the title bar to select which virtual desktop you wanted to send the window to.
I find Apple's additions to the Mail program interesting. It looks as though Apple is slowly adding features to both Mail and iCal that replicate the functionality of Microsoft Outlook. Only I like it better than Outlook (which I do have to use everyday at work unfortunately).
The shiny new reflective dock is intersting as well. The one thing that isn't so great about it is being able to tell which applications are running. It used to put a little black triangle under the icon of running applications. Now it is a little blue, oval-shaped light that is not bold enough to see clearly. Apple should make it brighter or try a different color.
While we're on the dock meme I might as well mention Stacks. I do like stacks. I already had a folder I called "Downloads" in my home directory, and I had an icon for it on my dock. So I was already basically the same thing, but when I used my shortcut, Finder would open the folder in a window, whereas I can click on the stack, choose my file, and the stack collapses. It saves me clicking the close button on the finder window (ok, so I'm lazy). The really cool part was that my having a folder already called downloads didn't mess anything up when I upgraded. Upon first boot I found my downloads stack sitting there, and when I clicked on it, my files fanned out like they were supposed to. I like it when things just work.
I've just began to scratch the surface of the new features, but I decided I would write about what I've used so far. So far I am a happy camper with Leopard. I can't say the same about Windows Vista on my PC.
I had a conversation today with a buddy of mine that used to work with me at my current employer. He was more or less a system administrator for us, and to our clients he was the person that came in to assess the situation and report back to HQ, so that sales could pitch a solution ("total package") to the client.
He is someone that I respect a great deal. He always valued my input on a situation (he wasn't really my supervisor, but would often be the project lead on a project I was assigned). He's also yet to steer me wrong. He also always thanked me for a job well done. And, I'll also add that he's one of those people that is technically proficient in the IT consulting world, and yet has excellent social skills as well. Liked by almost everyone. It goes a long way for him at times. I am not as socially adept, but I wish I was.
That said, he currently lives in Florida and works for a financial backer (one of the things they do is loans to small businesses). It's a stable company, with a CEO who is open to new technologies. In fact, I'm told the CEO wants to investigate using Linux in the server room (CEO hates paying MS all those licensing fees). Of course, I am a huge fan of Linux, and I have had some experience maintaining mail and web servers running Linux for a previous employer (not my current employer - they are in bed with MS). So, my contact (as I'll refer to him) is the sole systems administrator at this company and he's swamped with work these days - and the company plans to expand soon.
Getting to the point, I was griping about my current job and he said, "why not come down here and work with me?" He's got more work than he can efficiently get to these days, and he's not versed enough in Linux to offer up those Linux solutions that CEO wants to see. So, I have things to bring to the table. I am generally versed enough in Linux to support Linux on the back end (so long as it does not involve doing any programming), and I am an MCSA, and I have Cisco knowledge as well - I've just never taken the CCNA exam.
I've been told I will have some "freedom of creativity" in playing with technologies to see what may be beneficial to the company. In other words, I get to "geek around" on the job instead of at home trying out new things in a lab setting. And to top it all off, the salary offer is more than enough to offset the increase in the cost of living in moving from where I'm at (Ohio) to where he is (Florida).
"So what's holding you back?" you may be asking. Family. And friends. All of the people I care about the most are here in Dayton. I have no family in Florida. I have some relatives in Georgia, but not close to where I'd be in Florida. So I will be alone, in new territory. Not that I don't do this regularly lately. If you read my last post you'll know that I'm on the road in a new place every week as part of the current project that I'm assigned to. But I get to come home on the weekends. I have family and friends nearby. I have no significant other or kids to move with me. So unlike my weekly travels where I get to come home, this will be leaving for good. And I am just not sure I can uproot and move.
Choices, choices...
I work for a smallish company - currently somewhere between 250 and 275 people (I know we haven't hit the 300 mark yet). I've been employed for about a year and a half with them (started in May '06). And this company is a young one at 6 years of age. We seem to move at the speed of light compared to most businesses. In the year and a half I've been with the company we've outright bought one company and merged another under our brand name. And lastly we are a privately held company in the Dayton, OH area.
So I was originally hired in as the first person of a helpdesk. Only I've really never done that job for them. A helpdesk person is chained to a phone in a cubicle all day and takes calls. In the beginning, I'd take a call, and then I would have to head to the client's location and take care of the problem(s). And on top of that I'd get random paper shuffling jobs that I guess everyone else was too busy to do, so they just decided to give it to me. Fast forward to today, we do have a helpdesk these days (which has gone from myself to about 10 people), but I'm not really apart of it. No, indeed I'm pretty much still what I would term a field technician.
The company accepted a contract from a client that was to last 18 months. It's actually been shortened to 13 months, and thankfully that is up at the end of December. So for the last 11 months I have been doing what I said I would not do when I hired in (i.e. during my interviews). I would travel up to 25%. No more than that. Well from March through July I was put on a two week on the road, one week at the office rotation. OK we're up to 2/3rd travel... Then in August, the client and my employer struck up a special addon to the original client that was to last from August to the end of the original contract. Myself and 3 other poor souls/coworkers (who also had no option not to be put on this assignment) are now travelling 100% (except holidays of course) Mondays through Fridays until the end of the year.
I see my home 2 days a week: Saturday and Sunday. I have enough time to catch up on snail mail, make sure all the bills are covered, do laundry, and pack for the next round of travel. Somewhere in there I have to do some "paperwork" (its all electronic/database stored) before I leave on Monday mornings as well. I've been in 6 cities in 5 days at one point in time. I stopped counting the number of cities I've been to since I started this project after I counted fifty. And the number of states that I've been to (one of which I've been to 4 times) is up to 14. Next week I'll be heading to Illinois (15). And after that New Hampshire (16).
So what's the point? Well my salary still reflects what I did prior to this project. The closest match I could find to what I do on (looking on Salary.com) was "Field Service Engineer I". Namely, that I travel to places, install equipment (PCs, servers, and network equip), train personnel, troubleshoot broken equipment and get replacements on the way. That pretty much sums up my job description. Salary.com's profile says that the mean salary for a Field Service Engineer I based in the Dayton area is around $42,000/year. And that the low side is $36,500. Well, imagine my shock at reading that when all I get to bring home is $32k/yr. Talk about underpaid.
And it's somewhat funny (not really) at the same time. I think we just saw on Slashdot, in the not too distant past, a reference to an article about tech jobs exceeding other job sectors in compensation/benefits/whathaveyou.
Well, I'm not seeing it.....
I'd leave Ohio if it weren't for the fact that I would be leaving some really good friends behind, and the only family that I care about. I've seen some nice jobs posted OUTSIDE of Ohio.
The real kicker is that my employer is now "fishing" for a Systems Administrator. We have an IT Director whose been doing that role as well, but now that we're expanding again (significantly this time) they want to hire an SA. I applied for it, but haven't been given a definite on whether I'm going to get it or not. If I get the promotion, it would mean less travel. I'd only have to travel down to Blue Ash every now and then.
If anyone out there cares - cross your fingers for me. Then again, I'd be managing Windows servers...
I have to go to Philadelphia in a week. I've been to quite a few places in Pennsylvania, but not to Philly specifically, so this should be interesting. I've done a decent bit of traveling since I started my new job. In the last year I've been to...
Later!
Well, it has arrived. Wow. This Mac is a monster (both in size AND computing power). It is amazing just how fast this thing flies around OS X. I've yet to install anything other than Firefox and run software update, so I have four cores that aren't getting much exercise at the moment. (That comes very soon!).
One of the first things I am going to grab next is the MacFUSE package.
Oh and having a whole bunch of windows/apps open simultaneously without anything skipping a beat is sweet. I mean not even a hesitation.
OK, I guess that's enough geeking out for now...
I finally did it. I've ordered a new Mac with the intention of switching the majority of my computing tasks to a Mac...
I've played with Macintosh computers off and on since 2001. And even prior to that in middle school - the first computer I ever touched was in fact a Macintosh (I don't remember which model - but it was black & white only I do remember that!). Through friends and in high school however, I was introduced to the "intel-compatible PC" (Mac is part of that crowd now... heh). I became fascinated with DOS and Windows 3.1 after taking computer literacy classes in highschool. And somewhere around the end of my junior year I was introduced to Red Hat Linux 5. My fascination with Windows wore off around the time Windows XP was released. And as I've reinvestigated the Mac, I find that with the newer OS X (and classic but a memory) I like Macs this time around.
Of course, the last straw that pushed me over the edge is Vista. I can't avoid getting to know that OS completely, I realize. My job won't allow that. I *will* be doing support for Vista soon I am sure. However, I can limit my Windows exposure at home. It will be here just to keep up with the Microsoft world and not much more (hooray for Parallels). I've pretty much given up on gaming anyway - the games are getting lame/stagnant (or I'm just not interested anymore?). I did option out my Mac Pro with an ATI X1900XT 512MB just in case I decid to pick up a Mac port of a game I like sometime down the road though.
So, I opted for a Mac Pro tower. The specs of which are:
I think that'll do for a while.
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
