Rick the Red's Journal: Job Change and other personal matters

Well, it's official: I'm now a house-husband! I've been one for quite some time now, and late last year we decided to have me give up the job search and concentrate on the house and kids. Now it's official, as I've listed "house-husband" as my occupation on my taxes. It's been "engineer" since 1980, so this is quite a traumatic change for me.

On to the other personal matters: We're going through a life-change right now. We're clean-sweeping our house and our lives. We've been in this house for 10 years now and it's still not finished -- no baseboards, the basement is a warehouse without any sheetrock, etc. Meanwhile, we've managed to fill every nook and cranny with junk. So the new rule is: if we haven't used it in 2 years, out it goes. We've got two piles in the basement, Keep and Sell, and two more in the garage, Goodwill and Garbage. I may have more to say about this as time goes on, I don't know.

Meanwhile, the relevance to Slashdot is that I'm going to make the time to work on some open-source projects I've had on the back burner for far too long. Like upgrading my firewall, for starters, and building a server with Samba, Kerberos, and LDAP. Simple things to a Slashdot geek, but I haven't had the time. Lots of plans for things like Squid to block the kid's access to the internet, etc. I've also got some casemod ideas, in case network administration isn't enough to keep me busy.

I guess I'm posting this publicly to shame myself into following through with these plans :-) Wish me luck!

Good luck then...

[Allen Zadr]

If you can swing it... you are actually in the perfect position to start a consultancy... you don't need the income immediately, and you could build yourself a business from the ground-up, for the right reasons.

Re:Good luck then...

[Rick the Red]

Thanks for the encouragement. Yeah, I've considered it, but I'll have to broaden my skills first, as I've been almost exclusively in testing for the last 9 years. A consultancy or any other business will have to wait until the basement is finished and the 19 month-old is a bit more independent -- right now I have to watch her like a hawk :-)

Re:Good luck then...

[Allen Zadr]

If you can build a working box (without using Windows) with Kerberos and Samba, you are already skilled enough to do small-office work.

A buddy of mine down in Florida is doing servers for businesses ready to network more than two computers, including (at his option) doing the call-back support of these systems... regular patching, etc.

You'd be amazed at how many small businesses have need for someone to come in at a reasonable price - without an upsell agenda (like the Geek Squad), and build them an inexp