Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke
Every once in a while you need to get away for a long weekend. One of the best ways we can do that here in Phoenix is to head north into Utah for a couple of days around the Grand Staircase. For this vacation, we went up to Zion Canyon for 3 days, then headed over to Las Vegas for a night a fun before coming home.
Today I was officially made lead for a team of 7 (including myself) at work. This is a step in the right direction for my career, but it makes me very nervous at the same time. Will I be able to lead effectively? Will I be able to protect the team from the managerial details that all companies have? Will I know when to follow their ideas versus when to push my own instead? So many questions, and while I hope I know the answers the only way to know is to go through the experience.
When Karelia released Sandvox a little over a year ago I was quite excited at some of the capabilities it had. The simplicity of the program, the ease of tweaking designs and styles, and the highly extensible plugin API all were very appealing. Unfortunately it has some flaws, but I am hopeful those are or will be addressed as time goes on. Also, some of the flaws can be corrected via plugins.
Every once in a while everyone needs a change in their lives. If you go to long without having one, you become complacent and too set in your ways. I recently decided that I needed such a change and that employment was what needed to be changed. For the past 5 ½ years I have worked in the PKI group inside of Wells Fargo, but on Monday I will be working for a major internet company in the Phoenix metro area.
Because I was at Wells Fargo for so long I because the primary architect for the PKI, designing the interaction of the various components, what should be firewalled from what, how they would communicate, and how the systems would be built. This included major hardware consolidation using virtualization, database consolidation, clustering and redundancy systems, and overall network design. By the time I finished all of these projects, I had the entire network design for our systems memorized (mainly because I designed it). I had also reduced the amount of work for scheduled…
It will happen. The Anne-Marie I married will be resurrected 1 week from today at 5pm. At that time, she will walk out of her current employer's office a human being, no longer subject to 60+ hour work weeks, minimal recognition, and high levels of stress. It was a long time in the making, but the right opportunity finally arose.
A little over a week ago, while I was working in San Francisco, AM woke up and decided she had to do something to escape her current job. While this was nothing new, the fact that she did find a job posting that interested her was. The job description was a little vague, but it looked promising. So, after polishing up her resume a little, she sent it in. Later that day the company's HR person called to setup an interview for Thursday and answer any questions she had. AM found out the pay range she would be looking at, and how many hours would be expected. She also found out that she would be an hourly employee, so even if there was overtime
, she…
© 2007 Chris Giard and Anne-Marie Pleau