Well. Had a mini LAN yesterday. My boy slept ’til after noon! Thanks to The_Sader for comin’ all the way down to get smacked on! I think everybody had a good time. I know I did.
ROC coming up August 25-26.
Just when I think things can’t get any better, something else pops up. In my race to find a new job, I had mistakenly left out calculating in ‘On-Call‘ pay.
$4000 I make up in gas
+ On-Call money pay
- the minor pay cut I took taking the job
= an 18% increase. Woo Hoo!!!
It all hasn’t been a smooth road lately however. I’m having a hard time adjusting from a stressful situation to one that has next to no stress. Isn’t that a pity. 
I’ll talk a bit more about the old ’stressful’ part. Maybe it will stop….
Whoops. Had a page for work. VPN -> UltraVNC -> Reset AS/400 -> Done in 2 minutes. Damn I love this!!!
…(continue) me from feeling like I have a deadline or something.
At the first of the year, a new boss was put in charge of the I.T. department. I was ecstatic! Finally. I had been biting my tongue for a long time on what I knew needed to be changed. I documented all my concerns in a paper and hand delivered it to the new boss. I received ‘zero’ feedback. After I saw I had no room for promotional gain; I hit Michigan Works, Dice, Monster, and M-Live…. HARD!! I dared not post my resume to an online site for fear of the repercussions before I had another position lined up. Ironically, it was word of mouth that landed me the last position.
Sorry. This is some stuff I wrote a few weeks ago to help me adjust with the change. I had held my feelings in for so long that I needed to get them out. Just trying to set a few more nails into ‘closure’.
I’ve been screwing around with VMWare Server for the last few weeks. I’m amazed by the number of preconfigured Virtual machines (appliances) that can be had via their website too. Need a database server? Grab a pre-configured nano-sized Linux distro with MySQL already configured. Fire up the server image in VMWare, and voila, you have a fully working MySQL database, with web based administration, within 2 minutes. I shit you not. Log into the system with VMWare, change the root password, find it’s IP address, and point a web browser to it. Then all ya gotta do is start creating databases and tables. I downloaded the MySQL ODBC for Windows and Boom!, I have a nice place to store data via Access.
Right now I’m using a SLAX Linux virtual machine to browse and send email.
Wow. That’s probably the most links I’ve ever put in a post before.
I’m flying solo for the next few days. My partner at work is going on vacation for a few days. I think I can handle most issues. My biggest problem is knowing about the multitude of different software systems that are strewn thought the organization. From imaging, file transfers, dictation systems, and billing… all the way down to VPN and RAS. I’ve been documenting my ass off with Word documents so I’m mostly prepared to do anything, I think. I’ve also been looking at Cisco training courses…
I actually spent the weekend reading books on Visual Basic 2005. It’s nice to feel like I’m not wasting my time learning an old programming language. Hell. Microsoft has the Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition available for free for Christ sakes! And I’m sure glad I didn’t attempt to learn VB6 any more than I had to because VB2005 is so much different. I don’t feel like I’m learning the past. I do feel like I’m preparing for the future.
I wrote a few programs already to automate some FTP/Encryption/Compression jobs. I have a few other tasks to work on but for the most part, they’re small.
I got me a pager now and this is the first week I’m on call. Oddly enough, I had a call as soon as I got home! It kicks ass that I was able to VPN right into my Desktop at work and take care of it. I guess the only good part of being on call is that I get paid for it. 
Other things I got going on? Well, I’m in the process of rebuilding my TAIL router. I found an AMD mobo that will except a socket 462 cpu and has an ISA slot. I filled it with an AMD Athlon XP 1700+ and 384MB of PC-133 SDRAM. I installed W2KPro and VMWare Server on it. I hope to have a virtual RedHat 7.3 machine running. I’ll post my results when I get time to play with it more.