Trying to get a handle here…

…but I’ve been sparse lately. I actually had written several posts that sat in draft and never published, that are now irrelevant. So I’ll hit publish on the ones that are ok, and ignore the oldies.

Anyway, I’m going to try to get in the habit of putting things here again, and digging into a little that is not my forte. e.g, I’m thinking about doing a PMP cert and working on project management. An RHCE with a PMP could be most formidable, indeed. Since being in engineering for as long as I have been, I have become fairly adept at managing projects, as that’s my day to day workload. I think I might be able to branch out to other areas and spread out past just the linux world.

Brave new world…

Chromebooks. We got a few… Acer C7’s.

The twins each got one, and I have one as well. They see to be good little teaching machines.

I’ve already spun Ubuntu onto mine, and will show the kids how to do theirs when they’re ready to load them.

Looking into flashing the bios and possibly adding some other bootloader…these are fairly locked down OOTB. Looks like it’s time to do some good hacking. 🙂

 

Edit: This post was written back in December, I just forgot about it and it was sitting in draft for months.

So…my boys turned 11 this month. This was their 11th birthday present…

Friday evening, we’re taking the train to Orlando and going to Universal Studio’s Hogwarts theme park for the weekend. The boys have wanted to go since it opened. Bonus: they don’t have to take their sister…Grandma is going over to house/puppy/sister sit. 🙂

These are what they found at the front door when they woke up that morning.

 

Actively considering starting a charity….

I have been toying with this for a while, and think I might actually start the paperwork.

The company I work for does a fair amount of charity work. One charity they support is designed to give kids refurbished computers. I thought I might like getting in on that, but there’s a catch. The install Microsoft Windows on every machine.

I really can’t bring myself to help spread Microsoft’s dope. Getting their claws into kids early, and forcing schools to use Windows has literally kept kids from learning other ways of doing thing- even free ones. Accounts of uneducated people telling kids that they have to use Windows for legal reasons or warranty reasons are abound. It’s a bit frightening. (Want a real world example? Google “HeliOS and AISD”.)

At any rate, I’m all for getting computers in the hands of underprivelidged kids, the sooner the better. What I’d really like to do is TEACH the kids HOW to use computers, and not just how to use Windows Continue reading Actively considering starting a charity….

So, updates are in order…

I did end up leaving my contract position in April. Twice, actually.

I was not particularly happy with the previous employer, as an environment. Not a bad place to work, great people, good assortment of hardware….but they were/are a “company in flux”. That phrase came from a colleague of my new recruiter who had also recently left my previous company. 🙂

It’s not anyone’s fault, per se, but the corporate direction was less a business plan, and more a funeral plan. The upper management seemed to be far more concerned with getting someone to buy us out than to actually run the company. (They were on year 5.5 of a 5-year plan.)

At any rate, I started entertaining offers, and man did they come fast and furious. Continue reading So, updates are in order…

The job market is definately improving for those with a little bit of Linux in their CV…

And how. I am getting daily calls from recruiter looking for Linux experience. I am still receiving calls based on a resume I uploaded four years ago, too.

For the record, I have NOT been looking, just getting approached, repeatedly. Like at LEAST 10 times a day. Some days more, but a quick look at my ‘Droid and I can see that barring holidays and weekends, there’s not been a single day in the last three months where I didn’t get at least that many.

Sure, about half are relocation offers, which I’m really not interested in at the moment, but that leaves half that aren’t. Of those, a good half are ones I really have no business doing (mostly because I would be considerably overqualified, and the pay is not in the realm…but not always.) The remaining ones are really in my zone.

I’d been looking to exit the Contract I’m in now (seeing as how it expired back in October, and they weren’t in a position to keep me in that location, nor were they willing to have anyone in my role as a FTE.) I’ve been on several interviews, and had a couple offers that were simply not good enough to get me to jump ship, but that day is coming soon, I think.

 

**Bootnote… I had saved this to my drafts last month instead of posting…See new post.**

Technical Info for Technical Recruiters

EDIT:Originally posted 2012, updated for 2016…

I am a mid-to-advanced-career techie. I have been working in, on, around, near, over, under, and through computers and networks for  literally as long as I can remember. I got my first computer at 10, now almost 30 years ago, and was the local geek for years. I’ve been paid to work on computers for nearly 25 years. I realize that doesn’t make me an expert per se, but it means I have a bit of insight into the tech world. Sure, there may be more knowledgeable people for this post, I concur, but it seems nobody else has taken the time to set it to text.

So, here goes.  TECHNICAL RECRUITERS: you could learn a lot by paying attention here.

A technical job is going to be able to be broken down into a few categories. Many of these overlap, and I understand it gets confusing, but here’s a few quick breakdowns:

Job types in tech fields:

Administration world… (Key words: Microsoft Windows, Linux, Unix, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Sun, Active Directory, Virtualization, OpenStack , AWS, VMWare, LDAP, Apache, IIS, LAMP… ) Continue reading Technical Info for Technical Recruiters