I recently mentioned that I was going to try starting to post more again, and so here is my attempt at rebooting myself…
What am I doing?
Too much, but that’s not uncommon. Actually, whilst my plate is very full, I’ve not felt like doing anything, and I think some other people observe the same kind of issues. When I get overloaded, I shut down for a bit, quite literally a reboot of the brain. It normally lasts about a week or so, and then I pick up everything that I slacked on doing, and kick it out the door fast… Here is hoping this reboot starts a better path.
Work Projects
We’re still migrating all of our equipment from $old_parent_company to $new_parent_company. This is been a time consuming project because we’ve been piecemealing it, shifting parts of the environments around so we have minimal impact on our customers1. Our production environment wasn’t a migration, more of a new set of servers for most of it. This made migration easy (generally just a case of change DNS records). I’ll be in Boston for a few days next week doing the DR portion of the migration.
We also have a NetApp racked and ready to configure, just lacking time, and energy to do so. We’ve been fighting getting a SAN/NAS for a long time because we’re always pushing the storage boundaries of our various servers, now we have one, I cannot get time to work on it.
Another project on the books is putting in a Cisco VPN concentrator using 2 factor authentication. Just when I thought I was getting rid of the RSA key I’ve held so close for the last 3 years, I get another one.
Windows 2008 R2 Active Directory upgrade is somewhere on the books too, this one should be a fun one, but will lead to better support for Windows7, and Windows 2008.
Home Projects
Finish painting. I only have 2 more rooms left to go, well 2.5 if you could the bathroom, and toilet room as separate rooms.
Get back to the gym. I shocked, and depressed, myself the other day, when I got on the scales, getting a little round around the mid-section. So I’m trying to kick it up a notch. Flipped to diet soda (bleugh), using the stairs most of the time at work2, walking the dog more in the evening3, and set myself some concrete goals instead of wishy washy stuff. I’ll post more on this specific topic later.
Mobile barcode scanner for food tracking on my new toy. This ties in with the above.
Some misc electronics projects I want to play with.
Training, and lots of it. Whilst training is more of a work thing, it’s more of a personal benefit than work ever realizes. I’ve yet to get out on training courses, and I have a shipping list of the ones I want to get done. This will also be reshaping my future as my $job starts restructuring, and talking about career paths within the company.
What Else?
I joined LOPSA, I’m hoping this might allow me to get more contact with people outside of work, and in my areas of interest.
I’m working on cleaning up my time management skills. I now have a todo list longer than my arm on my phone so I know I’m less likely to forget stuff, I still have 300 unread messages in my work inbox (not counting pre-filtered stuff).
Start working with the mutt on training, and obedience. He is generally a well mannered dog, generally listens, but recently he has been getting a little, er, grouchy, towards other dogs. I need to find him some more hunting games to play, and work with him on that.
Cleaning house… Well in a metaphorical type of sense. I realized this evening as my google reader counter rolled over the 1000+ items yet again, that I probably have far too many lists, and I need to clean up. I also need to start actually reading offline too, especially as I have a few tech books I want to get through.
We’ll have to see how this all falls apart, and how well I manage to reboot, and get things shuffled along.