Life Stuff

At first, I didn't think I was going to be able to, but after mentioning the idea around and getting amused-but-positive feedback, I'm now walking at work again. I'm in a cubicle, but I'm kind of stuck back in a corner. So there's really only one person who can hear the treadmill and he said he didn't mind since he usually wears headphones anyway.

My setup is basically the same: same treadmill with keyboard, monitor and trackball on a raised desk. The cube is furnished with this modular furniture that attaches to the wall, so I just had to attach the main desk at the correct height.

The one main difference is my cooling setup. Before, I had two, sometimes three, fans blowing on me as I walked. Here, the entire building is on raised floors with the air conditioning being pumped under the whole floor and then into the office via vents in the floor tiles. To keep me cool now, I've just found a couple extra vented tiles and put one on either side of the treadmill, blowing cold air on me on both sides. I've found that if I'm not walking I actually need to cover one of them up or I get really cold.

In addition to walking, I'm trying to get back into eating better. Basically, I'm just going back to what I outlined in this post way back when.

So, I'm employed! After almost two months of unemployment with no job offers I received two offers last week. One was for a small company in downtown DC as the sole systems administrator; the other was for a huge company that does work for the government among other things, including manufacturing.

And while the whole time I was saying that, all else being equal, I would prefer to work for a small company, all else wasn't equal and I took the big company's offer. I'm now an employee of ITT's Advanced Engineering & Sciences division working on a long-term contract at the Naval Research Laboratory.

I'm working as a Linux Systems Administrator with a huge amount of technology that I've never worked with before (some, I've never even heard of). The sheer scale of things is pretty amazing/terrifying. Previously, the largest storage system I've built (or even had contact with) is right around one terabyte; I asked about how much storage we are dealing with at NRL and various systems are into the tens and even hundreds of terabytes. Everything's clustered and redundant and big. It's pretty cool.

I wrote several more paragraphs going through the factors influencing my selection, but when I hit save it kicked me out and didn't save. I'm not going to rewrite the whole thing, so he's a quick list:

• Money: both were the same
• Dress code: casual, jeans & t-shirts ok (this is big to me)
• Commute: small company wins. Downtown DC vs. across the Wilson Bridge (notorious traffic hot spot for you non-DC types). This was a big hesitation. I can slug straight into DC, but I pretty much have to drive to NRL. I tried slugging one day this week, but it was pretty ugly.
• Government bureaucracy: there will definitely be more of this at NRL, but it doesn't seem too bad.
• The work: most of what I'd be doing at the small company is similar to what I've done before. I feel quite out of my depth at NRL, so it'll be way more challenging.
• Co-workers: I've never worked with other Linux admins, and I'm quite looking forward to it.
• Security Clearance: I'll get one at NRL. This is big, too. About half of the job listings I looked at required a security clearance. Without it, I couldn't even apply. Security clearance equals more job options in the future.
• Benefits: the big company's benefits are big.

Looking at this list, I don't think it does justice to my thinking on the matter. Once I had both offers in hand, there was really no contest. What I had written before was clearer on this point.

I started Tuesday.

Most of you know this already, but in case you don't, I figured I'd mention it. I don't currently have a job.

I think the last life-related entry I posted was about the fact that my new job wasn't working out and I was looking for another new job. That job wasn't working out because it wasn't really as advertised (I was expecting more cutting-edge linux stuff, but it turned out to be pretty light on linux and heavy on misc. other stuff like windows desktop support). I don't think this was malicious, I think it was just that the position was new and they didn't know exactly what it was going to be. There were some other reasons as well, but that was the main one.

I started looking for a new job about a week after I started (it was pretty apparent pretty quickly that it wasn't going to work out). I gave them notice that I was looking and I stayed on until they could get one of the other applicants in. I spent a couple days imparting the knowledge that I had acquired in that time, then I left.

That was December 18th, 2007. It's now coming up on two months of no job. It sucks.

Since then, I've been sending out resumes pretty much every day and have been on several interviews. I've also been working on various other things like my photography and I've done a lot of reading (I've been meaning to write up some reviews of the books I've read...). I've also played the Wii a lot (I'm a pro at tennis and pretty close at boxing). You'd think that I would've also been posting a lot of blog entries...

So, that's the job situation. It's lame, but I'm continuing to plug away and am confident that something will work out.

p.s. if you know anyone looking for a good Linux admin, let me know

Seriously. 2007 sucked.

Since last we met, I've started the new job. Also, I've started looking for another new job. This one isn't working out. It kind of sucks that that it isn't working out, but at least I realized it sooner rather than later.

I never got around to blogging about the second concert I had seen. It was Morrissey at Constitution Hall. It was a great show, but now it's too late to really blog. I'll just say that due to some cosmic fluke we ended up right against the stage for almost the entire concert and that I ended up with a piece of Moz's Dolce and Gabbana shirt and a drumstick. Oh yeah, I also hopped up on stage and was tackled by security. Luckily, a couple people captured it and put it on YouTube (I'm in the red shirt--about a minute into the first vid and right at the beginning of the second):



Lastly, I just found this photographer on flickr who shoots a lot of photos of dogs. I'm not much of a dog person, but for some reason, I love a lot of her shots--particularly this one:

Check out the rest of her stream.