Productive at Work
Over the last few days I've setup Dell Openmanage and finished tweaking our install of IPMonitor. Now, when a service goes down or there's a hardware failure I'll get an email notifying me. You'd think that this would have been setup before, but my predecessor apparently just scheduled weekly walkthroughs of the two datacenters to look for amber lights on the servers.
Tomorrow's project will be configuring tighter rules for alerting that will go right to my phone via a text message (I only want the really critical errors to come there) as well as automatically open up a helpdesk ticket. I also began sketching out a new server inventory which I will need to put into Sharepoint along with some other documentation.
It's a fairly slow time right now, and since I've gone to work in academia I've really enjoyed the ability to set things up the right way, rather than rush from fire to fire like I had to do in startup-land. That's not to say that I don't miss some of the fun of being in a startup - I worked with some absolutely brilliant people at Grid, and I really miss spending time with them and having debates and conversations about tech.
I also found a piece of software which, so far, has helped me a lot. My desk is right outside of the office that the desktop support folks work out of, and there's a lot of traffic in and out of there. It's very distracting to be troubleshooting some server or network problem and hear people BS'ing with the desktop folks. Since my desk is actually in a really nice space (although it's a bit small) and there's political reasons why I can't move into an office, it's become imperative that I find some way of isolating myself. Well, besides the big frosted Japanese privacy screen that I set up in front of my cube, I found an OSX White Noise Generator, Noisy. I have it set to generate pink noise at about 10% of my iMac's volume. It's a small app that I just keep open on my second monitor and jack up the volume if someone starts talking loudly or I really need to focus.
I still miss working with Jae, even if he was noisy.
New stuff at www.BenRuset.com
Just made a quick page for www.BenRuset.com. Has a nice minimalist feel to it.
The picture is of my Touareg (the 'egg) at the Forked River Mountains.
Book Forward
I was just asked to write the forward to another book. Going to have to get cracking on that this week. Goes into print really, really soon.
5 Year Anniversary
Yesterday was my 5 year wedding anniversary.
We decided to keep it pretty low-key. We went out to dinner at the Lambertville Station, where, incidentally we ate for our 3 year anniversary. The food was good - perhaps not worth the 1.5 hour drive each way, but good none the less.
The highlight of the evening was getting their "100 Year Flight of Port." Basically, it's four 1.5oz glasses of 10 year, 20 year, 30 year, and 40 year port. Now, I'm not a huge fan of port, but it was definitely interesting to drink a wine that is older than you are.
Next week I am off from work on vacation. Hopefully I will be able to blog a little bit more. There's a lot of things that I've been meaning to write on here.