jro.codegrinder.com

I’m back, and still surviving

The Orbitz Years

When I started in the NOC at Orbitz, I really only expected to stay a year or two cutting my teeth before finishing school and moving on to something new. Well, that year turned into six, and that finishing school thing never really happened. I was, however, lucky enough to get to know some truly awesome people, and work in three rather different positions within the company.

In the NOC, I recall meeting Ryan on one of my first days at the company and chatting about the Enlightenment window manager while the rest of the team moved the NOC down a floor. We got on pretty well, both being from down-state Illinois, and spent a fair bit of time trolling around Chicago as we learned our way around. Shenanigans included a few visits to Defcon, many rounds of drunken chess, and being asked if we were FBI agents while Wardriving.., er Warsitting?.

After the NOC, I was able to move into a position as a Systems Engineer attached to the development team. I learned about managing a large number of workstations, and dealing with the requests from a large number of developers. LDAP for authentication, RPM + apt, and a local Jabber server really really helped me from going insane. This is about the time I saw the light for properly packaging software for local use. Mmmmm RPMDEBFINKPKG-stuff.

Moving on, I landed in the Information Security department with Justin, Ed, and Laz. We had great fun, and I was able to really spend some time with Ruby, visit Mauritius errr.. audit a vendor in Mauritius, and meet real live Sarbanes-Oxley auditors (shudder).

There were, really, too many great folks to talk about my experiences with each, but it was a wonderful experience all around. I will however note that Laz is still procrastinating in starting his blog. Laz I know you worked at SGI during the Jurassic period, but seriously, stop contemplating, start writing.

Viewpoints

In May of 2007, I left Orbitz to start a new adventure at Viewpoints. It’s been a great experience so far. We’re a small team (an awesome one), we’re a Ruby on Rails site, and I’ve been able to learn a lot. Awesome!

So 10 years in tech?

I’m very happy with where I’ve landed at Viewpoints, and I don’t see myself freaking out and changing careers any time soon. But, it has been interesting to look back over the last 10 years and contemplate where I’ll be 10 years from now. It seems quite likely as I get a bit older that my next real adventures won’t have anything to do with my career or career aspirations, but that’s a thought for another day.

As of a day or two ago, I have survived for 28 years of life. Of those, I’ve spent roughly the last decade working in technology. I’m not normally a huge birthday person, so maybe it’s been the recent onslaught of “your parents music” at work, but for some reason it strikes me as a milestone. So, I thought I’d share a few memorable points and people from the last 10 years of being a geek.

The first “real” job

I’d worked some farming, and food industry jobs before, but right after I graduated high school in May of 1998, my friend Joe secured me a job at the school district he was working and graduated from. I think we reported sometime in June to Jim, where we spent the first month or two of the summer lashing cat5 cables together, making ethernet patch cords and crawling through crawlspaces and air-ducts in up-to century old school buildings. Moving into maintaining the hundreds of windows95 clients for the school district, I was tasked with building some kind of mirroring script using “rdist” (for DOS/Win). It was sort of like Norton Ghost, but command-line, rather rudimentary, and free to educators at the time. It did, however, allow us build a lab of 30 computers in something like a day, rather than week once the “master” image for that lab was finished. That was really my first push into Systems Administration. After that I setup an authentication system for the school’s self-hosted ISP, managed Fool-Proof configs (a totally awesome and amusing way to lock down Windows95 machines from student tampering), and started helping Corey with managing email, DNS and the other “core” services that were on the Linux server in the house.

Amazingly, it looks like the Hoopeston School District is still sporting a web design based somewhat off of one I did a decade ago. In some ways I’m not sure I’d ever design anything like it again, but I am proud of it’s longevity. Check it out here, if you dare!

All in all, at eighteen and working with Linux, I really did feel very lucky to be doing what I was doing.

Net66

Around the start of fall semester in ‘99 I needed to look for some work more local to the university; I just wasn’t able to keep the kind of hours I needed to with the high school being an hour away and the cost of school was an increasing burden. My friend Pete and I applied for Support Tech positions at Net66 (now gone), which was then a small ISP owned by Dennis. I got the position and spent a year or so working with Dennis, Marsita, Bobby, Alan, and a whole mess of other folks that rotated in and out, or were a part of Dennis’s other company (Suburban Express)

Dennis, himself, is really what defined my experience at Net66. Much more-so than my hung-over morning shifts on the phones, late night Saganaki and coding sessions with Alan, annoying Marsita by being late to a shift after falling asleep in a class (more often than you think), and even more than George the Cat.

Dennis started Suburban Express while in school, so that he could have an excuse to explain his business school grades falling to.. B’s. It’s a niche bus service that take kids from their central Illinois campus to the Chicago suburbs where they live. And, he’s been terribly successful at running it, and keeping competitors away, including a price battle with GreyHound and various other upstarts.

So, Dennis decides one day to start and ISP because all the other ones in town suck, and he orders a few custom build fancy fancy servers that will run BSDi, thinking he can get them setup in a weekend. It takes Dennis a week to get Apache setup. And, really, that’s one of the things I’ve come to admire most about him; was simply that when he sees an opportunity, he starts working on it for real. Not just thinking, but doing. He’s had some false starts along the way, a newspaper to compete with the monopolized college rag, etc; but his determination keeps him moving forward.

The sale(s)

Dennis sold Net66 to Advancenet in 2000, and I sort of went along with the company. This was after finishing my last two weeks making flyers for Suburban Express, in what used to be O’Malleys (of Don Mclean - American Pie / UIUC midnight drinking song fame). At Advancenet, I was able to meet some folks that would become important to my life, Dave, and very briefly the girl that I would marry, Cindy. Though, neither of us knew that at that time. Unfortunately for her, (or fortunately, depending) she worked near the front of the office which I did my damnedest to avoid, because that’s where the sales folks and those that took messages from customers were. And both groups created more and more work for me. It got to be so bad after a while that I couldn’t get a haircut without being called or paged, and ultimately had to leave school at UIUC for a bit.

I stayed at AdvanceNet for about a year all told, until I bought a car that was a little too expensive for my income at the time. On a lark, I put out some feelers based on hotjobs.com postings from local tech companies. Within days I had an offer at Orbitz.com that I had no idea what to do with. The salary was near double, so I figured I didn’t really have a choice to make and I took it.

While at Orbitz, Advancenet was bought by another company Egix who I did a bit of consulting for to help transition some of the ISP authentication systems that I had been spending a lot of time on. I was pretty naive about it all, and either through my fault or H&R Block’s ended up creating a couple thousand dollar tax bill for myself. OUCH!

To Be

(continued)

for that last post. I was moving this blog do a different virtual host and wanted to test it out, but didn’t have anything real to say, and well “I’m sorry”.

With that out of the way. It’s time to put some energy back into this. But, rather than a bunch of empty promises that I’ll write something every day for the next 30 days or some other such non-sense, you’ll just have to wait and see. I do plan to revisit an old post/tutorial on RPM, so be sure to check it out for a refresher. Also, if you have any feedback on the content, length, or frequency that you find most interesting or useful in a blog, I’d love to hear it in the comments.

seems to now report status to the command line in kilobits rather than Kilobytes. Sneaky.. sneaky.

I hope everyone had a safe and happy time over the holidays. I’m just getting back to normal life after a month of craziness, and I need to figure out my resolutions, or lack of, for the new year. What are you doing differently or better this year?

Techcrunch has a post on Google’s recent disclosure of a blogger’s IP address to the authorities. What’s disturbing is that, at least according to TC, Google did not require a court order before tattling on the blogger.

UPDATE: It seem TC and I may have spoke too soon. A couple of commenters on the TC post seem to indicate there was something lost in translation, and that there was indeed a court order. Here’s a referenced link, if you happen to read Hebrew. I do not…

They need to win the social wars for _me_. That’s right, for me. I was on friendster. I was on orkut till the Brazillians took over. I’m on linkedin. And now, I’m on facebook. I’ve gone where my friends have gone, and I’m sick of it.

I’m tired of creating all the connections to my friends. Tired of putting in my updated contact info. Tired of figuring out what the whiz bang features are of this iteration of my online rolodex.

And that’s really all I want it to be, an online rolodex. I don’t care about sending zombie bunnies to my friends, or poking/hugging/punching someone, or playing vampires with people in my network. I want a place to keep track of people and to communicate with them. They are what’s valuable to me, and all the silly games in the world won’t change that.

Something needs to either unite the social frameworks, or crush them under their heels. Maybe that’s what google’s opensocial hopes to do one day. But, after orkut, I’m not holding my breath. So, facebook, start crushing. I need you.

It seems that Walmart just started carrying a $200 computer from Everex that’s running Linux. And it just happened to be Google’s Ubuntu-based distribution. It’ll definitely be interesting to see how Walmart’s customers react to a very affordable computer, running an operating system they’ve never heard of.