At Work

A cracker story from work this morning - I've just pulled into the office car park, and the security guard is chatting to one of the inspectors. As I approach them, the inspector points just beyond my head.

Not initially realising what he's pointing at, I look back, slightly bewildered, and ask him what he's on about.

"Not very observant, are you?" comes the reply, "I'm pointing at that big ferry sailing down the channel. I'd love to be getting on that right now..."

As you know, I’ve been getting to grips with CentOS, the Community ENTerprise Operating System.

Another little foible that CentOS inherits from Red Hat Enterprise is that it doesn’t include native support for MP3 playback. Again, down to legality/licensing issues. Damn those lawyers!

Just upgraded to the latest and greatest version of Kubuntu Linux yesterday, the Dapper Drake edition. Such a smooth upgrade path - just modify your /etc/apt/sources.list file, replacing every instance of breezy with dapper (back the file up first, of course), then you simply run the following commands:

Kubuntu Linux has the root account disabled by default for security purposes. Users are encouraged to use the sudo command as an alternative whenever root-level priviledges are needed.

Now, maybe I’m too old-skool, but that’s just plain irritating. Here's how to enable root logons in Kubuntu.

I was asked by someone today how they could get a well-formatted email signature like mine - you know, with the nice fonts, corporate logo and everything.

Well, I remembered going through a lot of pain trying to create my signature at the start. There had to be an easy way to distribute my signature as a template so that other people could customise it with their details.

Phew! I'm stuck here in Glasgow airport for an hour or so before my flight home. And while I've got five minutes, I thought I'd update the old blog.

Personal Issues

When your blog is branded with your name on it, you are naturally more careful about the frivolous throwaway comments you might make on it. Or even deeper existential questions that are on your mind - after all, what might they reveal about you?

I'm finding it very hard to blog on this site, because I'm really not sure what image I want to project to the spectrum of people who might read it. (I say might read it. Let's face it, barely anybody knows it exists!)

At the moment, friends and family might find it. Nothing offensive there, and possibly the most accepting group of whatever I chose to write here. But I find myself pondering what employers might think - past, present and future. Should I care? I'm not inclined to, but I know myself well enough to suspect I might care in the future. For one reason or another.

And what about all those lovely people who read my more popular blogs? Well, they're getting nothing. Nada. But then, very few of them search for me anyway.

So I'm continually spinning ideas for personal posts that I can share here, but my inner editor keeps rejecting them all.

It's been a week of challenges in the new job.

Running as part of a distributed, multi-site network is the part of the job that I knew I would thrive on, and that's exactly what's happening.

Because our staff spend their time between various sites both in the UK and abroad, they're mostly laptop users, and mostly connecting to different parts of the company network.

The new job's going exceedingly well. Do you know what the best part is? I'm feeling engaged again. The work I'm doing is directly helping people and they're genuinely grateful for it.

I hate to have to say it, but toward the end of my time with CFR, my work had become less than challenging.

This came into sharp focus for me today as I visited a site in Doncaster that was having problems. While I was looking forward to going to the mainland, inwardly I was a little worried that my hardware skills had become rusty.

Well, today was my last day at Cleaver Fulton Rankin. I had worked there as IT Manager for almost 8 years. It would have been a full 8 years in September.

Leaving a job after such a long time is an odd feeling. On one hand, you've been there so long that being anywhere else seems alien. You're part of the furniture, one of the old-timers. On the other hand, there's something refreshing about a new start. All that history, years of developing a network and resolving problems, are at an end. A new challenge is on the horizon, new system, new people.