Category Archives: General

General

Change of Focus

Posted on by

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve kind of slowed the volume of stuff being posted to the site. The reason for this is that I’ve been focusing pretty heavily on the podcast site lately. I’ve found that podcasting is something that I’m extremely interested in, know nothing about, and completely suck at — a perfect place to focus and learn something new.

Not only that, I enjoy the process of podcasting more than blogging. I find it to be a more “personal” medium. I find myself preparing more (not as much as I should, but definitely more than blogging).

So if the site looks like its getting stale, it probably is. This might change, or it might not. Lets see how quickly I get bored or burnt out with podcasting — and lets hope that if that does happen, it happens after I’ve hit my 20 podcast goal that I set with Andy.

In August of 2004 I wrote a post listing some of my favorite quotes. One of those was from a friend who once told me that “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly while you learn it”. I’m putting that one to the test here and seeing whether it holds water. Personally, I’m having fun with it.

Tickle Tests

Posted on by

I found a site called Tickle that has a slew of career oriented tests, many available for free after registration. I became curious so I decided I would take the time and take some of the tests, just for the hell of it. The first was the Right Job / Wrong Job test, which purports to tell you what kind of personality you have and therefore what type of position you would fit best in.

After taking the test, here are the results:

As an Analytical type, you don’t want to be limited by established rules and regulations. Your inquisitive nature demands that you sometimes question authority. Otherwise, you might not be able to find fresh approaches, or come up with new solutions to a problem. It’s not that you act without weighing the pros and cons of a situation — it’s more that you’re more willing than others to take justifiable risks if they’ll further your career success.

You’re smart enough to know when you need help and are confident enough in your abilities to ask for it. You understand that sometimes there are no clear right and wrong answers, and that’s just fine with you because you tolerate gray areas better than most. In fact, pondering potential outcomes can sometimes be more interesting than coming up with the definitive solution for you.

Your right job doesn’t have to be about self-expression, but it needs to be a job you can be proud of.

Is it accurate? I would say I agree with most of it, except that I don’t think I’m driven so much by furthering my career success as I am by knowing that I’m making a difference and creating positive results. I definitely feel that established rules and regulations limit the effect one can have in an organization, because in many instances the rules can’t be changed because they exist, no matter how much they don’t make sense in the current environment. In these instances I rarely have the patience to debate with someone who doesn’t recognize that the established rules and regulations go against common sense.

There’s a good leadership development opportunity for me …

Failing Battery Backup, Preparing for Next Podcast, and a Humorous Wife

Posted on by

I got home from work last night ready to start my two week vacation away from the office when Jake gave me the announcement that the “network was down”. I ignored it, because our SBC DSL connection tends to fade in and out lately, just disconnecting randomly and then coming back after a bit.

After we went to dinner, we came home and Jake asked me if the network was back up, as he wanted to check his MySpace to see if anyone had listened to his and Kelsi’s experiment in spoken word music that they have put up on their account.

What I found is that the UPS on our main Linux server in the labs had died and the machine had turned off. Since this runs our primary caching DNS server that the DHCP server in our router points all of our machines to, no one could get to the internet. I brought the server back up and our online lives continued, though now I have no battery backup if a power outage occurs (we’ll be picking up a new one today). Right now the unit is serving only as a surge protector.

Flash to this morning. I am preparing to do the next podcast, looking for instrumental guitar music to play on the Podsafe Music Network. I found some great stuff, so make sure and listen to show #9.

Periodically, the battery backup unit begins to beep, because the battery is essentially dead. Luckily I have my headphones on listening to music so I only notice it periodically. However, it still begins to bug me.

I switch over to Google to do a search for the artist I’ve found to see if he has a web site. I use a customized Google home page, and my latest mail appears at the top and I see a few messages from my darling wife who is sitting in the family room watching TV and surfing the web. Following are the texts of the messages that she has sent me during the time I was oblivious to the world.
Message 1 (7:36a):

your microwave dinner is done

Message 2 (7:41a):

you’re mini-doorbell is ringing

Message 3 (7:44a):

a big truck is backing up in the living room!

Message 4 (7:54a):

your Morse code message is coming in!

Message 5 (8:01a):

your heartbeat monitor is going off!!

Message 6 (8:14a):

school hearing testing in progress….which ear to you hear the beeping?

We definitely have to get a UPS today. Its disappointing that this one only lasted for a couple of years. Its encouraging, however, that I have a wife with a sense of humor.

2005 Highlights – The Year in Review

Posted on by

With December starting and knowing its just going to fly by before I know it, I’ve started going through the photo album and picking the pictures that I think are the highlights for me for 2005. Its been a really great year, with the following events being the definite high points:

These are just a few of the highlights. 2005 has been a great year. I’m looking forward to what 2006 has in store for us.