/dev/zero

Any recommendations for books on Ruby on Rails?

Not from a programmer’s perspective, but a sys admin’s. I have a contract coming up where I’ll have to set up all the sys admin stuff to interface with applications coded in Ruby.

I know nothing about Ruby.

All quiet on the western front…Yeah, haven’t posted in a while. Been so busy…

Really hating my job. I am SO ready to be rid of ${POE}. I’ve been waiting for a promotion I was promised since Sept. I got the pay raise in mid Oct, but am still doing the old job, which I hate, with no change on the horizon. They can’t seem to hire people fast enough and they need to hire like 3 people in order to replace me.

Meanwhile, I’ve started doing consulting with . I flew out to San Diego this last weekend and did a job for a small company involved in mobile messaging. Was very fun. Got to play with some new (to me) technologies (ethernet interface bonding, HA failover with heartbeat, load balancing (not new to me, but the piece of Cisco kit being used, 11501, is). Was on the go the whole time. I took off at 15:30 from DFW on Sat, landed 16:30 at SAN (two hour time difference), got the car from Avis and met the client outside the data center. Got a bit of orientation with the client, then we looked at their gear. I’m not too impressed with the data center they use. Very lax about security (they never bothered to ask for my ID when I first came in) but they have some strange security rules. Many other customers in that data center make the cabling at ${POE} look good, which is really saying something. The data center didn’t even have the second ethernet drop in the client’s cabinet activated, per contract, until after the client emailed them this weekend. And THEN they never responded to the email, just fixed it silently.

I was intending to take lots of pictures of beautiful San Diego to post to the blog, but ended up not having time to take pictures, or even SEE beautiful San Diego. Landed after dark, was on the go the whole time, took off after dark.

I did get ONE picture, which I haven’t offloaded from the camera yet.

So earlier this week I got a hit off my Monster (or Dice) resume. I’d never heard of the product that would be supported by the job (sys admin position) and told the recruiter such. Their response was “don’t worry, no one outside our industry has. We’ll train you for that part.” and that everything else on my resume looked perfect for the position, including the fact that I like to travel. They asked if I was interested, I said yes, they asked the classic “what are your salary requirements so we don’t waste each other’s time?” Now, this is where I get annoyed. That’s like asking someone on eBay “What’s your reserve, so we don’t waste each other’s time with my bidding?”

Anyway, I came back with “What are you willing to pay?”

They responded today with a quite acceptable figure.

Just got off the phone.

I aced the technical part of the interview. Part of it was a “break / fix” where they had me log into a server as root, reported various problems and I had to fix them. I got 2 out of the 3. (of which 1 actually had 2 things wrong.)

They wouldn’t tell me the answer to the one I didn’t get. “If we bring you on board, we’ll tell you how to fix that one. :)”
Should hear by the end of the day, or the end of the week at the latest.

Helped parents move to Austin this weekend.
Looked for new job in Austin.
Possible new job. In San Antonio.
2x my current pay. Great benefits. Relocation expenses covered.
Phone interview in 10 minutes.

Happy birthday, mizdandylynn!