Monthly Archives: February 2008

The details

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(I’m looking specifically at you, mizcrank. 😛 )

I start my new job on Monday. I’ll be telecommuting (or be a remote worker, take your pick) for a small ISV (that’s Independent Software Vendor for the uninitiated) that is based in the Twin Cities. This means I’ll be making trips there. Maybe, also, to Paris, Berlin, or Hampshire, but I doubt it. I will be definitely going to MSP for a week, probably sometime next month.

I’ll be working on the company’s flagship products. They are near-real-time monitors of software, mostly for a well-known middleware product, but now branching out into monitoring other products like databases and other items. It will raise alarms if certain thresholds are crossed. They also interface with a monitoring product produced by a previous employer. The products run on over 10 hardware platforms, and associated operating systems. I’ll be working on the mainframe versions (z/OS, z/VSE, z/VM, maybe even BS2000/OSD), but I’ll be learning the *n*x and Windoze versions as well, and maybe even platforms like HP Tandem NonStop and HP OpenVMS.

Pay is actually a little better than the last job, and benefits are also a bit better. I’ll be sort of an early bird, as they are of course in the Central Time Zone, plus there’s a developer in Berlin. Right now they are mostly concentrating on the Americas and EMEA, but Asia and Australasia is in their sights.

I just finished going over the PowerPoints from a class they teach on this product, so I can be a bit more familiar with the product. This is the first time I’ve been exposed to this middleware, and I’m very impressed with it. It appeals to the map-loving part of me, because you have to map out network topology, make definitions, etc.

I generally don’t make it known where I work, whoever you can e-mail me off-list and I’ll let you know. If you have any questions, fire away…

OMG

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A good friend of mine…whom I had actually only met a couple of times in person, but we had known each other since the late 1990s, thanks to the internet…died suddenly in the past couple of days. No one had heard from him in the past couple of days; another friend of mine went by his house yesterday, didn’t notice anything wrong…so the sheriffs went over yesterday, and found him dead in his bed.

He was a bit older than I was.

Damn…I am about to cry.

Why I hate Microsoft, reason #717 of âˆž

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When I booted up this morning, suddenly UAC is asking me for approval when logged on to accounts where I’d disabled UAC.

Windows Defender is blocking startup programs.

And when Outlook started, a Windows Installer package decided to run. And it’s still running. And not responding. And it started 45 minutes ago.

All I did yesterday? Install a Windows Defender update, plus an update for x64 systems that showed up at the same time in my Windows Update.

EDIT: What turned on UAC? And now it wants me to reboot. Does anyone have access to tactical nuclear weapons that I can target at Redmond, WA?

Chronicles of the unemployed, day 17; chronicles of the near-death, day 5

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Yeah, I’ve been quiet. I did plan to post about the Portland trip, but then I caught the flu bug. Which I still have, mostly. And Cheri has bad at the moment.

I had some good interviews on Wednesday, two were with my ex-ex-employer, and one was with a company that is known mainly for its work on LUW systems, but they do have a mainframe component, and are looking to expand it

But today is a holiday, so I won’t be hearing anything from anyone. Dammit. The world does not move on at my pace.

I’ll talk about Portland later, but I’ll leave you with this Dilbert comment on why all IT projects are successful…