off by one for 2005 October 26 (entry 0)

(1) Wed Oct 26 22:01:30 PST the patience of job:

The new job is great. I started out working from home for a week and a half, but now I am in the office. We're in the middle of a big project, and due to the workload and the constraint that much of the work has to be done when nobody is around, we're working weekends. (I'm working with a consultant from the UK who will be here for a couple more weeks.) I'll probably put in about 60 hours this week. Luckily, I'm getting paid overtime right now because I'm still hourly via the hiring firm that got me the job in the first place. It is really interesting work, and a very interesting work environment, unlike anything I have ever experienced. Someday I will explain, but not right now. Every day is a new adventure, that's for sure.

From the IT perspective, it is very different from NPU, but also very similar.

Essentially, we are rebuiling the company's network, which has only been tended to by hourly consultants who came in to do occaisional backups or fix minor "helpdesk" kind of things, and contractors for their more specialized software. So the similarities are, at a very basic level, lots of control and authority, hands on with Windows, Servers (Linux, yay!), and telecommunications stuff. Much of my work at NPU was indispensible for this job, and the Linux I have been doing is a big plus now.

What's different is organization and infrastructure. When this is done, I'll be the "cowboy" IT guy in the building, responsible for everything. And as I said, they have never had a full time IT guy. As a result, the system is a total mishmash of random bits of hardware as things have been cobbled together over the last 20 years. There are switches plugged in that we're not even sure if they do anything (but they're buried in tangled patch cords). The fiber switch is, I would guess, around 10 years old and is covered in strange fuzz. It sounds like a dying cow and has a post it on it that says "do not turn off -- 1999". Of course, changing some of the settings requires a reboot. I guess we'll figure out a different solution. There was a T1x2 (3 megabits) installed in March, but it has never been used as far as we can tell. The network switches are full so there are many smaller chained, unmanaged switches. Network pulls were insufficient so 2 signals were sent on one CAT-5 cable by means of a breakout box. I think the PBX is older than North Park's.... seriously, I could go on, but I think you probably get the idea. Thankfully the issue was organization and not resources that led to the current situation. As we rebuild the network we get to take a fairly "ground up" approach (within the confines of "not looking funny at the fiber switch") and that's fun to think about too.

At North Park, there was a lot of good redundancy and duplication, and that was great for the school's infrastructure, but here it will be only me (with occaisional contract help for small things if necessary). So there's a lot riding on my shoulders, which is both good, and bad. Overall though, I think it's a great experience for me to have to really step up to the plate in a way that I never really had to at NPU.

Basically, it's an exciting situation, I'm working a LOT right now, and that's ok. I'm glad I like it though; I can't imagine working 60 or 80 hours a week at a job I didn't like.

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