wigblog

I have recently made a job change. If you care, read on.

So yes, I’ve made a job change in the last few months. That’s really what brought on the “dry spell” of blogging… the looming job change was really what I was wanting to talk about, but several factors really kept me from talking about it.

I had been working for this great, global, Fortune 500, healthcare company. Nothing wrong with it. I liked the people I worked with, what I was doing, etc. What then, was the main driver for the change? The commute. It was taking me 1 hour each way to get to/from work and losing 2 hours of my day like that was just more than I wanted to admit to, especially having a new child at home and wanting to spend as much time as possible around her. So I’ve now remedied that with an (avg) 8 minute commute… and boy is it nice.

I did use the commute time wisely though. I had switched in August to taking the commuter rail (such as it is) every day and would get to spend the time reading. I had started reading the New Testament straight through, which I was finding quite rewarding, but now I’m finding not having a set block of time set aside for that, it’s being neglected. I need to find a way to get back into that habit.

I did make an “industry change” of sorts. For the last 9 years or so, my work has really focussed primarily on the internet and supporting technologies: web development (mainly PHP), database servers, application servers, web servers, etc. I’m now working for a fabless semi-conductor company who’s needs are quite different. Things are mainly internally (LAN) focussed and the required resources include file servers, process automation, and lots and lots of computational resources. I’m getting the chance now to do a lot of things I had always read about in the various tech mags I peruse regularly, but never really had a reason to do in my work before. Really getting intimate with NFS again and now building out my first cluster has been a lot of fun. Not going to go into too much detail here, but will probably talk about clustering in another post for those interested in the more technical stuff.

It’s been a challenging and rewarding experience thus far though, so I can say I’m 99% happy with the change. That last 1% is of course not filled because of the good friends I left behind at the previous company. I’ll miss those guys as I won’t get to see them as much going forward.