Much is happening (not much of it good…)

Well - what can I say?

I’ve suddenly have some free time on my hands, however not the way I’d intended (some holidays). My employer decided - very suddenly I might add, over a coffee @4pm last Tuesday afternoon - to make me redundant as of the 13th of May.

I wasn’t given any warning and frankly it’s a right pain in the arse (having just renewed a lease on my apartment for six months and trying to fix up and sell one of my own) but I’ll hopefully survive.As those who have worked with me and know me can attest I’m not omniscient but what I know, I know well. I’ve been assured that performance was never an issue, merely one of cost (alas, some of my colleagues went with me, they finished today..)

Fortunately it seems the jobs market for systems administrators is good, so I don’t think I’ll be unemployed for long. I would really like to look more at systems/infrastructure architecture and perhaps some product engineering (I planned, tested, wrote the backend scripts for, built, installed and configured Webcentral/MelbourneIT’s managed MySQL offerings and I’ll wager I still know more about them than many working there now :-)). If you have an opening you think might interest me (ideally in the South Brisbane/CBD area) email me. You might also be interested to peruse my LinkedIn profile.

Just as I got the bad news some new kit arrived to replace the Sempron64 kit in defender. It’s now an Athlon64 5200+, with a nice new Gigabyte AM2+/780G board, 2G of Corsair RAM and an ASUS NVIDIA 8800GS (yeah, should have gone GT, but given the circumstance the price was right). The onboard NIC has a tendency to clash with other interrupts so I’ve slotted my old GA311 in it’s place. I’m using it now so it works OK (advice: if you flash the BIOS, clear the CMOS afterwards as I’ve had the Award F4 revision lock up a bit before doing so)

The change in mobo necessitated an XP reinstall (right PITA, see my Twitter updates.) but fortunately Fedora was semi-intelligent about it; as a precaution (and because I was planning to anyway) I’m on Fedora 9. More on that in the future. I have noticed that createrepo is busted - I’ve had a couple of emails so I’m aware and have worked around it, which is also why I’ve not done F9 builds yet.

Hopefully things improve as I spend some time with my sweetheart (who has been very supportive) and consider offers/positions with a good, secure employer.

Related posts:

1. Unfortunate circumstances…
2. Random musings for an autumn evening.
3. Experiences in both success and failure
4. Know Your Product.
5. Where to from here?