After seeing Lewis C. post apologizing for not posting recently it really shamed me into thinking about the lack of updates on my own blog. Since my last set of updates its been a whirlwind couple of months.
First in September I left TUSC and joined IT Convergence as their strategic consulting manager. Nothing against TUSC, but with the direction they currently have it wasn’t the place for me right now. At IT Convergence I really can’t ask for a better job. I’m building my own team of experts from across the world. At last count we had over 10 different countries represented at our Naperville office alone. My role focuses on building the team to take charge of Identity Management, custom J2EE / SOA development and Business Intelligence. I’ve worked with some great companies like these, and started to plan some of biggest architectures I’ve worked with to date. My role has allowed me to play with tons of new technology and software from all of the major players and integrate some open source ones. Look for a couple articles coming up around that.
Friday I got my acceptance letters for both Collaborate and Kaleidescope. I’ll be doing talks on Oracle Identity Management, Application Development with AJAX, and Securing Web Services at both conferences, and at Collaborate I’ll be adding a fourth on Virtualizing Your Environments with VMWare. It’s going to be a couple busy weeks getting ready. I also have a couple presentations on the “wait list” if other people drop out. I actually hope that they don’t get approved, I have enough on my plate right now.
I’m still working on the side project I alluded to. Thank you to all the people that have been beta testing it for me. The only problem I’m running into right now is seeding the torrents on the same machine as my tracker is running. I’m using VBTT for the tracker and bittorrent-console on a Linux box. If anyone has any ideas I would greatly appreciate it as I’m at a loss right now.
On a personal note, Erin and I finally got married on October 20, 2006. After 8.5 years together we tied the knot. We did a great destination wedding in Marathon Key, Florida with 30 of our closest family and friends. Those of you that know Erin know I really cannot ask for a better woman. She has been with me through all my crazy work schedules and projects, supporting me all the way.
Last week we signed the papers for building our new home our in Ashburn, VA. The area is great and the best part is that the neighborhood is full of other Oracle and technology geeks that all work in Reston. Being in the apartment with all 4 of my servers running and the plethora of other toys I have from the house back in Michigan its going to be nice to get back to a normal life. I have 2 rooms in the basement dedicated to my toys plus my home office.
That’s right, I’m up to 4 actual servers at home right now. I bought myself a Dell 2950, dual core, dual cpu, 8 GB of Ram for Christmas. After seeing these things fly doing all of the architecture and application scaling at ACT, I had to have one for myself. I’ve been building a lot of VMs on it, its my primary development box for the new technologies I’ve been working with. You really can’t beat booting 6 VMs at once and not noticing a performance decrease and if I need to reinstall Linux from the ground up its done in under 10 minutes.
If the first month is any indication of how the rest of the year is going to be things aren’t going to slow down and if anything they are going to speed up tremendously. It’s really great to be surrounded by people that I see as the best in the business again and grow a company to be number one. Thats the one thing I missed the most about Polk after leaving PolkInsight and now I get to do it all over again on an even bigger level.
My goal for this year is a new blog entry or article every 2 weeks, so keep an eye on this place things should start moving again real soon.
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