When Life Gives You Lemons…

Image by John Harper

Make Lemonade?  What About When You Can’t?

Sometimes, life gives you lemons.  Dried up lemons that you’re not going to be able to make lemonade with.  You are then left with some old, dried up rinds that are brown and withered that look like tiny catchers mits.

Life did this to me in September.

I was laid off.  This is something that never happened to me before.  I worked for a financial institution supporting production software running on Linux.  It was a GREAT job and one that I did for 4+ years.  I was able to work with RHEL and SUSE Linux servers on the daily.

This is the first time in my life that I haven’t had a job.  The last time I didn’t work was 1998.  These past 6 weeks have been not much fun at all and I’m dangerously close to running the distance of my severance package in the next 3 weeks.

On top of those nasty old lemons…I have yet to find a job.  I’ve had plenty of attention for my resume but it seems people are looking for specific titles that didn’t exist 5 years ago when I was looking for work.  The IT industry changes so quickly.  So the traction I got 5 years ago is gone.  Instead, it’s like I’m using bald tires on black ice….it’s just spinning around.

I rewrite my resume weekly now.  Update it with recruiters.  Update it on websites.  Apply to new jobs.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s especially scary when The New York Times is reporting that there is a lot of job hunting going on right now, but no job, despite low unemployment.  Hopefully, all things will sort themselves out in the next few weeks.

What’s Next for Here?

This post is just a quick update on why there have been crickets here for the past few weeks.  I still have a review of OpenMediaVault prepared…all the nifty screenshots are taken.  But I haven’t written it yet.  Job hunting is taking all of my time currently.  I’ll probably need to take a break from the grind of job hunting so I should get that out sometime in the next few weeks.  Wish me luck on the job hunting front!

Thank You, Dear Reader

thank you!
Photo by woodleywonderworks

Thank you, dear reader.

Thanks for making Yet Another Linux Blog one of the top Linux Blogs on the planet!  It was an average day over 8 years ago that I began to host my own blog at linuxblog.sytes.net (thanks No-Ip.com!) on a PII that I inherited from one of my friends.  Slackware Linux hosted the project then and I wanted to use my new blog to explore the Linux world posting tips, tricks, and how-to’s on my way.  Millions upon millions of pageviews and 6 hosting changes later, we arrive here…at the end of 2011.

So am I throwing in the towel since I didn’t post regularly in 2011?  Heck no.  I’m going to continue learning and posting, exploring and writing.  In fact, I’ve made it a resolution to do more posting this year than I ever have to develop my writing as I begin to supplement my technical writing portfolio.  Technical Writing would be my profession of choice if this were a perfect world…getting paid to help people is something I find very satisfying.  For now, I freelance and am looking to possibly make freelancing become my full time job.

Once again, thanks for making Yet Another Linux Blog be a stop in your browser…thanks for making it be a blip on your RSS reader….thanks for your support and continued reading 🙂

Status Update for Devnet

For those of you who follow me here at Yet Another Linux Blog you might be wondering where I went the last month.  I assure you I’m still here and I still use Linux every single day.  I’m currently running both Arch Linux (32bit) and Unity Linux (64bit) on my main computer.

I’ve been working pretty hard through the holidays at my full time job where I am a server administrator for a medium sized hospital in the U.S.  Recently (in December), I moved 2000+ users from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.  We considered farming out our Exchange environment to the cloud or perhaps going with Microsoft Exchange Hosting services but in the end, upper management decided they’d rather underpay someone to work exceedingly long hours with minimal training on a system not built by him.  So, that’s why I’ve been pretty inactive as of late.  As you can imagine working with Microsoft technologies…I always have something to fix and things are always unstable.

I know that some of you might be saying “why not use linux based exchange alternatives in your enterprise?” and I’d say, why indeed.  But I inherited this beast and it’s been Exchange since Exchange came out.  Not only that, but the primary application for all departments (ERM app) runs completely on Windows and plugs into Exchange and nothing else.  Talk about vendor lock in eh?  Well, it’s a job.

I used to work with Linux when I worked for rPath but parted ways with them about a year and a half ago when I had to move away to help out after a death in the family.  I was very sad to leave but am very happy with the large pay increase that came with my current position.  However, migrations do take their toll…lots of hours worked and frustrations vented.  Now that I’m over the hump, I’ll be able to get back into a normal swing of things.

For those of you who might be Exchange administrators in your day to day work, I’ve begun blogging about my experiences and setup a community to share tips, tricks, powershell commandlets, and a place to talk shop.  I figure if I have to work with closed source at least I can open source some help.  Find my Exchange blog at http://teknologist.net

Thanks for hanging in there everyone, and sorry for the inactivity.  Now that I’ve hit 6+ years blogging (in December) here I have even more incentive to continue sharing great Linux help with everyone.  I’ve got some good tips directly in the pipeline and here’s to a great 2010!

Creative Commons License
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.