Building for a Better Tomorrow

It  has a been a while since i last blogged.  I guess I've been so busy with work and life.  Job is crazy but fun and life, well, lets just say it's life.  Been working on many new and wonderful things in the past few months.  Things dealing with stuff I've never seen or experienced before.  Which is a great thing, happy to be learning and growing every day.  Hopefully this continues, hopefully I continue to be challenged by the things that I face every day of the week not only at work but in life also. 

Montrosity Services is ready to rock and roll

So I don't know if it's just me or maybe it's a lot of people that work in the IT field, but I get a lot of requests from friends in order asking for help with there computer issues.  Every household has at least one computer in it.  But so many people aren't aware of what they should do or not do with the computer.  Recently I've had 3 friends contact me asking for help cause either the OS went bad, or the mouse stopped working or they had issues installing software, or maybe it had something to do with a program not working the way it should.  Either over the phone, via IM, or in person I was able to assist them with there issues.  Well, all these calls have given me an idea.  Why not start a side business where I am able to assist the everyday home user with minor computer issues.  Instead of you paying places like Best Buy hundred of dollars in order to get your easy computer issues fixed, I'll do the same thing, but a lot cheaper.  I have no over head, willing to come to your house to look at the issue, and if it's something large, I'll take the computer with me and work on it and bring it back to you.  So far I have set up a facebook fan page and a twitter page for this new service based side business.  You can find me on twitter at www.twitter.com/montrositserv or on facebook click the profile badge on this blog.  So if you are in the DC Metro area and need some repairs or services on your computer or home network please feel free to contact me.

VMWare and Green DataCenters

So, I am currenty on the job hunt, been going on a lot of interviews lately and been talking to a lot of potential employers about jobs.  The biggest trend that I have seen since I last looked for a job is virtualization.  Everyone I speak to wants to know if I have ever done anything with VMWare, I've played with it, installed it on a box or two, tried to see what it's all about.  At my soon to be last position we actually were getting ready to virtualize the entire QA and Dev environments, but they weren't gonna use VMware, they wanted to use Zen.  Lets just say they didn't really do what everyone else did.  Anyways, with me hearing all this talk about virtualization, i started to get curious and see what it's all about.  Well, lets just say it's big, you cut down the amount of hardware in your datacenters big time, that means less emissions, less heat, less energy.  Plus now servers are logically bigger than they were before, so you can easily get a server with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB of local storage at no problem, actually that's become pretty much the norm, there's always bigger than that.  So if you were to put 4 virtual machines on a server of that size you could easily have at the least 4GB of RAM and 200GB of disk space for each virtual machine.  For a lot of applications that more than enough disk space and RAM.  So i'm learning a lot right now going through all these interviews.  I've seen the light, I've been hearing virtualization for a while now, I am just now starting to listen, as are many people and many companies out there.  If we can save so much money, so much space, and run cleaner, safer, cheaper datacenters why not do it?  All I gotta say is....wherever I end up, I am gonna make sure we do make a lot of stuff virtual.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Hello World...this is my first time blogging on here and well, I am just trying to decide what I should say and what I shouldn't. Lots of things going on right now, the biggest I guess is trying to find a new job. Why is it things in the job market have changed so much, I remember the days of applying for a job and they company that you applied too was the company you worked for. Now a day’s all you see is there headhunters and recruiting firms that are basically doing the leg work for the real company. It's actually a little crazy, some of these places will have a few conversations with you on the phone and be ready to send your resume to anyone and everyone, others want you to come into the office, meet with them, etc. Just seems a little strange to me. I actually got a job offer for a short term contract and never met with one person face to face, everything was done over the phone. I am not that old and haven't really worked that long but I miss the days of actually walking into an office seeing the environment you might be working in and the people you might be working with. But yes I am seriously job hunting, looking for something long term and permanent. I've got my fair share of responsibilities, house, child, etc and need to do whatever it takes to provide for my family. So for all you out there on the WWW if you know of any job openings for Systems Administrators in the Washington DC area please let me know.