Another Riding Season Ends

Well my riding season, what little riding I got to do anyway, has officially come to an end. I dropped the bike off at Chuck’s for the winter, and I honestly hope this is the last year I need to store it at his house. While I really appreciate his generosity each year and the rent free space in his pole barn, I would just really like to have my own garage to store it in. Not just so I am not burdening my friend, but also so I can have the bike close so I can take advantage of random nice days late or early in the season. Once again though I didn’t get to ride as much as I would have liked too. I have yet to find a route to work that is motorcycle friendly, which is a huge bummer considering how long the commute is. Perhaps if we can find a house that’s closer and offers a better route…

One Year at Secure-24

Today marks my 1 year anniversary at Secure-24. I can honestly say it seems like it has been a lot longer. When I first started working here everyone referred to time in S24 years, and I found out that it was a running joke amongst the engineers. It is in reference to how the years at S24 seem to be much longer than at other places. This is due to the constantly changing environments due to the nature of business that a Managed Service Provider runs. I laughed it off for the first few months until I slowly began to feel it too. Now, here I am, one year later and I find it hard to believe that it has only been one year. During this time I even managed to meet a personal goal, and  change teams. I’m not even sure I could manage to list all of the new things I have learned between the two positions, or the things I have had access to here that I would never had had access to at my old company. The people I have met here are all incredibly talented and great to be around. The company culture is amazing and the events that encourage us all to come together outside the office are terrific. What I am most thankful for though, is the fact that it has been a year and I still enjoy coming to work everyday; with the exception of the commute anyway! I’m working on that…

EMC Tailgate

Today was the annual EMC tailgate and customer appreciation event, and honestly, I wasn’t very impressed this year. There were a lot of changes this year, some from EMC and their sponsor partners and some from the general atmosphere. You can tell this year that they didn’t go as “all out” as they have in past years. For starters they didn’t hand out as many tickets to the game, in fact this is the first year that I didn’t have tickets. That’s not a big deal though as I am not a super fan or anything. Besides they have TV’s there with good sound so we can watch the game too. Well, at least that is half right. They had the TV but no one bothered to bring the sound cables to connect them into the speakers, so we had no commentary. Also, the food this year wasn’t up to par and the caterers were downright rude, and they seemed to be understaffed. So it took forever to get anything to eat, at least the drinks were flowing good though! In addition my old co-workers, Chuck and Dan, whom I was really looking forward to seeing, didn’t show up because they didn’t get tickets this year either, and that is the main reason they go. While it was still a decent time, it just didn’t live up to what I have come to expect from an EMC event, in fact, Melissa and I left right after half-time. Hopefully next year will be back up to standard….