Kylie has been having trouble with math and though she is getting extra help at school Tiffany and I feel that it isn’t enough. So today we had a consultation with the Sylvan Learning center. We sat down with them and told them what our concerns were and where we felt Kylie was having difficulties. They took Kylie into another room for some evaluations and will get back to us with their findings.
Author Archives: Ed
There goes another
Winter Motorcycle Storage, and other work
Brought the motorcycle to Nicholson’s today for them to provide the off season storage. While they have it, in addition to preparing it for winter storage and then preparing for riding season in the spring, I am also going to have a few other items looked into. I still feel like the fuel gauge is not reporting properly, so I am going to have them check into if that needs replacing or not. They will also be checking the battery and charging system as the battery seems to be dying out quickly again. I will also be having some items replaced and upgraded as well. The riser bolts are going to be replaced with stainless steel ones and the rust will be cleaned out, I am also having caps added to the tops of them to keep water out. Once again my brake and clutch levers will be replaced, however this time I am going back to the aluminum ones, seeing as the oils in my skin appear to be eating through the chrome ones. Lastly I am having new mirrors put on, hopefully they will sit a little higher and come out a little further to improve my visibility. The bike should be ready for pick up around mid-April, I just hope the weather is also ready around that time. Additionally Kylie had fun looking around the shop and playing with Melissa on all the different vehicles! This Polaris Ranger was her favorite by far, as it was the perfect size for her.
First full day of new career
Today was my first full day at Secure-24, and it seems like it is going to be a good place to work. My hope to hit the ground running wasn’t as fruitful as I had planned though. The environment in which the company operates is pretty locked down, which I understand the need for. However, this makes for a lot of jumping through hoops in order to connect to the desired systems where work needs to happen. This means there are also many accounts that need to be configured to allow the appropriate access, and all of mine have not been set up yet. Hopefully over the next few days things will get straightened out. From what I can tell so far working here is going to be an entirely new experience from what I am used to. I already see a lot of exciting challenges and opportunities to learn new skills and improve on existing ones!
A Marriage made in Hell
Nothing like a wedding at a little chapel in Hell to start out your new life! Congratulations to Dann and April on their day! Though the weather was dreary and rainy the day was great! it started out with a nice reception lunch at their apartment club house and then moved to Hell for the ceremony. I have to say it was probably the most unusual wedding ceremony that I have been to, but it was extremely fitting and appropriate for Dann and April, and we wish them a lifetime of happiness!
It’s a Circus
Tomorrow is Dann and April’s wedding, so tonight we got together with them and a few of their other friends and went to Circus Bar in Ann Arbor for some karaoke and drinks. Considering that Melissa and I pretty much never go out to bars or clubs, this was a really fun time for us. Watching Dann perform is always a blast, and the general atmosphere was a lot of fun. In addition to the bar, in the basement there is also another club called the Cavern Club that we also checked out. I guess in the same building there are also two other clubs, but they weren’t opened tonight. there’s a lot to do in that one area, and not surprisingly we had never been there before. Perhaps one day Melissa and I will venture out that way once again.
A New Begining
My first day at Secure-24 was a typical slow orientation day. Spending the better part of 8 hours in a training room and going through procedures is about as fun as it sounds. There were only two other people in my orientation group; Brian is joining the project management team, and Patti is joining the storage team. I’ll be working more closely with Patti as the backup and storage team work together and report up through the same manager, and our desk areas are right next to each other. I will say that it was nice to see that the facilities team had everything together. We got our badges, our desks, and our laptops and bags all on the first day. At the end of the day we went and spent about 1.5 hours with our teams, meeting everyone and setting up our desks. I opted to configure my desk to be a standing desk, and am looking forward to it. I have the rest of the week off, but now that corporate training and orientation is over I’ll be able to hit the ground running!
Last Day, Technically
Today was my last day at Truven and it was a lot easier than expected. This is mainly due to the fact that my manager had me not even come in to the office, but rather we all just met up for lunch at Ichiban. I have to admit, I am going to miss those lunches as Ichiban is a great place to eat, especially when it is free! In all seriousness though yesterday was a long day of saying goodbye to people I have spent the better part of seven years working with. I am sure I will keep in touch with some of them, especially Chuck, but it’s still hard to say goodbye. I am still very excited though and looking forward to the new adventure!
Time For A Change
After 7 and a half years, and what I consider a good career, it is time for a change. Two weeks from today will be last day at Truven Health Analytics. It’s been a good career as far as I am concerned and I have come a long way from where I started, however, all good things must come to an end.
It all started in February of 2005, with a bang I might add, when I started working for Thomson Medstat as a Computer Operator on the midnight shift. After about a year and a half I relocated to Eagan MN to help rebuild the company infrastructure and move our data center from Ann Arbor to Eagan. I went out on September 16, 2006 and was only supposed to be out there for about 3 months, but that turned into almost 9 months. I made the long drive home on April 10, 2007 and during that entire 12 hour trip I was driving home to no job, as I had just relocated the data center I once worked at to Eagan! However after being home for only a few hours that day I received a phone call and got some good news, and that is when I stepped away from Computer Operations and started down the road to being a Systems Manager.
In the beginning my focus was strictly on TSM administration but sometime in 2008 I started working with NetApp filers and my career as a Storage Engineer came along with it. However in typical corporate form I wouldn’t get any training for my new position until almost a year later, and an additional two years before I got certified. The past year and a half have been spent trying to hone my skills on the NetApp’s along with trying to learn how to provision SAN disk on both EMC and HDS hardware with both Brocade and Cisco fabric switches. Admittedly I am stronger on the EMC hardware (specifically the Symmetrix line) than I am on the HDS hardware, but I think that is because I have had a lot more secondhand exposure to those. Sometime in there I got raised to a Sr. Storage Engineer as well and ran point on a number of different projects including upgrading ONTap versions, performing filer head swaps, and even upgrading the TSM systems, hardware and implementing encryption.
Yet after all this it has come time to say goodbye. I have been given the opportunity to join a new company out in Southfield, Secure-24. Secure-24 is a hosting provider for other companies, supplying everything from SAP and Oracle hosting to total IT outsourcing. As for me, I’ll be joining their backup team and focusing on NetWorker with a little bit of Avamar thrown in. Though in all honesty I am hoping to quickly transition over to their storage team as I think that is really the direction I want my career to follow.
While I was not actively looking for a new job (a recruiter for the company actually contacted me via LinkedIn) too many stars aligned and showed me that it was a good time to make a change. For instance Truven is currently gearing up for a data center migration now that the company has parted ways with Thomson Reuters and become its own stand alone company. Which I guess makes the fact that I am going to work for a data center provider a little ironic. However, I also feel that I have hit a professional growth wall here. While it is true that I am still learning much of the SAN side of the house, that learning is slow at best due to the siloed nature of such a small team (there are a total of 3 engineers, 1 contractor in India, and our manager). Those coupled along with a few personal reasons have made this opportunity to hard to pass up.
So it is with both great sadness and great nervousness and expectation that I have put in my two week notice of resignation with the only company I have known in my professional career.
Tailgate Time
Today was the annual EMC Customer appreciation tailgate and U of M football game. Today they were playing Air Force. While the party and game were enjoyable, for me I think the best parts were right before the game began. During the singing of the national anthem Air Force released a trained Bald Eagle which circled down through the stadium and landed on its trainers arm down on the field. If that weren’t awesome enough, just as the anthem finished a B-52 Stealth Bomber did a flyover! The whole thing was pretty awe inspiring!