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!
Category Archives: Ed
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!
Yearly Pictures, a Little Late
Today we were finally able to go and have Kylie’s 7 year and family pictures taken. We typically like to have these done closer to her birthday so we have an annual timeline of her, and us, growing up. However this year we had a few issues getting the time lined up with the photographer, mainly because we were hoping to use Tiffany’s friend Sara take the pictures but the timing just wasn’t working. So we went back to Sear’s Portrait Studio and had these lovely pictures taken. I have always been happy with the way their pictures come out, but we were hoping to do some on location shots, these will have to be arranged for later I guess.
Tall Ships
Today Melissa and I had what I think was a really neat opportunity to see a piece of history! Columbus’ ships, the Nina and Pinta, or rather historically accurate replicas of them, where docked Downriver in Wyandotte. My first thought when I saw them as we pulled up was that they were really quite beautifully as far as ships went and considering when they were designed. We were able to actually board the ships to look around, and that is when i was shocked to see just how small these ships really are. In Columbus’ time there were no crew quarters with the exception of one very small room for Columbus himself, the rest of the crew all slept on the deck! The hold below would have been used to store all the necessary supplies for the voyage, where as today the hold has been refitted for the crew and some modern conveniences. During the course of our viewing Melissa and I took many pictures, you can see them in their gallery.
Shots Fired
Tonight Melissa and I took advantage of a Living Social deal I had purchased to go to Firearm Exchange, a gun range in Livonia, and shoot some 9MM hand guns. To say we had a lot of fun would be an understatement! I had only shot a hand gun once before and Melissa had never shot one. The deal included two 9MM gun rentals, 50 rounds of ammunition, two targets, and one hour of range time. After a quick safety course we got to look at a few different guns to see how they felt in our hands and decide if we wanted to rent those particular guns. I chose a Glock 19 because I liked how it felt in my hand, and I am also interested in someday possibly getting a Glock 22, along with my CPL. The Glock 19 was a little too large for Melissa’s hands so she chose an M&P Compact 9MM that fit her hands much better. We were shown how to load the magazines, sling shot the first round, drop the clip, and all basic safety. Then we were shown how to operate the range controls, where to obtain eye and ear protection, and headed into the range. Of the 50 rounds Melissa decided she only wanted to fire 15 so I got to fire off 35. Both of us did very well, better than I think we were expecting. We both decided that this is something we would really like to do again, and it reminded me just how much I want to get a handgun and my CPL.
50 Miles Already
According to my Fitbit in the last two weeks I have walked 50 miles! Granted since I have gotten the Fitbit I have been trying to go for daily walks of a minimum of two miles. Additionally I have begun parking farther away from the entrance to the office building and I have been trying to take the stairs everyday as well. I hope these behaviors continue as I am sure they will have positive overall effects on my health.
Now I Feel Old
I have an old, miniature Frogger arcade game from when I was a kid. I brought it back from New York the last time we were out there. I remember my brother Chris and I playing this game and another we had of Donkey Kong, for hours when we were younger. I have told Kylie this very story when I first showed her the game and showed her how to play it. She seems to enjoy playing the game occasionally. Today she saw the game again, apparently she had forgotten about it, and then immediately asked me a question that made me feel old. When she saw the Frogger game she was momentarily excited and then immediately asked if I had Frogger “back in the old days.” I laughed and asked if she meant when I was a kid and she said yes. So now my childhood is back in the “old days,” amazing how quickly we can feel so old.
Help me get fit, Fitbit
For a while now I have been checking out Fitbit and looking to get one. Well today my Fitbit arrived! I am really looking forward to seeing how much I walk during the day and I am also hoping that it will motivate me to walk more and take the stairs when possible. The fact that the Fitbit automatically uploads to the site and tracks everything with little to no intervention from me is great. I think one of the features I am really looking forward to is the ability to also track my sleep pattern, especially since I rarely feel like I get a good nights sleep. I have already set up my profile and connected it to my various accounts. Let’s see how I do.
Four Years Shaving
So I just realized that yesterday also marked four years since I got my new shaving paraphernalia and began wet shaving. After four years I am still using the original 10 blades that I purchased (I still 4 brand new blades that I have yet to use) and the original Omega shaving soap (about half left)! The badger hair brush never got used because I ended getting my Grandfather’s old shaving brush from my Mother (it was her Father’s) and so I have been using that. I am happy to say that after four years I am very happy with my decision to change to this method of shaving. Not only have I saved a lot of money on disposable razors and shaving cream, but I also have a lot less razor burn and general skin irritation after I shave. I still get some irritation occasionally and because of that I am thinking about purchasing an Alum Block, but we will see. I would recommend to anyone that they make the switch to wet shaving though, I think it is much better.