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Oct
22ndHello Again : My life up to this point
This post is a catch-up for all the stuff I should have written about but didn’t in the last few weeks. For those that don’t know, I recently moved from EMC over to VMware into a brand new kind of role. Right now I am caught in the trifecta of learning a new company, meeting new teams, and trying to help bootstrap my own with recruiting and design work. Which results in my blog getting a lack of attention. But, all that is going to change. My new mission with this blog is to just start dumping from my brain a combination of what I am playing with and what I have discovered along the way. I am working on tools and special things for the cloud community at large. But these will take a bit of time to see the light of day. So my new post will be titled: “Nick’s Distractions” – and will be a summary of mildly interesting topics that distracted me somehow during my week. So here is my first catch-up: Project Razor: Razor has exploded way bigger than I expected. Funny how solving personal problems can result in public acceptance. The current forks are over 50+ and watchers are almost 200 on the github repo(https://github.com/puppetlabs/Razor). This is just awesome, as I had always envisioned Razor as being truly powerful when it becomes a part of an open community that contributes 99.99% of the code and design. Now for the updates: 1. I was lucky [...]
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Sep
13thChange of pace : My next career experiment
Every year I get a little older and a little wiser. And the one thing I am realizing about myself is that I thrive on challenges. My natural element is breaking problems down and creating answers. I live for that first 5 minutes after success when you can look back and see a pattern of effort paying off. Which is why I look back at my time at EMC and feel so good about what has happened. I have made a great many friends. I have worked with people that have influenced me greatly. I have made my small dent in the technology world where I could. And beyond all that I have had a blast doing it all. And it would be very easy to stay comfortable and contribute where I am. But, I have been presented with an opportunity to move the ball in a way I have not before. Life is a sequence of opportunities, challenges, and empty-time in between. It is how you handle each of those moments over a long period of time that shapes who you become. This new change for me is both a major challenge and an extremely important opportunity to shape who I become. Which is why I am announcing that I have accepted a position with VMware as an Automation Architect in Cloud Infrastructure and Services. This position presents some very unique challenges and I am joining an amazing team of rockstars. I have very specific challenges in this role [...]
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Dec
28th2010.Close; 2011.Open;
What a year it has been. From just a personal level 2010 has been my banner year so far. I have got more done, met more cool people, had more fun, and learned more than I would have ever thought possible. Here is just a short list of things that have happened for me (in no particular order)
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Sep
14thRichards RockbandHad Greg, Colleen, and Adom over tonight and as usual when company comes over, out comes the Rockband. Here is a pic of the Richards Rock Group.
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Sep
13thQuick Update and ResolutionWell, I haven’t written anything since Jan. 2008. So does that mean I am not cut out to be a blogger? So my 3rd quarter resolution is to start updating this site. And with that…. I just got a white iPhone 16GB from Best Buy. I was not going to get one yet but I won my companies IT innovation and excellence award two months in a row (didn’t think that was going to happen). The prizes were gift cards to Best Buy. I am giving my company HTC Touch to Greg but after really looking at the iPhone I doubt it will be long before he gets one himself. So now that I have it I am going to start working on getting some business value out of it for other company iPhone users. I have to work out the VPN access, a new WLAN with HTTPS only to intranet sites (project mgmt., and helpdesk mostly), and maybe even try my hand at ThinkCash specific iPhone apps. The iPhone rocks btw. I thought it was 50-75% hype, but now that I have it, I don’t know how I did without it. Kudos Apple. .nick
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Jan
13thUpdateWell I better start adding content here sine I took the trouble to come up with the idea. So here goes: I just started working on my Dad’s campaign site for District Judge. It has been awhile since I did web design and I am super rusty on CSS. It took me 3 days to get the 2 column layout the way I wanted it. I am still waiting on some content but it should be up soon. I am going to take the Security+ test soon. I have a friend who passed it. Him and another guy I work with tell me that I should ace it. I read through a study guide and took a sample test. I was surprised how shallow some of the questions were. I guess going from Cisco tests to CompTIA is the wrong order. I will also take my Cisco Firewall specialist test soon. I have 30 training credits I have to use by May that should help. I have recently worked on a new VPN solution with Cisco ASA that combines RSA Authentication(SDI), LDAP authorization, and Dynamic Access Lists. I pitched it to the CTO, CSO, and my Director and it was a hit. I can filter VPN access by user group, RSA key, Endpoint evaluation, or user certificate in the local store. The idea was to allow different levels of access based on whether they are using a company provided laptop, home computer, or public computer. Using the new setup we [...]
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