Category — Personal

I’m approaching my last week at the firm and up to my neck completing and polishing documentation on the various systems and technologies at play here, it serves as a pretty good reminder as to how much things have changed since I arrived four years ago.

Back then, the ideas of unified messaging and comms were just ‘nice to haves’, possible enhancements to what we had (and were at the time satisfied by) but by no means vital.

Today, the prospect of moving on to an org without these tools is like some kind of scheduled amputation - it’s safe to say I’m going to miss it.

As I’m currently working my notice period in one role in anticipation of beginning another I’ve been in quite a lot of contact with job agencies of late. It’s the first time since I’ve spoken with any for about four years and the recruitment approach for some seems to have changed considerably.

At my current firm I’ve resisted the use of Social Networks, the idea of them makes me cringe on many levels (excluding Twitter, that’s a bit different) so it was interesting to hear from some firms about the use of sites such as LinkedIn to find and research candidates.

So, I’ve taken the leap and signed up, if you get spam from me apologies in advance!

I’ve been pondering this a lot lately and concluded that the easiest thing to do would be write a post (mostly for my benefit) on the topic of why I registered and keep seeming to fail blogging here on TT.

To answer the question I’ve been asked several times lately, I came by the name back when I was in Year 10 at PGS. One of my lecturers wasn’t entirely keen on the direction our discussions took and one day dubbed me the “master of tangential thinking” and when I was scrabbling around for an apt domain to register it came to mind… It’s only more recently when looking at site maps and SEO I find that it’s also a symptom of schizophrenia (I’m not, thankfully).

Anyhow, this blog, originally I started it with the intention of writing about the things which interest me in my everyday faffing with gadgetry and trawling of ‘teh intarweb’ but since the transition back from journalist to SysAdmin I seem to have lost a lot of the organisational skills which I developed and feel much more like a monkey at a typewriter when I sit down to post.

It’s frustrating as nearly every day I encounter things of interest which would be worth discussion, one of the reasons I began getting in to GTD was to start capturing all these ideas in a logical and structured fashion to begin making more sense of the various todos which form my everyday life.

There’s a whole range of topics I’ve yet to cover in any detail, my day is spent working on products such as Exchange 2007, ISA 2006, Office Communications Server 2007 and Windows Server 2008 but I’ve posed on none of them. Nil. Nada.

 I’d say there’s a fair share of procrastination too in the sense that being a bit of a  perfectionist (read: picky sod), I’ve changed the design of the site countless times - I’m not quite sure how I want TT to look or behave but seem to have adopted the tactic of changing it frequently because that elusive layout is obviously going to be produced by my next redesign (or the one after that) - imagine more monkeys + typewriters here…

All these changes don’t just hold the process of blogging up, they’ve been fairly counterproductive in other ways too, a recent ecto upgrade hosed 90% of the larger posts on the site, I’m not sure which button I pressed but as of now I vow to stick to Live Writer, the Wordpress WYSIWYG or Scribefire. I should probably schedule some regular backups too :).

So, from tomorrow I’m going to quit thinking about layout, lists and what the best topics would be and just make sure I post something daily. Actually make today my first day - not an interesting post but one I had to write so that I could get on with the task in hand.

Actually, that’s probably not quite the right word, but it will do.

My blogging efforts stalled recently (after getting off to a mediocre start I’ll admit) when I hit issues posting via Ecto thanks to some new security doodads at my host.

They’ve fixed it (a while ago, again my bad) but I’m only just getting back in to the right frame of mind to attack this properly.

Watch this space