Wow. Just like that, it’s been over a month since my last post. It’s not that I already lost interest in posting, but rather a whole slew of things all came into alignment in this past month that has kept me extremely busy. I’ve thought about posting numerous times, but never had a good chance to… but finally, here I am again.
The main thing that’s been occupying my time is work. That would seem ironic, based on my posting in Chapter 3, but let me explain. Firstly, the company I had been working at had decided to move their main wholesale operation to another facility, leaving the professional division behind. This move comes after only a couple years since they last moved. The main reason for the move is they had a major shortage in warehouse capacity, and needed to move into a facility that had a much larger storage area. This also meant moving from a nice neighbourhood near Main and Cambie to the industrial neighbourhood of Clark and Powell. Whatever the case, this move took place during the last couple weeks of December, so I was very busy helping to get all the computer equipment set up and working. To complicate things, the company needed the computers from the professional division to still interact with the servers at the wholesale division, so we had to set up a VPN (virtual private network) between the two locations and have the computers on the professional side connect to applications on the wholesale side via a terminal server. Fun stuff, but a good learning experience.
Words for the wise techies: If you are looking to set up a VPN, don’t even THINK about getting the Linksys WRV54G Wireless VPN Router. It might look good, and seem to have all the features, but to put it plainly, it’s a well packaged piece of shit. From the link I posted, it is obvious the concensus is fairly general. I didn’t do my due diligence when researching VPN routers and decided to get a couple of these units, and did I ever regret it. The VPN function simply does not work. It wasted many hours of both my time and my very experienced associate’s time. Avoid this unit like the plague. Fortunately I was able to return these routers to NCIX, after complaining to Linksys directly and obtaining a case number. Not all Linksys products are bad… in fact, most are pretty good. It’s just this particular model that they really dropped the ball on. We ultimately ended up using the Linksys RV042 VPN Router, and this model is a very good product, however lacking wireless.
Anyways, It’s been a couple weeks since the move now, and things are finally settling down now… which is good, because I no longer primarily work at this company five days a week.
At the same time this move was going on, I had just began working at a small, but rapidly growing tech startup company. I didn’t want to desert my current employer when they needed me most, even though that meant giving up working for more than three times the pay per hour at the new company. So it was quite the balancing act between helping my old employer and not blowing my chance with my new employer. So these last couple weeks, I’ve mostly been working at the new company, helping with all sorts of IT related tasks. I’m also learning a lot as I go along, which is a good thing. I’ve helped out with things such as configuring their VoIP network, and installing and setting up rack mount servers at a dedicated hosting facility.
As of now, my current arrangement is working Tuesdays and Fridays with my old employer, and Monday, Wednesdays and Thursdays with my new employer, plus weekends if necessary… an option that I’ve been excercising the last two weeks, which means I’ve only gone one day without working in the last three weeks or more… a far cry from the slack hours I was pulling before this.
It’s interesting to see how my mentality has changed so rapidly in correlation with working this new job. With my old job, I was pinching my pennies much tighter… usually springing only a few bucks for lunch, like $2 on the McDeal burger or at most $3.50 for two slices of pizza and a pop at Uncle Fatih’s. Now that I make more than three times what I did per hour, when it comes to lunch options, it’s like… "$6 combo? Sure, whatever… I only need to work a small fraction of an hour for that." I guess when you make more, you spend more.
I actually wrote a lot more in this posting on a variety of things, but decided to separate them out into their own postings that I will publish later on to keep things neat and tidy.
