This week we had a re-org at work.  The changes didn’t impact many people, and no one was let go, but it did affect me.  I’m no longer a member of the Research and Diagnostics team, no longer a lead, and probably the most significant change, no longer interfacing with the customer.  I’ve been moved to the IT team as their developer to help automate our internal processes, to consolidate tasks and to ultimately help improve our security procedures and policies by allowing us to properly restrict privileges to those that should have them.

My day-to-day responsibilities, as they were in reality, aren’t changing that much.  I’m still responsible for the production environment, deployments and maintaining our products, but I no longer have to deal with the stress and frustrations from the relationships with the customer.  Which recently, have been very frustrating, since most of my interaction with the customer is after or during a big mess.  My involvement in customer tasks often meant that is was a crisis or deemed a crisis by the customer.  Moving from one upset customer to another can be very tiring, so I am looking forward to not being responsible for those issues any more.

I still do not know how to feel about all the other changes yet.  For a while, it means that I’m solely responsible for managing and maintaining our products until I get the other members of IT up to speed, which means I’ll be working more and on call all the time.  The situation isn’t a whole lot different than it was during the re-org right before I moved to cover for nights, but now my only customer is the rest of the company.

A couple of technology “changes” I’ll be learning and working on are:

• Learning and scripting in MS Powershell.
• Automating many of my previous responsibilities.
• Coding monitoring tools and plug-ins to interface with our production environment for forecasting and reliability purposes.
• Teaching IT about our services, products and architectures.
• Teaching IT basic “programming” skills in areas of scripting and thinking to help increase management and maintenance productivity.
• Documentation.

 

There are still a lot of things to iron out in the next week or two, but ultimately, two or three months in the future, I should have a personal life once again.  It felt good to remove my name from the emergency contact list and my cell phone from the distribution list after two years.

Rex is a mother's reflection on her struggle and joys as a parent of an blind and autistic boy.  Cathleen walks the reader through the hardships, the internal struggles, and joys of understanding true love and peace that hope and faith can bring, despite life's many struggles.  Rex is an autistic and blind child that has one strong connection to the world around him through music as a savant.

While not an easy book to read due too the emotionally heavy content, this is one book that I believe should be added to the required reading list of learning young adults.  The book is an instant and reaffirming acknowledgment for those that have learned what unconditional love really is.  But the book is also an opportunity for those that do not quite understand unconditional love, due to a lack of experience, to experience it through a mother's own struggle with the pains of this world and the joys of children despite the hardships and struggles that come with being a parent.

I especially recommend this book for individuals that desire to grow in areas of helps ministry.  This book will work on your empathy more than anything.

I’m releasing the first version of the AutoMute Service, which will automatically mute and unmute the sound on a Window’s computer when the session is Locked and Unlocked.  This is incredibly useful for the computer at the office when you’re listening to music on your headphones and often forget to pause or mute the music when you walk away.

More info can be found here