Well that wasn't long enough

So I have become a Principal Security Engineer for a company called ReddShell. They have a neat software product and they have some really cool consultants working here.

I got back to Colorado on Sunday night, started the new job on Wednesday and was told on Thursday to pack my bags I would in Chicago for the next month. Needless to say the wife wasn't exactly happy with me and well I was a bit disappointed myself. I was looking forward to being home for a few weeks, I was even beginning to enjoy changing the little girl's diapers. Oh but the life of a consultant requires some sacrafice and so I must head off to Chicago in February.

I am diving headfirst into the world of VISA CISP and Sarbanes-Oxley. Should be fun, finally going to use that silly CISSP for something useful.

Leaving Utah

Well it has finally come to the end. January 28th was my last day with DynamicCity. I decided to leave the UTOPIA project for multiple reasons - all eventually leading to the betterment of myself as a person. My boss put it the best - refering to me as a Technological Gypsy. I like that, may spin that off into another blog line.

I leave my responsibilities in very capable hands. Right now I am sure he is questioning the logic of accepting my position but I believe he will find a strong supporting staff and make his name known. If you or anyone you know is looking for a job as a senior network engineer or sysadmin please contact DynamicCity or Dave.

I managed to get in one more CTO breakfast before skipping town. Phil as always is a wonderful host. If you find yourself in the area during one of the scheduled breakfasts please take the time to attend. I will be trying to schedule my own trips back occasionally for them.

It was nice to talk to people at the breakfast and discover that they understood my decisions to move on from the project. They understood that occasionally you stop growing in your position and you either need to get out or continue to be miserable. This led to some interesting discussions.

A vast majority of people are stuck in jobs, or towns or situations where they don't ever leave. They continue to live with the pain whether real or pyschological and do nothing about it. The worst case is our own perceptions of jobs - we call something we hate to do a job and then moan and whine about having to do it. When you start having problems getting up in the morning to go to the office then you need to stop and evaluate what the real problem is. Are you no longer happy where you are? If that's the case can you fix it from the inside or should you be moving on. I tried to fix my situation, didn't like the band-aids applied and decided it was time to move along. People don't do that - they live with the situation and allow it to eat them from the inside. Silly people!!!!

My new contact info is available for those that want it. Try my google mail wardspan at gmail.com and I can forward it along to you.

Notes from CTO breakfast

First I should once again thank Phil Windley for hosting the CTO breakfast. It usually happens the last Friday of every month and the regular attendees always bring something to the table to discuss. I am not a CTO, don't claim to be one but hope some day to aspire to the levels the gentlemen that do attend have achieved. This is the only place where I feel I am not the largest geek in the room.

So I thought I had better throw my notes up here or else I will forget them.

So what topics got thrown on the table:

Google Desktop Search. Everything from the interesting traffic sent back to the mothership to how badly the processor is consumed from the launch of the program until the entire hard drive has been indexed. On my own machine this took a little over 3 hours to index. Someone mentioned Nat Friedman you may know him from his Ximian days (one of my all time favorites) but we went into his project Dashboard . This app is more useful in my eyes than what google is rolling out - the main thing to note here - people seem to want their google everywhere as we all aren't as organized as we thought.

QEMU was the next topic - I think the leap to virtualization came from the leader Phil - he always seems to understand when it's a great time to change the direction. Virtualization has become a hot topic followed closely or even tied into the ability to make virtualization invisible to the end user. There are the common products VMware (which I use), VirtualPC (former SCO employee swears by it) and then the open source revolution. Development has begun to cross platforms - if I have the app on OSX then I expect it to be over on my WindowsXP box - and it sure would be nice if I could run the same app on the linux box as well. The general consensus was that we may see a change in the way we see OS's that takes the desktop and makes it ambiguous across every platform. this brings the focus back to the applications and not what lies underneath. You can see this change in Apple - the move from OS9 to OSX fundamentally changed the OS and improved the functionality.

Security always get mentioned in one way or another - since I am really interested in it I usually bring it up but not this time. We talked about LogWatch, and some possible extensions to the security model it provides - RSS (XML not the person) got involved and some ideas were scribbled down - got to be careful sometimes we are always looking for that next big project so people have to stake their boundaries.

Downloads - how about a Friendster/Digital Fingerprint download suggestion web site. You could know that a download was clean, and who recommended it among your friends - you can then quickly determine whether you should ever trust your friends again and whether they actually have any idea of what good software is.

There were many little side discussions, more notes but these were the main hot topics. Always looking for new topics to introduce so feel free to drop me a comment.