Busy

You can definitely tell when I’m busy and when I’m not based on how often I update this site.  As you can image, from how infrequently I’ve been doing updates, that I’ve become incredibly busy.  I received a promotion, and now I’ve taken on about 10x more responsibility than I had before.  It’s definitely different than what I was used to, but it’s a good different (at least it still is right now).  Instead of just being a worker bee assigned to a project, I now, in so few words, manage all infrastructure aspects of projects that come into the department. 

This has resulted in a lot more work on my plate.  And not just more work, but more work that I’ve never done before (at least not at this scale).  Things like quotes and estimations.  Plus, I’ve been traveling some and trying to get some training done through NetApp.  Oh, did I mention all this responsibility was done by a person that was twice my level before my promotion?  Well, I can’t say that exactly because everything that he did didn’t just jump onto my plate, there’s a project manager that’s actually doing some of the work.  However, regardless, everything needs to cross my plate because of my technical abilities and my knowledge of what my team is doing.

We’re also getting a NetApp FAS3050C cabinet in on Tuesday.  This is why I’ve been doing some training on it, since I’ll be point-man on getting that all setup.  We’ll primarily be using that as an iSCSI target for virtual machine hosts and SQL machines.  I’m personally really stoked about that.  ~30 TB of raw data to play with.  I’m glad that I’ll be doing that though, as it helps to balance out the ever increasing management responsibilities.  Toys are good.

In non-work related news, I’ve been taking another photography class: Portrait & Lighting I.  It was actually one that I wasn’t really going to take, but I’ve definitely learned a lot.  I was skeptical of taking it at first because I had heard that the teacher didn’t go into much of the technical aspects.  However, that’s what I really like.  I enjoy learning all the technical stuff and then be able to play with that knowledge for my own images.  Well, the normal teacher is actually taking a break, so the same guy who taught our Photo II class is teaching this one.  This is probably one of the reasons I decided to take the class, because I like the way he teaches.  Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of “good shots” from this class as we’re basically just learning how to correctly use lights and many of the pictures are of different types of lighting or of a dummy head.  It’s possible that something from this next shoot will show up on aaron spruit (.com) though.  We’ll just have to see.

In other photography news, I’m looking at getting a new 105mm macro lens and flash.  I’ve also been contemplating getting a light meter, and I’ve actually bid on a few on eBay, but I just don’t think I’d use it all that much.

I think that’s about it, and be sure to check out aaron spruit (.com), since it gets updated every weekday.  Oh, and there should be some pictures taken in the last month showing up now, as I finally got out last weekend to take some pics.  Out of 100ish pictures, I’m probably going to throw up 29 or so.  It was nice last weekend; I just put some newish music on my iPod, threw on the headphones and took the camera out with me.  It was actually quite relaxing, but still amazing how many strange looks people gave me.