When I started as an IT dogs-body I was lucky enough to do quite a bit of travelling. For a young guy this was awesome; configure Exchange servers, see the world! But it also meant I was hopelessly naive AND… Read More ›
Tales from IT
Tales From IT: A Round-About Career Path
Sometimes I think back on my career path and it’s a bit…. meandering. I love what I do but how I got here was more luck than judgement. Still, in the style of Marvel’s WhatIf? there were a few key… Read More ›
Tales From IT: How I got paid to play World of Warcraft for 3 months
Upset customers, complex systems, poor documentation, high-pressure situations, bizarre legacy choices. Working in IT is hard work. Except when it’s not. Watching installations / patches run, interminable meetings, deciphering manuals (“What does ‘Klaatu barada nikto’ mean?”), hanging around for a… Read More ›
Tales From IT: Don’t Confuse Relative and Absolute Pathnames!
This incident occurred in the first place I worked and it proved to me just how much damage a little ignorance can do (unfortunately I was the source of the little ignorance in this story). More specifically, a little ignorance,… Read More ›
Tales From IT: I Don’t Want To Win If They Don’t Lose
IT projects past a certain size get quite complex. They have a lot of moving parts and often those parts have to be aligned correctly and at the right time to make everything work. In turn, that means you need… Read More ›
Tales from IT: Man Vs Pager
In the IT department where I first worked, there was a Network Admin who was a bit ‘highly strung’. He’d get quite short when things got tense and he liked things done the way things were always done (he supported… Read More ›
Tales from IT : Installing Servers in Style
I’ve been lucky enough to do quite a bit of travelling throughout my working life. Most of the time it wasn’t particularly glamorous (“Be an IT guy! See the inside of server rooms in exotic locations!”) but occasionally I’d get… Read More ›
Tales from IT : The Great Snipe Hunt for DNS
One of the first places I worked was a software development house who’d built themselves up from a small group of developers into a pretty big (2-3 thousand) outfit. Originally they had two IT departments; one (where I worked) focused… Read More ›
Tales from IT : For Whom The Bell Tolls
It was my second week at my new job. It was still hectic as I tried to get their infrastructure performing better but at least my second week couldn’t be as bad as my first, right? Oh dear.
Tales from IT : The Story of the Little IT Boy
Or, “How badly can you mess up in the first couple of weeks in a new job”? That said, it could have been a lot worse. Full gory details below the line.
