Posts tagged as:

Work

Why I made a “stupid” financial move – intentionally

November 23, 2009

On my previous post, I mentioned that we were debating making the switch from a PPO to an HSA. Thanks to all who commented! We’ve decided to go the HSA route, and what’s more, we’ve decided to use the option to roll over funds from an IRA to the HSA (we are contributing the maximum [...]

Tagged as: Health, Insurance, Personal Finance, Work

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Help! Health insurance – Blue Cross PPO, or Blue Cross HSA?

November 6, 2009

Open enrollment for health plans starts at my day job soon. Now that I have a child, I’m looking at the HSA (Health Savings Account) combined with a HDHP (high-deductible health plan) with a high deductible versus the PPO (traditional) health plan option again, and with a few changes that have been made in the [...]

Tagged as: Health, Insurance, Personal Finance, Work

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nate’s task list: 2009/jul/10

July 10, 2009

Continuing the tradition started here..
Work tasks

An hour and a half of conference calls with vendors
An hour and a half of meetings which are unrelated to the conference calls
Continue researching VM thin provisioning and configuration management frameworks
Continue to work on a storage evaluation framework to compare overall cost/performance of multiple vendor’s arrays
Get Citrix licenses for workload [...]

Tagged as: Task List, Work

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nate’s task list: 2009/jul/08

July 8, 2009

I’m starting to actually make todo lists for myself, and figure that since there really isn’t anything private or confidential, might as well post them to bore you all, and maybe even get some constructive feedback on one some of the work I’m planning to do. ;) We’ll see how it goes!
Work tasks

Continue [...]

Tagged as: Task List, Work

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regarding sales pitches..

March 6, 2009

To the sales person trying to sell me, well, anything:
I am a tough sell. I will ask hard questions. I will not take anything you tell me at face value, you will have to prove it to me. If I think your product sucks, I will tell you that, and tell you why. If I [...]

Tagged as: Work

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if you manage routers and don’t have rancid, get it

May 18, 2008

RANCID, the “Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ” (nice backronym, eh?) is a program that periodically goes out and fetches the config files from your routers / switches / many other devices that it supports. If you manage any of these type of devices, and do not currently use RANCID, well, all I can say [...]

Tagged as: Management, networking, Work

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odesk – online melting pot for consultants/contractors

April 2, 2008

The other day, I ran across oDesk, which is a site where contractors (“Providers”) can offer their services and clients (“Buyers”) can find them. Providers can take free tests to show their skills. The site also facilitates payments, etc.
Quite interesting – I’ll have to try it out at some point. One thing I notice is [...]

Tagged as: Contracting, Work

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interesting concept in recruiting

January 22, 2008

A friend invited me to a new site – Notchup. Basically, you set up a profile, post some details, and in theory employers who are looking for employees like you will actually pay to interview you. Interesting! I might be a little bit more interested in listening to recruiters if they are willing to pay [...]

Tagged as: Work

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new site launched – slantly.com

December 15, 2007

Well, the project that I’ve been working (with a large team) on for the last two months or so at work has finally gone into public beta – check it out at slantly.com.
Basically, slantly is a site where you can post an opinion, and other people can either agree or disagree with it, and provide [...]

Tagged as: Slantly, Work

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changing with the times..

November 7, 2007

As many of you know, I’ve recently moved positions at work, and am now the primary systems administrator for an extremely smart group of people who are working on rolling out some new products.
Nifty technologies we’ve been working with:

Hadoop
Ruby on Rails
Amazon EC2

Other cool technologies we’ve looked at, but are not using quite yet:

AppLogic

If you are [...]

Tagged as: Amazon, Work

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new resume format

April 7, 2007

I’ve gotten tired of my custom-written MySQL app to handle my resume, so I decided to scrap it and try out xml-resume-library to maintain it. It’s quite interesting, and I think the results are pretty good.. my resume page has been converted over to it, check it out!
One of the really cool things that this [...]

Tagged as: Work

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yeah.. i’m a little busy.

October 17, 2006

OK, like most fledgling bloggers out on the ‘net, I’m becoming an utter failure when it comes to updating this bad boy on a regular basis. Sorry ’bout that. Just a few random notes:

I’m extremely busy. Work. Work. Work.
I’m now the official NBC Sports sysadmin at my company. That means work. Lots of it.. sometimes.
We’re [...]

Tagged as: Cell, Work

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nbcsports.com goes live

August 21, 2006

Well, my pet project (from an infrastructure perspective) for the last couple months is finally up and live — check it out. Note I can’t take any credit for the coolness of the site — that’s the excellent design team down the hall from me.
In any case, I was fortunate(?) enough to miss the blood, [...]

Tagged as: Work

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back to normal hours, finally!

February 27, 2006

After a few very tiresome weeks working night shifts for the Olympics (started at midnight on Friday the 10th, and had the midnight to 9am (well, 8:30 most days) shift every day until the last shift started at midnight on the 25th), I’m finally back to my normal hours, and only working Monday through Friday [...]

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testing live streaming video on the nbcolympics.com site

February 26, 2006

Well, this weekend, we’re going to be trying a new experiment.. we’ll be putting a live stream of the gold metal hockey game between Sweden and Russia or Finland up on the NBC Olympics web site (streaming video is fun!). It’ll be interesting to see how it goes, and how well Akamai can handle [...]

Tagged as: Linux, Work

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olympics site finally getting some attention

January 12, 2006

The company that I work for is responsible for the production (both the hosting environment and the actual design) of the NBC Olympics web site, and we’re finally starting to see some serious media attention focusing on the site – it’s nice. A local TV station interviewed a few people here, and put the report [...]

Tagged as: Work

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