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Almost done with my vacation, I have been reading this book recommended by a friend that has a lot of different stories in it from different time periods, and during reading it I thought of a couple games I used to play a long time ago – Castles, and Castles II, with the first one being almost 20 years old at this point. I wanted to play it again, so I searched around and pretty quickly came across a pretty cool site – Gog. Very professionally done, they seem to package everything you need for some of these really old games at a low price. Including integrated DOSBox, installation, even the manuals are included.

I don’t know if they are legit or not, whether or not the original publishers have given their blessing to re-distribute these games(I would expect not), but there is likely very few legit ways to acquire these games at this point anyway. But for $6 to get Castles and Castles II in a single package was more than worth it. I spent nearly two full days playing these games, had a lot of fun.

If  you know me, you know I don’t play a lot of games these days, so I was happy to come across this on vacation so I could devote some real time to them, and I beat them both pretty quickly so I won’t have it in the back of my mind that I need to play them more in the coming weeks. Though I did come across several other games that look neat too. I also bought Descent & Descent II from Gog, I had good memories of Descent II, I was really good at that game back in the day. I haven’t downloaded it yet though.

I’m not going to vouch for Gog, though so far the experience has been good and the result very high quality. There are a lot of key games that are missing from Gog still, so I’m not sure if they just don’t have all the materials yet, or if they are legit perhaps the publishers have denied them rights or something. I’m thinking of the Wing Commander series and the X-wing series. I did go through and re-buy most of the Wing Commander games last year, it really feels strange to me as someone who likes modern technology to find myself really enjoying playing some games that I used to play on a 286 15+ years ago(in the case of Castles, and Wing Commander I any ways).

While I’ve been away from home I did notice that the FTC settled with Intel (in an update to an earlier posting), time will tell if it does anything, I am in agreement with this statement from The Register reporter:

To be even more honest, you could argue that the damage to AMD has already been done and that a resurgent Intel got away with all kinds of anticompetitive practices. It is debatable as to whether AMD, VIA, and Nvidia (which may now enter the x86 chip market) can beat Intel even on a more-level playing field, now that Intel has its engineering act together.

So on that note..

Happy Saturday from Cannon Beach Oregon.

So I made the decision, I gave my notice to quit my current gig a couple of days ago. Out of respect for most of my fellow co-workers, I offered to stay the standard two weeks to transition some stuff to other people. I could leave tomorrow and be fine (or yesterday for that matter), doesn’t really matter to me.

I just wanted to thank all of my friends, co-workers, acquaintances, recruiters and those I have interviewed with over the recent weeks for the positive support you have given me. It really helped make the decision much easier. I’ve worked hard, harder than most people I know work in their careers to get where I am today. I’ve sacrificed a lot from a personal level, because I didn’t want to get caught off guard like I did during the last recession. And when I saw signs the economy and society in general was peaking, it was more motivating to get to the top of my game and stay there. And I believe I’m there now(have been for a while). Really takes the stress of a down economy away.

I went through four different job offers before settling on a “Web 3.0” startup in Seattle. They seem to be growing fast and in great need for someone like me. This was the best and most active job search I’ve had in my career, I’ve turned down companies before but I’ve never been so pursed by them both before and after I turned them down. It feels so encouraging that there is such a high demand for folks such as myself, that made the decision even easier — if I don’t have to put up with the current situation that has been festering for years (before I started even!) with no end in sight then I don’t have to. It’s a very fortunate position to be in I have no problem admitting that, I know people who are in, how should I say it, less than ideal career situations but aren’t as fortunate to be able to find a more healthy work atmosphere at another organization.

My work is my life( I’m working on fixing that still), so having a positive professional experience on the job is very important to me. Becuase my work is my life, myself I know of nobody more motivated, more dedicated to their work at least in my field. Which makes it that much harder when an employment situation doesn’t work out.

Anyways, on to the category of jobs, my new gig is hiring many more people, including what appears to be a mid level linux system administrator, if you are looking to make a move, drop me a line with your resume and I’ll pass it along. I would expect the position to have career growth opportunities given the size of the company and where they are at (they are a pretty young company but not your 10-20 person startup).

Other positions include a lead PHP developer, and a Java developer, I can send you more complete job descriptions if you are interested. And of course willing to split the referral bonus 🙂

One thing I have learned though, is think twice(or three times) when the position your interviewing for was for someone else who left suddenly. There may be very good reasons why they left, or maybe not. I first noticed signs of problems more than a year and a half ago, but decided to try to work through them and see if things could work out, no such luck! My current position is my 3rd position in which I replaced someone else. The first was my first job, the previous guy was a flake(showed up to work maybe 25% of the time), the second I forgot why the previous person left but the company was halfway decent and I got a lot of stuff accomplished until the economy ate them. And my current is of course the same situation, and the previous two people left for much of the same reason I am, in fact I’m told that I have held my position longer than anyone else had held it at the company. What does that tell you?

Oh and in case it wasn’t obvious, my current job is probably open, I can’t reccomend anybody senior going there, for reasons I won’t get into here. But if your a junior or mid level admin without a lot of career aspirations then it could be a good fit.

I don’t know about you but to me it’s kind of odd. It’s not something I would expect to be such a regular occurrence. Maybe it’s just the region, or maybe it’s broader.

I’m talking about vendor sales reps and engineers jumping from one company directly to the competition. I mean just from my own experience, I know people who have

• Moved from Extreme networks to Juniper
• Moved from Foundry networks to Extreme
• Moved from HP networking to Extreme
• Moved from Foundry networks to A10 networks
• Moved from F5 networks to A10 networks
• Moved from EMC to 3PAR
• Moved from NetApp to 3PAR
• Moved from Equallogic to 3PAR
• And recently saw someone I hadn’t  seen in more than a year and a half moved from Hitachi to Xiotech

Maybe it’s just the line of work, but to me at least it seems like an amazing amount of cross pollination to the point where it’s hard to tell on occasion what the person really believes, I mean one minute they are pitching product X from you and bashing product Y then the next their doing the opposite.

Then there are other less direct migrations of course going from a manufacturer to a VAR or a distributor, but I’ve been more fascinated by those making the leap from one manufacturer to another.

I suppose it’s just a job at the end of the day.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, I certainly hope so. Indications point to them being out of gas as far as their big growth earlier this decade. I watched a report on CNBC about a week or two ago where a couple of analysts agreed that Google is going nowhere fast. I don’t pay that close attetion to them with whatever products they launch etc. But do feel a bit more at ease if Google has infact peaked. I know a lot of people believe that they pulled out of China to save face because they had trouble competing, which certainly sounds like a more plausable explanation than their official excuse.

It’s been a while since I blogged on anything and had this in my head since I saw it, so wanted to mention the report.