Busy, busy...
Happiness is knowing that you have a pair of
concurrent contracts ready to go in the next week or two.
While I rationally knew the old axiom, "It's not what you
know, it's who you know" (and the logical extension, "and
what they think you know"), it was really driven home
with these two opportunities; one is with a former employer,
and the other is a direct referral from a co-worker at
another company.
So, I'll be doing a bit of training (Linux-based
service load-balancing and high-availability with
off-the-shelf hardware) with possible longer-term assistance
and maintenance on retainer, and a bit of engineering
(revisiting a spam filtering system I built many many moons
ago for a former employer), also with the strong possibility
of follow-up work doing more involved systems
implementation. Maybe this whole independant consulting
thing will work out, after all. :-)
Regular readers of my diary will notice that
I've shied away from the consulting arena before; let me
shed a little light on that. My real objection isn't the
travel, the work, or anything really related to the job. My
objection is doing all of that for someone else's gain. I
want to provide my services to clients, but not with a
middle-man directing me. If I wanted that, I'd be jumping
back into an IT department or programming crew
somewhere.
By the way, if you're doing consulting (or
thinking about it) and are looking for some good reading
material, Alan
Weiss' Getting
Started In Consulting, and his better known Million
Dollar Consulting. His direct approach to the subject
can catch you off-guard initially, but it is a truly
refreshing change from the typical marketspeak of similar
publications.
Newsletter
I'm considering writing a monthly newsletter
covering issues that a systems administrator in a UNIX and
internetworked environment would run into; problems I and
people I know have run into in the past (with solutions),
dealing with politics (management, projects deadlines,
customers and users), ethical questions, and references to
useful articles and information. Drop me an email if
you'd be interested in such a thing if I decide to do it. Or
just let me know if you think I'd be wasting my time.
;-)
Ah, Loki, we
hardly knew ye...
What a shame to hear about the demise
of Loki. It's good to see that services they're currently
hosting are being moved to new homes in an orderly fashion;
this is probably the smoothest shutdown of a company I've
witnessed in last year or so of major business failures
(small comfort for the people laid off after putting so much
work into the business, but that really is how it goes; you
take a chance on a risky new venture, and hope it works
out). Loki and the people surrounding them accomplished some
incredible things for the Linux gaming community (SDL,
OpenAL, and SMPEG being the most prominent examples), in
addition to just bringing games over to the platform. Just
like the failure of Eazel, no matter what you
think about the companies themselves, they both left
something behind for the community to build on. When is the
last time you could say something like that about a
traditional proprietary software company that couldn't make
it in the marketplace? Thanks, guys.