Changing Directions

It's been about six months since I left the consulting world and went back to work for a former employer.  Things are very different.  My current role has nothing whatsoever to do with virtualization, Active Directory, Group Policy, WSUS, SQL Server, Application Virtualization, or even SMS or System Center.  I had just earned my MCTS on System Center Configuration Manager, which is a bit ironic that I have nothing to do with it anymore.

I spend my days building and testing software deployment packages using Wise products, to hand over to another department to deploy using Altiris.  I also work within a team providing support for those products which we deploy.  It's a good environment and I work with great people who know their stuff and know how to laugh as well.

My home network runs smoothly enough to where I'm not constantly having to troubleshoot problems or figure out workarounds and fixes.  It just runs  (part of the reason I love Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista:  they just work).  Add to this that my current job is 32 miles away, so I spend much more time in traffic and less time at home than I have in years.  I simply don't have as much time to stay up on infrastructure issues and emerging products and technologies.  Staying up late is getting more difficult as I get older and my kids need me even more.

Quite a few former colleagues will e-mail or call to ask me about how to fix this, or how to do that, but it's getting harder for me to respond to those things.  Time to point them elsewhere.  

So, I won't be blogging as much about infrastructure technologies.  For now, at least.  Who knows where tomorrow may lead.  But right now, I just can't discuss those issues authoritatively since I'm no longer intimate with the environment that goes with it.  Time to put things behind and move on to new things.  In some respects it's like moving past the ten years I played in bands.  I learned a lot and met some really nice people during that phase, just as with working in the world of infrastructure engineering and administration.  The road goes on.