Since my last entry the world has moved a little for me. It moved me to colorado springs, Colorado. I'm here with yet another company (I've lost count now how many that makes) to provide my skills as a linux professional. I'm coding – a little. I'm running lots of benchmarks. I'm bringing up infrastructure to support the development of an embedded system that is up for a government contract. Actually, I don't know if we're up for that contract or if we already have it. Homey don't do contract analysis. Homey is a geek. And the hardware is pretty cool. And doing embedded stuff is pretty cool. So whether we have the contract or not isn't my concern right now. That's for VPs and other pointy hair types to work out. My concern is just doing the work. It's what I do.
The job is interesting and I'm getting to play closer to the hardware. I'm even working on a high speed network driver. I think I can tell you about it (it may become open source at some point in the future), but since I'm not positive about that I won't risk the details. What's interesting is that I'm finally working seriously on a device driver. That's pretty cool. I was starting to think no one was ever gonna pay me for that again. The last one was IBM, and that was more than 10 years ago.
The drawback to this place is structure – they have to obey lots of rules the commercial world doesn't. One is something called Sarbo-Oxley (or something like that). It causes the IT department to move very slowly solving basic network resource issues in order to make sure they are in compliance to government rules. It also means that if I decide to “go it alone” and set up some resources for use locally until IT catches up – as I've done in the past for lots of other companies – it can get me fired. Literally. It's the first time I've ever been liable to lose my job for being too productive.
There are some things in this world that just don't make sense. And when that happens, I just go back to what I know best. writing – code or words. It doesn't matter which.
As of now I'm officially back on the Tux Magazine team. Tux changed editors after the first issue and it wasn't clear if I'd still be a columnist. But that seems to have been cleared up and so far I'm in all the issues. I'm also still writing for linux format. And I'm hard at work on my book – and probably far behind after trying to get settled in temporary digs in Colorado Springs until the house in Houston sells and the family moves up and we get a new house.
But it keeps me busy. And keeps me from worrying about why government rules make very little sense.