Although our company closed down the 18th of December, it has not really felt quite like that till now. Pretty much everyone else is gone, or there are a few stragglers that will be around, but not people I really talked to or had much to say to about anything at all. Today, is the day when the last help will be given to any customers who cry for it. Today is the last day that there will really be someone to joke with or make comments about how badly things were run. Its all rather depressing. On Monday I get to shut down DNS for anything but the market sites we own, I will be turning off FTP access for anything. I will be taking them out of our mail servers or shutting some mail servers down. By some counts we may still have a few hundred clients that have yet to move away. Who knows why, maybe because they think the technology world is better left alone, too complicated, too fast, or too uncaring. Or maybe they were just too confused on how to figure out how to move away. Some may say thats a good thing, after all, if they cannot figure out some basic stuff, should they really be doing it. Not sure of that myself, but I think its likely not a good thing. I still have yet to hear the official word from Liberty Mutual. On a good note at least they seem to be moving somewhat forward as I got an email requesting me to fill out some online forms. I will feel much more secure when I have an offer in my hands, rather than their desire to hire. And on a technical note, I am yet again installing Cygwin on another box, so it will have an SSH server. Going to use it to transfer a few million files.

I had to drive down to Braintree Massachusetts today. I hate driving in Mass. Absolutely, there are way to many cars on the road, and none of them show anything pretending to be manners. Now hold on before you get all bent out of shape if you are one of those drivers, I am SURE its not you. Really, its like why cities riot after their team wins or loses an important sporting event. Its mind of the masses psychology. So I drove down and back without any hassle it was a long drive but uneventful. But seeing the big city always makes me think, why do people bunch together and live in such tight spaces one on top of each other. Its not natural. Tomorrow I get to turn off the majority of the DNS stuff and ftp servers for the company. After that we will be hosting only a couple sites, that are paying nicely for it. Our spam should go way down as we will no longer be a mail relay for over a thousand domains. And I really will not need to get up in the middle of the night to fix things, I hope. And all I can say to most of those clients is, GOOD RIDDANCE!

***************CRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAK*************** Hmmm let me wipe off some of the dust here before I sit down. *cough* *cough* yup a bit dusty alright. Man talk about falling into disuse. I never knew cobwebs could form so quickly or in an electronic world. Well its been a while, yes I know two months, 17 days to be precise. But really who was counting? And if you say you were, well really don't you have better things to do than read this tired old blog? I mean come on, its not like its interesting or anything. So where to begin, well I could start at the end to be original but then I would probably think whats the point in going back to the beginning if you know how it ends. Not much, unless of course you watch the movie Momento... Anyway, I got really tied up in November with our new product release, based on ATG, which apparently stood for A Terrific Gamble. I ended up spending a lot of time setting things up on the servers doing code pushes etc. And really did not have anything interesting to post. Got to play with rdist and other stuff, but really nothing very interesting. This continued till mid-December, one of our developers was putting in a good 80 hours a week it seemed. When they decided to change ATG to mean Axe Those Guys. And our backing people pulled the plug on the company. So the 18th of December we shutdown. *poof* Cept it was not really *poof* it was more like *gurgle gurgle gurgle sputter sputter sputter* *attempt to die*. See I really lucked out, I guess, well thats how I will call it for now. I got asked to stick around to help shut things down, we had about 1500 customers that needed to get off our systems and there really was not another person who knew where all the skeletons were. So I as well as a few others were brought on, or kept on as contractors depending how you look at it. So since then its been a process of disabling or turning things off, slowly, very slowly. We coulda just gone *poof* but they were trying to be nice about it. And of course ended up just getting a bad rep from people in the business. Figures. Meanwhile, its not a great situation to be in. Wife 9 months pregnant, no job, and having to pay COBRA rates on insurance. OUCH. So I immediately set out on finding a job, one that would be there after they decided they no longer needed me. You know what? Its depressing out there. Headhunters do not call you back. Companies that do have openings do not even bother to let you know they received your resume. Which I can kind of understand, as I was told by an HR department where I did get in (more on that in a bit) that they get 400-500 resumes for a single position. Needless to say I did not hear from anything I put in for. I also went down the networking path, networking in that talking to people you know, friends, relatives, people you have not really spoken to enough of in the last 2 years. You essentially call on anyone you have known and ask them if they know of anything. Well, not exactly, first round you call on anyone you know that you LIKE/have respect for. When you run out of those avenues then you call on the people you don't necessarily like/have respect for. Why do it that way? Cause the first type will likely find you a job that fits or is good, the second type might find you a position as a sanitation engineer, and think it fits. Well in calling on people of the first type, I got really lucky. And I do mean REALLY lucky. Someone I had worked with back in Cabletron U, for a while, and is now working at another local employer got my resume in front of the right person's eyes, and put in a good word for me. Without that I probably would never have even had my resume looked at there. I really really appreciate that, hopefully I can do the same for another in the future So after going in for interviews three times, I have been told they want to bring me on, just waiting to discuss start date and salary. Good things DO happen. And of course in the middle of all of this my little army of darkness decided to increase by one, a bit ahead of schedule but hey thats okay, it all worked out for the best. Now at this time I have to think that I am done expanding my army, so please please no more applications or resumes. Hopefully I shall be able to keep up posting more often, but who knows, with a new job on the way and a little cadet to indoctrinate, well who knows what time shall be open. But I am really interested in getting my own domain setting up my own mail server and messing with some other blogging tools like moveable type. And a bored geek is not a happy geek....