Yes, I am doing something I rarely did as a contractor. Taking a vacation, a real vacation, one where I actually still get paid. What an amazing concept. As a contractor you make enough (well if you did it right) to not have to worry about taking an unpaid vacation but the thing is, you don’t want to have any unpaid time so you seem to not take vacations. Instead you try to sneak out for occasional long weekends or holidays which you may get paid for. Unfortunately in the IT Ops world, the long weekends and holidays tends to be when the “company” wants to make the “big” changes so that users aren’t impacted during the normal business week. So, the times you would take off, you wouldn’t, and you end up working years and years on end with no real vacation.
So, now I am a 9-5 moe and while I may not make the money I used to make on a yearly basis, I make more per hour and work a lot less hours and get, yes, you guessed it, real vacations.
Of course I sit back and wonder, how much stuff will stack up for me when I am gone? How busy will I be when I get back?
It doesn’t matter. I need to focus on my vacation and that means keeping the g/f happy by doing fun things and keeping Robbie happy by working on chapters on “the book”[1].
As for the book, it is progressing nicely, at least I think so. It is getting a little smoother running through it. Mostly I have been doing a lot of changes that, IMO, should have been caught in TR’s but there are some things that have changed that I am updating and some things where I think opinion has changed considerably such as around certain security concepts, etc. Also I had to make a few notes on writing code for web pages for the AD Stuff… With the explosive acceptance of Firefox, you can’t just assume anyone using your web site is using IE anymore which means client side vbscript and activeX object use goes out the window… You can only assume this if your company only allows [2] IE for browsing.
Anyway, I am off to start the vacation. My friend Dean has promised that he will tackle any and all questions on the ActiveDir Org list I would have tackled in my absence so that is all covered. There is an exception, he won’t tackle any joeware questions. He makes it a personal goal to not use the stuff just to try and irk me. It is quite funny when he comes to the conclusion sometimes that something he wants to do can’t be done with anything but a joeware tool. I can hear him swearing in Florida from here in Michigan.
[1] Where have you been? The O’Reilly Active Directory Third Edition of course…
[2] And I argue you still can’t assume in this case, you can simply smack people if they admit to runing Firefox.
Ha! It is not Active Directory COOKBOOK, third edition silly. It is just “Active Directory, 3rd edition”.
And I’m still waiting on those dates 😉 Don’t make me start spamming your blog.
Huh, that is what I said. 😉
*makes a note to ask a lot of questions next week for which ‘use oldcmp’ or ‘use adfind’ is the easiest answer* 😉