what's doin' @ work

I'm a network engineer for a financial company in Boston. I help design the corporate data and voice networks and maintain the overall physical and logical (sometimes illogical) infrastructure for the company. I've been working in IT (i.e. getting paid), in various capacities, since about 1994 or so, and have been doing network engineering full-time since 1998, when I lived and worked in Chicago.

In the past few months, my company has spent millions of dollars upgrading our network from one vendor's equipment and topology to those of another. For many reasons, this has widely been regarded as a good move. Downtime has decreased by a couple of orders of magnitude, and we're already realizing a (theoretical) return on investment -- fewer helpdesk calls and complaints about the network "being down." Granted, this doesn't mean people don't call at all, but at least we can definitively say it's not our problem. This time. :-)

I've been doing a lot of SNMP hacking lately -- tweaking our new network management (manglement!) system. It's pretty cool when I can get one of its zillions of components or features to work, but by and large, it's rather clunky and unwieldy. And it cost sixty grand. (It runs on Windows... need I say more?) But I must admit I'm learning quite a bit about SNMP and other network management technologies and concepts, and it keeps my brain sweating (more or less), which is always good.

I'm also studying (or at least trying not to get distracted too much from studying) for another professional certification. We'll see if it pans out. I have pretty poor study habits (you should see my college transcript), as I'm very easily distr--... ooooh, look! Donuts!