A month or so ago, my boss and I had a meeting about my current job role and how it would be changing. Currently, I am managing a CRM system that is used throughout the organization. I also work with our core transaction system making changes and adjustments as needed, and I write reports from this database.

When we met, she said that she wanted me to work on special projects that came up within the IT department for the time being. Beginning in 2009 I will start to transition to the role of a developer. This kind of took me by surprise, but it is also something I had been thinking about in the back of my mind. I just didn’t realize anyone else was thinking it. It is a great opportunity for me, but will also be a challenge.

A lot of the development within the company is done in SQR which unfortunately isn’t that common except with PeopleSoft organizations. A lot of our web applications are written in ASP.NET or VB.NET so those will be very beneficial to learn. I know we have a couple in C# as well. So, it looks like I have a lot to learn and will probably spend the better part of next year learning programming languages. I have dabbled in it once before, but it wasn’t for me at the time. I think this time it will be more enjoyable. I guess we will find out.

I finished my database class tonight. Luckily we didn’t have to stay to learn anything new. I finished in under an hour and then went home early. The final went pretty well. I don’t think it was as easy as the mid term, but hopefully I did ok.

We had so much work to get done for the class this week. I had an individual assignment due on Tuesday as well as two quizzes. I did well on both the quizzes, so I can’t complain. Tonight we had the final and also had to turn in our group project. It seems like the majority of our grade was based on assignments this week.

Our group project went very well. I had a great group and after meeting over the weekend, had everything but some finishing touches complete. It worked out well. Hopefully we did everything correctly.

Even though a lot of the class didn’t like this course, I thought it was great. I learned a lot and realized that I really enjoy the database side of IT. The professor was great and made the subject enjoyable even when it can be pretty boring. Hopefully I will continue to learn more about databases through work and school.

Now I have two weeks off from school before Leigh and I both start back. We are taking some time off from work to go visit family. I can’t wait! When I start back, I will go back for 15 weeks straight and take 3 classes. I will try to have an update or two while I am off from school. Take Care,

After getting a new computer, I decided to turn my current desktop into a file server that Leigh and I could share. I had received a couple of hard drives for presents but had put off using them until I had a need to. I started to run out of space, so I figured with the new computer, now was as good of time as any.

Since I can’t afford the licenses necessary for Windows Server 2003, I decided to go open source. I had tried this once before on my everyday computer, but there were too many Windows programs that I used on a regular basis. Since I would only be using the server for file storage, I figured I would be ok and would still keep windows on my laptop.

I went with Fedora 9 which was released not too long ago. It is based on Red Hat Linux and has pretty good support. I was able to find books on Fedora, which can’t be said about all Linux distributions. The install was very easy. My next step was to configure Samba on this server so all the other computers could see and share files. This took some reading, but I finally found the answers I was looking for. I ended up changing some settings in the IP tables that fixed all of my problems.

We have been using the server for a couple of weeks now and it seems to work fine. This will hopefully give me the opportunity to learn some command line in Linux as I have not used it before. The best way for me to learn is by forcing myself to use something and figuring out problems and solutions as I go. I am able to use Putty for an SSH connection back to the server without having to hook up a monitor, keyboard and mouse. It should be interesting to see if I move away from Windows and more towards Linux.

Maybe my next step will be to move the website over and setup an Apache web server on this box. That is a project for another day though.