Re: The Well XLIX: Halp, I need a finger extinguisher!
Next time you are in town we'll have to catch a drink out in Westport since I work not far from there.
Definitely, I'm always out in Earth City when I'm up there and usually get put up at the Crowne Plaza on Lindbergh, not far from the airport.
IIRC, you do Cisco stuff or something similar? How did you get started in IT?
Yep, my official title is WAN Engineer. Basically, I'm under the tutelage of our senior engineer and help him take care of aggregate connections into our datacenter and their interaction with our ~2500 customer locations. The customer sites are a mix of private DSL and VPN over public connections (could be DSL, cable, aircard). We provide a secure, managed broadband connection for merchants that have to process credit cards. We don't actually handle the card data, we just transport it. Wow that sounded like a sales pitch :laugh2:.
I got started in IT right out of high school really, I started going to school at New Mexico Tech in Socorro for Computer Science, and found out I absolutely hated coding. So I took a year off, saved up some money, and went back to school. This time I went into Information Security, and loved every minute of it. My first job in Albuquerque was being a jack-of-all trades IT nerd for a local semiconductor company. I managed the website, maintained their computers, did backups, etc. Then I got a contract help desk job for the company I currently work for and they pushed me up the ranks, eventually buying my contract out after six months. They sent me to get my CCNA, and then three months after that I got my Bachelor's degree and they bumped me up into the "engineering group" to start working on PCI compliance. I will have been with this company for two years on December 11, actually.
And if you had only 1 amp, 1 pedal, and 1 guitar for the rest of your life what would they be?
Great question. Guitar would be the strat I assembled a couple of years ago, no question. It is *my* signature model and I'll never part with it. Amp would be a VHT Pitbull 45, I used to own one and sold it during a rough financial patch a few years back, miss it dearly. Pedal would probably be a Hermida Zendrive, it's a terribly cool light overdrive.