I am excited to say that UC Berkeley and ETH Zurich are leading the effort on the Opencast Matterhorn Project. I am also happy to say that I am in the video (that was very well produced by our Video Production team) that announce the kickoff of the project.
Don’t blink, you might miss me.
Yes, it has been quite a summer of little trips for me. About a week after my trip to LA, I was off to Boulder for the Educause Management Program. No, I am not a manager, but I am just checking out what it might take and what the challenges are to manager people. I am not much of a control freak, but it is scary to think how people might react and what you have to do to deal with problematic situations.
Certainly, there were many tools that were helpful and it was quite a good conference. There were also many stories of problematic situations and it was certainly fun to hear some of them (like say, this one at the University of Wisconsion). Networking (people terms) was certainly one of the big things that everyone got out of the conference and we even got some free time to tour around and hike and buy Smorkin Labbits as our unofficial mascots.
In any case, we shall see how things go. I am not in a rush to become a manager. One of the things that I learned is that you will have to let go of some of your day-to-day responsibilities and delegate…I guess I may not be ready for that yet.
Well, I certainly do not have to think about it for the next couple of weeks. I will be off to Seattle/Vancouver next week for a nice short vacation (plus my old friend, Jenna’s wedding) and a week off (probably supervising our bathroom remodel in some way) after that.
No, not the kind that remains after the random Berkeley change-mongers cut off the parking meters, but rather a small entry into my blog.
I really thought I would have had more time today, but I seem to be in more meetings lately (and no, not unproductive ones) and have been slightly lazy until the end of the work day. Thus, I have been busy working at the end of the day and have not really felt like writing in my blog.
In any case, part of the reason for my busy schedule is that I have been tapped to head the Sakai hardware and installation committee to make sure that the hardware and installation for UC Berkeley’s version of Sakai. The fun part right now is trying to get ahold of the University of Michigan and University of Indiana to get some information on their Sakai production setup while trying to make some decisions without that information. Well, it is not an easy job, but that’s why I get the medium-sized bucks.
So school has started again at the University of California, Berkeley and in some ways my job will actually be less hectic because of that. Aside from the previous server crashing issues, things have been going pretty smoothly. I have managed to setup a new server and migrate (without too much headache) our home page from the temporary location (which was a development area for one of the groups in my department).
Also, I have managed to help with setting up the environment (and negotiating with another department, as they are hosting the server) on time for our Grade Book Pilot. As the name suggests, this is an application for professors, instructors, and graduate student instructors to input grades so that they will be able to keep track of it in a centralized location. It does offer many different options (curves, drop assignment, curve one test only, etc.) for the grader to choose from so it is pretty customizable to suit each grader’s needs. It is actually going to be a part of a larger project called SAKAI, which is an open source course management system. So now the fun begins as I will have to setup SAKAI on our development server.
I guess part of the fun of working as a systems administrator is to recover from a server disaster such as having random parts of your RAID 1 (mirrored hard drives) hard drives erased so that the machine does not boot and personal data be erased. Of course, it would not have been so painful had we had a real backup plan. Unfortunately, I had just started to do some basic backup to a central server when this happened. And further unfortunately, since I was using some old scripts, the backed up data were erased Monday morning as in my old workplace, we would have had the data backed up to tape on Friday. Anyways, at least the critical data did not get erased.
The really fun part was trying to bring our trouble ticket system back online. We use Double Choco Latte (DCL), an open source product, which we had to make many changes in order to make it work with our system. Of course, since this is not documented and the knowledge lives in one person’s head, it was quite a challenge to bring it back online. It goes to show how open source is not always the answer, but it still beats paying $7,000 to get something else that does not work.
So now things are mostly back to normal. We also found out that to recover data from the hard drive would take $10,000+, so since it is not exactly critical data that we need, I think we will be passing on this one. So the lesson of the month is…do your backups!
After a bit over one month back in Berkeley, things are back the way they should be. I am getting settled into my job back at UC Berkeley with Educational Technology Services (ETS) as a Systems Administrator. Even better yet, I am no longer being paid peanuts to support the entire IT department for my group. Of course, the challenge now is to standardize and stablize the environment at my new job while juggling learning new things and carrying on new projects. The most fun part is dealing with more instances of Microsoft software, something that I would much rather not see much of when I work.
Along the home front, the house is getting back to normal also with the return of Shareena and myself. Shareena has been busy cleaning up the inside of the house with some help from Olivia, while I have been cleaning up the yard that has grown unkempt for the better part of nine months. So far, things are going well on the inside and the outside is slowly coming around as well. Other than the occassional large boxes (for a new desk for Shareena and a dresser for Swati’s room), Shareena stuff is stacked inside her room and so the house no longer suffers from clutter mania.
So the next steps for me are to start playing basketball again at the RSF and to try to get Shareena outside and exercising some more now that she has cleaned up the house and will have some time to take a break from school/work and do some stuff that she likes (reading, sleeping, cooking) along with some research to do some minor home improvements. So it should be some more good times as things get back to normal.
I was very pleased with my recent interviews with Educational Technology Services (ETS) at UC Berkeley for a Systems Administrator position. The lengthy interview process included a video conference interview about a month ago that included some lengthy questioning on specific issues and scenarios that this position has to manage. In return, I learned that this position is a newly created position and that ETS has been growing, from merging of several departments, and that they have not had to time or resources to hire someone to do systems administrator duties. Although my interviewers were unable to give me a specific job description and duties for this job, they were looking for someone to come in-house and stabilize and clean up the administration of all of their servers (12 at the moment, but they are working to consolidate some of them into fewer servers). This is definitely something that I am interested and furthermore, their critical mission of being the leaders of educational services makes this job very interesting.
So I guess I impressed them enough with my organization and thought process and they invited me to go to Berkeley for a second interview in person. As I met with various members of the staff, I got a sense of how this position would interact with basically everyone and have an influence on the entire department. Surprisingly, the current situation is that there is one person that does a bit of admin as things happen (which is never good) and that various members of the development teams do admin stuff as their team needs it. This department has grown quite quickly and even though they have been fighting this uphill struggle for systems maintenance, they have great development of technologies that is evident in all the different applications that they have built and implemented. Clearly, there are many smart and dedicated people working there.
They were very thorough in answering my questions about the state and direction of the department and from top to bottom, the department is on the same page. It is very rare to have such an in-depth look into a job and department during the interview process and I value it greatly. It shows that the department is serious about finding a candidate that will fit in and perform well with the group that is already there.
So, hopefully, they will find me equally worthy and I will stop being a bum of sorts. But regardless, it is nice to know that there are places where they want to find the right person rather than the person who knows all the answers to techno-babble.
