By the end of today, I’ll probably have signed a six month contract to work for a company in Chicago using my obsolete 1980s computer skills. We haven’t mutually decided if I will be moving to Chicago or working remotely from Connecticut – either is a possibility, but long time readers know I would really like to get out of Connecticut.
What this means to you is that
1) Even less of my time and energy will go to maintaining the Streaming Radio Guide
2) The system could go down for extended periods of times if I’m 1000 miles away and can’t press the Reset button
3) If I do move to Chicago, there may be a period of time when the system is down while I move computers
4) If you submit an update or correction, it might be a week before I even see it.
In any case, this will cease being the main focus of my life as I hope to return to being a somewhat normal human being with real life friends.
More than likely, I’ll be putting the server into “lockdown mode”, which means anything that would allow vandalism is turned off – ratings, the blogs, show topics. The directory itself will function normally, just seem very sterile without my charming insights 🙂
Congratulations and I hope it works out for you, whether in Chicago or remotely!
Congrats! That wouldn’t be the Chicago Stock Exchange would it? NASDAQ better look out! 🙂
Thanks again for keeping SRG up (albeit in lock-down mode) while you’re gone. I think we’ve all enjoyed your blog as a thought provoking salvation from the talking heads on the 24-7 news channels.
I hope it works out for you – a huge thank you. It is generous of you to leave it up and THANK YOU.
Whatever we can get when it comes to SRG is more than we deserve. I don’t usually try to speak for others but in this case, I am confident that I accurately do.
There seem to be a couple computer geeks loitering here, so this is the dinosaur machine where people want my skills (keeping in mind I haven’t touched one since 2002). This is a pretty concise history
http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug060205-story03.html
I want you to be happy art, I really hope you
don’t HAVE to move though. I was just starting to
really get into things.
Change to change is in the air.
I’m now in the old “Hurry up and wait” game. Having a firm date and accepted the offer to start on Monday, and with a non-refundable plane ticket in my hand (that I paid for), the client pushed back the start date because they won’t have a place for me to sit and/or the laptop won’t be ready in time for my “training”.
So you have me to kick around for probably two weeks more. This was not 100% unexpected by me – I’ve worked enough in big companies to know there are always people who think their job at the company is to show their value to the company by saying “No” at the last minute.
My general principle in life is you get one “free” chance with me where I trust you. If you abuse my trust, then we move into “Trust but verify” mode.
The opportunity is NOT in the stock business or related field, although it is related to another thing I write about a lot. Since leaving NASDAQ, I’ve paid very little attention to it – most of the people I worked with were “let go” and probably replaced with people from Bangalore (guess). The above story mentions that NASDAQ purchased 500 Tandem processors which tells me that my handywork must still be what they are using, and that they ultimately understood the purpose of the design – rather than trying to funnel everything through one process as fast as possible (the original NASDAQ approach written by people who didn’t understand N+1), the SuperMontage system was designed to spread out the trading over as many processors as possible.
Since HP took them over, they apparently made huge improvements in the throughput, especially the disk drives and inter-processor communications. At the time I was designing things, I/O was a huge bottleneck, so things might have been over engineered to work around a problem that went away ultimately – but it’s important not to rely too heavily on promises that might not work out on schedule.
However, Chicago is not a bad place to living if you do computer work. COBOL programming on a 30 year computer architecture is not the only option 🙂 I could probably get a job doing something in C/*nix working on a 40 year old computer O/S 🙂
Cool Art ! Old software is ok. Its still good. All this crap that out there now like:
.Net, Flash, (junk).
Some good ol C++ programming is good. There maybe some good people in Chicago. Like the JerseyDevil said,, Thanks for SRG! Its awesome.
I hope you still get to help your friend in North Carolina too, (that’s running for Governor).
So you will work with Cobol? Database related , maybe some software that is so intertwined with Oracle, Sybase, PostgreSQL or DB2 its compiled together.
Is it InterSystems Cache ?
Have a good one Art !
Parrott
My phone calls are not being returned, so I assume this is dead at this point. I started by telling them I was retired and had no need to go back to work. I didn’t mention John Galt, though 🙂
To be honest, after I started asking more details about the systems and what the job involved, I’m pretty sure I would have wound up extremely frustrated. Whoever nixed the contract probably looked at my resume and said “Why the hell would he be wanting this stinky job?”. The people who I actually talked to knew the answer to that question. As my relative said…. if they don’t at least offer to pay for the plane ticket after you accepted their offer and then pulled it back, you’re probably lucky you didn’t actually go to work for them.
Weird. After a week of hearing nothing, I just got a phone call. I’m pretty sure it’s still dead, but I should have a firm answer tonight.
Server is now in lock down mode.
The blog is still here and you can still post to it – it’s just if you didn’t ever bookmark it, you won’t find it 🙂