So here I sit at BNA, which is the airport in Nashville Tennessee. It’s just after a near week-long stint at a work conference here for our database vendor, Sage. The conference went very well and I got enough out of it to feel like I got my organizations moneys worth. There were high points and low points but looking back on the entire experience the good far outweighs the bad. The next time I have to do this will be when this event moves to Washington DC on July 21st 2013.

I haven’t blogged in a while and mostly it’s because the conference and socializing pretty much grabs you right after you wake up and won’t let you go until you drop in your shoes. I got to laughing that the only real moments of privacy I had was when I was in the bathroom, only because people won’t follow you into the john to talk – thank god for that! It actually became rather tragicomic. Each time I would get ready to start working with my email, or Instapaper, or well, anything else really there would be someone who would hail me and we’d start talking. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would far prefer to be interrupted and engage, after all, that’s what I’m here for, so this isn’t a complaint. This is more of an idle observation. The only time I wasn’t engaging with peers was when I was in the bathroom. So, in a way, the bathroom is the last frontier. 🙂

As I attended sessions and get-togethers the same themes kept on appearing with an unusual regularity. That people kept on referring to their IT staff as “them” and the sense of their feelings were that their IT really didn’t understand or appreciate their needs. I’ve written about this before, about what I do in my job and that I really have never understood how other people run their shops. It has been a concern of mine that whenever I introduce people to how I run my shop I get very similar responses. It’s shock, that an IT shop is open and receptive and welcoming enough to engage with their supported staff. In many ways I suspect that these other organizations have never read the “Good Book” when it comes to running an IT shop, which is “The Practice of System and Network Administration”. There is nothing I can do for these other organizations and I’m kind of pinned at Western. During the conference it struck me that I could very well start to write about some of the philosophies that I have developed in my little tiny niche. So in the spirit of that, I will be writing more about my job and the technical things that I do in the day-to-day operation of my job.

I often times sit back and wonder how many of my work peers read any of this drivel. Much of what I write will be dry-runs for some topics I plan on presenting during the next Sage Summit in Washington, DC.

So with Nashville functionally in my past, if not positionally, the blog posts coming up next will be more about my work. I wouldn’t blame anyone if they stopped reading for a while. It’s going to be dull. 🙂