gigamatic

thanks to Courtney, I realized many folks don't know what I do for money. (shut it, Jay).

what my mom tells people is: "he works with computers. i'm not sure exactly, but it has something to do with the Internet." (which is great, because then, her friends ask me for more details...)

what it says on my business card is: (i actually had to look this up... I havent ordered cards in so long, and I wasnt sure what they said then) systems develop'r. yeah. that's actually surprisingly accurate at this point, since what I was hired to do and what I actually do are now two very different things.

I was hired to make (and support) websites. i did that for a few years, but also did some desktop user support. then, as sites got more interactive, i built content management systems, and other back-end databases. then, i built internal (intranet) sites with even more databases. eventually, 80% of what I built were databases which happened to have web front-ends. functional, not pretty.

i still do a lot more desktop support than you might think. we've got something like 100 desktops - all windows, and around 30 servers, of which i can do support for about a dozen, maybe. i'm also the "mac guy," by default -- we have a dozen macs, too. i've been using OSX since it came out, and some of our macs arent even migrated over yet, 5 years later.

i'm also the only guy who can troubleshoot most graphics-program or printing issues (outside of our prepress dept.)

there are 5 guys in our IT department. One splits his time between managing our cash register system and distributed software license sales, and all the reporting that entails. He's also learning how to support our printer mgt system. Another guy manages that system, and also supports our document mgt system, and will be learning our new integrated production sys. Then there's a primary guy for the doc mgt system, who also knows the print mgt system. Then there's our hardware and network guy, who does most of the desktop support. And then there's me... the integrator and "competent generalist." You need something done in a database, you come to me. You need a web front end (or Access), you come to me. Your mac won't print, you come to me.

Right now, I'm in the middle of no less than 4 major projects. Possibly 8, depending on what you count as major. Today is a slow day, so far, but probably will break loose in < 1 hr.

So what am I doing today? Building a custom portal for a doc mgt project. Planning integration of 4 trouble-ticket systems. Building a custom CMS which will manage content for our new website (rolling 7 sites into one). Building our new Intranet portal page (and adding functions to it).

That's the short list, folks. Boring stuff.