Update... or Did Ben Fall Off the Face of the Earth?

I haven't written much since June 2013.  The first few months I can blame on a project at work.  I finally got approval to replace the aging Rolm phone system at the hospital with a shiny new Cisco phone system.  After months of planning, training and worrying we went live November 1st.  Being that the old system couldn't support a T1 to bridge to the new system, we did the cut over as a flash cut having staged the phones earlier in the week.  Overall things went well except for under estimating how long 400+ analog lines take to move and a glitch with the telco.

After the phone project had settled down, I turned back to taking care of my family.  My wife, dogs and I had been rather unhappy for some time in our current house and town.  So that led me to put out my resume and find a new job. 

This spring I changed jobs to a multi-state hospital system headquartered in the next town down on the Interstate.  It's been a great career move and I'm getting to work with a lot of technology that I would never have had access to in my previous position (UCS, Nexus, OTV, and others).  Unfortunately the house has been harder to sell than we thought, but we're hopeful that by next year that too will pass and we'll be moved down the road.

So now my plans for the rest of the year.

1. Pass TSHOOT before the exam changes.
2. Dive deep into datacenter technologies.
3. Figure out ways to make my commute productive time.