Archive: May, 2010

----- 05.26.2010 --------
Things are pretty busy these days with the baby, a job search, some part time work and so on.... but I wanted to take a quick time out to congratulate my wife, Kim. This evening we will be attending CAMH's Transforming Lives Awards Ceremony. Not only are we attending, but Kim is one of this year's award recipients! The press release first came out on May 8th with an article in the Toronto Star, but it's never too late to tell the world how proud you are of your wife :) Looking forward to tonight's award dinner to honour Kim and the other award winners.

Aside from showing some public display of pride for my wife, what else is new in the land of Rob Girard? On the job front I've had a few interviews and I'm especially excited about an opportunity that I have a 2nd interview for tomorrow. Stay tuned for an update on that. And on the baby front, Alice is doing great! We continue to post stories and pictures up at TheGirards.com.

What else? Last week I took VMware's "vSphere: Install, Configure & Manage" coure. It's a requirement to take the course to get my most recent VCP certification: VCP4. It's too bad I dropped the ball and missed the opportunity to upgrade my VCP2 without having to take the course. The course was quite expensive ($3K!) and unfortunately was very basic. I should have taken one of the more advanced courses such as Troubleshooting or the FAST track, but there wasn't anything available that matched my availability (ie. now, when I'm not working and have the time!). Oh well... although the course did not provide good value as a whole, the instructor was awesome and could answer just about any question I threw at him, so I tried to derive some value that way. There were a couple advanced questions I had around memory management (specifically limits and how it affects host swapping and/or guest paging, as well as ballooning) and deleting multiple snapshots that had him stumped and that I am awaiting a followup email from him. I was able to create a lab experiment to contradict what was "supposed" to happen and am hoping to find out what is really happening. If it's interesting, I'll share it here, even if it is just for the geeks (both directly hitting my site or finding it through google). Enough rambling... change the subject. This past weekend we were down in Windsor to celebrate Laura's birthday. It was the typical May 2-4 weekend: BBQ, Beer, Friends, Family & Fireworks (not necessarily in that order). Took lots of pics, but I don't have the time to post them right now. I was disappointed with my fireworks pics from our backyard display, but was lucky enough to catch the huge Ashbridges Bay (Toronto Beaches) display from our front porch! Got some pics of that I'm happy with :) OK... that's all for now... later!

----- 05.04.2010 --------
First of all, Happy Luke Skywalker day everyone! May the 4th be with all of you! :)

So, what's new? Definitely life is pretty much all about Alice right now. But, in an attempt to keep an identity of my own (yes, it's OK for all you parents to laugh at how naive I'm being.....)... I want to keep updates mainly about me here, on Rob Girard dot com, and updates about Alice and other family stuff on the new site I set up: TheGirards.com. But, just because there's a site set up for Alice, doesn't mean I won't drop the odd pic of Alice on here:

Back to me, and all things Rob Girard! :) The past month has been amazing! I've been mostly off work, with some part time consulting a few hours a day for the past couple weeks. As much as I love it, I need to ramp things up and get back into full time work. Fortunately, loving what I do (ie. being a professional Geek) as much as I do, going back to "work" isn't really "work". Besides, if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life, right? So, in keeping with that theme, as I have for most of my "working"career, I have been applying to some new jobs. I'm mostly applying to contract positions in the 6-12 month range so that I can have more impact in more organizations. However, I am staying open to long-term opportunities if the company and position are a great fit. I am primarily looking for challenging positions that call upon as much of the 13+ years of experience I've gathered to date so that I can build upon it and help companies move into next generation data center solutions. And in my mind, pretty much all next generation datacenters revolve around Virtualization. Since I love working with VMware so much, that's been my primary search term and has brought back a handful of really interesting positions. My first interview is this Friday, but I expect to have several more over the next couple weeks and be fully employed again by the end of May. I'm really looking forward to getting back into the flow of loving to go to work everyday!

If you know anyone looking for a hardcore geek with a very rich, diversified set of skills pertaining to running an organization's infrastructure, please feel forward to send them my resume (link is on left, or copy & paste: http://robgirard.com/RobGirard_Resume.pdf). Or reach out to me if you can think of any opportunities that will challenge and interest me and let me know what they are... so many awesome places to work, but I can only be in one place at one time! OK... I think I hear Alice crying.... later!

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