Gruntled n' Combobulated

Time for an annual web site certificate renewal. No problem, we've done this dozens of times before. Only one small difference this year - it's on IIS7 in a Windows Server 2008 machine instead of IIS6 on Windows Server 2003. That shouldn't matter right? Sadly, yes, it does. I opened the IIS manager, navigated to the root node for the machine and selected "Server Certificates." There, I right-clicked and selected "Renew..." No special options to choose from so how complicated could it be? Well, it turns out that there is a difference. When I opened the request file it was quite a bit larger than I was used to seeing. Not being able to read hex I decided that was probably just due to it being a 64-bit machine instead of our previous 32-bit OSes. I uploaded the request, logged on to the certificate authority, and approved my own request. That's just how we roll around here. Then, back on the server, I downloaded the new certificate and completed t...

The Duke Health Technology Solutions has offered me a full time position and I have decided to accept! This is a marvelous step forward and I'm very excited to join the team. It does mean that I'll have to pass off my current project to another contractor as I'll be shifting my job responsibilities, but I'm confident that the codebase is well commented and clean enough that it should be relatively easy for another software engineer to pick up where I'm leaving off. It's been a very interesting transition. The work environment here is much different than what I experienced at Microsoft. Here, the expectations and pressures seems to be much more reasonable whereas at Microsoft I would have been in dire straits if I did not work at least 50 hours a week. This could partly be my aptitude, but I think that everyone in the local office worked at least that much so I certainly wasn't alone. At Duke, while there will still be pressures of deadlines and deliver...

On February 9th, I will be starting my new position at Duke Hospital. I will be updating the software that provides the doctors a summary page view of a patient's vitals, recent lab results, and other crucial information with the option to "zoom in" on a given dataset or increase the timespace to twenty four hours, or three months, etc. This is a crucial application that helps doctors and other healthcare professionals save lives and increase quality of life for their patients. I am proud that I will be part of this team of two contractors with one mentor from the regular IT staff. At the same time, it's bittersweet leaving Microsoft in the middle of a product release cycle. There were so many more tasks to complete and improvements to make that now may be left incomplete as my team is down on pair of hands. I'm sure they'll get by, but I will miss them. Changing jobs is never easy. I hope in this blog to track my path toward a gruntled and combobulated p...