Some SSL magic

My field is primarily web design and development, but my main employment also includes some end user support duties. Aside from day-to-day tasks like adding users or restoring files from backup, I primarily have left the administration of the server to a network consulting agency. We recently purchased a new server and began migrating from our old server, which was a task I left largely to the agency. I wanted someone with more experience to handle it, since downtime while I muddled through a task I’d never tried would squash my co-workers’ ability to do their jobs, and I didn’t have the resources to do practice runs. But, after some hiccups with the consulting agency, I found myself needing to move our SSL certificate from the new server back to the old server so that Outlook Web Access could continue to run on the old server while some delays with the new server deployment were worked out. I’m pleased to say that after some careful research and some really great phone support from GoDaddy, I managed to move our certificate back to the old server, and got our OWA working again for our remote staff. While I’m not going to try tackling the migration of the Exchange mailboxes, I have decided that my success with this experience was good enough that I’m now going to try installing our anti-virus remote server and our printers onto the new server. My strengths are definitely in web design and programming, but I think that having some level of confidence in networking matters (and knowing when I’m out of my depth) bring a richness to my understanding of the issues involved in keeping a web server running. While I’m not going to pursue networking as a passion as a result of this experience, I do think it will make me a better developer, since I’ll understand issues on the networking side of the fence.

Learning from mistakes

I just read a really good essay on Lifehacker about identifying and learning from mistakes. Honestly, I’m blogging about it so that I can find the link later, but I thought others might benefit from it as well. So often, when navigating our career and life paths, we can abandon a particular path because of a mistake, rather than using that mistake to improve how we walk on that particular road. The key is striking the delicate balance between learning from mistakes and punishing yourself for them. In both programming and design, mistakes are inevitable and learning won’t happen without them.

End of Stagnancy

A couple of months ago, I noticed a dramatic and pronounced upswing in my interests and motivation. For various reasons I won’t go into here, the previous 18 months or so had been a rather stagnant stretch in my life. I don’t think that stagnant periods are necessarily periods of inactivity. After a series of changes or a flood of growth, it is sometimes necessary for a system to move into a period of seeming stillness while the lessons and changes of the period of growth have time to sink in and percolate through the system. Once that process completes, a new period of growth, learning and expansion can begin. Now that a new period of growth has begun, I find that my desire to learn as fast and as thoroughly as possible is really invigorating and refreshing. As far as technology goes, this has manifested in an interest in brushing up on skills, and on teaching myself new skills, specifically mobile app development. Stay tuned!

Always learning

I’ve been taking a PHP refresher class through a friend who edits a PHP magazine, trying to keep my skills current in an often-changing field. I found a couple other good online, “casual” courses that I’d recommend as well. Codecademy does a brief intro course in JavaScript that could be a good refresher or introduction. And Method of Action is putting together a series of courses for teaching programmers how to design. I took their kerning quiz and got 85 out of 100. What can I say – I’m a sucker for quizzes! Both of these online courses are free, as far as I can tell, and they’re actually kind of fun. They’re certainly not going to make you into an expert, but they’re a good way to brush up or delve into something you don’t know.

Tags: Codecademy, design, learning, Method of Action, online courses, PHP, programming

Fur balls

We’ve got a couple cats, and we’ll soon be adding a dog to the menagerie. I struggled for some time with a way to keep my cat off my desk. He’s a grumpy fellow and, while my desk is designed such that he can’t actually sit on my keyboard, he took great joy in biting my mouse hand. I got him a cat bed that bolts to my desk, and he thinks that’s the best thing since sliced tuna. I did have to add a fleece blanket, because the brown pad that’s included is apparently not quite luxurious enough for his refined tastes. So, now that we’re adding a dog, I’m considering tasking the other half with creating the dog bed that’s featured on unplggd. The article includes the cat bed that I use too.

Tags: workspace