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| Did anyone else read the report today in the Dallas Morning News about the ICE Raid on meat processing plants owned by Swift & Co. in six states? What about the furor regarding Farmers Branch enacting ordinances that limit the illegal alien population of their fair city.
I have heard the terms "unconstitutional" and "civil rights violations" mentioned on more than one occasion. There's one fact I think people are forgetting. These people are breaking the law.
How are the people breaking the law in Farmers Branch or Cactus, TX any different from someone else breaking the law? If I get stopped for exceeding the posted speed limit, there are consequences for my actions. I have to take responsibility for those actions.
Not that I'm equating illegal immigrants with sex offenders, but we restrict where convicted sex offenders can and cannot live, and this AFTER they've paid their debt to society. Why shouldn't someone actively engaged in breaking our laws be restricted as to where they can live?
For me, the choice is simple. Either quit coddling law breakers because of a fear of being labeled racist, or change the laws. My problem is not with people of an Hispanic ethnicity, my problem is with law breakers. (Should I even use the word criminal, or would that open up a barrel of worms?)
I understand that the illegal immigrants are deemed by some to be vital to the local economies. Fine, change the laws. It should be that cut and dried....
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| Well, my baby got married today. I can still remember rocking her to sleep and worrying that I was missing something in her upbringing that she would need later in life. No bank robber and no murderer, no time in the pen. I guess she turned out okay. (Could a' been worse.)
It was a simple affair with the JP, just her mother, the groom's parents, and me. No sons and her last name is no longer Simmons. That's the last of the Simmons line. From here on out it'll be Hendrix.
BTW, she's due in April. (Glad I didn't need that shotgun I brought in the car.)
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| Wow. Almost eights months since my last update. A lot has happened during that time.
- Started working in Overland Park, Kansas.
- Traveled back every other weekend, by car, to Garland.
- Job (as a contractor) ended, unexpectedly.
- Spent a month in Kansas looking for a new job.
- Moved out of the Homestead Extended Stay hotel and back to Garland.
- Got a job with an international company with the option to live anywhere they office.
- Decided to stay in the Dallas area, for now.
- Working as an instructor and traveling about 50% of the time.
- I've been to
- San Diego, CA
- Herndon, VA (twice)
- Chicago, IL
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Scottsdale, AZ
That's a quick synopsis. I'll update the blog with some of my experiences and pictures in later days.
For now, just know that I have a renewed commitment to updating this blog.
L8r...
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| As some of you may or may not know, my current contract's initial six week contract was ended and I've accepted a position with a consulting company in Kansas City. I'm going to be working as a Backup and Business Continuity Consultant for the Sprint/Nextel merger.
Now, what does a Backup and Business Continuity Consultant do, you might ask? That's a very good question!
As the merger continues to progress, different departments are going to be working with my group to ensure they have good backups and can continue business. I'm sure this involves doing backups, but, does it involve disaster recovery sites and drills? Does it include me doing an audit of their infrastructure in the hopes of eliminating single points of failures? Redundant power supplies? RAID-5 disk arrays? Failover clusters? Alternate sources of power, such as diesel generators in the event utility power fails? I don't know!
What I do know is that the Sprint/Nextel campus is huge! It houses 15,000 people. It has 19 office buildings, 12 parking garages, about five coffee cafes. 4 cafeterias, an auto shop, a florist and a health club. Back in a previous life, I did some work for IBM. This was in the late '80's early '90's when IBM had large complexes with parking garages, subsidized cafeterias, discounts for health clubs, etc. This is going to be like that was, onloy bigger!
Also, I've never lived outside of Texas. Sure, I went to college at A&M, lived different places around DFW, even moved down to Waco for four years. But I've never had to pay a state income tax. THIS is going to be culture shock.
I figured, "Hey! A state income tax must mean that the sales tax is lower." Well, it is, but not that much. It doesn't offset what I'll have to pay for the extra income tax.
My wife and son will stay in Garland to finish out the school year, then they'll be moving up with me. Until then, I'm making the ten hour trip back down every other weekend. I've been waiting on the birth of my fifth grandkid the past two weeks. Lillian (my new perspective grandkid) has decided she's gonna wait until Big Daddy leaves for KC to make her debut.
The next few weeks are going to be SUCH a mix of emotions....... | | |
| Now, the poop behind ITIL.
ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library, and is a standard intially developed by the British Computer Society in 1989. The ITIL underwent a revision to 2.0 in 1999. It's a set of "best practices" for IT shops.
Closely integrated with the BCS and ITIL is itSMF. In a nutshell, the BCS sets the standards and the itSMF helps to implement those standards. The itSMFUSA is headquartered in Dallas, Tx with many LIG's (Local Interest Groups) spread across the world.
ITIL intially saw acceptance in England. It then spread to Europe and is now seeing acceptance in the US and, to some degree, in the AP geographic area. It has been growing in popularity in the US since about 2002 and seems to be a part of the vendor agnostic approach to certification that we're seeing more and more these days.
ITIL certification in the US is handled by EXIN and involves three different levels of certification. The first level is called ITIL Foundations and is primarily concerned with showing that the professional so certified has an understanding of the "best practices" for the ten disciplines/functions divided evenly between Service Delivery and Service Support. The second level is for specific disciplines/functions and is called the Practictioners certification. Students can get certification in more than one area as a Practitioner. The third level is the Managers (or Masters) level. Testing is available at Pearson Vue and Prometric testing centers for the Foundations level. I'm not sure if the Practitioners and Managers levels are available there, as well.
I had been looking for a "management" certification program for IT. There are plenty of technical certifications availabe, but the ITIL program seems to be the best, most widely accepted certification process for my current needs. I'm hoping that this is the next wave of the future. Doing a search for job postings in the Linked In network using ITIL as the search string reveals sixteen jobs in my network and more than 1000 provided by Simply Hired.
If you've attained your ITIL certification, or are working towards on the levels mentioned, add a comment to this posting. I'd be intereseted in hearing aboout your experience. | | |
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