New Year, New City, and the Start of a New Career

It has been far too long since I have posted to the world about happenings relevant to myself and to that of the Fedora world so I will attempt to recap a bit.

Where have I been and where did I go?
I left the humble little town of Huntsville, TX which is the location of Sam Houston State University. It is also where I earned my Undergraduate Degree in Computer Science, where I am continuing to pursue my Masters Degree in Information Assurance and Security via correspondence, and where I have spent the last three years working as a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Systems Administrator. While my time there was good, it was clearly time for me to move on so I began looking around for position openings at companies I was interested in working for. I was fortunate enough to get a recommendation from a fellow Fedora Community Member for a position as a Systems Engineer at Dell Incorporated. I was called in for an interview and I will assume I did well because I was later offered the position which I was extremely excited to accept. I now wear a Dell Badge and I wear it with pride, I'm privileged to get to work in a R&D lab on GNU/Linux technologies powered by Dell hardware (yes I have a Fedora machine on my workbench in the Lab). I'm really bad with words so I'll leave it at this: I absolutely love my new job. As a side effect of the new job I relocated to Austin, TX and I again find myself without the literary skill to explain my enjoyment of this town as a whole so I will again say this: I love this town.

What about Fedora? You mentioned Fedora!
I was very sadly out of the loop for pretty much the entire Fedora 14 cycle and I would like to apologize to appropriate parties for that. I am currently working on getting some priorities in line as well as having purchased a new laptop with a bit more power under the hood so that I can do more QA work in VMs. Fedora 15 will hopefully be something I can contribute more time to. I'm regaining interest in the Xfce world after my tangent off to both KDE and Gnome (I'm really just a DE nomad these days, I respect the power and offerings of all three major contenders) so I hope to find myself on the list of co-maintainers of the Xfce Spin once again and with any luck I can find myself there for the ongoing future. I've also in the last week been working on getting my EPEL responsibilities up to date with the latest EL6 release and I'm happy to see that not only is fedpkg proving to be amazing but also that there is an Olive Branch of sorts being extended to active EPEL maintainers lacking a RHN subscription for those interested in supporting EL6 for at least the time being while RHEL clones get up to speed. While this might not remain permanent, it is nice to see those within the firewall seeing the value and user base of EPEL desiring the community supported packages. I personally have two subscriptions that I use at the house because not only am I a big Red Hat fan but I'm always preaching that I don't mind paying for good software and chose to vote with my dollar. That being said, I don't think contributors should necessarily be expected to follow that same guideline so I like that steps are being taken to provide contributors with the necessary tools.

Well .... that's where I'm sitting these days, my apologies for my ramblings if they make little sense. My blog often flows from mind to keyboard without much of a writing fundamentals filter so for my imminent grammatical errors please be kind.

P.S. - For those who have requests in for a couple of my packages to be updated, I am working with them. There's one most notable which is Pida, its upstream release structure has changed a little so I'm going to be spending a little time getting familiar with the new code before slinging packages out.

Night all,
-AdamM