Today’s my birthday.  Not a big deal or anything, but as someone who loves playing with numbers, I can’t help but think there may be a slight superstitious significance to today.  Not being into that sort of thing, I just thought I’d put the numbers out there for the heck of it. Here, check this out:

I turn 33 today, 7/7/7, at 21:11

The time/date is local time. My birth and current local time zone is US/Eastern for anyone who’s going to try and get technical. Either way, I’m going to be 1041379200 seconds old, and that doesn’t look too significant - although it DOES seem like a lot.

Hi!

It’s July, can you believe it? The iPhone is out, the trees are green, everyone’s on vacation, and Maine is loaded to the teeth with tourists! I have’t made a post here in a long time now, and there’s a good reason for it, I promise. I don’t know how to write well when whatever I say is going to be audited and checked for content. It feels like I have to compromise my integrity (even though I probably don’t) in order to say the things I want to say regarding some of the stuff I’ve been working on. The problem with working for a publicly-traded company (at least as far as this subject is concerned) is that anything said could potentially be treated as news, a press release, etc. and be viewed as “forward looking” or representative in general of what the company I work for is doing. This troubles me a great deal, and has caused me to edit or scale back many entries to the point where they’re basically nothing more than general descriptions of concepts*.

While I realize that part of a CIO/CTO’s job is to come up with those types of things, that’s not what I do currently. My job today is to implement the strategies handed down to me from above, to question what I see if something looks amiss, and to finally make whatever I’ve been charged with a reality. I do that here with no problem. I’ve yet to be tasked with anything terribly difficult and have had a lot of opportunity to interact with members of other departments. To say my experiences here have been rewarding would be an understatement. I have learned a lot, maybe not about the technology side of things, but certainly about the corporate and business side, but these aren’t things I would be able to share at the moment.

So, now I’m trying to figure out how to do a meaningful blog. While I do that, I’m going to stop with the current format and do some more random stuff for the time being. In other words, my entries won’t start with “The Entry About” until I once again feel like I can do something with meaning and substance that won’t give away the keys to the castle. This decision wasn’t made lightly, I’ve been thinking about it since I started here at Intellicare. In no way was I pressured, bullied, or even asked to do this, so it shouldn’t be taken as a reflection on the company I work for, or its parent or other subsidiaries.

I know that my co-workers read my blog. As a matter of fact, it was passed around to several employees before I was hired so that maybe someone would find something wrong with it. I’m glad that I (mostly) survived their scrutiny, and I wish that I could continue posting the way I always wanted to, but that’s ok: reinvention isn’t always a bad thing. Part of the reason I got this job was because of my candor, even with uncomfortable or possibly damaging subjects (re-doing an entire DB system while the boss is on an airplane, anyone?), and not being able to keep that up the way I want to is disappointing, but certainly not the end.

So, until I figure it out, I’m going to post some more basic stuff, but nothing close to the novellas I like to write. Stay tuned!

* I’ve got more than 20 half-completed entries.