After teaching high school students about computer hardware and programming languages for 20 years I am now practicing what I preached!

This week I started working as a Senior Technical Support Officer in the Administrative Systems team of Southern Cross University. I’m learning about managing system environments, modifying and applying upgrades to corporate software, and providing advice and operational support to clients for Corporate Services applications and other related systems.

Conceptually I understand what is happening, but learning the nitty-gritty details will take time. Fortunately, one of my tasks is to update and develop documentation, so I have time to delve into the details. And to put the theory from the classroom into practice is very exciting! A highlight was a guided tour by one of the Senior IT Admins into the corporate data-centre.

Leaving the high school system has meant a change of environment, and work practice. It has also meant moving from blogED to blogspot; I assume my DEC account will be disabled, and at end-of-year when blogED is archived I will be unable to access the content (and drafts).

Getting content into blogger was not as easy as I expected. Text, image, and video data was fine, but using tables with CSS had specific quirks, requiring some fine-tuning. And tracking down some of the original content for some posts took some time.

In future I’m considering how to incorporate an audio edition (podcast) to blog posts; just need a convenient way to implement RSS. Things will continue to change …