[ubuntu-uk] RE: Introductions

[Anthony Vickers]

Hi everyone,

Not to be left out, here's my introduction. I'm originally from
Chesterfield, Derbyshire, where, I see, Andy Ferguson aka dsas lives. I
now live in Port Talbot, South Wales though. 

I came down here 5 years ago after being offered a job by an old
associate who needed a database programmer for his IT department in a
telemarketing company. It was attractive to me because he was keen on
using open source software and I was keen to get into it myself. So I
read up on postgresql and, after arguing, somewhat heatedly, its merits
over mysql, knocked together a backend database with it and used MS
Access as a frontend. I was then seen somewhat like a god by the board
and all my colleagues, especially when they saw my hardware and
networking skills too. This, though, put my mate's nose somewhat out of
joint and being my boss, he turned, well, very bossy, nastily so. Thus,
after spending a fair few months learning all I could about linux
(Redhat) in all the spare time I could find and after a particularly
nasty outburst from the IT Manager, the moment had arrived, I stole his
job away from him. The way I see it, yes, he gave me the opportunity but
he drew first blood and couldn't be reasoned with. I feel no guilt.

So, I then switched to Mandrake for the database server, the domain
server was Win2k and both were serving 30+ local Win2k desktops and a 
couple of Mandrake desktops. I installed first smoothwall then ipcop on
a machine that was good for little else, as my firewall. I set up
sendmail on the Mandrake server and installed zope and started porting,
the now many, MS Access frontends for the, now many, Postgresql
databases I'd developed, to the web. This went well and I was now
looking after 6 associated companies across 2 local sites and 2 remote
sites. I'd by now tried Debian and then discovered the joys of Ubuntu. I
switched the sites to using Ubuntu for the file servers. I converted the
local QA department (10 desktops) and one remote site (20 desktops) to
it. This went swimmingly until a year into a takeover and some cost
cutting exercises, boardroom squabbles and some major collateral damage
to my friends' and colleagues' livelihoods. They closed the local
office.

I was offered the same position in Manchester but refused it and went my
own way last November. I now have an office in Swansea and I'm
collecting a few clients now where I'm dropping in Ubuntu servers,
networking them and knocking together databases with postgresql and
intranets/extranets using zope/plone. I'm also porting their desktops to
Ubuntu where it's feasible too. For a weekly fee I'm taking care of all
their backups, maintaining their systems, advising them and giving them
some tech support, sort of part time IT manager.

So that's how I'm keeping busy, you can find me on irc.freenode.net in
amongst other channels #ubuntu-uk, #ubuntu and #ubuntu-offtopic as
anto9us.

Best Regards,

Anthony