Is this thing on? Hello? Testing 1,2,3

Hey Guys, I just wanted to reach out an apologize to you, my readers, for essentially dropping of the map the last two months or so.  If any of you follow me on Twitter, you know I remained active on there, but I just sort of left my blog dwindle in the dust.  I wanted to give you a brief rundown of what I’ve been up to and then pledge at the bottom to blog at least once a week this summer.

What I’ve Been Doing

The second half of March was a transitioning period for me.  I went from working two days a week and going to class four days a week to working five days a week while still going to class four days a week.  I was hired at Robert Morris University to be an IT Student Associate Systems Administrator to head up the project of getting the Macs on campus back up to speed.  Some of my other responsibilities include maintaining the exisiting Xserve, preparing to install a brand new Xserve, and designing, creating, and deploying three brand new client machines this summer to our different Macs on campus.

Early April I really began plowing through some of the Apple Training Series books for IT, and by mid April it was time to start preparing for finals.  The end of April brought finals, and after it was all said and done, I got a 4.0 both semesters my freshman year and carried 37 credits total for the year.

The first week of may, I took a trip up to Canada and stayed with one of my best friends, Kyle Van Essen (he makes a pretty cool piece of OS X software – check it out), and also met Patrick Patience, Andre Deminiac, and Alex Robert.  I knew Andre from working online at Forumer years ago, and I met Patrick and Alex on Twitter.  The trip was my favorite vacation I’ve ever taken.  You can see some pics here.

I’ve been super busy at both Fox Chapel and at Robert Morris as well as at home by continuing to read through the OS X Training Series books.  I’ll be writing some posts soon about some projects I’ve been doing in both places.

My Plans for the Summer

1. Work MWF for Robert Morris
   1. Install, configure, and deploy the new Xserve
      1. Migrate all our existing OD accounts
      2. Create new managed preferences for both faulty and students (centrally managed)
      3. Provide more to the users.  Storage, web services, wikis, blogs, etc.
   2. Create & deploy new images for the new iMacs, MacBook Pros, and Mac Pros
      1. System Image Utility? DeployStudio? ASR Multicasting? (blog post coming)
   3. Assist in the deployment and transitioning of the entire campus to Windows 7 based images.
2. Work T/Th for Fox Chapel
   1. Wrap up the SMB Portable Homes project for teachers (blog post coming)
   2. Wrap up the SMB student profiles project for students (blog post already written. See here.)
   3. Assist in recycling old equipment
   4. Assist in asset management, creation of image, and deployment of image for 300+ new teacher MacBook Pros
   5. New Xserves?
3. Become at least Apple Certified Support Professional and Technical Coordinator. Maybe Deployment Specialist?
4. Lose ~10 lbs
5. Get back to fiddling with the piano
6. ENJOY MY TIME OFF!

Pledge

I’m pledging (and we all know how valid pledges are) to blog around once a week or so at the minimum on this blog.  I want to interact with you and I want to share with you what I’m doing.  My goal is to post some more technical guides and also post my thoughts on major news stories.  iPhone 4G release, anyone?