MikeBoylan.com » General Site Stuff http://mikeboylan.com A collection of thoughts and ideas by yours truly... Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:23:16 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Is this thing on? Hello? Testing 1,2,3 http://mikeboylan.com/2010/05/is-this-thing-on-hello-testing-1-2-3/ http://mikeboylan.com/2010/05/is-this-thing-on-hello-testing-1-2-3/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 23:35:47 +0000 Mike http://mikeboylan.com/?p=733 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?

]]> http://mikeboylan.com/2010/05/is-this-thing-on-hello-testing-1-2-3/feed/ 0 Site Sees Record Traffic Month! http://mikeboylan.com/2009/10/site-sees-record-traffic-month/ http://mikeboylan.com/2009/10/site-sees-record-traffic-month/#comments Sun, 01 Nov 2009 04:21:08 +0000 Mike http://mikeboylan.com/?p=424 What can I say?  THANK YOU all, so much!  For the first time ever, MikeBoylan.com saw over 1000 unique vistors.

Over 1000 unique visitors? WOW! Thanks!

Over 1000 unique visitors? WOW! Thanks!

What does this mean?  Well, this means I’m going to try and start blogging more frequently.  If I have this many visitors, I need to make sure I continue posting unique and interesting content so that you’ll all return!

Just, wow.  I’m completely speechless right now.  This blog was just something I made for me to have an online presence.  I never expected to see more than a couple hundred hits a month, let alone unique visitors.

So, thanks agains guys (and girls)!  I’ll be sure to keep the site updated with new content on a more regular basis!  Feel free to contact me at any time using the contact form or on Twitter @mboylan.  I want to know what YOU want to see here.  Let me know!

- Mike

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*Yes, I’m aware there are numbers missing and they’re out of order.  This is due to the fact that I’m still waiting on some responses.  As soon as I get them all in, they’ll be in the correct order on both the site and the feed.  Thanks for your patience!

http://interviews.mikeboylan.com will be a permanent shortcut to the interview series.

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