About Adrian
I'm a computer support fellow living in London, England having had the experience of working in commercial IT for over 20 years mostly in Microsoft Office programming, but also in general computer support.
There's more about that in my At Work page.
I was born in a town just outside Manchester, the year that England won the world cup. 1966. Apparently I gained weight fast. I don't know exactly what I'm thinking of here. Computers or Dinner?
Fifty years later, I took a post birthday trip to the US throughout April, specifically visiting California's Silicon Valley, the streets of San Francisco and then onwards driving via Death Valley to Nevada's gaming town of Las Vegas, meeting friends and relatives :)
But before that happy event, my last contract finished in December 2015 with the successful completion of the OS migration project that I was working on.
However finding a new job at or after Christmas was not to be, especially as after February 2016 the country was getting ready to have the bejesus scared out of it by the event of the upcoming Brexit referendum.
Uncertainty was raining in the UK, so I squashed some of my savings and, as mentioned, I travelled to the US. And thoroughly enjoyed it :)
May 2016
Coming back to the UK, four months have passed without work. I was off the agency radar as a daisy-fresh candidate and those incoming phone calls, that plagued my mobile madly when I was in work, also silenced.
So after a following year spent spent battling out CV applications through recruitment websites and hearing little back, I eventually landed an IT support job working in central London.
The secret I found was to register direct with with large companies that run their own internal recruitment operations, and leave your application profile with them, at the same time studying their advertised opportunities. Their online careers portals can be found through indeed.com by excluding "staffing agencies" in a bookmarked search.
SO, apart from that, what else have I been up to?
Well, as can be found on this blog, I'm still madly involved in IT.
- SCCM
- After my excellent roles in deploying operating systems on-site using MDT and SCCM, I've personally purchased the computer server equipment to have a suitable study lab environment at home for self training purposes, heavily using both Vmware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Happily a lot of the Microsoft SCCM suite is licence free for personal training use and also has limited evaluation licences. It's an interesting thing to play with and learn from. A whole company multi-server IT infrastructure in a box(!), with multiple virtual instances of Windows Server 2012R2 engaged in roles, all together pushing out Windows 10 with WSUS patching straight through to client machines. - Scripting, Web development
- Outside that, within the other personal IT projects I do, I'm finding out about new methods of scripting for internet, LANs, Windows and Linux environments, especially when new frameworks and computer languages come into play. Automation and internet content generation does interest me a lot – like the clean HTML5 and CSS3 code I've put working behind this Blogger based website, which works great on mobile phones, tablets, TVs and every modern web browser I've tried.
My plan is to eventually grow traffic here to adrianontech.net, to further popularise my interests and skillset, display some hardware projects, further advertising, and see where this goes with regard to my employment future. - Further online
- I'm also actively participating with folks on several technical communities for both Microsoft and Linux operating systems, computers, DIY, and other things in general interest. Keeping the problem solving mind fresh :)
