Today was my first performance review since the rest of the e-smith
operations team was laid off pretty much exactly one year ago. I moved
from a little mostly-unmanaged group that took care of its own stuff
then into the middle of corporate IT — a week in the network
group before it was clear that I belonged in the server group, and
there ever since.

I’ve been a bit apprehensive over the last little while because I wasn’t
quite sure where expectations sat. Everything seems to be going
well; all the stuff I manage keeps running, and I’ve had my hands in a
few high-profile projects involving other people in the group, but I
could never be sure that I was meeting expectations, or if my manager
thought I was shirking or being antisocial or combative or something.

Turns out everything is going exceptionally well. No complaints at all.
I’m probably going to have to get my hands dirty with Windows 2003 in
the upcoming months, but that’s fine, because it’ll be planning
migration from scratch, and something I can grab and run with. I do
well with that sort of challenge, even if it is Windows.

We’re supposed to get the tail end of Hurricane Frances here tonight,
now that it’s crossed the continent inland. They’re calling for 10cm
of rain tonight and tomorrow, plus 40km/h winds, which isn’t much
for a former hurricane but which is still a lot for Ottawa, which is
far enough from the St Lawrence and the Great Lakes that it doesn’t
get a lot of interesting weather. It also means that we get neat skies
for a few nights:

For locals, there’s a decent radar image of the storm here, and Environment Canada’s storm warning is here.