December 5, 2008 by Joel.

I’m at NCREN Community Day today. This annual event brings together the NCREN stakeholders and network users, which now includes the entire K20 community in North Carolina. It’s encouraging to see participation from the K12 community and the emphasis on bringing value to K12, leveraging the information resources of the traditional University community community to holistically improve education in the state.

One of the biggest values is the human networking, and the opportunity to talk with colleagues across the state. While we have a similar event for the University of NC system (UNC CAUSE), Community Day brings in representation from the K12, Community College and state government sectors. National research networks such as Internet2 are also represented. The opportunity to talk and synchronize with this extended community is a key to the importance of this event. Already I’ve had several productive conversations and have another scheduled for lunch.

Of course I did have a chance to also talk with my colleagues about boating and fishing

Now, back to the meeting…

Posted in Boating, UNC-G, MCNC, Technology, Flyfishing | No Comments »

April 3, 2007 by Joel.

Well, though I was not looking for a job and was very happy with my current job at MCNC as Director of IT & Data Center Services, I got an offer too good to refuse. A former colleague who has been doing some consulting work with The University of North Carolina at Greensboro called me and encouraged me to apply for a position there. I did, and in short order, I interviewed, they offered, and I accepted a position as Associate Vice Chancellor for Administrative Systems. This is a great opportunity professionally, back to what I was doing at UNC-Chapel Hill, and will also reinstate me in the North Carolina retirement system, one of the best in the country. Though the commute will be longer than I have today, it’s worth it for me and my family. I start there on the first of May.

Posted in UNC-G, MCNC, Family, Technology, UNC | No Comments »

December 22, 2006 by Joel.

As part of my charge at MCNC, I’m responsible for the corporate IT infrastructure for our organization of ~45 people. We have a hodge-podge of software for collaboration — IMAP email daemon, MeetingMaker calendar, a plethora of IM clients, standard Microsoft Office clients and a Microsoft file server environment. We need to replace our IMAP daemon as it has some issues, the calendar software is not everyone’s favorite, and we email too many files around. We have experimented with Google Apps for your Domain, and that’s very promising, but not quite there. I really think it needs IMAP support. There’s a good article in the current issue of the Economist magazine that highlights Arizona State’s use of Gmail for students. I think, though that in the next 12-18 months, we’re going to see a lot from Google in this space. My colleague Paul Jones also wrote about this in his blog recently.

We’re looking right now at a product called Zimbra, and it is promising, though a bit sluggish in performance, I think. It’s inexpensive, though, and might hold us until we could actually outsource much of this to Google or someone like that. Organizations like mine don’t need to be spending their resources supporting email, calendaring, IM, etc, and need to focus on their core mission.

Posted in MCNC, Technology | No Comments »

December 20, 2006 by Joel.

So, I am spending the afternoon pouring through Wikipedia, trying to come better up to speed on various things electrical.  While I’ve managed data centers for years, I have typically not had to deal with power and circuit issues the way I need to do now.  We’re working to determine PDU utilization, circuit routing and a myriad of other things as we continue to build out the occupancy of MCNC’s data center…I think I need to go find the book “electric power for dummies”!  I’m sure it exists somewhere!

Posted in MCNC | No Comments »

November 15, 2006 by Joel.

In the time I let this blog go fallow, I decided to change jobs and move from UNC-Chapel Hill to MCNC as Director of IT & Data Center Services. I still get to work with the National Lambda Rail (NLR) Experiment Support Service and the Internet2 HOPI project (though that is morphing as I2 begins to deploy “newnet”). This had been a long time coming, as I was not really happy with where I’d found myself at UNC after a big reorg. Now that I’ve made the move (March 2006) I’m quite happy with the decision! I still teach at UNC as an adjunct in the School of Information and Library Science. I have been teaching Systems Analysis & Design (INLS382) since 1998, roughly one course per semester. The good news is that’s enough of a UNC affiliation to let me still buy basketball tickets. Go Tarheels! It promises to be a great year for the ‘heels.

Posted in MCNC, UNC | No Comments »