JaimeC - Automating stupidity

It was in the 90's that I became Netscape's Product Specialist for Portugal. It was a marvelous and crazy time and I ditched my course since the appeal of Mathematics couldn't really compete with creating this new thing called "The Internet". 
It was a time when people still bothered with creating value instead of giving their money to Anderseen Consultants and Project managers to help you take advantage of your company's business and engage in high quality initiatives, backed by due process while maximizing shareholder's value, ... (now try saying this 3 times in a roll without breathing).

Over the years, I've been doing support, installations, pre-sales, ws one of the creators of an Hierarquical  Storage Management product still in Oracle's price list, did hardware, O.Ses, Applications, routers and Databases, managed people, was managed and, even if I do flatter myself, I think I did OK in all those tasks. But, the bubble, when it bursts, bursts for all and, instead of hanging on to some delusions of power, I went back in the progression ladder, back into system's administration and, managed to keep my pay increasing with inflation instead of some massive cuts (or unemployment) some friends had to take.

Irony of the world, I'm now in a 3 people team that's changing all the I.T. of one of the biggest Portuguese Media groups into something less 90's and, since the management is now realizing that 1 person to manage 2 Virtualization farms with about 300 hosts, 1 person to manage about 100 Weblogic servers (with SOA, UCM, IBR, BI, well, basically most of the fusion Middleware suite - that's me by the way) and 1 person for all the Databases that support all this isn't enough so, we three will probably be out of a job soon with our jobs outsourced.

Having worked a lot with authentication technologies, starting with LDAP and, as the years gone by, going up the services ladder as it was being built, with concepts like SSO, Federation and interoperability with privacy, I also became a strong critic of what's being done to issues like consumer privacy and to the laws that are supposed to protect us.

So, welcome to this blog. I know a blog is out of style, last year's fashion but, I miss writing and, it also helps me to put my ideas in order. I'm not yet sure if this blog is going to be about privacy problems, something more technical filled with how-to's or simply some fotos of David, my almost 5 yo son. Perhaps all of the above.

One thing I hope is that next time I write here I'll be a bit more cheerfull. Till there, feel free to grab a drink and, ... cheers