Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Life, the universe, and the world of work

It's been pretty quiet here for a few days. This is partially because my brain's still in shutdown mode after attending a stag night at the weekend, but also because a lot of my mental bandwidth has been taken up with other stuff. This stuff has mostly been thinking about future projects for when I leave my job at the University at the end of next month.

After spending ten years doing effectively the same things (I worked in 24-hour monitoring of TV transmitter networks for two years, after which I was a sysadmin, then another sysadmin, then for my current job I'm once again a sysadmin) I think I've just about learned to be a sysadmin, so it's time to do something else. To this end, I've decided to take a crack at freelance consultancy work as a general rentageek doing UNIX stuff, MacOS X, infrastructure work, machine room work, short-term geek hire and any number of other things. My hope is that if this works out, I can get enough gigs to make a living and leave some time free for side projects.

One reason for doing this is that having observed a number of consultancies and their accompanying consultants in action I've identified some things I think they often do wrong, so I'd like to try and see if I can put a slightly different twist on things. If I'm right and this turns out to be successful, I'd hope to start finding other geeks to work with after a while. If it turns out that I'm wrong and I find that I can't make a living, then after a few months I can cut my losses and re-enter the full time job market with no regrets. Whatever happens, I'm certainly looking forward to having a go.

More on this as it happens. I haven't even thought of a trading name yet, so if you have any ideas...