For anyone who has known me for any period of time, they will likely have picked up on the fact that besides being a UN*X SME, I have had a life-long love of astronomy. I was probably 4 or 5 when my mom got me my first telescope... a cheap 3" refracting telescope on a crude, flimsy Alt/Az mount. That "refracting" bit means that the telescope, like a pair of binoculars, has a lens where the light enters the telescope, goes straight through the tube of the telescope, and to a eyepiece lens at the other end, with perhaps a "diagonal" right before the eyepiece, to make the light go through a 90° angle, typically with a mirrored optical prism. And the "alt/az" bit means that the telescope can move left/right and up/down, just like you turning to your left or right and looking up or down. Only, this means that to follow something as time progresses, you not only need to move the telescope say to the right if you are looking generally southward, but also down. But it is more complicated than that, because everything is going around a spot near Polaris, the "North Star", if you live in North America as I do, or in Europe or other areas north of the equator. And the result is, depending on just where you look, to track the object, you can end up with any combination of left/right and/or up/down. And if you are doing astrophotography, you also have to rotate the camera, else, the stars will produce trails as the view rotates due to the different axis of rotation.
While I have digressed a bit, I will add... with the really big telescopes, like the Vera Rubin Telescope, while they use an Alt/Az mount, they don't use photographic plates like were used for the early days of the 200" Hale Telescope with exposures lasting hours, but instead take a whole bunch of very short, 15-30 second exposures using a digital camera, which are then combined to produce the final image. And because they are so short, and the exact time and position is known, though some fancy spherical trigonometry, they can actually compute how far to rotate the individual images to get everything to line up nice and neat.
But anyways... returning back to my original digression on my way back to my main subject, when I was nearing my 10th birthday oh so many years ago, Mom and I looked through Sky & Telescope, and I ended up "getting" a 10" Newtonian reflector telescope for my 10th birthday. Mom always did splurge on me if it involved me learning something. And this was a telescope produced by Cave Astrola out in California, and had an equatorial mount, just like the Hale Telescope, only instead of what is known as a "Horseshoe" mount, mine used what is known as a "German equatorial" mount. And I did lots of observing with it growing up, including contributing to the International Halley Watch, and shot so many pictures that I used to buy my film in 1000ft bulk reels and develop them myself. And I will add, the quotes on "getting" the telescope are intentional. The telescope did not arrive in the published timeframe. Indeed, Mom actually had to threaten to sue, as Cave was in its final, failing days, and I got one of, if not the last 10" telescope they made. And I still have it, sitting in storage at my place up in Ohio, and really should move it, along with other things down to where I am now. But, I also don't live where I could use it, and being so old, likely in need of work and having the mirror stripped and re-mirrored... I don't know... I may just retire it and keep it as a keep-sake, and buy myself a new telescope. But, back to things. Yes, I even went to school at Ohio State and started out in Astrophysics, and was a fixture not only in the Astronomy department known by every single prof, and had my own copy of the keys to building and the observatory on the roof of the Physics building, and later, even a key to Perkins Observatory about 30mins north of campus, where there were numerous larger telescopes, but I also volunteered on the Big Ear Radio Telescope, working alongside (and became friends with) the famous Dr. John D. Kraus, Dr. Robert Dixon, and the almost as famous Dr. Jerry Ehman, of "WOW!" signal fame. And had it not been for the way that Ohio State set up their undergraduate physics program, I would have gone into that field, rather than my current one, and definitely gone on to get my Ph.D. But that is another, even longer story, likely not published here. But to wrap things up, when I moved back to Ohio from Indiana in the 90s, I soon found myself seeking out my friends, and eventually volunteered on the "Ohio Argus" radio telescope project years later. But always, in the back of my head, I always wanted to work in the field, and had I gone the radio astronomy route instead of the optical route (I never got to the point to where I would have had to make that decision), I had the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, aka NRAO (Wikipedia), on the list of dream places to work. And now, we are back to the main thread.
At various points in my career, I have applied to various technical jobs at NRAO, especially since moving down to just across the mountain from the NRAO Headquarters in Charlottesville, VA. And I have been applying for both software engineering jobs and sysadmin jobs. But these are very, VERY difficult positions to land. This past time around, I even applied for one developer position, went to the final round of interviews, and when they closed the position without filling it due to budget concerns, I was told to reapply when they re-posted it. And I did, when that happened, only they went with a different candidate. So, back in like April, I applied for a position for a System Administrator III-IV. Being a UNIX SME, I have always had that as part of my "other assigned duties", if not being one of the actual listed duties, like when I was at the Parallel Data Laboratory at CMU. And I applied, and waited, and waited (they follow a typical, what I call "academic" hiring cycle, where everything takes months, not weeks). And finally, in late June, I got the email I had been hoping for... "We would like to interview you... please let us know your availability between X and Y dates"... I did, and interviewed on July 2nd. And then I waited... and waited. I expected to hear back by the start of the week of the 13th (given the 4th of July holiday potentially screwing up them meeting to discuss candidates), sent an email saying "Hi... Enjoyed the interview. Wondering if there was any updates?", to which I finally got a "We are working the administrative side of things." OK. And then, I got a "Hey... we would like for you to come in for a visit on the 28th. What is your availability?". I replied "How about 1pm?", thinking that gives them the morning to take care of anything which needed attention sooner, got them through lunch, and then we could meet. I got a reply back... "How about 11:30 lunch with Alejandro?". Lunch? Cool! I said "Sounds Wonderful!"... and on the 28th, I showed up a good 10-minutes early, complete with my passport, incase they wanted proof of hire ability, such as a pre form I-9 screening, or even potentially getting an offer and just saying "Do you want me to fill out the I-9 now to get it out of the way?". I did that, because the job post said some foreign travel would be necessary, and I mentioned the fact that I did have my passport during the video interview, which resulted in a "Remember X" side comment between my interviewers, where X hadn't had his passport when he need to travel overseas. Lunch went great, Alejandro, being originally from Chile, when I found that out, I said "Hace muchos años que no estudio español, pero recuerdo un poco.", which translates to "It has been many years since I have studied Spanish, but I remember a little bit.", and got complemented. And over lunch, we did the typical "About us" discussion, where I found out that Alejandro has studied Kenjutsu for a number of years, while I had studied what were more likely the more modern forms associated with Kendo, when I was at Ohio State. Then, after lunch, we went back to the office, talked a bit, I got to see how the "data center" room had changed since I last saw it some years back during another interview, then went up to the Assistant Director's office, where I met with him for probably 30 minutes. And I went home, and took a nap, having worn myself out (interviews, no matter how trivial, always seem to be tiring to me). And when I woke up, I checked my email, prepared to send the "It was really wonderful to get to meet Alejandro and the Assistant Director in person. Thank you!" note, only to see an email reading "We would like to extend an offer...". So, 41 months and 14 days after being laid off from Monkey Knife Fight after the company which had bought us mismanaged things, I finally had a job. Yes, the market is that tough. Just shy of 800 applications, around half a dozen interviews out of all of them (less than a 1% interview rate), and the all important offer. Not what I was making in industry... about 74% in fact, but better than the drop to 52% that I suffered when I went to work with the PDL after working at Trapeze Networks. And, at about 82% of the way from the bottom of the pay band to the top of the pay band for the position. And, I found out the amount and the job title, System Administrator IV, in the formal offer, which I received that Wednesday.
So, after the offer, they had to run a security background check. Being an organization which is funded at least in part by the National Science Foundation, and thus being "Federally Funded Research and Development Center", including what is known as a "Denied Party Screening" or DPS. Far short of what some employers in Charlottesville require, where you frequently see "TS/SCI Polygraph" somewhere in the job post requirements, but it still takes a few days. And I finally started on the 10th, and am now mid-way through my 2nd week. Yes, it does mean that I have to go in to the office... odd, given that outside of the PDL, I have worked remotely since 2004... wow... 22 years, and only roughly 2 years working on site. As for what I will be doing. I am basically backfilling the position which Alejandro left when he was promoted to fill his old boss's position. And while I will be doing some things with the Very Large Array in New Mexico, some with the Green Bank Observatory, etc., my primary focus is going to be on the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) (Wikipedia), as a part of what is known as the North American ALMA Science Center. And already, I am involved in discussions involving the currently in progress upgrades to ALMA, which will increase the data produced by at least an order of magnitude, to perhaps 6-10PB (6000-10,000 Terabytes) of data each year. And, this means working with things like Ansible, Grafana, Docker and actual virtualization, and other tools, in part to support CASA (Common Astronomy Software Applications), which was based on AIPS++, making sure that the data is flowing around as it should, and even getting to try my hand at using CASA on actual data if I want.
Anyways... major news, which I felt was worth an actual professional blog post about, which even resulted in an entirely new Drupal category for articles, pages, etc. And since I need to be at work tomorrow, time for bed. Even with a nap after getting home, it has been a long day.
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