Category Archives: Work

Working at CLEARLINK

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I’ve had some pretty cool jobs in the past. So far though, none have been as cool as working at CLEARLINK has been this past week. I’m sure that as time goes on a little bit of the romance will wear off, but from what I’ve seen they work hard here to keep their people happy.

Thus far, when I’ve needed something, it’s been made available to me. They bought me a license to both TextMate AND Coda 2 to make sure I had all the editing tools I need as a developer.

There is also just a really good vibe here. People are generally nice, and I’m always able to find someone to answer my questions should I have any. The schedule has been really good too. I haven’t had to worry about things like when I’m going to get off or if I’m going to have to work late. Sure there will be times when I’ll have to stay a little late to finish some stuff up, but I’m able to leave at 4:45 if I’ve got nothing going on.

You might be asking yourself “Why did you want to leave The Ranch?” Well, the answer isn’t simple. I loved working at The Digital Ranch. They are an awesome group of people and I wish them all the best. In fact, I wasn’t even looking for a new job. CLEARLINK came to me though, and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

At CLEARLINK I have better health benefits, discount gym memberships (if the on site gym isn’t quite doing it for me), tuition reimbursement (so I can finally go to school), and lots of cool company events! Basically there are a lot of reasons that made me want to move over to CLEARLINK.

Aaron Takes the Bus

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More specifically, “Public Transportation”.

UTA Trax Train

I’ve been considering taking public transportation to work for some time now. Yesterday I decided that today I would try it out. Here is the story of how it went:

I woke up at about 6:20 this morning; just enough time to get ready, take care of the dog, and walk to the Trax (Light Rail) station by my house to catch the 7:11am train. Everything was going good.

I got to the station with just enough time to buy my ticket. What I didn’t expect though was that the machine would be finicky and I would have to fight it to get a ticket out. Just as it decided to print my ticket my train came and went. Shoot.

Well, I waited like 10-15 minutes for the next one and jumped on. Once I got as close to work as the trax would get me, I hopped of and boarded a bus. Now, I don’t mean to sound rude here, but this bus driver was MEAN. He was just in a downright grumpy mood and would snap at people as the boarded the bus.

All in all though it was a good experience. I think I’ll be taking public transportation to work every day now. UTA (Utah Transit Authority) offers a monthly pass that will work for me for just $75.00. That will save me so much on gas (I drive an SUV) that it’s not funny.

Anyone else have any (good or bad) stories about riding public transportation here in Utah or around the world?

First Week at The Digital Ranch

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My first week here at “The Ranch” (as I will refer to it from now on) has been a good one. I’m excited to be working with ASP.Net again, but I won’t soon be forgetting my deep roots in PHP.

I’ve been working all week on a re-skin of the back-end on one of our products called “Site Manager”. As you couldn’t probably guess by the name, Site Manager is a CMS system. I’ve enjoyed working on the re-skinning project because it’s given me a chance to learn the in’s and out’s of Site Manager.

Just to get you, my readers, a little more familiar with where I work I’ll give you a quick list of the tools I use here:

  • Visual Studio 2010, Ultimate Edition
  • Visual Source Safe / Team Foundation Server (a mix of both)
  • Microsoft Office (of course)
  • Notepad++ (yep, still using it for quick edits, javascript, and other little things)
  • Chrome / IE (browsers)

And here’s my desk:My Desk

Well, that’s about it for today. Be looking forward to more programming-related (don’t worry, I’m still going to do PHP) articles!

My Last Day at Ivinex

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Yesterday was my last day at Ivinex. I got to work earlier than everyone else, as per usual. I did my normal surfing around on the internet to get my brain going (not to mention the Dr. Pepper at my side).

Next (at about 7 am) I began putting the final touches on some reports I was working on. Calculating Profit Margin Percentages and such…you know how it goes. Hardest part is getting the client to buy into a formula for calculating different percentages.

Once I got all that sorted out I went through and delete all my files off the computer, cleared the cache on all the browsers, documented everything, and I was outta there. It’s sad to leave and be on my way to a new job, but I don’t think it will really hit me until I’m sitting at my new desk come Monday morning.

I’m pretty happy about the way things are going in life right now. I love my wife, I love the type of work I do, and I love all my family and friends. Life is good!!

New Job!

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I’ve been keeping this one under my hat until after my background check passed (not that I was worried, just didn’t want to jinx it), but I got a new job!

Some of you might be asking yourselves “But Aaron! I thought you had a great job with Ivinex?”. Well the answer is this: I do, but the time just came for me to move on. Ivinex is awesome and I will always cherish the time I spent here, not to mention the things I learned. But, I can’t stay at one job forever…or could I? No, no I can’t.

Well, my new job is for a company called “The Digital Ranch“. They do Web Design / Development, as well as hosting / co-location. I’ll be doing a lot of ASP.Net (C#) stuff again, which I’m looking forward to. I kinda missed that world.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to be leaving PHP / MySQL behind. I’m going to always be building stuff and chances are (if it’s for myself) it will be in PHP.

Dreaming of Ivinex

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Isn’t it weird how when you put so much thought and effort into something that you start dreaming about it? That’s happening to me with Ivinex CRM.

As you know, I do work for Ivinex, a small and innovative Web Based CRM company in Utah. And lately I’ve been having dreams (when I’m not dreaming about Mekenzie) about functionality that could be added to our software. Is this normal?

Technical Writing Galore

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The past few days I’ve been working on all the technical documentation for Ivinex. It’s a pretty big project, but one that I’m actually very excited to tackle. Of course, I set up the documentation site using WordPress. It’s amazing how capable this little piece of software has become over the years.

I’m taking a two-fold approach to attacking this project. First I’m going to flesh out the technical manuals (the ones that say, this is for that, this does this, blah blah blah). Then I’m going to take on the tutorial side of it. That’s the part that will give how-to’s on specific tasks.

I’m pretty happy with how it’s turning out so far, but there’s still a long way to go. I have the next week and a half to two weeks to get it a good portion of the way done. I’ll keep this blog updated with my progress as time goes on.