Introductions All Around

Greetings Everyone,

First off, I want to welcome you to my new blog I've decided to start writing.  I have another blog about my journeys as a student in Japan that you can check out at Karraker in Japan, but I wanted to create one specifically for telling everyone about my experiences in IT in the real world.

A little background first, so I used Macs all my life and didn't even own a PC until I was given one for my freshman year in college when I decided to go to University of Wisconsin Stout for a bachelor's degree in information technology.  I was one of the crazy Mac guys who hated Windows and everything that went along with it.  The exception to this was the Xbox I owned at 14 because of Halo: Combat Evolved.  The creators of Halo, Bungie, had long produced many of my favorite games on the Mac and was the reason I got an Xbox.  I'm glad I had because I'd have missed months of amazing gaming and I'd be down a healthy number of friends if it weren't for Xbox live.  So now, I still love my Apple devices, but I've come to accept the fact that working in IT means I'll be dealing with Windows products for the rest of my life and all the special features that come along with it.

After I graduated from college in December of 2009, I was able to find a job in IT after about half a year of temp work at Vets Plus, Inc.  Here I got to start learning more about all the wonderfulness of managing active directory, windows 2003 servers, and windows operating systems.  I also learned many of the basics of server management like SQL servers and Windows 2008 R2.  Eventually student loan debt forbearances were beginning to expire and so I had to look for a more permanent position.  I had updated my resume on Stout's business website so I could upload my latest resume for an on-campus interview with Menards in an IT position.  The interview went well but I had learned it was just a pre-screening because no actual positions were open and I was a bit bummed out.  Later on in the week I had received a call from an HR manager from GNet Group asking if I'd be interested in applying for a position as an Infrastructure Support Specialist to assist the current IT manager because his workload had become too great to focus on company infrastructure anymore.  I had a few phone interviews with the HR manager and the guy who managed IT, and about three phone interviews later I was invited out for an interview with the CEO and the HR manager.  It went real well, and I ended up getting the job.

Since then, I've been introduced to several big Microsoft technologies and I've had to learn a lot from scratch in the last half year.  These technologies included SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Denali, SharePoint Server 2007 and 2010, PowerPivot, Windows Hyper-V, Exchange 2003, and Lync Server 2010.  While I continue to learn more about how to use these technologies, I'm constantly tasked with learning how to manage and fix these technologies as well.  I am now the owner of the infrastructure for the entire organization and so I'm learning new ways every day to manage my responsibility, and keep us online and running smoothly.  Through these growing pains I learned how to do many new and exciting things, as well as fix some difficult ones.  I'm a firm believer in googling, without Google I'd have been lost because I hardly use any of the stuff I learned in school.  It's good to have a background in networking so you can fix the notorious layer 1 problems that always seem to pop up, but I don't use it as much as I was expecting to before I graduated.

Information Technology envelops everything we do in business these days, and without IT guys and girls out there who learn how to do everything as simple as connecting a laptop to a wireless network to installing a unified communications server,  we'd never get anything accomplished.  Not all of us realize it, but we are the glue that holds companies together, and without us we'd be cast back to the stone age.  This blog is for me to share my experiences and ways I've solved common or complex problems, so that the next aspiring college graduate can have a resource to figure out what the problem is and learn from it.  That way they can then continue to pass their knowledge onto others, and pass the learning forward.  Don't think this is going to be a blog on how to fix problems you run into, I'll try to cover some neat topics such as wireless security and cracking WEP and WPA security, to learn how we can keep it from happening to us.

-Chris Karraker-