Last day at work //at 19:00 //by abe

As some of my friends already know, I’ve quit my current job and will start working at the Department of Physics of the ETH Zurich in May.

Today is my last day at work here and I feel a little bit sentimental. Most co-workers became friends during the last four and a half years and I’ll move away from a bunch of friends at Darmstadt and from some friends in Mainz and Frankfurt/M. And I’ll leave the Rhine-Main area just shortly before LinuxTag moves in. Fsck.

But it had to be. Although I like creating dynamic web pages with Embperl and Apache, I became sick of working with SuSE Linux, sick of developing with OpenLDAP, sick of developing web applications which must (also) run with Apache under Windows or with MS Access. Since I understand that for the success of my current employer the use of these products can’t be changed that easily, the only solution for me was to quit the job.

My new job at the ETH Zurich will be administrating mostly Unix systems at the Department of Physics as well as some Unix user training. I won’t get rid of Windows and OpenLDAP there though, but I won’t have to develop software with them. What I’ll get rid of is SuSE: I will have my beloved Debian around me (which I can use here only for building Debian packages for customers) and some FreeBSD (no change here ;-), too. So I really look forward to my new job.

Therefore I’ll move to Zurich soon. And since I have down there a lot of friends, too — not only through Symlink and the Linux User Group Switzerland but also people from the 2CV scene — it’s not so hard to the leave the current environment and jump into a new one. Another advantage of moving more southwards is that I’ll be closer again to the rest of the Beckert family, at least the part I’m related to. (The biggest number of Beckerts seem to live near Chemnitz according to Geogen, so perhaps I should pay attention to this when visiting the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage the next time.)

But I’ll come back and visit the Rhine-Main area probably quite often, not only for LinuxTag.

P.S.: It maybe that further blog postings about my move to Zurich only appear in the German written part of my blog and therefore not on Planet Debian (but Planet Symlink).

Today is ircbot-day //at 18:33 //by abe

Today is ircbot-day. Let’s worship all those ircbots who serve us with information, announce new stories or submissions, keep an eye on our servers, annoy dkg, mirabile and others ;-), or just turn someone’s head.

So today I think of

• jabba — for announcing every Symlink story, announcing any Symlink submission to the Symlink editors and for bothering anyone who says “re” on #symlink or #lugs. ;-)
• gaby — for never letting an eye from any of the ETHZ Departement of Physics’ computers and for probably being the most sexy chatteress on #lugs. ;-)
• MelOne — for always knowing what we said on #symlink.
• blogbot — for remembering all our blogs and a little backlog on #blosxom
• captu (aka Copyra Pasta) — for helping us to not paste a lot of waste into #lugs.
• blutbot — for I just can’t remember what he did and what he could do. Maybe I also don’t want to know.
• And of course also a thanks to all these NickServs, ChanServs, MemoServs and StatServs out there in the net for their ubiquitous services.

Thanks to all of you not war-making ircbots for existing. Without you, IRC would be less funny. ;-)