For the past six years I’ve been working for a small defense contractor here in Oxford, writing software for airborne radar. I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot along the way. Unfortunately, we were primarily funded by Congressional earmarks, which have fallen out of favor as of late. To make a long story short, I was laid off four weeks ago. I harbor no ill will, because I feel like they held on as long as they could, but it still sucked, a lot.
There aren’t many high-paying software jobs here in Oxford. We briefly considered moving elsewhere, but ultimately decided to stay in Oxford, at least for now. Most of you will recall that Cassie does not work outside the home, so it was a little scary until I got an actual job offer.
Luckily, there was a timely opening at the University, and I’ll start today as a High Performance Computing Specialist for the Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research (MCSR). We have two SGI Altix supercomputers and a large Linux cluster. I’ll be working with researchers from all of Mississippi’s public universities to help them utilize the supercomputers, provide training, etc. I’m looking forward to it, and it’ll be nice to be back on campus where I have several friends from previous stints as a student and as a Network Administrator for the Computer Science department (my first “real” job).
There’s also a research component to my new job, which I’m hoping will accelerate my PhD research. I haven’t been very productive in that area lately.
Hopefully I’ll find a little more time to blog and tweet as well, but no promises.
