This was my first ZendCon, and my overall impression is a positive one. I walked away with a much better understand of the community and Zend’s involvement in it. I also was very fortunate to meet many new people from all over the world and of wide skillset and experience. The networking and conversations that took place outside of the sessions and at restaurants or poolside over drinks is where the real connections are made.

Paul Merrill from “How To Geek On” shares tips, advice, and offers services to those who have been laid-off or looking to make a career transition:

We prepare you for a focused and efficient transition
Identify your skills, goals, and realities
Learn how to target companies and network into them
Learn how to get your Resume to the top of the stack
Mock Interview and Critique

Make sure to sign-up for the free newsletter, and if you are in the area, attend a “Coffee and Helping Each Other Out” session.

I recently picked up a gently used, off-lease Panasas ActiveStor 3100 Parallel Storage Cluster from eBay.  The unit powers on and I have been able to console in to the management and storage blades.   The next step is to bring the cluster online and learn more about the activeScale operating environment (which appears FreeBSD based..) and the PanFS parallel file system.  Documentation online is scarce without an active support contract with Panasas. Look here for updates as they happen.