phil@Rice.edu (William LeFebvre) (05/15/89)
You knew it wouldn't last forever, so now the other shoe must fall. And I've already used three cliches! Gentle readers, I am leaving Rice at the end of May. And with my departure, I will be stepping aside as Sun-Spots moderator. I've been at Rice almost 10 years (as an undergrad, a graduate student hacker droid, an instructor (one summer course), and as staff). I'm sick of the graduate student life and I want a real job in a location I can call home. So the wife and I (and the dog, too) are moving to Chicago in the first weekend in June. She's leaving her high profile, high pressure, high benefits job to move up close to her family in the northern suburbs of Chicago. I'm leaving my "systems programmer" position to take on a job as "Manager of computing facilities" for the EECS department of Northwestern University. So: Q&A time. Will I still be involved in the Sun community? You betcha. If anything, I'll be more involved, because I'll have the time and motivation to be so. In fact, I've already been asked to be on the next SUG conference program committee, I've started writing a monthly column for the Sun Observer, and I was recently asked to give a talk at the Santa Clara "Sun Expo" in June. Will I still be on the network? Yes: Northwestern is on "MERIT", which is connected to the NFS backbone. What happens to Sun-Spots? It stays here. I have set some things in motion to alleviate the pressure of moderating the list, and I have not ruled out the possibility of completely automating the digestification process and removing the moderator completely. However, I do plan on establishing "eecs.nwu.edu" as the home of the new unmoderated, undigested list called "sun-managers". And the most important question: will my username still be "phil"? Well, since I'll be the one in charge of issuing usernames....... (In fact, the current system manager has already set up an account there for me, with the username "phil"). Maybe once I stop moderating this group, I might even have enough time to answer some of the questions that are asked here (and even be accurate about it :-))! William LeFebvre Sun-Spots moderator Department of Computer Science Rice University <phil@Rice.edu>