My last post was January 2013 when I started working at my, then, new job at the EEB Hub. A lot has happened since. I have been here for 1.5 years and I can honestly say I could not have predicted that this job would shape into what it has become.
First of all, we went through a re-branding/re-naming. It is a bit frustrating, to say the least, since this organization was already re-named once (from GPIC, Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster, to EEB Hub, Energy Efficient Buildings Hub). It is now CBEI, the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation). One of the big things I needed to help with was our new website: www.cbei.psu.edu
The new site means we are no longer using an outside contractor to maintain our website. It is now hosted within the College of Engineering at Penn State. There are many challenges now that the site is in-house, but, one thing is for sure, it is much, much, much, much cheaper. This website probably deserves its own post at a later date.
Our new headquarters is still under construction (http://kierantimberlake.com/posts/view/259/) and planning for the move has been a great learning experience. Just today, we received a few of our new VOIP phones. We will be transition to VOIP from analog before the move, so we can port the numbers ahead of time and just “plug and play” once we get to our new offices.
There’s a lot more I could write about, but one of the biggest news is that our budget from the Department of Energy has been cut by more than 50%, so our staff has been shrinking. This directly impacts my workload, since I am in a support role. This also opens up some time to catch up and think of places to improve or catch up. For example, I have been working on getting Dell KACE set up on our machines for patching and software deployment.
Also, with the extra time, I plan on incorporate blogging into my regular routine, so there should be more consistent updates.