The majority of my work years have been invested in working with Information Technology. The field is closely linked to instrumentation and has been a great asset to me in that regard.
Web Design and Development
This is where I began in Information Technology as a career. After graduating from college with a Computer Support Technician diploma, I immediately went to work as the webmaster for a large non-profit conservation group. While there, some of my greatest accomplishments included:
- Taking monthly unique visits for their sites from 6,000 to 80,000 people per month, in less than 6 months.
- Developing a content management system allowing the organizations employees to make updates to the websites. This was prior to commercially available content management systems that we have today.
- Producing and programming an interactive childrens’ web site.
- Providing project management for the development of a conservation art auction site.
While working for a web development and consulting firm, I was part of a team that developed a content management system for Human Resources and Development Canada. That was an interesting experience as working for the federal government is much different than working in the private sector.
From there I went to work as a web developer for one of Canada’s largest telecom service providers. My team did custom web design and development work for small businesses, Fortune 500 companies and celebrities.
College Instructor
From there, I went to work part-time as a college instructor teaching courses on HTML and web server technologies. During my time as an instructor I participated in the development of the course outline, the course content and training materials. That was something I found particularly enjoyable. I find it very satisfying when technology can be used to bring people together and make life more enjoyable.
Information Systems Coordinator
Project Management
The challenges in this position really added to my skill set. I employed my project management skills to help bring an in-house software development system under control. I did this by helping to define what management was looking for and and then defining those needs as deliverables. By utilizing my knowledge of oilfield procedures and my knowledge of software development, I was able to act as a translator of sorts between the developer and management.
Hardware and Software Acquisition and Support
While in this role I was tasked with sourcing and customizing laptops for 55 field personnel. The budget restraints were tighter than optimal for this task. However I found that the Toshiba Satellite Pro series of laptops provided the ruggedness I needed for under $1000. For software, I implemented OpenOffice and other freeware to accomplish the same tasks they would with licensed software.
From there I customized the software so that files created would automatically be compatible with Microsoft Office programs. Not really a tough task, but it needed doing.
I also customised the operating system installation so that the field user would have certain restrictions that an administrator wouldn’t but gave them the flexibility to do things that an ordinary user couldn’t.
Budget, operational, and communications restraints didn’t allow for having the field laptops connected back to the office server, so management of permissions could not be done at the server level. By implementing certain registry tweaks in Windows XP Pro, I could create an image that could be quickly, but manually, deployed across the 55 laptops. All the laptops were also set up to create images of the main drive each time the computer was shut down. This kept an uncorrupted back-up of the system on the computer locally, in case a restoration of the image needed to be performed.
Something else I was kind of proud of was finding a piece of freeware that would monitor certain key-indicators of computer health and setting it up so that it would e-mail me directly should any of these indicators exceed parameters that I set. That really helped in a preventative maintenance way. I wrote an article about that for MakeUseOf.com
In order to restrict unacceptable Internet activity with their cellular Internet cards, I managed to force all communications through a proxy server with a white list of acceptable web sites. This was done with an open source proxy server and several registry tweaks to prevent the user from being able to circumvent the proxy settings. Should a user have required access to a site not on the white list, they simply needed to call me, tell me about the site and if the site met established criteria – it was added to the whitelist.
I was particularly proud of this accomplishment as it was an almost zero-cost solution that rid the company of multi-thousand dollar cellular Internet bills. The solution also decreased laptop downtime to almost zero because of the lack of viruses and malware getting on the laptops. Laptop and communications downtime had cost the company thousands of dollars in lost jobs prior to this solution.
Technical Support
In this role, I also provided technical support via telephone, remote desktop access and going on site. This was a 24-7 service provided throughout my time in this role. On occasion, I was required to drive several hundred miles to an oil or gas well site to perform hardware repairs.
SCADA and RTU Maintenance and Support
Another part of my duties was to maintain several SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) units. Many of the well testing jobs would have a Remote Telemetry Unit (RTU) on site that was customized to share data with FieldNotes. FieldNotes is the industry standard software for recording the results of the well test. To my knowledge, this was the only system that was able to do this via cellular, radio or direct Ethernet connection. I provided support and training on the use of the units as well as with it’s data interface with FieldNotes.
The breadth and depth of the technology used in the role of Information Systems Coordinator was very interesting and stimulating. One minute I might be coding a script to perform a task, then I might be installing a SCADA unit, then I might be troubleshooting a cellular Internet connection. It definitely kept me on my toes.