Experiments in Geekery

I started a new job in April 2012. My old one was relatively geeky but working in a very highly specialised field. "Group Technical Support" was the job title but in reality I was doing all-sorts, from development support, software & hardware validation, and a fair whack of PHP/MySQL/Bash/Python troubleshooting on a distributed system getting telemetry data from buses at depots through a wireless network. My new job is for a company that does what essentially comes down to data processing. Lots of stuff like address cleansing, identifying duplicate users with different accounts, fraud prevention, data pooling. My job title is "Application Support Engineer" and formally I sit between the service desk and infrastructure, mainly tasked with monitoring the data flow in, through and out of the business. In reality there's a lot more of the tedious stuff than I really want (service-desk type stuff) and far too much being on-call for my liking, but overall I