Services Archives ~ fitzmoskal

Pixabay

Wes — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 14:47:16 +0000

Pixabay is one of the largest repositories of royalty free stock images – you can use these anywhere, even for commercial purposes. I’ve just started a profile to ‘give back’ to the community:

https://pixabay.com/users/fitzmoskal-21007215/

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Digital Health Checks

Wes — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 19:37:14 +0000

During my time as a consultant I have worked to develop various digital health checks to assist companies with taking a tempurature test of their IT systems and strategy. The view of health checks is sometimes that they are just a tool to drum up more business – which to an extent is true, but the health checks I developed have been critical in assisting companies to identify risks, avoid costly mistakes and pinpoint the source of complaints.

I have developed comprehensive health checks for BMC Discovery, Kubernetes, NFS and PostgreSQL. I have also developed exception reporting on data pipelines for data quality assessment. The health checks I have developed have saved customers in the following areas:

Identified security vulnerabilities around plaintext usernames and passwords storage
Identified issues around NFS performance
Identified opportunities for license reclaimation
Identified usage patterns for insecure practices (i.e. logging in as root user)
Identified various misconfigurations in non-alignment with best practices

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Corporate Trainer

Wes — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 17:14:51 +0000

Over the span of my career I have facilitated as both a BMC corporate trainer and internal technical trainer where I have used both vendor material and designed training from scratch. I have also produced two training courses for Traversys.

I have delivered training in person to locations in US, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Remotely 24/7 including Australia from the UK and also in pre-recorded material for inclusion in corporate training portal.

My perspective on the keys to effective corporate training are:

Good pacing – particularly if the vendor material does not fill the time-slot
Build in feedback and Q&As
Extra material and real world use cases if you have time and appropriate
Engage with students, don’t just sit in the chair and repeat a script! Move around, be expressive. Corporate training can be incredibly boring or incredibly rewarding.

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Exam Assessment & Vigilation

Wes — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 14:41:00 +0000

Over the years I have offered my services as a reader for those with disabilities taking exams. It’s very simple work but also very rewarding to assist someone to get a certification (and inform them that they passed).

You’re not actually allowed to have any personal interaction at all, but you can enjoy their reaction all the same.

Recently I have taken up a part-time contracting role as an Online Assessor for a training partner supporting the University of Oxford’s Aritificial Intelligence Programme.

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Mapping Food & Drinks Venues with Foursquare API

Wes — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 14:33:39 +0000

I was given a brief to extract data from Foursquare to identify the nearest food and drinks venues within 1000 meters latitude and longitude provided in an Excel sheet for a historical tour company.

I developed this with a mixture of Bash and Python, exporting the results to JSON and then converting to CSV. All code was handed to the client.

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Escape Room Concept

Wes — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 14:16:06 +0000

I was once hired to write a concept for a “panic room escape” just as Escape Rooms were becoming a new thing. I wrote the following brief:

A gothic setting with a backstory to escape from a locked room in Leaven Molt Castle set in the year 1878.
All characters and names invented by myself.
List of props required which included amongst other things, laminated notes, incantation pieces and a cryptex.
Placement and setup for the props along with timings.
Hints and answers (for the game masters)

It was a very fun thing to do and I’d be happy to replicate again.

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Transcription Services

Wes — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 13:55:25 +0000

On and off during my career I’ve been asked to transcribe handwritten notes and paid for my services. I am trained in touch-typing but I’ve also used speech-to-text (STT) tools for assistance.

My first gig was transcribing the handwritten notes of a mother of a colleage who had passed away, for which she was very grateful and I was compensated a small sum, but I enjoyed it.

Other notes can be very difficult and STT will get you nowhere. Like the old journal below I was given to transcribe about 13 pages in all, but they can be interesting to read.

Anyone looking for assistance in digitizing personal hand-written notes should get in touch. I’d be happy to do it for them or offer some knowledge transfer in how to do it yourself with STT software.

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