Beach Blankets and Back Issues Are Author's Beach Essentials

A beautiful beach, beach blankets, and a bunch of back issues of Windows IT Pro—that's a recipe for a nice relaxing weekend in Apostolos Fotakelis' eyes. Those weekends don't come often enough, though, because Apostolos is an IT professional—and as you probably know all too well, working weekends and weird hours is almost routine in the IT world.

As a systems administrator at NATO Headquarters in Albania, Apostolos' job is far from routine. Unfortunately, for security reasons, he can't talk about his on-the-job-adventures. It's not a case of "If I told you, then I'd have to kill you" but rather "If I told you, then I'd be unemployed." Apostolos—who holds various certifications, with the most recently earned being MCITP Server & Enterprise Adiministrator 2008 and MCTS: Business Intelligence—frequently does IT training and consulting on the side.

When Apostolos isn't on the job or at the beach, he's probably at home in front of his computer. One of his favorite activities is sharing what he has learned with other IT professionals through Reader to Reader (R2R) articles. He wrote his first R2R article "Stopping a Shutdown in Progress" back when the whole world was sighing in relief because the doomsday Y2K scenario didn't become reality. Since then, Apostolos has written more than 50 other articles, including

You can see the entire list of articles by clicking here.

Another activity that Apostolos enjoys is taking photos of the many places he travels to for work and pleasure. Some of those photos he showcases in Facebook. For example, he has a sampling of stunning sunsets and a captivating collection of photos portraying the essence of Thessaloniki, Greece, his home town. And here's a picture of one of those beautiful beaches—Liro beach in Vlore, Albania—Apostolos recently spent a weekend at: