Another Trip Cancelled

Well, I've just had another trip shot down at work. One of our customers in Australia is doing an upgrade, and someone has to go down and do it. Originally it was supposed to be another member of the team, Viv, but then the project got delayed and it conflicted with her 3-week holiday in China, so someone else had to go. I was the only implementer left in the office (the other guy is in cape town) so I was supposed to be sent instead. Now it's been delayed again and Viv is going - in fact, they're flying her straight from Hong Kong to Sydney, she's not even coming home.

As I said a few days ago, I'm not overly happy with the way the travel has gone here. When I signed up it was on the understanding I'd be travelling a good bit of the time. I'm here nearly a year now and I've been to one place! Instead, my days are spent reading log files to try to see how Vodafone [Censored] have fucked up their systems now! So far, since I've come back from Jakarta, I've had the following trips proposed, then cancelled:

• Reading: Supposed to go on the tuesday, got cancelled on the monday
  
• Guyaquil, Ecuador: Got put on one week's notice to go (as in "have your bags packed"), then got canned. Issues with the contractor I think
  
• Cairo: Same as Ecuador, was "vitally urgent" we send someone over at short notice, then the urgency sort of evaporated (despite their systems still being as fucked-up now as they were then)
  
• Sydney: project got delayed, I was told I was going, project got delayed again, so the original person is going.
  

Maybe in January when the takeover (sorry, "merger") is done, the travel situation may be different. Our new lords and masters are apparently extremely good at project planning - good, we could do with some of that around here! Maybe we won't be spending our whole time firefighting then! I'll wait and see what happens in the first few months of the new year In the meantime however, I might be dusting off the CV just in case.....

My new laptop is not very game friendly

Well, here I am, still running Vista on my new laptop. One thing that I'm not running tho, is games. Seems tho that nearly every game I try doesn't work on this new laptop of mine:
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars: Doesn't like the gfx card
- Rush For Berlin: Bad gfx drivers for Vista
- Lost Planet: Won't run
- Biohazard: Keeps crashing
- Medal Of Honour: Airborne: Gfx card not supported
- Crysis: Gfx card not supported
- Jericho: Keeps crashing
- Call of Duty 4: Gfx card not supported
- Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars: Keeps crashing

And I'm sure the list is going to get longer.......

One of the reviews I read before I got it said that "most games will run on the graphics card". Experience and this page say otherwise.

Xmas before Halloween makes the Baby Jesus cry

I thought things were bad last year when the xmas decorations started going up before Halloween, but this year is worse. We've still got a week and a half to go to Halloween, and already the xmas ads are already starting to creep onto the TV, and in Dunnes in Waterford they already have a whole section of xmas decorations in the shop. We're still nearly 10 weeks to go to xmas, which is like 1/5th of the year. What the fuck? Give me a break, is all this hype and full over one day of the year!

5 minutes

It's amazing the difference 5 minutes can make when it comes to getting to work in the morning. This morning I got up a tad late and decided to take the dart from Tara St rather than do the 15min walk to Grand Canal dock. I just missed one train (naturally) and when the next one arrived, we only got as far as Pearse station. It seems some gobshyte truck driver misunderestimated the height of the railway bridge at Grand Canal Dock and wedged his truck under it. Was one of them brick-carrying trucks with the crane on it to take off the bricks, and the crane was jammed tight under the bridge. The impressive bit was that he managed to run the truck half-way under the bridge before it jammed tight enough to stop - is a wide bridge! As a result, no darts erre running between Pearse and Lansdowne until they un-wedged it and the engineers checked out the bridge, so I had to walk up to Lansdowne, and there they said they hadn't a clue how long it'd take before the trains were running again, but prob at least an hour. So I had to go catch the bus, naturally just missed one and finally arrived in work an hour late!

Lessons

Well, I did French in school for 4 years and I still sort of 3/4 know it, and I did Arabic night-classes and have forgotten it all, and Italian night classes and remember a good bit of it, and then I did a few language lessons when I was living in Beijing ("survival chinese"). So, I'm semi-fluent in lots of languages! I decided a few weeks ago to try to improve my slightly sketchy knowledge of at least one of these languages, so I looked around on nightclasses.ie and found a cheapish Chinese course on up in a place on Baggot street on weds nights. Cool!

Started the course tonight and was definitely value for money! There were only two of us in it - altho there's supposed to be 7 signed up. Happy days for the organizers if they've already paid their money I guess :-) Didn't really cover muchfirst night: pronunciation of the tones (which is always a bitch from what I remember from last time), "Ni hau ma?" and the usual greetings stuff - altho we got a bit of grammar as well. Will see how we go next week!

One thing that I definitely found is that I'll need to rewrite my notes when I get done each day - I haven't done any real writing bar signing credit card slips and a few scribbled notes at my desk in the last few years (and even then we're gone to Chip & PIN with the credit card so I don't even do that any more), and my writing, never all that good in the first place, has really gone to shyte! I might as well be a doctor!

My New Toy

Well, I've been giving out about my old laptop now for a while, saying bits of it weren't working all that well (like the gfx card, the DVD drive, the wi-fi card, the heatsink, the 'e' key...) and that I was thinking of getting a replacement for it. I was passing though town during the week and saw that Dixons were doing a sale - 10% off all laptops, this weekend only. So, I decided to go in and take a look, and came out with a new toy. This is what I got:



The specs aren't hugely different to the Alienware - same RAM (1Gb), same GFX RAM (128Mb), slower chip (dual-core 1.7Ghz rather than a 2Ghz), bigger HD (100Gb), and what I couldn't get off any similar-specced Dell, an S-video out port so I could watch all the bootleg AVI movies I get off my boss on my wide-screen TV :-) One area where it is bigger tho is the screen - is a 17" rather than the 15.4" I had on the Alienware. One nice change as well is the machine not sounding like a hairdryer when I'm turning it on thanks to the dodgy heatsink causing the fan to be at 100% the whole time!

This is it sitting beside my work laptop:




My work laptop wants to be my new one when it grows up! :-P

One thing about it which is taking a bit of adjustment is that I'm now running Vista. Am not sure do I like it yet, still feels like a toy OS with all the flashy-flashy menu animations and stuff. I'm getting a bit annoyed as well with getting messages up saying "are you really sure you want to do this?" every time I try to install something - plus when I went to install my old version of Norton AV yesterday, I kept getting a dialog popping up that one of the devices Norton was installing was incompatible with Vista. Every time I clicked "OK" or close on it tho so that I could cancel Norton, the dialog would pop up again straight away! Took me nearly half an hour to cancel and roll back Norton in between clicking that fecking dialog! Hopefully there's an admin option there somewhere that I can turn that annoying shit off in!