Well, I've finally made it to Slough anyway. Since I joined the project, the mention of Slough has been sort of like the boogey-man: "if you screw up on somethign we'll send you over to Slough for a few weeks". Now that I've been there, it isn't apparenly all that bad. From what the lads had been saying, I was expecting the O2 office to be stuck out in the middle of an industrial estate outside of town, but it was actually pretty close in, directly opposite the main train station in fact. That puts it one up on Vodafone UK, where the office was a good mile or so outside Newbury! I didn't see all that much of the town itself, only what I saw out the taxi window, but it was at least on a par with the last place I got stuck - there was one shopping center there that the lads were complaining about, saying it shut too early in the evening - but at least it's there in the first place! Is one up on Newbury right there. And I don't know what the Travelodge that they stay in is like, but it can't really be any worse than that Fawlty Towers-type place I was stuck in when I was working in Vodafone!
To be honest, I don't really see the point of the trip over. Was up at 7am, in the airport at 9am for a 10am flight (which actually took off at 10:30, that's dublin airport for you), got to Heathrow around 11:45ish, made it to the O2 office around 12:30, had a sandwich in the canteen for lunch, had a meeting from 1pm to about 3:30pm, got the taxi to Heathrow about 4:15 and were stuck there til our 7:45 flight took off (on time!). We spent more time in Heathrow than we did in the meeting! I suppose the customer was just looking for that nice warm fuzzy feeling of being looked after, that we care enough about them to send 3 ppl over for a day to listen to their problems. Hey if they're paying for the flights, we'll go! And at least it got me out of the day as well, that's always good.
And now I can also scratch "Seeing Slough" off that list I have of things I have to do before I die :-P
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 03, 2008
Monday, December 01, 2008
Well, it had to happen eventually........
This day has been coming for a while now, but I guess I can't put it off any longer. The customer I'm working for wants some face-to-face meetings (capacity planning for christmas), so I'm off over to Slough on weds, over in the morning and back in the evening. At least it isn't overnight job I suppose!
What will make this trip even more fun is the fact that apparently some chemical plant is after exploding over there today. Great, chemical fires, will have to have meetings in hazmat suits! I love the comment on the sky news website's page tho: "From what I have heard about Slough this explosion could cause millions of pounds worth of improvements!" :-)
What will make this trip even more fun is the fact that apparently some chemical plant is after exploding over there today. Great, chemical fires, will have to have meetings in hazmat suits! I love the comment on the sky news website's page tho: "From what I have heard about Slough this explosion could cause millions of pounds worth of improvements!" :-)
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Working late
Well, here we go, am 5 weeks into the company and this is my 2nd day going home from the office at 6am - and the second day in a row actually! This better not be the start of a trend! This is one of the problems of working with a large telco as a customer (or any large customer-facing organization), the only time they can take their big-ass databases off-line for maintenance is overnight. So, I did a full day's work on tues, came back into work at 11:30pm, left around 6:45am weds, was back in again around 11, did another day's work, came back in last night at 11:30pm again, and I should be leaving here in the next few mins provided nothing goes tits-up.
So, by 9am tomorrow morning, out of the last 48hrs I will have spent 29 of them in the office, and only 6 of the others asleep (well, that would be if I was actually getting into work at 9am, which ain't fucking happening!)
The worst part of it is I wasn't actually busy most of the time. I had a busy first hour shutting down al the services and setting everything up, a busy last 30mins starting everything back up again, and most of the rest of the time was just monitoring stuff every now and then to make sure nothing had keeled over! I could have done it from home but I don't have a VPN account yet so had to come into the office :-( At least I was able to being in my home laptop with my game/movie collection!
So, by 9am tomorrow morning, out of the last 48hrs I will have spent 29 of them in the office, and only 6 of the others asleep (well, that would be if I was actually getting into work at 9am, which ain't fucking happening!)
The worst part of it is I wasn't actually busy most of the time. I had a busy first hour shutting down al the services and setting everything up, a busy last 30mins starting everything back up again, and most of the rest of the time was just monitoring stuff every now and then to make sure nothing had keeled over! I could have done it from home but I don't have a VPN account yet so had to come into the office :-( At least I was able to being in my home laptop with my game/movie collection!
Friday, April 18, 2008
All Done and Dusted
Well, I finally handed in my notice anyway. I got a new job last week, and got the contract signed on tues, but I was holding off on handing in the notice as it looked like Work (as in, the current one) might be sending me to Cairo for a week. My new job starts on the 26th May so handing in my 4 weeks notice now means I get a week off in between jobs, but the cairo trip looked like it was coming up the week of the 19th, so I was holding off on the notice for a week so that my last week would be spent off abroad one more time! Turns out the customer wants to hold off until the end of May tho, so that's me out - so no point in hanging around here the extra week! :-)
It was surprisingly easy to get the new job actually. Unlike last time where I was fruitlessly searching for 2 years and had god knows how many interviews (including the one where the muppet recruitment agent sent me to the wrong interview!), I got this on on my second try! The first interview was for a job that I didn't really want anyway, a 2nd line support job with Eircom which was a bit too close to the bits I didn't like in my current job - I was doing it more for the experience and to get back into the rhythm of interviewing than naything else. I dind't get offered it, and even if I had I would have turned it down. The interview was full of the HR type stuff like "where do you see yourself in 5 years time" or "what would you consider your main strengths/weaknesses to be" or "how would you say you perform under stress?", with techy questions few and far between, and needless to say it was this HR crap I apparently fell down on.
My second interview was a lot better - well, I got it, didn't I :-)? Was pretty much all techy stuff, and was more like a chat than an interview (I was bouncing as many questions off him as he was off me). It started at 3pm, I was out by 3:45 and by 4:15 the nice girl in the recruitment agency (and by "nice" I mean "hot") was on to me saying the company wanted me to give then references to check. Here was the first hurdle: they wanted one from CAPE and one from Sun! The CAPE one was easy, just banged off a txt to my manager who'd left a few weeks before and got an immediate "no probs", but the Sun one was more tricky. Seeing as my former group in Sun had all been laid off about 3 months after I left, I dint' have any contact info that I knew woud work! I ended up chancing my arm with a few emial addresses and eventually got a repy from two of them - Tom, my ex boss in Dublin who had survuved the department's demise (I thought he'd been let go too), and Shinobu, my former project lead in San Francisco. Up til the point where I heard from them, I'd been trying to remember what the last name was of my host manager in Beijing so I could send him a message! The reference info was duly sent off anyway, and in short order a reply came back: I had the job.
So anyway, the role is with an Irish company who do mobile phone content provision (I'm not naming names, amde that mistake before and got stung for it!). The role is as a "Deployment Engineer" which is pretty much the same thing I'm doing in my current job - I'm the guy who sets up the customer's systems and throws the software on them. There'll be some travel, but not much - at least they're honest about that, the reason I took my current job was 'cos they said I could be spending as much as 1 out of every 3 months abroad, and lok how far that got me! It's 4 grand more money anyway, 4 days more holidays, and hte best bit is it's only 5mins walk from my apartment, which is just as good as another €700 a year to me as it means I won't have to take the DART to work any more!
So, how will it turn out? Will my current place get out of the slump and start hiring ppl instead of losing them? Only time will tell.....
It was surprisingly easy to get the new job actually. Unlike last time where I was fruitlessly searching for 2 years and had god knows how many interviews (including the one where the muppet recruitment agent sent me to the wrong interview!), I got this on on my second try! The first interview was for a job that I didn't really want anyway, a 2nd line support job with Eircom which was a bit too close to the bits I didn't like in my current job - I was doing it more for the experience and to get back into the rhythm of interviewing than naything else. I dind't get offered it, and even if I had I would have turned it down. The interview was full of the HR type stuff like "where do you see yourself in 5 years time" or "what would you consider your main strengths/weaknesses to be" or "how would you say you perform under stress?", with techy questions few and far between, and needless to say it was this HR crap I apparently fell down on.
My second interview was a lot better - well, I got it, didn't I :-)? Was pretty much all techy stuff, and was more like a chat than an interview (I was bouncing as many questions off him as he was off me). It started at 3pm, I was out by 3:45 and by 4:15 the nice girl in the recruitment agency (and by "nice" I mean "hot") was on to me saying the company wanted me to give then references to check. Here was the first hurdle: they wanted one from CAPE and one from Sun! The CAPE one was easy, just banged off a txt to my manager who'd left a few weeks before and got an immediate "no probs", but the Sun one was more tricky. Seeing as my former group in Sun had all been laid off about 3 months after I left, I dint' have any contact info that I knew woud work! I ended up chancing my arm with a few emial addresses and eventually got a repy from two of them - Tom, my ex boss in Dublin who had survuved the department's demise (I thought he'd been let go too), and Shinobu, my former project lead in San Francisco. Up til the point where I heard from them, I'd been trying to remember what the last name was of my host manager in Beijing so I could send him a message! The reference info was duly sent off anyway, and in short order a reply came back: I had the job.
So anyway, the role is with an Irish company who do mobile phone content provision (I'm not naming names, amde that mistake before and got stung for it!). The role is as a "Deployment Engineer" which is pretty much the same thing I'm doing in my current job - I'm the guy who sets up the customer's systems and throws the software on them. There'll be some travel, but not much - at least they're honest about that, the reason I took my current job was 'cos they said I could be spending as much as 1 out of every 3 months abroad, and lok how far that got me! It's 4 grand more money anyway, 4 days more holidays, and hte best bit is it's only 5mins walk from my apartment, which is just as good as another €700 a year to me as it means I won't have to take the DART to work any more!
So, how will it turn out? Will my current place get out of the slump and start hiring ppl instead of losing them? Only time will tell.....
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Off again......
Well, never mind what I said the other day about Ecuador, it looks like my next destination is Cairo. At least I got about 2 weeks warning on this one - plenty of time to put the light clothes in the wash & get them ready! Looks like it's going to be about 20-25 degrees over there. Nice. Thing is, I'll be back on a sunday and the sat after I'm flying out to Austria to go skiing. More temperature shock!
Thursday, November 15, 2007
Safe
Well, I still have a job anyway.
I reckoned I'd be safe enough in that my group are so short-staffed at the mo anyway that if I took a few sickie days next week then the boss wud be screwed 'cos there'd be no-one left to do the work! Is still good to hear the news that you're staying officially tho. We were called into the meeting rooms one by one to hear, done alphabetically by first name, so I was in the 2nd half of the list. Then the boss decides to go for lunch in between the guy before me on the list and me, so I'm left sweating for another while longer! Meeting was short and sharp when it happened tho, "OK, you're staying, things are as they were from the re-org meeting yesterday".
So there we go, another round of layoffs survived! After all the Sun ones, I've lost count of how many bullets I've dodged now!
Suppose that's the Xmas bonus out the window anyway. Damn, would have been nice to get one this millennium.....
I reckoned I'd be safe enough in that my group are so short-staffed at the mo anyway that if I took a few sickie days next week then the boss wud be screwed 'cos there'd be no-one left to do the work! Is still good to hear the news that you're staying officially tho. We were called into the meeting rooms one by one to hear, done alphabetically by first name, so I was in the 2nd half of the list. Then the boss decides to go for lunch in between the guy before me on the list and me, so I'm left sweating for another while longer! Meeting was short and sharp when it happened tho, "OK, you're staying, things are as they were from the re-org meeting yesterday".
So there we go, another round of layoffs survived! After all the Sun ones, I've lost count of how many bullets I've dodged now!
Suppose that's the Xmas bonus out the window anyway. Damn, would have been nice to get one this millennium.....
Layoffs
Well, we just had a company update meeting here, and it was all going as well as usual (boring update slides on the "merger" etc), then the boss drops the clanger on us. Seems due to one thing or another, we haven't been getting in as many new customers as we forecasted in the last quarter, so we made a rather big loss (can't say how much but there were a lot of zeroes involved). Reckon if we hadn't been taken over merged then the whole company would be on the skids, but as it is we're losing 12 ppl from the dublin office.
They're taking us into the meeting rooms one by one in alphabetical order and telling us individually, I should be finding out in about an hour or so. At least it's a short sharp shock, not like the layoffs in Sun where they'd tell you there was layoffs coming up (sorry, a "Reduction In Force") and then leaving you stew for 3-4 weeks. I might even be joining my ex-teammates in Sun who got culled a few weeks go on the jobs market!
I don't really care either way, after working in Sun I make sure my CV is regularly brushed up anyway, and there's no point in stressing about something I can't change. I'm used to layoffs at this stage anyway.
They're taking us into the meeting rooms one by one in alphabetical order and telling us individually, I should be finding out in about an hour or so. At least it's a short sharp shock, not like the layoffs in Sun where they'd tell you there was layoffs coming up (sorry, a "Reduction In Force") and then leaving you stew for 3-4 weeks. I might even be joining my ex-teammates in Sun who got culled a few weeks go on the jobs market!
I don't really care either way, after working in Sun I make sure my CV is regularly brushed up anyway, and there's no point in stressing about something I can't change. I'm used to layoffs at this stage anyway.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Takeover
I came into the office this morning to have my boss tell me in an ominous tone: "you'd better check your mail". My first thought was "oh shit, what have the Egyptians done now?", but then I see the following:
So, they're calling it a merger, but is like the HP/Compaq "merger" - WeDo and Cape are being merged into a company called: "WeDo". So now I'm working for a Portugese company. Is going to take a good while to merge the two, but that is going to be the end result. So, my first buyout!
According to the 2hr meeting we just had on it, our jobs are all safe - in fact the new company has so many unfilled jobs on the books that they'll be hiring a lot more ppl! Will be a big change in the way we do business here in dublin anwyay - definitely in terms of my group. Instead of supporting customers all over the world, we're just going to be handling Northern Europe. Am not a happy camper over that.
When I started this job I was told I'd be spending at least 1/3 of the time on the road, possibly up to 2/3 - was pretty much the reason I took the job in the first place! I've been a bit pissed off with the whole travel thing for a while actually. I've only had one trip to one shithole of a place, and in the last 2 months I've had trips to Reading, Ecuador and Cairo dangled in front of me and then cancelled, which sucks (well, maybe not the Reading one). Now we've been told that the Dublin office will be responsible for Ireland, England and Scandinavia. No more pissing off to Asia or South America for me! I joined this job to go off to foreign places, I didn't join to spend my days rooting through server log files and poking through database tables or answering questions/fixing problems from some customer who didn't read the manual before he started hitting buttons, which is what I'm doing now.
We have a meting later on this afternoon with the boss to see what exactly this is going to mean for our team in particular. Will be pondering my options after that.
At least it may mean trips to Lisbon for "orientation meetings" maybe..... :-)
"We are delighted to announce that early this morning CAPE became part
of the largest non-financial company in Portugal.
Specifically CAPE has been purchased by our most respected competitor,
WeDo Consulting."
So, they're calling it a merger, but is like the HP/Compaq "merger" - WeDo and Cape are being merged into a company called: "WeDo". So now I'm working for a Portugese company. Is going to take a good while to merge the two, but that is going to be the end result. So, my first buyout!
According to the 2hr meeting we just had on it, our jobs are all safe - in fact the new company has so many unfilled jobs on the books that they'll be hiring a lot more ppl! Will be a big change in the way we do business here in dublin anwyay - definitely in terms of my group. Instead of supporting customers all over the world, we're just going to be handling Northern Europe. Am not a happy camper over that.
When I started this job I was told I'd be spending at least 1/3 of the time on the road, possibly up to 2/3 - was pretty much the reason I took the job in the first place! I've been a bit pissed off with the whole travel thing for a while actually. I've only had one trip to one shithole of a place, and in the last 2 months I've had trips to Reading, Ecuador and Cairo dangled in front of me and then cancelled, which sucks (well, maybe not the Reading one). Now we've been told that the Dublin office will be responsible for Ireland, England and Scandinavia. No more pissing off to Asia or South America for me! I joined this job to go off to foreign places, I didn't join to spend my days rooting through server log files and poking through database tables or answering questions/fixing problems from some customer who didn't read the manual before he started hitting buttons, which is what I'm doing now.
We have a meting later on this afternoon with the boss to see what exactly this is going to mean for our team in particular. Will be pondering my options after that.
At least it may mean trips to Lisbon for "orientation meetings" maybe..... :-)
Monday, May 14, 2007
flights!
Well, I finally have flights! Checked www.lufthansa.ie this morning, saw that there were seats available on the flights I wanted, and rang up Amex. Sure enough, they said the flights were booked. I'm still not very impressed with them tho. Not letting me know that I was on a wait list was bad enough, but at what exact point were they going to let me know that I had the flights if I hadn't been pestering them? Am I supposed to be clairvoyant now, or shall I just wander over there and do their jobs for them?
Now all I have to do is get a visa! I had to email them over a copy of the pic page of my passport - is lucky I keep a photocopy in my wallet as a spare ID! They're not sure in the indonesian office tho if can I get the 60-day visa in time or not. Apparently if they can't get me one I'll have to just turn up, get a 30-day tourist visa and then head off to Singapore about half-way though for a weekend and come back in again to get another 30 days. If this happens it means the company pays for flights to a place I was planning on going anyway! :-)
Hmm, must look up whether I need the malaria tablets now.
Now all I have to do is get a visa! I had to email them over a copy of the pic page of my passport - is lucky I keep a photocopy in my wallet as a spare ID! They're not sure in the indonesian office tho if can I get the 60-day visa in time or not. Apparently if they can't get me one I'll have to just turn up, get a 30-day tourist visa and then head off to Singapore about half-way though for a weekend and come back in again to get another 30 days. If this happens it means the company pays for flights to a place I was planning on going anyway! :-)
Hmm, must look up whether I need the malaria tablets now.
Friday, May 11, 2007
More Muppetology!
Here we go again. It seems nothing is destined to be easy with this trip of mine.
It seems now there's a bit of a glitch in my flights. I rang Amex (our "travel partners") on tues to book them, and they said they would get onto it. I hadn't heard anything by yesterday evening so I rang them up a few mins ago to find out what was happening. Apparently I'm on a wait list for a Lufthansa flight - but they never bothered telling me this til I chased up on them! So much for "your call is important to us"......
I've been looking at alternatives and it seems I can maybe get flights on friday instead, which would mean changing my going-away do to thurs night, maybe having to take a day's hols from work and ringing Thomas Cook to see can I get my money a day early. Is either that or flying Dublin->London->Kuala Lumpur->Jakarta. Great eh? Can see myself standing on the end of the runway in Dublin with me bags with a sign saying "Jakarta" trying to thumb a lift!
It seems now there's a bit of a glitch in my flights. I rang Amex (our "travel partners") on tues to book them, and they said they would get onto it. I hadn't heard anything by yesterday evening so I rang them up a few mins ago to find out what was happening. Apparently I'm on a wait list for a Lufthansa flight - but they never bothered telling me this til I chased up on them! So much for "your call is important to us"......
I've been looking at alternatives and it seems I can maybe get flights on friday instead, which would mean changing my going-away do to thurs night, maybe having to take a day's hols from work and ringing Thomas Cook to see can I get my money a day early. Is either that or flying Dublin->London->Kuala Lumpur->Jakarta. Great eh? Can see myself standing on the end of the runway in Dublin with me bags with a sign saying "Jakarta" trying to thumb a lift!
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Lovely....
Well, we still don't have a set date for the trip. I have a provisional date of 21st May but that can change at any time up to when I check my bags in at the airport. Last week, one of the girls was supposed to be going to Germany to do an upgrade. She was spending the weekend in Munich and then doing the work on mon/tues, and was on a 3:30pm flight fri so was leaving work at 1pm. She got told at 12:30 that the trip was off.
Also, was talking to one of the guys who's out in Indonesia at the mo and it's hot and muggy and smoggy there. Also, and this was sort of worrying, they're so paranoid about suicide bombers etc there that the hotel he's staying in has them big concrete barriers in front of it to stop cars coming straight up to it at speed, and once you get thru they won't let you out of the car until someone checks underneath with a mirror on a pole - looking for bombs! Great! :-( Looks like I'll definitely be bringing my "Don't shoot I'm not American" t-shirt!
Also, was talking to one of the guys who's out in Indonesia at the mo and it's hot and muggy and smoggy there. Also, and this was sort of worrying, they're so paranoid about suicide bombers etc there that the hotel he's staying in has them big concrete barriers in front of it to stop cars coming straight up to it at speed, and once you get thru they won't let you out of the car until someone checks underneath with a mirror on a pole - looking for bombs! Great! :-( Looks like I'll definitely be bringing my "Don't shoot I'm not American" t-shirt!
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Indonesia - the project from heck
The guys in Indonesia and Australia are really, really pissing me off right about now. After the last few weeks of constant questions from them on how to set up the hardware we need, with us having to make decisions based on incomplete information, getting it wrong (strange that) and having to redo it, now it turns out that a lot of it was the project manager's fuck-up in our Australia office. I've been going on the assumption all along that the Indonesians have had our environment config document which tells them how to set stuff up and they just haven't read it, but last fri I finally asked the PM in Sydney "so what version of this doc did they get anyway?" and the reply was "what doc?" Gaaah!
Then again, the guys in Indonesia haven't exactly been showing encouraging signs of competency either. We got the VPN connection to the servers that they finally set up for us last week, only to find that we couldn't log in as they hadn't set up any users for us. I asked them to do it and the reply was "you never told us that you needed user accounts set up". This made me wish you could send a smack upside the head as an email attachment - despite this being listed in the other docs we sent them (the ones they definitely did get, I know 'cos I sent them myself), they didn't put two and two together and realise we wanted them to actually create them for us. So how exactly did they reckon we were going to install the software?
And now the project managers in Oz have shown us a blast of competence of truly dilbertian proportions. For the last 3 weeks we've been pushing them to try to give us dates on when we're going to Indonesia. Ages ago, we were told "July", then "April 28th". Then they went silent on us for a good while (well, except for screaming at us to get stuff fixed). This morning, they turned around and said "we want you there April 25th". Not only does this break the standard procedure of us getting a minimum of 4 weeks notice to go, it also just happens to mean that by the time we get over, development won't even be finished on their customizations so we won't even have anything to do! Then, we look at the project plan, and that is still talking about July, which was put by the wayside weeks if not months ago! The words "cluster-fuck", "headless chickens" and "piss-up in a brewery" come to mind.....
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Solaris "laptop friendly" release doesn't like Dell laptops
Now I know the pain of not "running Sun on Sun" (our old mantra in the office).....
Have a nice shiny laptop here, running windows but with a ton of free space on the drive. Decided over the weekend in a fit of madness to throw solaris on it, so I took one of the DVDs I burned before I left (S11 intel) and threw it on. For one thing it took forever to pick up the installer GUI (had to reboot maybe a dozen times before it picked it up), and then it wouldn’t recognize the network card, but I was sort of expecting that not to work. Then I went to reboot into windows, and discovered that I couldn’t login.
It seems that while the installer was smart enough to pick up that I had a windows partition and added it to the grub boot menu, it didn’t quite know what to do with the Dell system restore partition that you get with all dells these days. That partition is supposed to be marked as hidden, but now it wasn’t and so it came up on windows as C: and my C: drive went to E:. Problem with this was that the windows login was expecting to find the home dirs in C:\Documents and Settings not E:\Documents and Settings – so no-one could login, and the machine didn’t seem to be able to reset it to C. Took the admin here most of the morning to try to fix it (partition magic couldn’t even fix it) and in the end we took the nuclear option and just wiped it and re-installed the whole damn thing. So, all the crap I’ve set up on the lappy in the last week, and all the work stuff that was pre-installed for me, was hosed.
So, to list my problems:
And this was build 55b, the build that was supposed to be Solaris Developer Express, the “laptop-friendly” release!
Have a nice shiny laptop here, running windows but with a ton of free space on the drive. Decided over the weekend in a fit of madness to throw solaris on it, so I took one of the DVDs I burned before I left (S11 intel) and threw it on. For one thing it took forever to pick up the installer GUI (had to reboot maybe a dozen times before it picked it up), and then it wouldn’t recognize the network card, but I was sort of expecting that not to work. Then I went to reboot into windows, and discovered that I couldn’t login.
It seems that while the installer was smart enough to pick up that I had a windows partition and added it to the grub boot menu, it didn’t quite know what to do with the Dell system restore partition that you get with all dells these days. That partition is supposed to be marked as hidden, but now it wasn’t and so it came up on windows as C: and my C: drive went to E:. Problem with this was that the windows login was expecting to find the home dirs in C:\Documents and Settings not E:\Documents and Settings – so no-one could login, and the machine didn’t seem to be able to reset it to C. Took the admin here most of the morning to try to fix it (partition magic couldn’t even fix it) and in the end we took the nuclear option and just wiped it and re-installed the whole damn thing. So, all the crap I’ve set up on the lappy in the last week, and all the work stuff that was pre-installed for me, was hosed.
So, to list my problems:
- First prob was the installer kept freezing on "setting up java...." or some msg like that, no matter what install choice you picked - took maybe 20 or 30 reboots to get past it - and even then it still took maybe 10mins or longer to come up
- Second prob was the network card (Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx) wasn't picked up. '
ifconfig -a' gave me nothing, then I managed to use the GNOME network admin tool to get it picked up, but after that the machine wouldn't boot up as it kept timing out on some pci device (am assuming it was the network card as it worked before I config'ed it). Reinstalled again as I couldn’t get past it and the next time when I tried to run the network admin tool it froze and eventually crashed gnome - every time. - The machine comes with an 80Mb partition for the Dell System Diagnostics at the start of the drive which is supposed to be hidden, but Solaris set it as unhidden. Straight away, windows picked it up as c:, the c: drive as e: and kept dying on login looking for c:\documents and settings. There seemed to be no way to reset this - even if we set the partition back as hidden windows couldn’t pick up the main partition as c:. This is probably more a windows problem than a solaris one, but solaris shouldn't have caused the prob in the first place.
And this was build 55b, the build that was supposed to be Solaris Developer Express, the “laptop-friendly” release!
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
New Job.....
Well, here I am on my 2nd day in my new job. Am having great fun here, as the first thing I noticed when I got in this morning was that the network was down, so no-one could do anything. The external access is back up now, but the internal access isn't for some reason. In other words, I can browse the web but not get at any of the docs I need to get to so that I can know what I'm doing. Then again, it's not that anyone has actually told me what I'm supposed to be doing/learning anyway, so am just browsing the network trying to find something that could be vaguely relevant to a role that I'm still not sure of the details of. And apparently, when I do get stuff to do, I'll just be dropped in on the deep end and left to fend for myself. Fun!
Monday, January 15, 2007
First Day.
Well, I have the first day in the new job over with anyway. It was strange finishing up in Sun on friday, clearing out my desk and all. Shows how good morale is on our place, as I only got about 7-8 people out to my going-away do on thurs - and 4 of those weren't even from Sun! We went out to the bar on the business park on fri evening tho for a few, which made my actual wrapping-up in the office a bit anti-climactic, as it was a case of coming back from the pub at about 7, picking up my bag, taking a last look around the empty desk and leaving my work badge on my bosses desk.
This morning was a bit strange, as I was up at the usual time, but was getting on the "wrong" platform on the DART station and going in the "wrong" direction! Got into the office anyway, and I had a momentary panic that I'd be told "Oh, we didn't actually get your contract back in the post, so we thought you turned down the job. Sorry!", but they were actually expecting me, which was good. Got a bit of an intro session with the HR girl, then got led to my new desk (actually my boss's desk as my desk still hasn't been set up yet) where my shiny new laptop was waiting for me!
After that tho, I was pretty much left to my own devices It seems there's no formal training course or intro session, so I was left to take a wander around the network and intranet and figure things out for myself. This wasn't really helped by the fact that I didn't actually get a login on the intranet or get read access to the shared network drives until the afternoon! Also, my new boss had some urgent business to take care of at home so had to take a last-minute flight back to Italy, and as a result I was left with a document which vaguely describes what I'll be doing, but not how. This should be fun next week when I'm dropped right in the deep end and left to fend for myself!
Lunch was a bit odd too - we don't have any canteen, so its a case of heading off to the local shop. Luckily there are a good few places to go in Blackrock, but it seems that the group doesn't go for lunch as a group, everyone just heads off and fends for themselves. This posed a bit of a problem for me, as I don't have a swipe card yet so if I left I couldn't get back in! Headed out with one of the lads eventually, about 2pm, and got a panini in some local deli.
All in all, it feels weird not to be in my desk in Sun, and I'm not 100% sure it has dawned on me yet that I'm not going back, that this is my future career. I'm sure it will eventually, but at the mo it's sort of a strange limbo feeling, sitting at "my" desk, reading docs that I'm not 100% sure are relevant or not - and using windows! I'm not 100% sure of the logic of working on a product that runs on Solaris and Linux from Windows boxes using stuff like putty and VNC. If we're working on Solaris, why aren't we running Solaris? Maybe I just still have the whole "run Sun on Sun" thing in my head, but it still feels strange to me.
So, first day, mixed opinions. Should get better anyway - I hope!
This morning was a bit strange, as I was up at the usual time, but was getting on the "wrong" platform on the DART station and going in the "wrong" direction! Got into the office anyway, and I had a momentary panic that I'd be told "Oh, we didn't actually get your contract back in the post, so we thought you turned down the job. Sorry!", but they were actually expecting me, which was good. Got a bit of an intro session with the HR girl, then got led to my new desk (actually my boss's desk as my desk still hasn't been set up yet) where my shiny new laptop was waiting for me!
After that tho, I was pretty much left to my own devices It seems there's no formal training course or intro session, so I was left to take a wander around the network and intranet and figure things out for myself. This wasn't really helped by the fact that I didn't actually get a login on the intranet or get read access to the shared network drives until the afternoon! Also, my new boss had some urgent business to take care of at home so had to take a last-minute flight back to Italy, and as a result I was left with a document which vaguely describes what I'll be doing, but not how. This should be fun next week when I'm dropped right in the deep end and left to fend for myself!
Lunch was a bit odd too - we don't have any canteen, so its a case of heading off to the local shop. Luckily there are a good few places to go in Blackrock, but it seems that the group doesn't go for lunch as a group, everyone just heads off and fends for themselves. This posed a bit of a problem for me, as I don't have a swipe card yet so if I left I couldn't get back in! Headed out with one of the lads eventually, about 2pm, and got a panini in some local deli.
All in all, it feels weird not to be in my desk in Sun, and I'm not 100% sure it has dawned on me yet that I'm not going back, that this is my future career. I'm sure it will eventually, but at the mo it's sort of a strange limbo feeling, sitting at "my" desk, reading docs that I'm not 100% sure are relevant or not - and using windows! I'm not 100% sure of the logic of working on a product that runs on Solaris and Linux from Windows boxes using stuff like putty and VNC. If we're working on Solaris, why aren't we running Solaris? Maybe I just still have the whole "run Sun on Sun" thing in my head, but it still feels strange to me.
So, first day, mixed opinions. Should get better anyway - I hope!
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