What country am I in again?

Well, I've arrived in Singapore, in one piece. It took me a bit of time at the airport to get my mind out of "work mode" - and I did have a good bit of time, as I'd allowed for an hour in the taxi to get from the hotel, but we made it in 35mins, which means I had a half an hour to kill before I could even check in! The flight itself was uneventful - everyone always rhapsodises about Singapore Airlines, but I didn't find them anything special. Maybe they're different on long-haul, all I had them for was an hour and a half. They had the in-seat entertainment system tho, which was good, but I didn't get much of a chance to play with it.

After I landed, I got out of the airport in record time, and onto the metro - at last! A city with a decent public transport system! 30mins from the terminal to the MRT stop my hostel was near! At that stage tho, things started becoming a little strange. I was staying near Little India, and when I got off the MRT I was faced with streets like Arab St, Baghdad St, Kandahar St, and Haj St, all of the restaurants were serving middle eastern food (with big signs in the window saying "Halal food") and within eyeshot of the hotel was one of the bigger mosques in Singapore, the Sultan Mosque, and just as I got there I could hear the "Allah Akhbar" coming from the Muzzein, calling people to prayer. So, despite me always considering Singapore to be a predominantly Chinese city like Hong Kong, I felt like I was somewhere in Saudi Arabia!

After I checked in anyway, I pretty much ended up going straight out. This is what I love about hostels, you always meet people who are up for a bit of a night out. In this case, it was a bunch of Canadians - altho not your ususal "aboot"-saying canucks, one was chinese-canadian, one was malay-canadian, one was indian-canadian, and one was a white guy! We decided to go into Clarke Quay, as the chick at reception had told us of a good microbrewery place there called "Brewerkz". Unfortunately, in our wisdom, we decided to walk in as it didn't look that far on the map, forgetting about the 31 degrees and 70%+ humidity outside. 30mins later we stagger in the door of the place, shirts sticking to us, half dead from dehydration, and in need of liquid sustenance. Luckily, they had it in spades for us in the form of a "tower of beer", effectively our own mini-keg of beer, big enough for 2 1/2 pints each and at S$80 (or about €40), pretty good value). After that, some other bars were visited in the area, and bed was hit around 1am-ish (I think).

(and yes, that is to scale - that pint glass is sitting right beside it)

All in all, not our usual introduction to singapore!

Not with a bang......

"This is how [it] ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper"

Well, I've had my last day in the office here anyway - if not my last day of work (will probably be logging on from the hotel in between trips). Was a fairly anti-climactic affair. I had to leave the office around 11ish to get back to the hotel to get my stuff and get to the airport to get to my Singapore flight, and after the last few weeks of screaming and arguing and stuff falling over and not being done properly (or on time, or at all), I half expected something huge to crop up which would scupper my Bali trip plans once and for all. There was only one minor hiccup tho, which was easy to deal with. As I was leaving, the office was like a ghost town as there was some sort of "sports and social day" going on in a marquee outside, so it was like I was sneaking out without anyone ever even knowing I was there..... So, I said goodbye to the two people that were still there that I'd been working with, and left.

After I got back to the hotel, there was a quick debriefing session with Angelo, the project manager. I could tell he still wasn't happy with the fact I was pissing off with things not fully completed, but there was nothing left for me to necessarily physically do there, everything else will be a case of logging in remotely and checking from home.

So, next stop, Singapore! :-)

finishng up - hopefully!

So, I'm hopefully finishing up tomorrow. - my project manager here has to talk to my boss back home and then get back to me about next week. I'd better be getting my Bali trip! Altho at this stage I dunno how realistic that's be since I haven't booked flights or a place to stay yet.

Either way, I'm downing tools tomorrow at about midday and heading off to the airport. Singapore, here I come! :-)

Bali vs Work

I've been deliberately avoiding saying anything in my blog here so far about how things are going at work. This is because I didn't want my whole blog to turn into one big rant. Remember before I came over I had the opinion of the people I was working with here as barely competent muppets? Well, my opinion of them has plummeted in the last few weeks. The engineers seem competent enough most of the time when you can get them to actually do stuff, but to do that you need to wade through so many layers of management and process that I nearly need to bring a new can of air freshener with me each day. And when they do stuff, they do no more than the absolute minimum needed to fulfil what they have been told to do. Before I came over we were supposed to have a public network for our application to run on. We arrived and found we didn't have one. I finally got it working after much effort - on Monday this week, or 3 weeks after I should have had it. This involved me being their sysadmin and their network admin for a lot of it, just to get it done. To give an idea how well things went, I discovered last weds week that the network, contrary to what I'd been led to believe, wasn't even cabled in! I asked for this to be done as a matter of urgency on the weds, and it was finally done on the Tues after. I then discovered that the cable monkey who'd set up the wires had never plugged them in - and he'd cut them all to the same length, so two of them didn't even reach the machines at the bottom of the rack! I ended up spending a whole day in the server room, physically having to connect up the cables to the switches myself, and make sure the network was working properly (which it wasn't)! And this is just one example of the problems. The base team won't even have a build for me for a few weeks as they're still waiting for data, so I'm running a generic build not the custom one I should have!

As a result, on Monday I was in the wonderful situation of having until Friday to do what I should have had 4 weeks to do - get the software running and bedded down on the network. I managed to get a good bit of it done before I got the network, but you never really know how these things are going to perform until you start everything up and start running data through it. So, I'm under serious time pressure to get stuff done here, and that assumes nothing else is going to go wrong (not likely to happen). Once I get the basics up and running the tweaking can be done from home, but I need that up first!

Because of this, my holiday next week is looking less and less likely. I was supposed to have the whole week off, and I was heading to Singapore for 4 days and Bali for 4 before I pissed off home. Singapore has to happen, as I have to leave the country and re-enter again to extend my 30-day visa, but the chances of having the work done in time and heading off to Bali are receding by the minute. Guess who's not a happy bunny! I may, if nothing else blows up or refuses to work, get to Bali on Thurs evening and come back sat morning before I fly home on sun. Maybe.

About the only solace I can take from this is that after this particular job is done, every other implementation should seem like a piece of cake - and in future my ass is refusing to get on a plane unless we have all the networks, databases etc we need!

Back to Shcool sale on the 3th floor....

I saw these two signs earlier tonight in a shopping mall we went to to look for pressies for the folks back home......





:-)

Pictures from Sunda Kelapa and Bandung

Well, I haven't had much of a chance to put up many photos of my own so far this trip - and a lot of the ones I have aren't worth seeing anyway! A few of the other guys who were here for the first few weeks are amateur photographers tho (as in, their cameras cost a couple of grand each and are way better than anything I'll ever want to use), so I'm going to shamelessly borrow their pictures!

Here's Anirudh's site so!

BATS

Well, I've now been to the Jakarta version of Maggie's in Beijing. One of the guys who was here on a previous trip kept telling us about this club called BATS in the Shangri-la hotel. According to him: "The women outnumber the men 5-1 and they're all hookers. You can't even make eye contact with anyone in there as they'll be cracking onto you straight away. It's a great place for a single guy". I was inclined to take this with a pinch of salt perhaps, but it was an interesting enough description to warrant a look.

So, Saturday night, me and the two guys from home that are still here took a wander out to this hotel to see this infamous club. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I got in, but it was disappointingly normal looking at first. Then you start to notice that a lot of the girls have that look in the eye, not "I'm out looking for a good time" but "I'm looking for a customer". As the night went on it was easy to spot all of the goings-on - young fairly pretty-looking local girls dancing and getting all up close and personal with these older western men, who in normal circumstances wouldn't get a look-in probably. Was sort of sad to watch actually, all these middle-age men chasing after some pretty little asian entertainment for the night.

Angelo, my project manager, kept pushing me to talk to a few of these girls - was almost like he was wanted the weekend status report to read "Got Kieran laid" :-P There were a few nice looking girls tehre all right, but I wasn't really in the mood to chat up a woman of negotiable virtue, and besides, Angelo was starting to piss me off. If I'm going to talk to someone I'm going to talk to them, and I don't appreciate being pushed into it. Eventually he sort of manoeuvred me into a spot where I had to talk to two girls or look really rude, so I decide "what the hell" and started chatting away (as you do). Revenge was mine though, as after a few minutes of chatter one of the girls leaned over and said "I think your friend is cute", pointing to Angelo! Was nice to watch him squirm after him pushing me to talk to someone all night!

Sure enough though, despite his insistence that "they're probably not all on the game", the topic of money came up near the end of the night, so our next task was to extricate ourselves and make our exits. All in all, not sure would I go back, but was an interesting experience!

Shopping pt. 2

Well, I got to do a bit more shopping today I was originally planning on heading out and doing some touristy stuff, but then Angelo (my boss here) said one of his friends was in town from Oz, and was offering to bring us out shopping, as he'd been here a few times before. Cool I thought, someone who knows where all the funky ethnic stuff is. So, I decided to postpone the sightseeing and go shopping with them.

Turns out tho that this guy's idea of shopping wasn't quite what I had in mind. We headed for Senayan Plaza, a big shopping mall which I'd seen already. Was mostly all high-end stuff, Gucci, Prada, Dior etc - I'd forgotten that I was going with a couple of upper management types whose pay packets weren't exactly the same as mine! There were a few more "normal" shops as well, and I managed to pick up

The most interesting part of that place was when we stopped for lunch: the cafe we went to had a very interesting way of brewing coffee! Have to find where to get one of these things!

After that, we went across the road to Senayan City, another mall I'd been to with Anirudh and Michal. I actually managed to pick up some stuff there - they had a shop that did DC comics-themed clothes, so I picked up a Superman t-shirt and a Batman pait of jeans (they have a big batman logo in denim on the ass). After that, Angelo's friend dropped us back at the hotel, where we decided to go to the ITC (the mall near the office) to look for some stuff. I was fairly successful there as well - picked up another t-shirt, a load of bootleg DVDs (including Shrek the Third!) and a batik shirt which will definitely make me stand out from the crowd back home! The t-shirt is quite intersting, I saw some like it in Japan - it's an Astro Boy t-shirt (some manga character) with a hologram pic on the front - if you look at it one way, it's Astro Boy, if you look from another angle, it's an x-ray view of Astro Boy (not as icky as it sounds, he's a robot).


So, a good day's shopping, but I still have to buy pressies for people!

Now I find this.....

...after being here for 3 weeks:

Learn basic indonesian in 7 days

Shopping

Well, I've got my first taste of shopping here. After work, I went to a shipping center called the ITC, which is maybe 5mins walk from work, as I needed to get some stuff (a new pair of shades and a backpack mostly). There's two parts to the center, the part with "proper" shops where you can't really haggle, and the part with stalls where you can. So, I made a bee-line for the stalls!

Well it's a fair bit different to China! The layout is roughly the same - a big building wit a few floors with little aisles filled with small stalls, but the attitude is different. They're not pushy over here like they were in china, you could actually look at the stuff in the stall for more than half a second without the owner being in your face to buy something! It was only when you went over and started actively looking at stuff that they paid you attention. It's almost too polite - I didn't think I'd be missing the "Looka looka, special friend price for you! Good bargain!", but you sort of do! They're sort of apathetic enough about it over here that you'd almost feel bad about haggling!

I ended up getting my shades anyway, but I couldn't find a bag that suited me. I didn't even bother haggling over the shades either - at RPY20,000 (€1.70), what's the point? They had a few stalls with decent-ish looking glasses tho, so I may be looking for a wraparound pair for skiing next year. Were a few stands selling fake rolexes etc as well - they looked the same as the ones I got last year, but they were starting at 200,000 so I reckon I can get them for about the same price as last year of not cheaper.

There's a few open-air markets around I must hit as well. Lots of shopping still to be done! :-)

Bandung pt. 1

Well, the weekend was interesting anyway. Long and a lot of it was spent in traffic, but it was good to get out of the city!

Our plan was to head to a city called Bandung for the weekend, about 4hrs drive east(?) of Jakarta, and go the slightly longer route via Punchak and the mountains to get the view there (and so that Michal could take pictures of the tea plantations!). Unfortunately, it was a bank holiday weekend here, so to beat the traffic we had to leave slightly early in the morning - as in, get up at 5am and leave the hotel at 6am! That wasn't fun!

Was pretty crowded in the car, as we had Me, Anirudh and Michal (the guys I'm working with), Joey (Anirudh's friend), Nina (Joey's boss) and Fiona and Lauren (friends of Joey's). Joey has a big jeep, and Fiona and Lauren are wee little slips of things, but it was still quite "cozy". The first few hours were fairly quiet, mainly because everyone was still mostly asleep! Wasn't really much to do but stare at the scenery out the car window. there was something not right about what I was seeing, but it took me a good bit of time to realize what it was - the trees I was looking at were palm trees! Everything went quietly enough until we got near the top of Punchak Pass, where we discovered that we had a flat tyre. So, that had to be changed in a lay-by near the top of the pass - in the spitting rain! Once that excitement was over, we motored on a bit more until we came to a restaurant at the very top of the pass. Seeing as we'd been on the road for a good 2hrs at this stage, we decided now would be a good time for breakfast (and a few pictures). I decided to be a bit adventurous and, instead of coffee, try some local drink which was made from ginger, coconut and something else(?) Was a real acquired taste, and by the end of it I still wasn't sure whether or not I liked it!

On we travelled anyway, and nearly everyone in the car fell asleep bar me and Joey (the driver). This was about the first time that it hit me that I really was far away from home: up til then we'd been in jakarta, and sure a lot of ppl didn't speak english, and things were a bit different, but we were spending all our time in the CBD, and one city's CBD is much like another's. Now though we were passing by little ramshackle villages, and palm groves, and paddy fields - even saw one guy in a paddy field ploughing with a water buffalo. Was like being in a National Geographic episode! :-) Unfortunately we were going a bit fast for me to get any pics - I tried a few, but they came out blurry.

We were going to stop off on the way at a Safari park for a look, but unfortunately we got there at 9 and they didn't open til 11. So much for that plan - there goes my chance to play Steve Irwin: "By crikey, look at the size of that lion! I'm going to try to piss him off now, see what happens!" ;-) By about an hour out of Bandung though, we started to catch up with the traffic heading that direction from jakarta, and that pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day - traffic jams! Was about 1 o'clock when we got into town, so we went for food in some random steak place. After we were fed and watered, it was time to head to the volcano, Tangkuban Perahu. Traffic wasn't too bad once we got out of town, but then we got to the foot of the mountain and had to pay some random guard-looking guys 300,000 to drive up the mountain. We decided "screw that" and went another road, where we only had to pay 80,000. Was some difference in the roads though - made the country roads at home look like super-highways! We were lucky Joey had a 4x4, and even then we were thrown out the bit while crawling along in 1st gear!

When we got up there, the view was less than awe-inspiring. I'm not sure what I'd been expecting (maybe I've seen too much footage of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, with all the flowing lava etc) but it pretty much looked like a quarry with a small lake at the bottom, a bit of steam coming out at one end and a really really strong smell of sulphur. You're able to walk around the rim of the crater though, and we were just about to do that when the clods came down and it started pissing rain! Seeing as we weren't really expecting this it came as a bit of a shock - we had to "rent" an umbrella off a hawker for 5,000 to avoid getting soaked! Even when the rain stopped, visibility was down to a few dozen feet, so we decided that we'd seen all there was to see so we headed back to Bandung.

After that, we decided to go to get something to eat in a resort that one of the girls knew about - a place called Kampung Daun (or "leafy village"), which was on a hilltop just outside Bandung (and by "hill" I mean mountain - Bandung itself is about 700m above sea level!). The road up to it was only marginally better than the road up to the volcano, so I didn't really know what to expect when we get to the top. All I can say is "wow!" :-)

Instead of a "normal" restaurant, it's like a jungle path with little open-sided thatched huts every few meters where you sit in and eat there - with a stream and waterfalls going down the side. Really impressive! And the food was damn good, and dead cheap too. We chilled there for a few hours and then decided brave the traffic and to head into town.

Before we did though, Joey decided to ring the hotel to just confirm our booking. Unfortunately, he'd originally said we would be checking in about midday, so when we didn't show the hotel had given away our rooms. Homeless! Luckily Nina had an aunt in Bandung, so after a few phone calls we were able to stay in her place. One slight problem: Nina didn't know where she lived! So, we dropped Fiona and Lauren off in Lauren's place, and then the adventure began. In between the heavy traffic, the 3 wrong turns and Nina arguing down the phone with her cousin about the directions, we finally got there an hour and a half after we set off. Nina's aunt's house is apparently a typical middle-class indonesian home. A bit different from ours, especially in the bathroom! The toilet didn't have a flush, there was a bucket beside it to pour down the drain to flush with, and the same bucket was used for the "shower" - a tin tub beside the loo to stand in. If you wanted hot water, you put on the kettle!

The sleeping arrangements were fairly rushed-together - Nina was sleeping in with her cousin, the other 3 guys were sharing 2 mattresses in one room, and I got lucky and got a mattress to myself in a room that just about fit the mattress! And so ended day 1 in Bandung.

Early

Argh. For some reason, despite the face that we're going to a place that's a two-and-a-bit hour drive from Jakarta, we have to leave at 6am to get there. Want to beat the traffic or something? Tomorrow morning is going to be worse. the lads want to catch the sunrise over the tea plantations, so allegedly we'll be up at 3am to drive from Bandung to Punchak. So much for sleeping in on the weekends!

It's too early in the morning to be this early in the morning....

Jakarta - two weeks in.

Well, as i may have mentioned here before, I'm not here on holidays. It's a good job this is the case, 'cos as holidays go this would really suck! Mosy of my time so far has been going from the hotel to the office in the morning, working til late, going back and eating in the hotel, booting up the laptop and doing a bit more work, then going to bed late and repeating the next day. We've managed to get out for a meal some evenings, and we had the weekend as well to do stuff, but that's the general pattern so far. Lots I haven't done around here yet!

So, just over 11 days in, here's my impressions of the place:

• Traffic: Well, I've talked about this already, but is still mad. Any bit of space on the road is filled by a car or more likely about a dozen bikes. Indicators are optional, lanes are optional, horns are more commonly used than anything else. At least, unlike Dublin, the traffic is constantly moving - mainly I suppose because there's no traffic lights anywhere to clog things up, except on the main roads around the city. They also have bus lanes on the main roads, but the big buses just seem to stick to those - everywhere else you're going by mikrolet - small, old minibus type affairs which don't even stop to let people on/off, they just slow down. Must be fun taking them! Getting across the road is fun too - don't bother waiting for a break in the traffic, 'cos there won't be one. Just pick a car that looks like it'll be able to stop in time, and walk out in front of it!
  
• Food: Well, like in China, I don't know what I'm eating, but I like it. There aren't many dishes so far that I've tried that I didn't like - altho you have to be careful what you eat. There hasn't been any cases of the Galway Gallops yet, but a few things have left my stomach feeling less than perfectly calm. We've been told "stay away from the street vendors unless you want to spend a week on the toilet or worse", which is a shame 'cos some of the more interesting stuff I got in china was from the side of the road. I haven't been trying indonesian food the whole time either - for some reason we've been eating thai and indian a fair bit. You go half-way around the world and end up eating the same stuff you do at home. Go figure.
  
• Drink: Drink here is a bit pricey - about RPY70,000 for a beer (or about €6.40). The local beer isn't great, so I'm restricted to things like San Miguel or Corona (ain't no way I'm going to find a pint of Bulmers over here!). We tried drinking spirits out one night, but they were so watered down and so expensive (RPY100,000) that that was a once off! As for the non-alcoholic stuff, I'm drinking some pretty weird fruit juices over here, stuff you don't get at home. Mango juice you might get - but guava? Lychee? Star fruit? Hell, I'd never even heard of a star fruit before I got here!
  
• Heat: So this is what 32 degrees feels like! To be honest I haven't spent much time out in it - I tend to go from the air-conditioned hotel to the (semi) air-conditioned office in an air-conditioned taxi. The few times I've been out in it though it hasn't been overly bad. Walked back to the hotel from the office last night as there were no taxis to be had, and survived (altho I did need to take a shower after!) The weekend will be a good test tho - we'll be out in it all day!
  
• Cutlery: This is a weird one. I'm used to "asia" meaning "chopsticks", but over here they do things slightly differently. Instead of a knife and fork, they use a spoon and fork (unless you're eating something definitely western like a burger or a lasagne). Is understandable I suppose seeing as most dishes are rice-based, but still, every now and then you have to cut stuff, and it ain't easy with the edge of a spoon!
  

There we go, only one or two things - hopefully I'll have more to report after the weekend!

public holidays

This sucks. Is a public holiday here but we still have to work. I was working from the hotel this morning (including a conference call with the project manager) but have to go into the office for the afternoon. :-( I'm also missing out on the bank holiday back home on monday. I'd better be getting that in lieu!

At least I'm getting out of Jakarta tomorrow - going to a place called Bandung. Should be fun!

argh!

So much for "Now Blogger saves your drafts automatically"! Was writing a big long blog on and off all day, said the thing saved, so I exited. I come back, and all I have is the first line! Don't trust it now, technology has let me down. Going to write the next version up in notepad and save as I go along!

So, what was I saying? ah yeah....

Jakarta - Not a "tourist heaven"

Well, I had my first day out in Jakarta yesterday. Up until now, I've seen pretty much none of the city apart from my hotel, the office, the road in between and a few restaurants and shopping malls we've taken taxis to. Normally, I'd head out and take a wander around by myself in the evenings, but it';s dark by the time we get back to the hotel, and besides, you can't really walk around and see stuff locally (as in, we've been advised not to by the hotel). Luckily, one of the guys here has a local friend, Joey, who promised to show us a bit of the city, so we headed off early yesterday morning to "get touristy".

When I say "headed off early", I mean we left early-ish, but then we hit a slight snag - traffic. Anyone who thinks dublin traffic is bad, should head over to SE Asia and give it a go over here. Even Beijing didn't have this many cars clogging the roads! The concept of lanes seems to equate to "whatever space is big enough to fit my car into", and traffic lights are things that happen on the major roads around the CBD. If it were just cars it'd be ok, but for every car on the road there's maybe 2-3 bikes (sometimes with 2-3 people or even whole families) that are weaving in and out between them at high speed, sometimes with inches to spare on either side. So, in between having to collect a few other people (two of Joey's friends, Nina and Ami) and having to inch our way through the traffic, it was maybe 2pm before we got into the "old city".

Once we got there, there wasn't a huge amount to be seen. It definitely isn't a "tourist friendly" area, there's a few museums to see but it isn't the type of place you'd happily wander around for hours. We hit two museums, the bank museum (which technically wasn't even open til the next day, but they let us in anyway), and another museum which seemed to consist of nothing but teak furniture - and which let us in without telling us they were closing in 15mins! Apart from that, we wandered down a few fairly run-down streets and went to an old colonial-style cafe called Cafe Batavia to get a drink (which was necessary since most of us aren't quite used to that type of heat).

After that, we headed out to Sunda Kelapa, the port area. That was interesting enough, as all of the boats were the old-style Junks which are nothing like what we get at home, and all of the loading/unloading is done manually as there's no cranes or any equipment - so you have work gangs of guys loading/unloading 50kg bags of cement or big planks of wood off trucks onto the boats.



Two of the guys we were with take their photography quite seriously though, so we spent a lot of time there as they went for the artistic shots - maybe more than us non-photo people would have been happy with. So, we wandered around the port for a few hours, then as the sun was going down, we decided to brave the traffic, go back to the hotel to freshen up, and go out for dinner and a drink or two.

Once we got to dinner, things became interesting. One of the guys, Anirudh, is a vegetarian, and we'd picked this Thai place he'd found on the internet as they were supposed to have a vegetarian-friendly menu (which is apparently really hard here). Unfortunately, when we got there, he discovered this wasn't the case, about all he could have off the menu was steamed rice, so he kicked up a big fuss. Eventually the Maitre'D called out the head chef and together they worked out a plan where he'd come up with something especially for Anirudh. The rest of us weren't quite as fussy, so we went for the usual arrangement of picking a few dishes for the center of the table and helping ourselves to a bit of each. What we got was Fantastic, and even Mr. Picky had to agree that the food was good - and cheap!

After that, it was drinks time! We headed to this bar called CJs which was supposed to have a live band, but when we got there we discovered that the "live band" was a boy-band type cover outfit who made n'sync look like talented respectable artists! The music was laughable, the drinks were expensive, but we stayed around for a good while nayway. The women were mostly pretty good looking, but the problem is that most of the bar/club scene is based around hotel bars, where a good few of the girls would be working girls trying to latch on to the rich western guests ("western" here equals "rich" - I wish!), so it was hard to tell which was which, girls there for fun or for "business". After a while the smoke was getting to Nina's eyes so we moved on to another, quieter place. where we stayed til closing time (2:30ish, same as back home). So, first real night out in JKT, was an interesting occasion!.

Visa cards

Well, it looks like I may have a problem paying for stuff here. We had to get local SIM cards here the other day to save us a fortune on roaming calls etc, and I put it all on my credit card. Came to about 1,600,000 rupiyah, or about €150. Last night, I went to upgrade my room to executive class so we can use the exec's lounge and get free beer till early AM, but the card was refused. I had to ring home to MBNA and get them to unblock the card again - a nice long expensive 10-minute call to home (altho by call center standards 10 mins is blindingly fast). It seems according to MBNA I'm in a "high risk" zone, so every so often it's going to come up with a "check with vendor" message when ppl try to swipe the card, and whoever I'm buying off is going to have to ring Visa to confirm that it's a legit purchase. That is going to make things fun! Wonder will that happen for drinklinks as well.....

So far so good

Well, I survived my trip over anyway. Is bloody hot here tho - will take a bit of getting used to walking out of a building and feeling warmer rather than colder! Is like walking onto a public swimming pool except without the smell of chlorine - hot and sticky, is like 30+ degrees and 95+humidity. Also, I have to wear "casual smart" - decent pants, shirt, suit jacket - so that makes the heat worse.

The flights went without any problems, apart from the button on my seat that's supposed to recline it not working and having to sit upright the whole trip (made sleeping uncomfortable). Oh yeah, had a few screaming babies within 3 rows of me as well. Plus the taxi from the airport dropped me off at the wrong hotel. Apart from that tho, everything has been fine!

Work-wise, there were a few sticky moments the first day yesterday where I had to bullshit a bit but I managed to get through it by letting the other guy who's here with me talk. The people are nice enough but there's an undercurrent of politics involved that I don't like - have had to say a few times "well, you'll have to ask Angelo about that" (my project manager) when they were pressing me for stuff I shouldn't really be giving them.

My hotel room is cool tho - is about the size of my apartment without my bedroom! Haven't been able to do any sightseeing yet as it gets dark here earlier than at home, was fully dark when we left here at 7 last night, so we just went for food. We're planning stuff for the weekends though - maybe a trip to Bali or to see Krakatoa.

Good job I didn't bring my stash with me!

This is pretty much the first thing you see when walking though the concourse in Jakarta airport after getting off the plane:



Nice way of saying "welcome" isn't it? :-)

My flights were pretty uneventful anyway. Made it here on one piece with no difficulties (apart form the little button to tilt my seat back not working so had to try to sleep upright). Made my connecting flights no problem for once, and miracle of miracles, we were nearly on time leaving Dublin! Think we took off maybe 10 mins late, which suited me as I got to watch the extra time in the FA Cup final! :-)

Haven't done any sightseeing after getting in as I was a bit tired after the flights and all, it was dark and it didn't look like there was anything of interest around when I came in in the taxi. So, just had something to eat in the hotel and have been sorting out my stuff in the room. My room is nearly the size of my apartment in dublin! Time to see what the bed is like methinks <yawn>

Getting a bit nervous now about tomorrow but shur what happens happens.....

Here I go.

Well, I'm just finished packing and am ready to head off to the airport. I'm not sure if I can totaly say that I'm looking forward to the trip - despite this being exactlyt he reason I joined my current job in the first place, the travel. I think last year I was a bit nervous going over to China 'cos I didn't totally know what to expect, but this time I have a fairly good idea what to expect work-wise.

My main issues with the trip this time are:

• I don't really like the guy I'm going over with - I have a feeling that at some stage he's just going to drop me in the shit just to see how I perform under pressure (and I don't know even myself how I'll do, as it's never happened really yet).
  
• The crowd that I'm going over to don't seem to be the most organized people on the planet - not by a long shot. Plus, I have to stall them for a week when I get there as the build i'm going over to install doesn't actually work yet according to the developers - and probably won't work for another week!
  
• Every second review I read of Jakarta says it's pretty much a shithole - the advice is "fly into jakarta and then get the hell out as fast as you can to see the rest of the country.". Plus, I don't have any guide book for it yet or anything. No place in Dublin has any lonely planet guide or anything like that, and the few indonesia books 've found have 5-6 pages max on jakarta - and no decent maps.
  

Ah well, whatever happens, I'm there for at least the next 4 weeks anyway. I was originally supposed to be there for 7 weeks, but it seems there was a miscommunication between the project manager and my boss as to whether or not I was doing the User Acceptance Testing phase as well. My boss won, so I'm back in dublin on the 26th June now instead of the 7th/8th of July. ta least I'm still geting my trip to Singsapore in! ;-)

Ok, here goes, catch ye on the flip side.....

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.

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!

Thought I'd lost this...

I was talking to my boss about the Matrix for some reason this morning, and I mentioned the low-budget spoof of it I'd seen ages ago - "Computer Boy". I realised I'd mislaid my copy of it somewhere before, and I remembered it wasn't easy to find on the web. I went looking for it anyway, and I found it here. There are nearly zero special effects, but at 49mins long it's better than most spoofs out there. After seeing this I was never able to watch The Matrix again without imagining Keanu picking up the phone to talk to Morpheus and saying "Mom?" :-)

woohoo!

Got the OK off the boss to take the week off after I finish, and go on a bit of a holiday! :-)

weather

Well, I was just looking at the 10-day forecast for Jakarta. 32 degrees and thunderstorms. Lovely. Last time I was going away for work, I was worried about freezing to death - now I have to worry about boiling!

29

Well, there we go. According to my mother, I'm officially 29, at 4:35pm (and she should know, she was there!).

How the hell did 29 happen? last thing I recall I was still getting hassle off bouncers in clubs. Suddenly I'm looking down the barrel of a gun, and I can see that the bullet in the chamber has '30' written on it.

Waterford

Every time I go out in Waterford city, I remember why it is I hate going out in Waterford. The pub we go to - Geoffs - isn't too bad (or at least it wouldn't be if my mates actually turned up when they say they will) but after, your choices are limited to the half dead places, the places with shyte music or the places with all the knackers, scumbags and slappers gyrating away to the techno music.

And a word to the wise for Waterford taxi drivers: if you already have a fare or you're pig ignorant enough to want to zoom past all us waiting people in an empty car, at least have the courtesy to turn off your light so we know you're not worth the effort of raising our hands to try to flag you down. Ignorant dickheads.

New Laptop?

I'm wondering whether or not it's time to upgrade my laptop. I have it now about 3 years (or is it 4?) and the thing is starting to get seriosly shook. At the mo, I have the following problems:

• The DVD drive doesn't really read DVDs very much any more, and as for burning CDs, fuggedaboutit!
  
• The battery life is starting to go. We're talking maybe an hour and a half now, especially if I'm doing something like watching a movie - on the train on the weekends, I get about half an hour of catching up on emails, then enough time to watch an episode of 'Galactica' or 'Heroes' and just as it's over, the "battery low" beeping starts. And I'm on my 2nd battery since I got it!
  
• Some of the keys are starting to come loose and fall off - I can stick them back in but am just waiting for the day when one falls off on the train and I can't find it.
  
• The graphics card is screwed. Sometims I'll get a few hours out of the machine, other times I'm rebooting every 5mins 'cos it's either blue-screening or freezing. This happens a lot when I'm on battery, and rebooting really sucks up the juice. A lot of the time the screen freezes and I get a creeping greyness spreading from the bottom right-hand corner. This isn't a driver problem because I've used about 3 or 4 different driver versions, is definitely hardware. Occasionally the system will be able to recover and I'll get a message from the ATI control center saying that the driver has crashed, but I'm able to keep working, more times than not though, it's rebooting time.
  
• The machine runs very hot sometimes - you can't have it on your lap. Occasionally you'll actually hear the processor fan ramp up in speed, and then usually at that stage the machine will keel over.
  
• It takes ages to boot the machine. Sometimes I've had to work on both laptops - this one and my work one - and I boot both at the same time, and I have booted up and logged on the work one before I even get the "welcome to windows" flash screen on my one. Then when it does boot, a lot of times I get the "This system has recovered from a serious error. Please tell Microsoft" dialog box even after I'm doing a clean boot after a clean shutdown. And it doesn't come up once, but 4-5 times.
  
• The hard drive is starting to develop a few bad sectors - some programs won't even run or install any more because the sectors used by the temp folder/page swapper seem to be seriously shagged.
  
• The wi-fi connection is erratic. Sometimes the signal will drop at random and I have to reconnect - and it's not the transmitter becuse my flatmate's laptop chugs away happily, connected the whole time. Sometimes it says I'm connected but nothing gets through (I have a DOS script set up to ping the wi-fi router, the DSL modem and the Smart Telecom DNS server which I use to check the connection). Most of the time clicking "repair connection" will fix it, but the odd time it'll lose all signal and I'll have to go searching for the router and entering the WEP key again.
  

Hopefully the last 3 or 4 problems might be fixed by a clean wipe of the HD and a reinstall, but it'd be putting off the inevitable. Likewise, when I'm in the flat, I can get away without the CD drive as I have the external DVD burner to fall back on (and these days when I install a game I go straight to gamecopyworld.com and download the "noCD" crack so I don't need the disk in the drive to play). Still, it would be nice if everything just worked!

Naturally I'm way out of warranty on the lappy, so if I was to send it back to the shop to get repaired it'd cost a fair bit. Think I'm going to have to go pricing a new model, see how much it'd cost me to upgrade. Technically I have the work laptop as well, but I'm not really supposed to be putting games or pr0n on that, and at any stage they could take it back off me, so better to have my own machine.

Dates for Indonesia!

Finally! I have dates for Indonesia! I have to be in the office on the morning of Monday the 21st of May. Is the "provisional" date they gave me ages ago, but finally it's been actually confirmed by someone and I can go off looking at flights and accommodation. Still no firm word on when I'm coming back tho, will prob be about the 2nd or 3rd week in July tho.

Going by previous experience here, I'm not going to get excited about it til my ass is on the plane and the doors are shut, but at least someone has given me a "firm" date at thsi stage!

Now have to figure out holidays over there...... ;-)

Japanese fashion - please god, not here!

My friend Whykay passed me on this link earlier about the strange new fashion fad in Japan. The big new thing now apparently is wearing jeans that look like really low hipsters with a thong sticking out over them. An example is here:



This is apparently a fashion trend that came from Brazil to Japan. I hope to god it doesn't make it to these shores! While there are some Irish women who do have the figures to pull this off, it would probably be the case where the women who would wear this type of fashion are the types that shouldn't be allowed. Not to beat around the bush, but these are the ones who think that wearing skimpy stuff makes up for the fact that they're 2-3 stone overweight.

It can be scary enough during the summer when these fashion icons swap their tracksuits for belly tops (with added belly), normally 2 sizes too small. Ladies, I know it's good that you're comfortable with your body, but there's nothing attractive about seeing a mountain of flesh spilling out from under a small top and overlapping your pants waist. Sometimes it's like watching a school of whales with hoop earrings and tracksuit bottoms wander their way up to Pennys on Henry st or TK Maxx, and I'll never forget one of my friend's comments on seeing some of them one day: "Jesus Christ, if flab on show ever becomes fashionable, we've just seen the next 3 covers of 'Vogue'!" :-)

So, belly tops bad, but belly tops and these jeans - dear god, give me a red-hot wire coat hangar now so I can poke my eyes out and save myself the pain!

(Then again, if the girls wearing them are our new Eastern European friends, then bring it on!)

Radox + jacuzzi - a bad mix.

Well, the new bathroom is finally finished in my parent's place. After such delays and mishaps as the taps being 3 weeks late arriving due to an argument between the shop and the supplier over unpaid bills, accidentally ripping holes in the studded wall when removing the old tiles, and the water pipes feeding the radiator being the wrong size, it's all done and dusted. New floor tiles, new wall tiles, new sink, new radiator, and the piece de resistance - the new jacuzzi bath.

To inaugurate this masterpiece of modern construction, my mother decided to take the jacuzzi bath for its maiden voyage. Unfortunately, there was one slight problem. She used the same amount of Radox bubble bath in the water as she'd use for a normal bath, forgetting about the effects the new water water jets would have on the bubble-making process. The result?



There is no water in this bath. It's foam the whole way down. And this was after a good few mins of clearing the foam off the floor.....

This is pretty scary...

I was just reading an article online about the standard of news broadcasting in America. According to this article:

A new study by Indiana University concludes that the popular comedy program, "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart, is just as substantive as "serious" primetime network news broadcasts.

it goes on to say:

Although a second-by-second analysis of "The Daily Show's" audio and visual content found considerably more humor than substance, a similar analysis of network coverage "found considerably more hype than substance in broadcast newscasts," said a press statement by Fox, specifying references to polls, political endorsements and photo opportunities as examples of "hype."

In another article, I found a report that says that seemingly it's the intelligent people that watch the Daily Show. In a survey on Americans' knowledge of national affairs:

[Pew] judged the levels of knowledgeability (correct answers) among those surveyed and found that those who scored the highest were regular watchers of Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Colbert Report. They tied with regular readers of major newspapers in the top spot -- with 54% of them getting 2 out of 3 questions correct. Watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS followed just behind.

And then:

Virtually bringing up the rear were regular watchers of Fox News. Only 1 in 3 could answer 2 out of 3 questions correctly. Fox topped only network morning show viewers.

So Fox News viewers know nearly the least about what is actually going on in the world. Who would have guessed?

the articles I was looking at are here and here.

New Layout

Just playing with a new layout here. Not sure do I like it yet, might go back to the original....

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!

11% - cool!

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.....

The "Sunny South East"?

I was out on my bike the other day, when I saw two rather curious signs near my house.

The first was on a patch off bogland beside a river near my place:


(the image quality is sort of crap as all I had was my soon-to-be-replaced mobile phone).

WTF? Alligators? In Waterford? I know we're known as the "Sunny South-East" of Ireland (a masterful PR job if there ever was one), but we're not that close to a tropical climate!

The second was on the gate of a house nearby:



Sure beats the usual "Warning: Guard Dog" sign!

Probably my fave YouTube clip of the moment....

Voltron gets Served!

Robot Chicken rocks! :-)

Grr......

Well, looks like the filesystem on my laptop is screwed. I've been trying to download a few game demos the last few days, among them Command and Conquer 3 - a 1.18Gb download! Every single time I've downloaded the zip or rar files, I haven't been able to extract or install them. Every single one has either given me a CRC error on trying to extract or an error on the install file when I try to run it.

So, I've just been getting a lot of bad builds you might say. Well, I downloaded the exact same file (the C&C one) on my brand new (ish) work laptop, and had no problems with it. So, something is screwed on my lappy somewhere. I tried running the defragmenter but it made no difference.

This means my laptop is having the current set of problems:

• A messed-up filesystem


• A broken DVD drive - it'll read most CDs most of the time but only reads DVDs when it wants to. Oh yeah, plus the drive door broke off a good while ago


• A screwed up graphics card. It has to be the card rather than the drivers 'cos no matter what version of the drivers I put on I get the same result.


• The processor is also runnning a bit hot on it as well I reckon

So, it looks like this is a shop job. I could fix the first part by wiping and reinstalling (it won't be the first time - in fact, it's overdue), if only the bloody DVD drive would actually read the install CDs long enough to install! Time to start backing stuff up.....

Hotpot!

Well, I've finally found what I've been looking for ever since I came back from China: a restaurant in this country that does hotpot!. The place is one of the hundreds (or so it seems) Chinese restaurants up on Parnell St, and is called the Zen Win House. I noticed it on the menu last time I was in there, but it's a dish for two and the person I was with at the time had no particular interest in it. So, I went back tonight with Vicky!

Was pretty damn good, altho I would have preferred my half of the bowl to be spicier. We ordered the "double happiness" pot, which was half spicy and half normal stock - guess which I had? ;-) One of the things tho which I forgot about with hotpot is it's so damn hard to eat - you drop your meat/fish/veg/whatever in, and then you have to try to find it again in the bowl with your chopsticks! Ah, a bit of exercise sharpens the appetite eh? :-)

(For those who haven't had it before, it's a big bowl of soup stock on the table on a hotplate, and you get all the meat etc raw on plates on the side. So, you take the raw ingredients, drop them in yourself and cook them to your own taste.)

Indonesia (ish)

Well, it looks like the dates for Indonesia have changed again. Now it seems like I'll be over there for my birthday - we're aiming to be over there around the 25th of April. then again, this is the 3rd date we've been given for it......

Skiing without much snow (pt. 3)

On our last day of skiing, we all managed to get together in a big group, with everyone there, for the first time in the holiday! It didn't last any longer than the first run of the day tho, as the girls who'd just graduated from beginners class didn't want to tackle anything harder than a few blue slopes, while trhe rest of us wanted to head over to another mountain where we hadn't been yet, at the far sie of the valley. The only way to get there was by cable car, right across the valley so we decided to head up to it. Unfortunately, as we wound our way up on the chair lift, what we thought had just been cloud at the top of the mountain turned out to be a full-fledged blizzard! The visibility was down to maybe 10 meters, the temp was about -15 with wind-chill factored in, and the snow was being driven horizontally into out faces. At that stage we decided to cut our losses and just go back down on the slopes we'd been on before. On the way though, we found the entrance to a run we'd been looking for before but had always managed to miss, and despite the fact that it had a big "closed" sign on it, we decided to try it anyway. It was probably the best run of the day, as we had it all to ourselves and were pretty much running on fresh undisturbed snow. After a (really) big lunch, we decided to try a few red runs before meeting the others again, and I was quite pleased with myself that I only fell twice (one was silly tho - crossed my skis on a flat bit!). After that we decided to call it a day, as everyone was a bit weary, so we started heading for the Hannenkamm lift. This involved taking a chairlift and two more blue runs though, and at this stage the weather had closed in again and visibility was back down to bout 5m - fun!

We made it back alive anyway and then headed down to meet the girls who had some sort of medals presentation thing from their ski school to go to, from some race they'd done on their last day (none of them had won tho I think!). After a drink or two in the pub, we all agreed to meet back up and have dinner in that place the lads had had the orgasmic steak in on tues night. So, after showerng, shaving etc, we all met up. Pretty much everyone ordered the same thing (the prawns for starter, then the steak) except for me - I hate prawns, and at the last second I had a fit of contrariness and decided against the steak. Judging by the silence around the table when the mains arrived out, a good meal was had by all, and after we set about the task of finding a good bar to park ourselves in for the night. Unfortunately, our first chouce was not the best one - a trendy cocktail bar full of the beautiful people, all dolled-up in thir friday finery - so naturally a big crowd of loud irish in ski outfits stood out like a sore thumb! We only stayed there for two drinks, then headed out to look for somewhere slightly better. We got distracted along the way by an outside bar where they were playing this game where you hammer a nail into a block of wood with the narrow chisel end of a hammer. Your strike had to begin with the hammer touching the edge of the block tho, so it wasn't as easy as it sounds. After a good few games of this we realised (a) it was nearly 1am and the bar was closing and (b) we had to be up early the next day to catch the taxi to the airport, so we called it a night.

The next day dawned bright and early - too damn early! We were getting a 7:30am pickup for the airport, so had to be up at 6:30am. Naturally the discussion in the taxi on the way to the airport was minimal, and we only really were waking up when we got into Munich. Checking in was uneventful, right up to the point where the girl at the check-in counter told em I had to queue up again to pay for my bags - damn Aer Lingus and their charging per bag policy! The guy at the Aer Lingus desk seemed to have had a serious attack of the slows just before I got there - there were only 4 people in the queue ahead of me, but it still took him 35mins to deal with them! And all of this for an €8 fine that had I known in advance, I could have paid online and saved myself all the hassle! At this stage the others had already gone through security, and by the time I reached them I didn't even have time to get food before we took off! Needless to say I was slightly a bit miffed at this. The flight itself passed uneventfully, apart from a pretty hard landing in Dublin, and so we all went our separate ways, probably never to see each other again until the next time we go skiing.

So, all in all, definitely not a leisure holiday, but a damn good one anyway!

Things to remember for next skiing trip

Hopefully this may make my life a bit easier next time around:

• Book the gear in advance again - saved me a bit of money this time, 20% of shop price!
  
  
• Bring a backpack to keep your shoes/runners in. That way you have to keep the ski boots on if you go out to apres-ski straight from the slopes. Also handy for bottles of water etc.
  
  
• If flying with aer lingus, check the bags in online - saves queuing in the airport (normally I just bring hand luggage everywhere so never have to worry about this)
  
  
• Get a decent pair of wraparound shades. the fakelys I had were crap for skiing in as they weren't wraparound so your eyes are tearing up after 2mins. (seeing as I broke them anyway, not something I have to worry about again....)
  
  
• Remember: no matter how warm it is when you're stopped, it gets colder when you're moving so close your jacket before you start moving rather than having to do it half-way down the slope!
  

Am trying to convince myself now that I don't need to buy a pair of ski boots...

Skiing without much snow (pt. 2)

Day three dawned with a lot more promising weather conditions than the previous two - both in terms of snow on the ground (lots) and snow in the air (none). Lessons were actually pretty productive today - the group was down to seven so things went a lot faster. This was a good thing, since we'd only signed up for 3 days lessons and the previous 2 had been fairly unproductive on our eyes! We were supposed to be going to another slope but it was apparently closed so back to the Horn it was for us!

We started off the morning by doing the run from the top of the cable car to the middle station. The run was quite nice, blue all the way, and it pretty much reminded me of the "home run" into the village in Sol, but a bit shorter. Seeing as we were with Walter (the instructor) tho, and he was going slow to make sure everyone could keep up, it took a bit of time to go down, so after lessons in the afternoon me and 3 of the guys decided to do it a bit faster. Took about 30mins the first time, we did it in about 10 by ourselves! Only problem is, the 2nd time down, we sort of ended up losing someone - we were certain he was right behind us. Ah well, I'm sure he was ok...

After getting back to the hotel, showering, changing etc, we decided to go out to a restaurant that one of the lads had had a drink in the night before when we were out playing pool. Was a fancy looking italian place, with one problem - the menu was in german and italian, but no english! Luckily I had some italian and the waiter had good english! I made a bit of a tactical error in my choices - for starter I picked "parmagiana", expecting flaked parmesan over a salad or something, but I forgot that in an austrian restaurant, what you see on the menu is exactly what you get - so I ended up wit lumps of raw parmesan cheese! Now, I like parmesan (I wouldn't have ordered it otherwise), but not on its own and not in the quantity given! My main course was nice, veal (with a hint of parmesan from my overloaded tastebuds), but going by the semi-orgasmic sounds coming from beside me from Evelyn, the steak was even nicer!

After a really nice dinner, we wandered out to try to find a decent lively pub, and then someone spotted a fateful sign outside a place called "The Pub" - "KARAOKE HERE TONIGHT". So, despite the misgivings of some of us, we all headed in. naturally no-one wanted to go up first, so we all shoved a fiver into a kitty for the first person to go up. Once everyone had thrown down, one of the girls said she loved karaoke and was going to go up anyway, but she'd take the money thank you very much! So, alcohol was consumed and much merriment was had, and come more singing actually happened as well. Unfortunately, there were quite a few locals singing local songs as well (or german songs anyway), which were pretty bloody awful! Then again, they like David Hasselhoff in germany too....

Weds was our first "real" day of skiing - we had no lessons and were finally going up the Hannenkamm with Doyley and Clem. The conditions in the morning were pretty bad tho, it was OK on the higher slopes but once you got to mid-mountain, it was raining! Whatever about blizzards, rain is awful to ski in - it turns the snow to slush, which makes it pretty damn hard to turn, and your goggles are useless 'cos they don't have windscreen wipers. By the time we stopped for lunch, we were literally steaming - we were so soaked by the rain and so hot from having to work so hard at turning, there was steam coming off us once we took off our jackets! The afternoon went pretty well tho, whizzing down blue slope after blue slope, and I even managed my first black! Ok, it was a fairly short one, but still, a black is a black. Only fell on my ass a few times, which was pretty good I thought. As the lads said tho, "if you're not falling, you're not going fast enough!"

After the skiing for the day was over, and everyone gathered in the usual watering spot, we decided to head down to a bar called the Londoner, where there was a live band on. This was the liveliest place we'd found so far, so we sort of ended up not bothering to go back and change, or go out and eat. As a result we were pretty well hammered by about 10 - hey, drinking for 5hrs on an empty stomach will do that to you. I even ended up chatting up some chick, which is not something I normally do on a night out (she was irish and all - go figure, I go to austria to hit on an irish girl!). Around 10:30 a few people got the munchies so we wandered out to see what we could get to eat. Unfortunately, the nearest place to get food was McDonalds, but hey, needs must when the devil drives.... We were slightly surprised when we got in to find that they had prawns on the menu. I privately was questioning the advisability of ordering prawns in McDonalds, and in a land-locked country like Austria at that, but Doyley was all gung-ho for it, and apparently they weren't too bad. That bout of gastronomic adventuring tho pretty much paid to our night.

Thursday was our 2nd last day of skiing, and it had pretty much snuck up on us rather fast. I didn't have the best of mornings, in that I managed to both break my shades and lose one of my ski poles. Was silly really, I was going up on one of the chair-lifts, took off my glove to get something out of my pocket and didn't realise that the pole strap was looped around the glove rather than my wrist. I didn't really miss it when going downhill - you don't really use your poles all that much really, altho you do feel a bit unbalanced with just one - but I definitely missed it on the level or when trying to go up a slope. One ski pole makes for a lot of damned hard work pulling yourself up a hill! The worst thing was, I knew exactly where it was, and could even see it every time we took that particular lift back up (which we did a few times), but couldn't get to it. I was expecting to lose my deposit or something at the end of the day when I went to get a replacement, but the girl in the shop just said "ok, go pick out another one there, we'll pick up that one in the spring". Fair enough!

Tat night, me, Doyley, Clem and Fran decided to split off from the group and try out a restaurant that Gar had told us himself and the missus had been in. We went in, and were told we'd be waiting at leat a half an hour. We elected to stay at the restaurant's bar and wait, and even before the first pints had settled in the glasses, the maitre'd was back asking us did we mind sharing. Seems a table of 8 had just come free, and coincidentally a group of english blokes had also arrived looking for seats. They turned out to be good gas, and much fun and entertainment was had, to the extent that it was close to midnight when we rolled out of the place. The others had hit the irish bar in the meantime, so we had to head down and try to catch up with them in the alcohol stakes. Never let it be said that we turned down a challenge! ;-)

Skiing without much snow (pt. 1)

Well, I'm back from my Ski trip, mostly in one piece! I ache in muscles I didn't know I had, I have a bruised knee, a wrenched shoulder, I broke my oakley shades and my liver is threatening to take out a restraining order against me, so yeah, was a great trip! :-P

Unfortunately, it didn't get off to a very auspicious start. We booked our flights way back in november, back before we knew the 6 nations timetable. So, by a sheer case of bad luck, we were taking off on saturday the 24th, landing in Munich at 5:30 - or just as Ireland v. England was kicking off in Croke Park. This would have been ok, but we still had a 2 1/2hr taxi ride to go to get to Kitzbuhel! So, we were on the road for the whole match. Luckily Vodafone were doing a "free txt" day, so we were getting txt updates for pretty much every kick of the match from one of the guys back home. Still tho, not the same as not seeing the match! What made it even worse though was that fact that the closer we got to the mountains, the more snow we didn't see. According to the taxi driver, it hadn't snowed there in 2 weeks! We got all the way to Kitzbuhel without seeing any more snow than you'd see in Ireland in your average winter, and the town itself was completely snowless. We were joking with each other that we'd have to find the local mountain bike rental, or buy 2 skateboards and strap one to each foot!

We checked into our respective hotels anyway, and headed out in the rain (for at that point it had indeed started raining) to Flanagans, the Irish bar where we were supposed to be meeting up with a few more of the gang. After suffering though their fairly inebriated description of what a bloody brilliant match we'd missed, we headed out to find some grub. We stumbled across a mexican place called 'La Fonda', which coincidentally contained two more of our group who were staying a bit further out of town and so hadn't joined us in the pub. This brought our motley crew up to 13, so much food and drink was had for the remainder of the night until we took the subtle hints of the staff (i.e. stacking the chairs up on the tables around us) and left about 1:30ish.

The next morning we were up bright and early to get our skis etc and sign up for ski school. We had 3 raw beginners, 3 intermediates (including myself) and the rest were "expert" - as in they'd been skiing for 5 or 6 years. Unfortunately by the time we got our gear sorted we were nearly late for school! The hotel was a nice easy 5min walk along the rail lines from the main cable car, the Hahnenkamm (which at various stages before we got the name right, we were calling the "heineken", the "mikka-hakkinen" or the "hasselhoff"), but the ski school was on another mountain, the Kitzbuhler Horn, which was a 5min bus journey away! The first day's skiing in class wasn't very spectacular, as we had a big group (14 ppl) and the instructor was really only feeling out how much we knew already. Also, the conditions weren't great - we'd only started seeing real snow about half-way up in the cable car, and even at the top there was only patchy snow off the pistes - some of the pistes were even closed. After lessons, we met up with the others sitting outside the hotel at the foot of the Hahnenkamm sipping beers (a place that sort of became "base camp" for the hol, as we always met there every evening!).

Once we met up with the everyone we decided to try out the apres-ski bar beside where we meet up. When we walked in we were hit with a wall of the best dodgy austrian apres-ski music, complete euro-crap (music in Austria sort of went downhill after Mozart died). The place was dark, loud and packed to the gills with people in sweaty smelly ski boots and suits necking back beers, gluhwein and jaegermeisters and listening to some of the worst tunes on the planet - everything apres-ski should be! After a good while of musical torture and watching 2 drunk chicks practically dry-hump each other on the dancefloor, we headed out for food (we found a pizza place called "Ali Babas" that did a kebab pizza! Had to try that!) and then to a bar that was showing the Ireland England match on TV, where we pretty much stayed for the night.

The snow conditions were skightly better on our 2nd day - a little bit too good in fact! It had been snowing most of the night, and when we got to the top of the mountain, it was still snowing with crap visibility. Our first run of the day was down a rather windy blue slope from the cable car to the foot of the baby slopes, and there was so much snow blowing in our faces that we were going down in a line and you couldn't see any more than 5 ppl in front of you. We were also the first down of the day, and the snow ploughs hadn't even levelled off the piste in some parts, so we weren't so much skiing as wading though 4-6 inches of snow! the weather cleared off after a bit, but at various stages during the day they shut down the t-lift as the visibility had closed in too far again to run it - the guys at either end couldn't see well enough to know if anyone had fallen and they had to stop it (which normally happens about once every 5-10mins normally!). We ended the day by doing the run from the top lift to the middle station - about half-way down the mountain. Reminded me a lot of the "home run" into the village in Sol, altho a bit shorter - you'd do it in maybe 20mins. After lessons, the 3 of us in the class pretty much had the mountain to ourselves so we decide to try to see how much speed you could get up on a few of the blue slopes and try to kill ourselves on a red.

Once we got back to "ground level", we headed straight for a bar that our ski instructor had told us was having a beer promo with 2 free kegs of beer. We arrived along about 5:30, or 30mins after it was supposed to have started, expecting all the free beer to be gone, as it would at home. We weren't at home tho - apart from a good few ski instructors, the place was practically deserted! The free beer lasted quite a while - maybe 4 more pints each, which was nice. At that stage we'd managed to wangle our way onto the pool table, where we managed to stay til about 10ish when Gar and Ev got beaten by a couple of kids! At that stage we reckoned it was time for food, so we staggered to an italian place where coincidentally we ran into the rest of the group! At that stage we were slightly, um, under the weather so I'm afraid the Risotto I ordered was wasted on me - but at least I wasn't falling asleep in my rockett salad like Fran!

England get new Chariot Driver......

In related news, there will be a wreath laying ceremony next Saturday in Croke Park in rememberance of the 15 englishmen slaughtered there yesterday.


:-)

43-13!

Ski gear sorted!

Well, I finally have all my ski stuff sorted out. I just went on the interweb and rented my ski gear. So, all I have to do is go up to the shop when we arrive, wave my receipt at them and collect my stuff. And I get 20% off through booking online! Seems to be my week of getting cheap stuff - went in yesterday to the ski shop where Deco's girlfriend works and she cut me a deal on some stuff, gave them to me at cost price! So, picked up a pair of goggles and a new fleece for €45! Between that and the el cheapo ski suit I picked up last year in Beiing, makes for a slightly cheaper than usual ski trip!

Now all I have to do is turn up at the airport with it all on time....

The forecast doesn't look the best tho - no new snow in the last week?

Vaccinated

Well, it looks like my travel plans are changing somewhat. Seems the customer in Indonesia hasn't signed on the dotted line or something, so now the trip is of until June. There's talk of a possible trip to Ecuador in the meantime tho - but at the moment it's only talk. So, all possible holiday plan are up in the air until we know one way or another.

Well, at least I'm all up to date with my shots now. I'm now proof against Yellow Fever, Diphtheria, Typhoid, Hepatitis A, Polio and something else which has a complicated name, plus I have a prescription for Malaria tablets. Some good shit, man.... Hell, I'm so protected now I could possibly go in and score in Copper Faced Jacks* in safety now! ;-)

Me arms are a bit sore tho - 2 injections in one arm, one in the other! And I didn't even get given a lollipop after! :-( At least the company will be picking up the tab for the shots....

[* - for those not in the know, Coppers (or Slapper Faced Jacks as it's also known) is one of Dublin's more (in)famous pick-up joints - a real "meat market", where the less than classy and hte les than choosy would go to get their fun on a fri/sat night]

Travelling again!

Well, the big reason I took this job is for the travel, and now I know the first place I'll be travelling to, and roughly when. It looks like some time in mid or late march, I'll be heading off to Jakarta for maybe 4-6 weeks. So, for my first trip, I'm going to a place with 3 possible drawbacks:

• Bird Flu


• Floods


• Tsunamis

So, will be packing my wellies, swimming togs and a few packs of uniflu!

Also, finally, 3 weeks after getting here and 2 months after doing the job interview, I finally get a job spec for what I am actually supposed to be doing! One thing they left out in the interview is good communications skills, as I'll be training people in on how to use our software. I hate getting up in front of crowds!

A Year On

I was just checking my blog archives, and realised that this day last year was my first day in work in the Sun Beijing office. Sort of scary to think that a whole year has passed....

So, what's changed in the last year? Well, still living in the same place, but have new flatmates, a new job with more money, am still single but have acquired a "friend with benefits". So, progress!

One of the strange things about being one year on as well is that coincidentally, last week I had Katie, the American girl I met over there, come visit, and tomorrow night I'm meeting up with Meena, who I also met in Beijing. Who'll be next, the two Peters or that cute american chick? Think I'd prefer the american.... ;-)

"brekkie pizza".....

Well, I've heard of the brekkie roll, the breakfast bagel, the breakfast bap and the breakfast sub (from subway), but this is a new one on me. I was just in the italian takeaway near my new office and I saw the "full irish pizza" - bacon, sausage, egg and tomato. Naturally I had to get one to try it!



So here it is. Now, I wonder what time in the morning do they open at...... :-)

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:

• 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!

Bloody windows update!

Well, I just found another reason to love windows update. I tried it out on my shiny new laptop this morning, running XP SP2, and it came up with 41 "critical" updates. So, I went and installed them and it asked me to reboot my computer, as normal. I'm used to this by now. I also discovered another annoying little feature -

After I rebooted tho, I was still getting the little yellow shield in my taskbar saying "there are updates available for your computer". So, I clicked on it and it came up with 13 updates to MS Office. I went back to the windows update webpage and got it to check again for updates, and it came back with nothing. You'd think that if you have an update mechanism that it would behave consistently! If one finds some patches, both of them should find them.

It gets even better then. After I installed the MS Office updates, I was asked to reboot my machine! For an office update! I don't mind rebooting after some security patch to a windows service or something like that, as it's a change to the OS, but for frickin' office? Does that mean that office is so tied into the system that it updates windows components as well? Hmm, wasn't there a court case about that sort of behaviour? ;-)

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!

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!