no weekend work!

Well, I managed to weasel my way out of the weekend work! The guy who was getting the build ready for me to install said he was going to have it ready first thing this morning, and the guys who were working on the machine were going back to jo'burg, so I asked the perfectly valid question, why couldn't I do it today instead of tomorrow, and they couldn't come up with a good reason why I couldn't! Means I'm still at work at 6pm on a friday and will be here for some time yet, but better to work late on a friday than not have a saturday.

So, now I have to start planning for the weekend now, a weekend I didn't think I was getting! :-)

Food, glorious food!

Well, this is more like it, no more late nights hopefully (even if I am losing a weekend day). Am managing to get out early enough to actually get something to eat these days! In fact, yesterday, we got out at 5:30 and headed out to Hout Bay for some beers and some food with the guys from the office here. And what food! We went to a place called "Jimmy's Killer Prawns", which as you might guess by the name, does seafood. The other guys all got big mad platters of prawns, calamari etc, but not being a fish person, I decided to go for something else. So, I went for the 600g T-bone steak (about 21oz). Man, what a steak! The last time I had a steak something like this size was the 25oz I had in FXB's in Dublin, which cost €30 as opposed to €8 for this one. And no contest on the taste, this one was way superior, hell it can lay a decent challenge to the title of "best steak I ever ate". Medium, so nice and pink & tender on the inside, beautiful BBQ sauce, and whereas the FXB one was maybe 1/3 bone, fat and gristle, this was nearly all meat off the bone!

Whatever else about this place, I'll be lucky if I go home the same size I am now. And I've slipped back into my habit of eating weird stuff that you cna't get at home. As well as the big-ass steak, so far I've eaten Ostrich, Springbok, Crocodile and I know where I can order Zebra and Warthog as well :-)

weekend work

Great. As if it wasn't enough that I was in late last night and it looks like I'll be in late tonight too, the cust has decided that they want to upgrade their production servers to the new build as well - over the weekend. So, will be in here most of Saturday and probably a bit of Sunday too! This better be a peak period for work, if I don't do this late night/weekend crap at home, I'm not doing it here for 3 weeks running. The odd time is OK, but if the guys here are expecting it as normal, well.......

Boss has said I can get a day in lieu for this, going to push to get them before I go back home - extra days are better spent in warm sunny South Africa than cold pissing-rain Ireland!

This had better not be the start of a trend.......

I'm just after pulling a 13hr day. Got into the office this morning and took me ages to get properly set up (network problems with my laptop), and as soon as I got connected, I landed in a shitstorm, had a ton of emails waiting for me. I knew from being told last min on friday that I'd be doing an upgrade today when I arrived in, but I never quite got told how complicated it'd be! It didn't help much that there was a lot of confusion between our side and the customer side over what exactly was being upgraded - with me being on the sharp pointy end of the argument over here with not a fecking clue what I was arguing about since the first time I'd heard any of it was half an hour before the meeting!

Finally got sorted what needed to be done, so all I had to do was actually do it. Easier said than done! We managed to get all of the arguing done by about 4pm, which meant that most of my day was gone already, on something I was told absolutely positively had to be done this evening. So, I managed to get out of work finally at about 10:15ish. Betcha I go in tomorrow and get told that "oh no, we won't actually be getting the test results until tomorrow anyway." :-(

Made it!

Well, I made it in one piece anyway. Her I am, sitting in my hotel room at the bottom of the world (well, not quite the bottom, call if a few km from the bottom of Africa so). Man, what a trip! I've said it before and I'll say it again, whoever said "getting there is half the fun" obviously never had to connect through Heathrow!

The first leg of the journey out of Dublin went uneventfully, and then when the transfer from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4 went off without a hitch I started thinking "wow, this looks like it'll be an easy one". Bad mistake! I got to the terminal in plenty of time (nearly 2hrs), and it just so happened to be Rugby weekend, South Africa (my destination!) were playing Wales in Cardiff. Mindful of what happened me on the beijing trip where i list track of time watching the rugger and had to run for my gate, I told myself I'd only watch the 1st half and then get to the gate in plenty of time.

And here's where things started to go awry.

I got to the gate with hages to spare (35mins maybe), and was waiting around until 5mins before we were supposed to be boarding, an announcement was made that they'd discovered some electrical fault on the plane and so were replacing it with another one, which had to be cleaned and serviced, at least an hour's delay. I could have watched the whole of the rugger had I known! :-(

Eventually we took off, 2hrs late, and started the trek down the Dark Continent (well, via France and Spain). This meant I was now getting in at 8am rather than 6am. I knew that this trip would be screwing up my body clock anyway, as normally if I have a 10-12hr flight then my destination is about 8hrs plus or minus what I'm used to , which I'm used to acclimatizing to. This one tho was an 11.5hr flight to end up only 2hrs out of whack with back home! Not used to it at all! As a result I wasn't feeling the cleverest when I got into the taxi.

And here's where things get even more fun. We make it to the hotel, and they tell me they can't find the booking. Lovely. Turns put that originally Alan was supposed to be flying out earlier on sat so he'd be getting in sat night, so the room was booked for the 24th to the 16th. Seems no-one had told them I'd be on a later flight and so getting in this morning, so when I was a no-show last night they cancelled the booking! Took about 30mins to sort that out with the manager and all (ended up paying for it on my plastic despite the fact it should be covered by the cust). Then, to make it worse, after that they told me that check-in time was 2pm so they couldn't let me have the room til then. And this was 9:15am! So, I dropped my bags in the left luggage room and headed out to see Cape Town. As I said tho, I wasn't feeling the cleverest so I got on the open-top bus tour (the same type of red bus that have in Dublin), forgot I'd left my sunblock in the check-in bag and ended up a few shades redder than I was when I woke up yesterday morning!

All in all, not the best of journeys!

(oh yeah, I finally got the room at 2pm anyway)

heading off

Well, am packed up and ready to go now. Has been a hectic few days - have had to drop everything I was doing and hand it off to other people, and then get up to speed on a project I didn't know anything about. It didn't help that the guy who I'm taking over for was saying "ah, it's a cushy number, you'll just have to hold their hand and answer any questions they have", then at abot 3pm yesterday I was told "Actually, you'll be doing an upgrade of tehir productin systems on monday using OWB" - which I've never done before, so needed a crash course in that! Should be fun!

It was also hectic aftert I got out from work in the evenings. Was out with the g/f on weds and had to tell her I'd be heading off for a while ("Um, remember you said we were hgoing ice skating next week? Well, I don't think I'll be able to make it..."), on thurs night we had a going-away piss-up with a few of the guys who were getting laid off, and then last night there was an impromptu going-away meal for me and another guy who#'s off to singapore to get married next week. So, my first chance to actually pack for this trip was when I got home at 11:30pm last night!

At least I know now that it'll deinitely be at least 3 weeks. At first the boss was saying "ah, it'll only be a week, until Alan gets back form Jamaica, then we'll send him down instead of you" but then I got my flights and they had me coming back on the 16th Dec. So, I leave her in a few mins, my flight takes off for Heathrow at 12:10, and then I get into Cape Town at 6:05am tomorrow. Well, at least it'll be warm there.... :-)

Cape Town

Well, I was complaining before that the company weren't sending me anywhere......

Was talking to the boss about half an hour ago. One of the guys here was supposed to be going to Cape Town on Saturday to support a customer down there, but it seems that there's been some big panic in Jamaica on the product he normally works on so he's being shipped off there, and I'm being sent to Cape Town instead. On Saturday. This Saturday coming. For "two weeks".

The last guy who was sent there for "two weeks" left the beginning of October and he just arrived back today! Xmas on the beach perhaps? :-)

Vista gone! :-)

Well, I finally managed to get rid of Vista. It took a while to get the XP CD to recognize the HD, I wasn't able to chnage the BIOS to uncheck the AHCI options, so I ended up:
* Copying the contents of my XP CD to a folder on the HD
* Downloading the Intel AHCI drivers
* Use=ing a tool called nLite to integrate the new intel drivers into the XP image in the folder
* Creating a bootable ISO and burn it to disk
* Installing off the new disk

The problem was the first time I did it, I used the same XP CD that had bluescreened on me last time, so when I tried to install off it, it blue-screened again :-(

Finally last night around 11:30pm, I had a bootable image that actually worked. Unfortunatey I made the mistake of kicking off the install (plus the reformat of my 85GB HD) at about 11:45, so had to stay up babysitting it til 1:30 :-(

After that I hit another small snag. Seeing as I got the laptop with Vista on it, the driver/apps CD I got with the system had, well, only Vista drivers. So, took a little bit of time to get all the necessary stuff installed! Surprisingly, after not being able to find the drivers easily forthe wi-fi card or the audio card, I let Windows Update try to find it for me, and was pleasantly surprised when it did actualy find them!

Tonight, I have all the fun of re-installing all my apps and stuff :-)

Vista doesn't like to go quietly on my laptop

Well, I finally got around to backing up all of the data on my laptop and decided to dump Vista off it and replace it with a more streamlined and less resource-hungry verion of windows (words I thought I'd never use about a Microsoft OS). It took me a while to find my working XP install disks (I have a few but they're either scratched or not bootable), but I finally found them, shoved one in the DVD drive and rebooted Vista for what I thought was the last time.

Not so.

The first disk I tried got as far as loading all the drivers and starting the windows installer, then it blue-screened on me. The second and third disks I got further, as far as the next screen after the other one blue-screened, but after I hit [ENTER] to install windows, another problem arose. Suddenly the installer is telling me that it can't find my HD. Great.

Loking on the web, I found the explanation here. Seems that newer laptops have some new intel technology for doing something i neither know about or care about. Luckily though, you can disable it in the BIOS, so I'm goign to try that now and see what results I get. Wish me luck! :-)

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.....

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.

Xmas music

I was walking up Grafton St yesterday and I noticed a change to the usual "ambiance" of the street. As well as the normal buskers, we now have xmas music being broadcast from Brown Thomas. In fecking mid november. And all the lights are up already, even if they're not turned on. I don't mind shops playing xmas music inside, I can always avoid those, but you can't avoid it if they're playing it in the fecking street!

At least I suppose it's the old Bing Crosby crooner type songs, not the T-Rex "I wish it were xmas every day" twaddle (although I'd be surprised if a classy place like BT was playing that crap). Any xmas song brought out after Bing hung up his microphone should have all copies of it tracked down and burned in a big huge pyre, preferably with the original artists sitting on top as well.

Ok, now this takes the biscuit. Just heard an ad on the radio for some furniture superstore place on the north side advertising it's January Sales already! Jesus! :-(

Footy

Well, I started back playing soccer last night. If I was under any illusions before about my fitness level, I'm not any more! Was struggling after 10mins, had to keep going in goals to catch my breath for 5mins, and played crap 'cos I was too knackered to run or put in proper tackles. Got home last night and wasn't up to much bar vegging in front of the TV. It doesn't help I suppose that I'm coming down with a cold so my lung power isn't up to full capacity (however low even that is!), but damn that match hurt!

Is probably about 2 years since I've played (was before I went to china anyway) so I wasn't exactly expecting to set the pitch on fire with my endless running and silky skills. And I knew it'd be painful afterwards - when I was playing, whenever we'd break for the summer in Sun the first few matches back of the new season were quite bad. I'm not feeling too bad now at the moment but I know from experience that by tomorrow I'll be walking around like a 90-year-old! Normally for some reason it's never my legs that stiffen up the most, is my lower and mid-upper back (didn't do anatomy so don't know what the muscles are called - the ones under your shoulder blades). Having said that tho, I won't be running up any stairs either, and getting up out of chairs is going to be a bit painful over the next few days!

It's not like I'm not getting no exercise at all, am not a total couch potato, but the 20-min walk to and from the dart station in the day isn't really so much getting me fitter as helping to stop me becoming even less fit. Is still about half of what I used to walk when I was in Sun as well, but walking the full way into work in the morning would be 1hr 20min, so that's not happening! Am not sure will I be playing again next week, will see how I feel by say sat. Might need to try to stop my lungs from collapsing first!

Another Trip Cancelled

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

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

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

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

My new laptop is not very game friendly

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

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

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

Xmas before Halloween makes the Baby Jesus cry

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

5 minutes

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

Lessons

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

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

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

My New Toy

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



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

This is it sitting beside my work laptop:




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

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

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:

"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..... :-)