Author: virtualwolf

Busy busy busy

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Man, since I’ve been doing Studio support I’ve been pretty much flat-out every single day. Some days it’s good and I get lots done and I’m very productive. Other days, like today, I have about five things going on at once for the entire day and can’t concentrate on any of them. My brain was leaking out my ears by about 2pm. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the hell out of work, but some days are definitely more draining than others.

When we first moved up to Hornsby, it really felt like Katoomba but I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly that was. I’ve realised now that it’s because the air is so much cleaner here than the city or even Lane Cove (Lane Cove is only ~10km from the city). It’s so nice stepping off the train in Hornsby after work and just having wonderfully clean fresh air. Even more so now that the weather is cooling down and the air has that autumnal coolness to it.

Oh god

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Oh god, Robowar. OH GOD.

IT. IS. TERRIBLE. IMDB’s rating of 4.0 is about twice what it should be. At least The Room had quotability… Robowar was just plain terrible. It was physically exhausting watching it.

We’ve discovered that after watching a truly terrible movie, the next one has to be a fair bit less awful. Cue Beowulf! It has Christopher Lambert, who is always hilariously awful, and was enjoyably cheesy. I don’t know why it got only a 3.7 on IMDB… it’s certainly no masterpiece of cinema, but dear christ was it vastly better than Robowar.

Of geekery, and bad movies

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I’ve been getting my geek on in a big way.

Since I’m supporting JIRA Studio, and it’s a lot more sysadminy (lots of command-line work, SSHing into hosts, etc.), I’ve signed up with Linode and have installed CentOS on it (CentOS is what we use at work for just about all our server machines) to get my learnings on.

I’ve got my own JIRA instance running on it, it’s also running Subversion, email (postfix and dovecot), and I’m using SVN for my web development as well (this is my regular website, and I test out everything on here). I’ve integrated JIRA with my Subversion repository, and have OpenLDAP set up for authentication for Subversion via Apache, email, and JIRA.

In another news, we’ve been doing bad movie night with gypocalypse on a semi-regular basis, and oh it’s such fun. So. Much. Snarking! We’ve covered a lot of video game movies (Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat 1 and 2, Double Dragon, all the FUCKING AWFUL Uwe Boll films, etc.) and our movie of choice for tonight is Robowar, and if we have enough time, BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR.

😀 😀

FINNNNNTROOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLL!

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(Link!)

We just got back from seeing them at the Manning Bar. I saw them in Boston for the first time when I was visiting kungfupolarbear, and they fucking rocked. They didn’t disappoint this time either. The two opening bands, Bane of Isildur and Claim the Throne, were excellent as well. SO MUCH HEADBANGING.

Of course, I’m not going to be able to move when I wake up tomorrow, but it’s so worth it.

Amusement

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Every quarter at Atlassian, we have “Fedex”, where all the developers take two days off to furiously code and make shiny new things (see here). One of the things being created this year involves Sharepoint, and the writeup for it was absolutely brilliant:

The Problem
Some people really love SharePoint. Especially business manager type people. They just can’t get enough of it. It’s like KPI crack. With no knowledge of programming, web design or HTML, they can go in and create customisable dashboards, reports and lists and lists of information, pulled in from every other data-store imaginable. They can set it up to email them regularly with new information, export into pretty word documents and use a myriad of other useful Microsoft-centric features. Once it’s setup, they sit back and bask in the luminescent glow of their sweet, sweet datas. From their fortress of KPI solitude, they have ample time to reflect on how brilliantly awesome they are – breaking occasionally from their meditative state to hit the refresh button.

Oh yes, they f*$&@cking love their reports.

With this image underneath it:

😀

Of moving, and cyclones

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The timing of our move to Hornsby could not have been better. This week has been quite hot, every day has been well above 30C (86F) which isn’t too bad ordinarily, but it’s barely cooled down at night. Yesterday it was 39C (102F) when we got home from work a bit before 7, I went to bed at midnight and it was still 33C (91F) outside!

Given I had a west-facing room when I was living with my parents, I’m fairly used to hot weather at night with no air conditioning, but 33C at midnight is really fucking hot. I read today that it was the hottest night in thirteen years. Poor kungfupolarbear would have killed multiple people today at work had she not been able to get to sleep due to our air conditioning!

And in non-#firstworldproblems, holy fuck tropical cyclone Yasi. It’s due to hit the north coast of Queensland about half an hour from now, and it’s a category five cyclone. They’re predicting wind speeds of potentially up to 320kph (~200mph), and it’s going to be the largest and most devastating cyclone we’ve ever seen. And check out how bloody huge it is! The ABC has some more stats on how it compares to other cyclones here.

For those not in Australia, don’t worry, we’re a good 2000km (~1250 miles) away from the cyclone. The main thing Sydney really deals with on a regular basis is bushfires. 🙂

Time for my quarterly update!

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Biggest news is WE’VE MOVED OUT OF OUR SHITTY FUCKING MOULD-INFESTED APARTMENT! \o/ We found a gorgeous two-bedroom townhouse that’s right near to the train station in Hornsby, and has AIR CONDITIONING and GAS COOKING! And a backyard! It’s about forty to fifty minutes train ride, which is a fair bit more than the twenty to thirty minute bus ride we had in Lane Cove, but it’s still less than when we were living in Dee Why. It’ll just take a little while before we’re used to the longer commute again. Pictures will be forthcoming once we’ve finished putting everything away. 😛 …I should point out that we’re still renting, not buying, heh.

Work is going well as always. I’m going to be doing support for JIRA Studio for this quarter, to see how I like it, and move into it permanently if it’s good. It sounds it, it’s a much more sysadmin-type role, which sounds fun.

And lastly, we’re going to see Rammstein and Tool this Thursday night! \o/ I saw Tool last time they were out here, and they were fucking AMAZING. Rammstein has been here before, but I’ve never seen them. Woohoo!

Happier

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On a brighter note than the last entry, I’m loving our camera and I think I’m coming along quite well with the photography skills. The 100mm lens is absolutely amazing. I’ve put some of my recent favourites under the cut.

New Life

"Iiiinteresting."

Leman Russ Demolisher

Abandoned

Today can go fuck itself in the ear

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Blargh. I had an extremely dumb day today at work. You know those days where nothing sinks in and you just don’t get anything? That was today.

Work has paid for a couple of us to take the official Sun Java training courses (at not-insignificant expense!) and I’ve been working my way through it (this is the very basic don’t-know-any-Java-or-any-object-oriented-programming-at-all one that I’m doing). At the end of each section there’s exercises where you write code to do various things. As I get further into it, they give you less and less hand-holding with the coding, which is understandable. But I was just not understanding it at all. I had to get a co-worker’s help about four times and it still didn’t actually click.

Later on, there was a support case that I took, the customer had provided a backup of his data so we could try to reproduce the problem. I was still struggling to get the backup imported when a co-worker replied to the customer having looked through it all and worked out what the problem was, and what the solution was.

Then at the end of the day I took another support case, and I’d gotten so bogged down from the two things I mentioned above that I was totally doubting myself, and had to double check my answer to the customer with a co-worker because I wasn’t sure.

Plus poor my kungfupolarbear might possibly be losing her job, or possibly not, we don’t know, because the CEO at the company she’s working at is a dick with no actual understanding of what she does.

Ugh. The title of this post says it all.

Updates ahoy!

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♦ The company I work for now, Atlassian, got US$60M in venture capital from Accel Partners, who invested in companies like Facebook and Macromedia. As part of all of that, we ended up getting an 8% payrise (it used to be that people would get a bonus at the end of the year, but there was a lot of angst about it and everyone ended up getting the full 8% anyway, so they just rolled it all into our salaries). Also as part of the whole venture capital thing, we got given share options! (Lots of coverage about it).

♦ So basically my current job is awesome. It’s all of the bits I really enjoyed about the Tier 2 job at Apple, expanded out to an entire job, and without the phone support, plus with lots of good extras!

♦ In less good news, the useless mother of my child decided to move to Wagga Wagga (for those not in NSW, it’s about a five hour drive away from Sydney). She’s coming up to Sydney once a month with Lily now. I really miss Lily, but I also don’t miss the more frequent drama with her, so it’s a net gain I think. Not to mention I’m sure she won’t be in Wagga Wagga for more than a few months at most, given how utterly useless she is with money.

♦ We bought a new lens last month, the Canon EF 100mm f/2, and have been busily taking lots of photos.

♦ kungfupolarbear and I are looking at buying a unit! It won’t be for a year or more, but we’ve got a reasonable chunk of money saved up already and with both our jobs going very nicely, we’re able to put a goodly amount into the savings account each month!

So on the whole, huzzah!