We’re all erasing our work computers and re-installing the OS afresh. It’s all kind of sad. Everyone is sitting around all melancholy.
My machine’s home folder has come from the original 15″ G4 iMac I used when I first started in October 2003, and I kept migrating it from machine to machine to machine. I’ve got so much stuff on here, over six years worth. I’ve copied everything to home that I’m wanting to keep at least.
This will be the last post ever from my Apple work machine. Sigh.
Fucking cunting arse. I didn’t get that sysadmin job. And what’s more, they didn’t even tell me. I had to get the friend who used to work there to ask around about and he told me. Ugh. Rude bastards. And the reason for the rejection was that someone else “had more experience”. I’m getting rather sick of that phrase. Apparently it turns out that six years supporting Apple products counts for absolutely nothing.
So as of the end of Friday this week, I’m officially unemployed. 🙁 I’ve applied to a number of jobs and on the whole have heard nothing at all, beyond the occasional “You didn’t get the role” emails.
Still nothing on the job front.
In other news, I’ve installed VMware Fusion 3 on my Mac mini server and am going to install Windows Server 2008 on it, mostly for fiddling and learning purposes. A friend has a copy from MSDN with a legitimate key, so woo! Learnings are fun.
We’re busily sitting at work doing very little, and talking complete shit in the joint internal iChat server that the Tier 2s from both Sydney and Singapore are in. It’s fun!
Arrrrghhhhh.
I was meant to hear something today about the job I interviewed for on Tuesday, and have heard nothing. 🙁 I spent the whole day being anxious and have nothing to show for it, dammit!
Well, that was odd.
It turns out that that SuperDuper backup that was apparently not working yesterday actually is, and for some reason it just didn’t want to let me mount it in my regular non-admin user (the backup was done from the admin user)! It’s something to do with permissions, but I don’t know why because the permissions were set to rwxrwxr-x, so it ought to have worked.
Anyway, I restored the server successfully and everything is working perfectly.
For lunch I’m nomming on left-over pizza made by my beautiful and talented kungfupolarbear… home-made pizza crust, with spinach and chunks of seasoned chicken. NOM NOM NOM. Even better was when we had it for dinner on Tuesday night, accompanied by (proper American!) ranch dressing and green Tabasco sauce.
Speaking of green Tabasco sauce, WHY DO THEY NOT SELL IT HERE?! omfg it’s fantastic. kungfupolarbear‘s mum sent some over along with various other goodies, and holy shit. I am very sad that I haven’t been able to find any shops that sell it. There’s plenty of the regular red kind, but no green. 🙁
Blargh. It’s becoming harder and harder to care about doing anything at work. Next week is our last week, and apparently it’s been planned so we’re not taking any calls, just wrapping things up, cleaning up ours machines, etc.
You know those days where just nothing goes right? I’ve been having several of those. The interview yesterday went well but the uncertainty of this whole situation is bumming me out.
And I know it’s a minor thing, but it’s just the topping on the pile of annoyances lately — everything has been going wrong with my server machine at home. I was fiddling around trying to use it as the router for my network as well, which didn’t work. That’s fine, I thought, I’ve got a Time Machine backup! I got it started on restoring from the day prior to me cocking it up and went to bed. When I checked the next morning, it’d somehow managed to restore to a point /after/ I’d been changing settings. So I booted back to the install disc, went to restore back further… and none of the previous backups were there anymore!
What happened was that the drive I was backing up to was running low on space, so when it went to back up again after the restore, it removed all of the previous backups so it’d have enough room for this one.
Fuck.
But! I also have a program called SuperDuper running, which makes a total clone of the whole HD and saves it into a disk image file. The last time that ran was the 15th, which is fine. So I went to mount the disk image… and it’s giving me a “No mountable filesystems” error. The logs within SuperDuper say everything was copied fine the last time it ran. Tried a few command-line tricks, but it simply will not mount. I got Disk Warrior from a friend this morning, connected via Apple Remote Desktop and tried to get it to rebuild the disk image, but it came up with a “Disk image in use” error and now appears to have taken down the whole machine, because I can’t connect to the VPN in the first place now.
And kungfupolarbear is still sick and feeling crappy, it’s going to be ages before she can get her tonsils out, and everything is just generally fucked at the moment. GRARHG#@(&$Y#$UH#k
Sigh.
Woo! The interview went very well. The guy who was interviewing me said I had everything they were after, and the place sounds great to work in. Very relaxed and chilled out, and doing internal face-to-face help-desk type support rather than over the phone. And best of all, they’ve got another guy who does the same job I’m doing but for Windows, and I’d primarily be the Mac guy.
He said there’s a couple more interviews to do and he’d get back to me by the end of the week.
Fingers crossed!
The interview for that sysadmin job is at 11:30am tomorrow. Wish me luck!
I’m thinking it ought to go well… the friend who was doing that job went straight from Tier 1 to it, so I’ve got the advantage of a few extra years of experience.
Also, can it be 5:30 yet? I’ve had enough of today already.
So, I didn’t get the internal Systems Engineer job. I spoke to the guy who interviewed me, and he was saying they had several applicants that had strong enterprise experience and Cisco certifications and so on. None of which I have, or any of us who applied internally here have.
On the bright side, I get my (fairly sizeable) redundancy pay!
Ah LiveJournal. I’ve been neglecting you lately.
Well, this weekend has been drama-filled. My daughter’s mother has been a complete psycho and threatening to not let me see Lily due to my getting annoyed at her for changing her mind with regards to child support every month (we’ve got a private arrangement right now where I just give her the money, rather than going through the Child Support Agency — which is soon hopefully going to change, as I called them today about it). Big long ranty SMS messages saying how horrible I am and how horrible kungfupolarbear, the latter most likely because kungfupolarbear made me realise I don’t need to just sit and take all her shit. Ugh. My stomach’s been in a knot the whole weekend.
In other equally sucky news, we were told towards the start of January that we’re getting made redundant. The whole call centre, Tier 1, Tier 2, and Customer Relations. Our last day is the 5th of March. I’ve applied for another job inside Apple, “Systems Engineer – Enterprise”, which looks pretty cool. I had the interview Wednesday week before last, but have heard absolutely nothing since. I’ve got a friend who I used to work with who is leaving his sysadmin role to do something a bit more technical who’s hooked me up with his boss’s email address, I’ve sent my resumé through there as well. There’s also a Mac support role at the University of New South Wales that I’ve applied for, so we’ll see how things go.
The Canon EOS 400D I’ve been borrowing from a friend at work is no longer available, as his brother is using it full-time for a photography course. Grumble! We’re still going to be getting the 7D, but it’s looking further and further away until we do get it. I keep getting the hankering for photography, and our lowly PowerShot S5 just doesn’t cut it anymore. Even apart from the impending redundancy, we keep getting the amount of money that’s on the credit card down, then something expensive comes up and brings it straight back up again. :\ Most recently it’s been the car registration, service, and insurance, plus last month the starter motor shat itself and I had to get a new one. I guess I can’t complain too much about that one though, as it looks like it was the very original starter motor (my car is a 1993 Corolla) so it would have gone at some point anyway.
I’ve adjusted the security my entire LJ so it’s friends-only now. I’ll probably go through and change the photography entries to be public, but that’d be all.
Blargh! So far, 2010 can go fuck itself in the ear. Although kungfupolarbear being here is absolutely fantastic. We’ve been married for just over eight months now, and I have no idea where that time has gone! Squee.
[EDIT]
And I just got a call from my friend’s boss about the sysadmin job, he wants to meet up Tuesday next week! Huzzah.