Dan Makovec’s blog

Back in Sydney

Well, I’m stuck here for a week, and once again, Sydney has turned on the charm.

We have the wet weather, the grumpy check-in bitch clerk, and the Pakistani taxi driver who told me that all gays will burn in hell and he’d like to personally cut all their throats as soon as I mentioned that I used to live in Newtown.

I’m theoretically here until Friday, working night shift down in the datacentre for the next couple of days. With any luck though, I’ll get my stuff done sooner and get back on a plane a day or so early. Fingers crossed!

Off to the mountains

Easter is here and we’re fed up with Sydney, so we’re off to the Snowy mountains for a couple of days of clear blue skies, fresh air and views of Australia’s tallest mountain, Mt. Kosciuszko.

I just confirmed the booking today. Talk about leaving it to the last minute! Still, it was hard figuring out where to go. We’ve been north already and done the Blue Mountains to death, and really there’s not as much readily accessible information about the Snowies as you might think there would be.

Still, we’re getting the woolies and cameras out. Should be a nice couple of days.

Catch up

Yes, I’m still around.

I haven’t been blogging for a while, mainly because I’ve had a lot on lately. Trips to Adelaide and Melbourne, a rediculously increased workload, preparing to move house, and something big, that if everything pans out the way I’m expecting this week, I’ll be able to mention publicly next week.

I’m thinking about setting up a mini-wiki for my own personal use (and for the use of any friends/colleagues). A colleague has one up that he uses to store handy notes to himself when he learns something new, and I think it’s a great idea. I’ve been playing with Wikis at work over the past month, and finally get them. More soon.

In the meantime, here’s a link to a great tutorial for setting up virus scanning on the Mac using the free ClamAV (we use it on our Linux servers at work). Here’s another one, to an AppleScript that lets Mail.app scan your mail for viruses and deal with it accordingly.

What a week

Brian and I went out to Dom Qixote’s last night. Great food from Sydney’s Spanish quarter. A platter of mixed tapas for entree, and a massive paella for dinner, followed by some lovely home-made creme catalan - all washed down with a jug of sangria. Yum! It certainly chilled me out after the week that was.

There’s no other word for it - the week at work was a complete c*nt. It started ok, but rapidly deteriorated as I (with the full support of my seniors) began moving work out of our group and into the group that was supposed to be responsible for it in the first place. I’ve never copped so much abuse in a workplace !

Apart from him, we’ve had a few vendor software bugs that have been causing headaches. Now, how that is supposed to affect me as someone in platform development, as opposed to operations, is anybody’s guess, but since I was one of the two people with the most knowledge of the vendor’s software about 6 months ago in my previous job, and the other guy’s on holidays, guess who got called in to deal with every situation as it arose, while still being expected to handle my own job? *sigh* If nothing else, I’m being forced to learn the skill of delegation pretty quickly. One more staff member would make things a lot easier.

To cap it off on Friday night, we began testing some software I wrote a couple of months ago. The idea is that the software is supposed to monitor modem connections, detect old firmware in the modems, and force an upgrade. The good news is the software works (thank god, I was pretty worried that it would fall in a heap). The bad news is that once we started load testing with more than about 10 simultaneous connections, the entire test network crashed. So we’ve had to send off reports to the vendors of the network management software to get a fix in place, just so we can roll out my software. We’ve been trying to get this program out there since May - I’m starting to think it’ll never happen! Well actually, I’m being a little over-dramatic. Put slightly more dramatically, in the words of one other fellow here who’s great at drama, it *must* happen in order for the network to survive. I’m just eager to get it off of my todo list.

By the time it crashed last night, I didn’t care any more. It was drinkies time in the office while we got to preview our new TV campaign. This one looks pretty good. Hopefully it’ll get us the extra subscriptions we need to reach break-even point. Of course if it *does* work then that comes back to bite me too, as I need to get the platform to the level where it can scale to accomodate the number of users we’re hoping to have. No problem technically, just another job in a high workload.

Good news! I’m finally taking leave. Apart from another weekender in Adelaide on the 19th, then a weekend in Melbourne on the 26th, I’ve got two weeks off at the end of September. We’re hitting the travel agents today to find a destination. The smart money’s on Bali: beautiful beaches, health-spa massages, temples, jungles, asian food, and a quick drop in on Ms. Corby to say hi. Something to look forward to!

Gotta do my tax soon. I just want to get my finances in a known state so i can think about that car I’ve been eyeing off.