Dan Makovec’s blog

Note to self

When attempting to travel from point A to point B, never attempt a new route of travel just before midnight on a Sunday - not in London anyway. It’s expensive.

As a result of getting hooked on cheesy 80s/90s music downloads courtesy of Kazaa, and American Pie on channel 5, we left Baron’s Court for Lewisham a little late, about 11:20. Deciding on a “faster” route, we Picadilly’d to Green Park, then Jubilee’d to Canary Wharf. Upon our arrival at 12:05, we discovered we’d missed the last southbound DLR by about 20 minutes (And they call London a world-class city!!!), and we were now stuck in the almost deserted tangle of glass and steel skyscrapers (there are even more skyscrapers now than in the piccy), with nothing but the occasional bulldozer and crane cranking away building the next crystal tower to keep us company.

Following the boyscout’s principal of always being prepared, I dialled up London Transport to find the quickest night bus route to our destination, which I was promptly given. We needed to catch the 277 to the Blackwall Tunnel, then the 108 down to Lewisham. Only two problems: Number 1 - we waited about 15 minutes for the 277, which never arrived. So we walked through the construction zone, across the dockland markets, under a near-deserted motorway and through a suburb up to the 108’s bus stop. This took about 15 minutes through the rather brisk night air.

That’s where we found the second problem: The blackwall Tunnel’s south-bound lane was closed for construction on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, so the bus stop which we’d searched for and finally got to was out of service. In the end we had to climb back up to the main road and hail a cab. Because of the tunnel closure, we had to drive all the way around the bend in the Thames that you see in the opening credits of Eastenders down to another tunnel and down to Lewisham. Final cost: 18 pounds! Final time home: 1:05

Wrapping up the pay dispute

Today and Friday I’m in an off-site engineering conference. It’s kinda nice being away from computers all day and still getting paid. I’ve actually learned some fairly valuable things about security and system reliability that I’ll try to start applying to our project from next week. Oh yeah, the venue, The Lanesborough Hotel on Hyde Park Corner, is pretty swanky too, with great finger food for breakfast and lunch. Hmm, that reminds me, breakfast is at 8.30 tomorrow so I better make this entry short so I can get some sleep!

The big boss came up to me today and tried to make amends, saying “I hope everything’s cool between us”. No aplogies or anything. That, and the fact that he introduced me to an international team as an Oracle DBA shows just how on the pulse his finger is.

The good news though is that I checked my ITG account tonight, and the cheque has finally cleared, meaning that I’ll get paid this month. There’s also a second cheque, for last month’s work, that’s due to clear next week, so my reserves will be topped back up again and I’ll be ok until the next snafu.

Also good (I think) is that it appears I’m wanted beyond the end of my contract. Let’s hope it’s a smooth transition and they don’t try that “times are tough, we all need to tighten our belts” crap to get me to cut my rate. Frankly I don’t have the patience for it and will start dropping the CV in elsewhere as soon as I get a whiff of trouble.

Got my Hep A/B booster shot tonight, so my right arm’s a little tender. Gotta love the free health service in this country. If this were Oz I’d have paid $20 for the privilige of being disease free.

Commuting

The sun’s out again. What a weird couple of days! The weather has been so patchy - the temp dropped by about 10c between Sunday and Monday, and there’s been a constant icy northerly breeze blowing across the town. Yesterday we had a sunny morning followed by absolutely ferocious downpours in the afternoon - the first serious rain I’ve seen here since February! It’s still quite cool - you need a jacket to go anywhere now. But, the sun’s back out and shining significantly weakened rays upon the street below.

The last two days I’ve been coming into work from Lewisham. Strangely enough, when I have to come all that distance, I’m usually here by 9.30, whereas when I come from Baron’s Court I’m rarely in before 10.30.

I’m a crazy driver, always wanting to shave extra minutes off of my travel time by taking back streets and avoiding traffic lights. Not having driven in 9 months, I’m becoming just as skilled at taking shortcuts on the tube and trains. I’m amazed at the number of different ways I can use the public transport system to get between A and B. If I’m really bored in a meeting and have my laptop with me, I hit the TFL site and use the TubeGuru to try to plot a new fast route (if you want a hope of understanding the rest of this post, I suggest you follow the link).

From Baron’s Court it’s a 15 minute tube ride here. Well actually if I take the district line door to door it’s 25 minutes because it always gets held up in Earls Court, so I usually hop on the Picadilly from home, pass through Earls Court really quickly, then get off at the last point the Picadilly and District intercect - South Kensington - and jump trains for the one stop to Sloane Square. More often than not I manage to grab a passing Circle-line or incoming Wimbledon tube, and in the worst case scenario I just end up with the same ol district train I could have caught to start with. So with a brief 2-minute walk across a station, I gain at worst 0 and at best 10 minutes.

From home to Lewisham is a different story. The most straightforward method is district all the way to Embankment, run up Embankment Plc to Charing Cross station and hop a Connex to Lewisham, finishing off with a one stop trip on the DLR. Total time: 45 minutes. Alternatively I can take the Connex to Greenwich and DLR down to Lewisham, but I haven’t tested this time yet.

Problem is that the Connex tends to be a bit unreliable - sometimes trains get stuck at Waterloo for ages, and sometimes they don’t come in at all. This can blow the trip out to about 1:15. Choice number two is to take the District all the way to Monument/Bank, then hop a southeast-bound DLR past the Docklands down to Lewisham. This always gets me there, but takes 1:00, and involves a rediculously long walk through Bank station from the tube to the DLR.

I’m thinking of ways to streamline this journey. I could shave off a few minutes by taking the Picadilly to South Kensington then transferring over to the District/Circle to Embankment or Bank. I may also be able to save a few minutes more time on the southbound DLR ride by taking the District as far as Westminster, then switching to the Jubilee to Canary Wharf and jumping on the DLR there. I’d be interested to give this a go and get the final times. The Jubilee’s the fastest tube in the network, but the walk between tube and DLR at Canary Wharf exposes me to the elements, and it’s a few minutes.

Given that the Picadilly is usually faster than the district, I may be able to grab another minute by taking the Picadilly to Green Park and the Jubilee from there, although there’s that long walk down the Gattaca tunnel (as Brian calls it) between platforms.

My final choice is to take the Picadilly up to Holborn, then hop the Central (also a fast tube when it’s not derailed) to Bank and DLR from there. I’m not sure this would really save me much time though.

The worst part of all the above is - I knew every one of those routes without needing to consult the map! I’d say I need to get out more, but I think the above is testimony to the fact that I really have gone out a fair bit.

Autumn hits

I’m a little tired today. I crashed at Brian’s last night - and the bed just felt wrong! It’s funny how you get used to your own bed, and no other bed feels quite right afterwards. I noticed this when I first settled down in London. When Myk and I got our flat together, as soon as I laid on my bed, it became “mine”, and was the most comfortable place in the world. After travelling the world for 3 months it felt great to know that I’d be sleeping in the same bed night after night for a while. Then when I moved into my current flat, I adopted that bed just as quickly - even though it is much harder and totally differently shaped to any other bed I’ve had. When I went back to Adelaide and what is *really* my bed - a lovely queensized ensemble, it felt a bit weird the first two nights, but I settled in pretty quicky. Sleeping anywhere else just isn’t the same.

The weekend was great. Saturday, a dozen of us got together and had a picnic in Greenwich Park. The first of us turned up at 1pm, then the rest over the next hour. Considering the fact that half the people had never met each other before and the only common link in most cases was me, everybody got along really well!

We ate a heap of food, then a few of us hit a ball and threw the frisbee around for a few hours, taking turns at resting under the trees and just sitting around chatting. When the light got dim we packed our things and headed up to the observatory to check out the laser pointing out over the docklands, marking out zero longitude. The sky was incredibly clear, yet the beam was still the most visible I’d ever seen it.

The park closes at 9pm in September, but the sun sets about 7.30 these days, so it was really dark, and Canary Wharf stood out like some sort of futuristic utopian metropolis - further enhanced by the two new skyscrapers that shot up from nothing back in March to nearly the hight of the main tower now, all lit up like a Christmas tree.

Sunday, Brian and I helped Blair and Christo perform the speediest flat-move in history, from Canada Water out to Kilburn. I hadn’t been back to Kilburn since Myk and I left Cricklewood, and it felt kinda strange to be back. They’ve cleaned the area up a bit, although we didn’t go up as far as Cricklewood, mainly moving the guys in then checking out the high street around Kilburn tube and Brondesbury station. We stopped in at a patisserie with some fantastic cakes for a bite and a drink, then left the boys to have a rest and took the bus down to Marble Arch, strolling through Mayfair for a while and grabbing a latte in Starbucks. Eventually we went back to my place, where Brian showed his prowess in the kitchen, making a Ravioli Dalupan (tomato based, with onion, capsicum and a hint.. er.. no, an entire pig of bacon with a nice salty finish). Yum!

We were going to see Underworld, but sort of lost interest by the time we made it to the cinema, and ended up just crashing at Lewisham for the night.

The BOFH

Given my state of mind during the paycheque fisaso, I started getting into the back-copies of Simon Travaglia’s Bastard Operator From Hell. I’ve been reading his regular fortnightly updates in The Register along with other technology tidbits and enjoying them for about a year, but thought I’d look back into history to find out where it all began.

It brought back memories of life back at The Levels (Now called Mawson Lakes - see that round building in the middle? That’s the lift tower. I’ve got a lot of fond memories of that lift with the lights off…, and OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO THE BUILDINGS??!! Graz/Myk - where the hell are THESE buildings? It looks like somebody’s puked up a blueberry milkshake!!)… The continuous battle between the students and the IT “support” staff. The endless silly hacking attempts and rediculous punitive measures doled out. The 1MB account quotas (and the big wahoo when we used our internal contacts to get upgraded to 2MB!) and the supersoaker fights in the PC labs… ahhh, memories.

Newsflash: Dan gets cash

Yes, 18 days late, the cheque has finally arrived with my agent and has been deposited in the bank. Of course being a cheque, it will still take 3 days to clear, but at least it’s there now. I’ve taken a cash advance to get me through the weekend, after which everything should be hunky dorey.

Not a single word of apology from accounts payable, management or anybody. At least they’ve finally showed me their cards and proven my rampant cynicism of the corporate world - which colleagues (many of whom have since been made redundant) have told me previously were bordering on the paranoid - to be justified.

Still, coming into this job and knowing about the general shafting that companies like to give their employees, I had very little expectations. I expected no job satisfaction, a poor work environment, and no benefits. The only thing I expected was to be paid, on time. Now that they have broken through even this low barrier, I believe I can set up a belief structure within myself so that no job can ever disillusion or disappoint me again.

I have just begun scheduling vacation time, and by god I’m going to use it all!

The mountains are calling

One of my mates and former Mot colleagues, Tim, just sent me a mail confirming what I’d been waiting to hear: Whistler is on!

The plan is that on Christmas Day, I fly out of Heathrow and land in Seattle, where I meet up with Tim, Ange and any of their friends (or mine for that matter - hint hint Ben or anybody else who might be interested!), hire a minivan and drive north over the border to Vancouver. Stop for lunch, then head towards Whistler.

We then spend the next 10 days in the Whistler resort snowboarding! Now, on the minus side, I don’t have a *clue* how to snowboard, but after speaking to some friends at dinner tonight, it’s apparently pretty easy to pick up when you have decent snow to practice on, and the average Joe should become fairly proficient within 2-3 days. If all goes well towards the end of the stay, we hire a chopper and take it to the top of Whistler, then spend half a day boarding to the bottom.

I guess I’ll be doing Christmas a day early with Brian (he flies down under 3 days later anyway), then new year’s in our little chalet. I can hardly wait! I’ve already looked into plane tickets, and at 300 quid return to Seattle max, I can’t go wrong. This is one holiday I *really* need.

Do I hear any other takers out there for 10 days fun in the snow? One of Tim’s friends is flying up from Adelaide - I wonder if any of mine would be interested in doing the same

This just in…

OK I’ve only just now been promised “the cheque is in the mail”, after it apparently needed to be signed by somebody else (not only do my cheques need the head of engineering’s sig, they also apparently need two bean-counter types to cross-verify and sign). While we’ve all heard this before, it’s the first time I’ve heard it from this company. All things being equal, I *may* have cash tomorrow. Stay tuned, sports fans!

Still waiting…

September 17. Still no money. The people responsible are not at their desks. I have tried IM, email and phone - nobody answers. I leave voicemails, nobody replies. I fired off an email to everybody involved, and set the receipt notification flag so that I was informed when people had read the mail. I received the automatic “read” confirmations 3 days ago - still no replies though.

I’m really fed up. I just want to pack my shit up and go home. Not to Barons Court - the other home. I read over my contract terms and conditions last night - it says I can give 4 weeks notice for any reason. I even fired up Word to write the letter, but stopped when I realised Brian was due round for dinner.

How the hell does this happen?

Well, it had to happen…

Ricochet was on yesterday, and it fell a little short of the mark we’d all set for it. Crowds were well down on previous events and two of the billed DJs failed to show (one was sick and who knows what happened to the other one, although I suspect a bit of interclub-rivalry foul play). The music just did not hit full stride at all.

Added to that there was a slight tenseness in the atmosphere, courtesy of a flatmate and a (former?) friend who were maintaining a steady distance the whole night. To top it all off, I got talking to a fairly nice guy during a break from the dance floor. Mid-conversation, he offered me something I’d tried before and not liked, but I stupidly accepted, and spent the next hour with a fuzzy head, quietly cursing myself for doing so.

The up-side, as I’d already researched and known from a previous encounter, was that the effects were limited to a very finite period of no more than an hour, after which everything goes back to normal. Symptoms include a heavy ringing in the ears, the dizzy feeling you get when you’ve held your breath for too long (in my case usually in a vain attempt to cure hiccups) - only lasting for a prolonged period, and then the bizarre sensation of having no sense of emotion and the inability to recognise facial expression in others.

The emotional symptom is in my opinion the least pleasant of the lot. This kicks in within 5 minutes of the substance being introduced into your system. You literally become Mr. Spock, completely analytical without any sensation whatsoever. The pattern of thought I went through was:

“I see the effects have kicked in… Interesting… I wonder whether I should get another bottle of water… Yes, that would be a good idea… Oh, I already have one.. Should I drink it?.. Yes, that would be a rational suggestion at this point in time, considering how much perspiration I appear to be exuding”….

*drink*…

“That appears to have been refreshing.. I’m confident that my body feels better now.. Maybe I should dance now.. Yes, that would seem appropriate…”

You get the idea. Then you step on the dance floor, hardly able to hear the music, but glance down at your feet and notice that not only are they moving, but they are moving in perfect synchronisation with everybody else’s. Unable to determine why this is so, you simply accept it to be the case, and allow it to happen.

One of the side-effects of being unable to process emotional feedback from other’s facial expressions is an acute sense of paranoia. Every face looks blank, or even slightly disappointed (check out the disappointed smiley at this link), and you start to wonder just what it is that you’ve done to disappoint so many people. Possessing nothing but warped logic thought processes, you start trying to assess the situation and figure out what could be wrong - an utterly fruitless exercise, because more likely than not there is nothing wrong at all. If you let it continue too much, you start to panic. Who would have thought that the ability to interpret simple visual cues such as the width of a person’s eyes or the tension and direction of their lips could make so much difference to how you perceive them and the world around them?

Another 10-15 minutes later, and there’s some sort of visual cue that you didn’t notice before, sort of like when you’re swimming underwater and you look up at the surface and notice somebody standing beside the pool. In my case, this was Brian cutting it up on the dance floor. You just keep focusing on this object, like a light at the end of a tunnel. With time the object becomes clearer and clearer as if swimming back up to the surface until finally you break free, all your senses and emotions return in a rush as you jar back into reality, take a deep breath and everything is normal again, except for the complete memory you have of the experience and the determination never to do that again.

Still having said that, it was nice to have a bunch of friends out with us for the first time, and most seemed to enjoy themselves, I guess if for no other reason than the fact that the enjoyed the novelty of the experience, this being their first time. I tell myself all the time that I shouldn’t hype things up too much, because they can only disappoint. Not that I had a *bad* time, I just wanted a bit *more* out of it.

It was my first time out in ages, and despite a little bit of a cough I held up pretty well during the event. I’m back at the gym full-time this week, having ramped myself back up over a couple of days last week. I’d say I’m about 95% back in shape, but still need just a wee bit more of a push to get right up there.

I wonder what this week will bring?