What I did on my weekend

I have a new job.

I think I mentioned that before… my last boss couldn’t manage his way out of a wet paper bag with a map in a brewery next to a brothel, but because he was a clinical psychopath this didn’t stop him from from ignoring the tax office’s increasingly strident and panicky demands, various software vendor’s legal demands for actually *buying* thier product that we use to mmake our stuff, and the complete lack of any actual business income to wank on to anyone that’ll listen about how rich he’d be, just as soon as the business took off.

So, like CinnKitty (not the same kitty as before, it seems) I jumped ship, to a lovely environmental monitoring company.

Or so I thought, the guy who had the job before I, was either a madman or a genius, had coded eveything to work, exactly as it was, forever.

Which was fine, unless you wanted to put something that wasn’t XP on the network, or upgrade to Office 2007, or, god forbid, change an admin password, killing the lovingly hand-crafted Intranet which had the domain admin password in plaintext in it, to gain write access to a protected directory.

So, it was out of the pan of evil bosses, into the fire of a place that has to be rebuilt, essentially from the ground up.

But, I not only have the might of God on my side (I’m rebuilding with Linux boxes ) I also have a new co-worker with a powerful weapon…

Spiceworks, which, amongst other things is a ticketing system for help desk requests- and it’s seriously amazing how the help requests drop off when it’s discovered that just dropping in for a chat, and by the way the printer’s running slow again, can you just pop round and have a look? is logged and reported and accounted for.

Plus the more serious issues stay remembered- no more forgetting that you were workign on a site-to-site vpn that’s worth $20,000 a day in production for the company because someone’s 100 mb email attachment has clogged thier outbox.

Add the full time parenthood (5 months now, seems like a lifetime!) to the mix, with no respite, as his mum has actually been deployed (who’d have thought there’d be a need for short, slightly manic medics in far north Queensland? But apparently there is) and all of a sudden, I have no time for this blog..

But there’s much to tell, so very very much…

We’re talking J-lo size here

I’ve got a big-ass new plasma TV! I’ve always wanted one! And… get this, it was free! (well, kinda, I had to set up a web filter for a community college, in exchange. For the record- SME server with Dansguardian works a treat)

The community centre where a friend fo mine works was about to chuck it out, because it was too big… so I claimed it pronto, stuck it to the wall, and plugged it in… and it works! Except…

The reason it was free, is that they also got it for nix, from Cityrail (train company). It was one of the monitors that gave arrival times.

It has burn-in…

It always tells me, in ghostly letters across the top of the screen, that it’s Arrivals, and across the bottom, that the next train is due in (blur) minutes.

Nice to know…

The moving finger, having writ…

Moves on…

Misstress M appears to have hidden from us…

and I miss her.

Silly I know, to miss someone who I have never, and will never meet, talk to, or otherwise interact with other than via text, but I followed her antics every day at my old job. It was lovely to lose myself in her new loves, imagine myself at the beaches she photographed, cheer her on as she took on a law degree and set her sights firmly beyond the glass ceiling.

But, after the obligatory “what the fuck have i done i don’t have a sodding clue how to do this new job and they’re going to figure it out and sack me, I know it” time, which tends to last about 3 months for me , I looked up to see where my favourite soap opera was, and it was gone…

Oh well. Good luck M, I hope things are all good for you

You used to be cool, man…

Wow, a long time between drinks… but there is a reason for all this…

1) a new job- I’ve been quietly seething at the insanity of the workplace I was at- CinnnKitty may have worked for a Morally Corrupt Mortgage Broker, but I worked for a serious psychopath- and like most psychopaths you find in industry he was initially witty and charming, but after a while, the true scale of his insanity was revealed…I could rant for hours on the curiously and profoundly illegal activities that went on in there, and the promises, and disappointments, but it’s seriously not worth it.

I just get.. angry and they’re going down anyway- you can’t just.. not pay taxes or super (401k to you ‘Merkin types) and get away with it… nor can you use pirated software as company policy and expect pissed off ex-employees tokeep quiet about it…

I’m now an IT manager for an environmental monitoring company, which is entertaining in it’s own right- no office psychopaths, but an evil legacy from an ex-employee- Microsoft Dynamics.

If you ever get asked to manage this particular piece of hell, run, run away. Screaming is encouraged.

It’s a horrid, clunky thing that takes 3 Windows 2003 or higher servers to run (database server, Terminal Server, and Internet portal service), costs in excess of $100,000 plus $10,000 pa to get a support plan (which you need, we use it every day), and, only 7 people can have a go on it at any given point in time.

This week, the internet portal died in the ass and I ended up having to rebuild the entire machine, operating system, IIS, SharePoint web extensions, custom web application installation, all coached by this guy in India and then it still didn’t work, but then it magically did and I lost 3 days of my life I’ll never get back.

But, now it’s working there’s going to be Ghost images made, so that I’ll never have to deal with this ever again… just a restore…

I also had to write my first.NET/ ASPX page yesterday, and I feel dirty on the inside…

2) I’m a full time parent, to a child that is essentially, me. No kidding- there’s a photo of him in the hallway, a snapshot of me at that age tucked beside it, and it’s the same kid.

His mum is in the military, and got deployed, so he’s here now for the indefinite future. But, his mum made some curious choices in raising him- she read lots of child raising manuals and practiced what she read- she negotiated everything, explained her choices, and let him ‘be himself’

He’s a pretty bright kid so this translated into pretty much finding out the right words to say to get what he wanted, and saying them a lot.

And one of the things he wanted to do was be vegetarian. He asked ‘where does meat come from’, and his mum showed him on the Internet. The next day he vowed not to touch any animal products again. This is fine when you’re a parent that doesn’t have to work (she has been inactive for the past few years, and got a phenomenal inheritance so didn’t need to work unless she wanted to) but, not when you’re a full time worker with a house with a kitchen that looks like one of those photos of a house in Israel after a rocket attack, complete with blood stains after the inlaws gave me half a cow for the dog. Didn’t bother to skin it or anything first but…

So, vegetarianism is out, except…

I used to be vegetarian, for exactly the same reasons, when I was young, and idealistic. I lived with Hare Krsnas, danced naked on the beach, played with, and breathed fire in the rainforests and was going to change the world.  So, sometimes I tell the child that he eats what he’s given, and if he doesn’t he misses out on icecream, then I take his computer privileges away, and so on until he gives in, and I hear my parents voice coming out of my mouth, and I feel…

sad… compromised… growed up and, well,

old.

I wonder what else I have to look forward to, where I have to watch the child do the same things I did,and I wonder, will I still be cool? Am I destined, like my parents before me to be out of touch, responsible…

respectable?

Money can’t buy me love

But this does:

Separate 3 egg yolks into a large ceramic or metal bowl. Stir in half a cup of caster sugar, and vigorously whisk with a fork- it’ll go slightly creamy.

Pour a 300 ml tub of thickened cream and a littel under half a cup of full cream milk into a saucepan. Slooowly heat it until it’s hot, but don’t boil it.

Slowly pour the milk/cream mix into the egg/sugar mix while vigorously stirring, so there’s no lumps.

Return all the mixture to the saucepan and heat until nearly, but not quite boiling again. When the mixture is a little thicker, so that it has a consistency that might give Misstress M and Cinkitty ideas and/or giggles, chill it in the fridge for a few hours.

Obtain an icecream maker. They’re pretty cheap- I found one for about $50 that has a metal bowl full of antifreeze or something, that you put in the freezer overnight, and this goes into a machine that basically stirs whatever is in there while it freezes.

When the mixture is cool (this is actually important- warm mixture will take too long to freeze and the ice cream maker bowl will warm up before it’s done) flavour it with something- dark drinking chocolate, coffee, smooshed up and stewed mango/strawberries, vanilla, whatever, and put it into the icecream maker until it’s done.

If you really want, freeze some chocolate treats and hit them with a hammer so that they smash into a million bits and add those, but right at the end or they’ll clog the icecream maker.

Stick the icecream into a plastic container, lick the stirrer (but not the bowl as it’s still probably cold enough to stick your tongue to it) and put the icecream in the freezer for a few hours until it’s hard.

Then, serve it in a cone to the 10 year old son who’s mother unexpectedly turned up one day and gave him to you, saying, essentially it’s your turn now.

Unexpected entertainment

Sally works for a Job Nework provider. Here, in Australia, these organisations are contracted by the government to provide services to the unemployed, and get a fee per client.

Lately, business has been good.

So good, in fact, that as a Christmas present to thier employees, last weekend they flew them *all*, and thier partners (yes, this includes yours truly) to a city, put us all up in a 5 star hotel, then hired out a town hall for a 3 course banquet.

Then, they opened the bar, with an unlimited tab. I don’t remember much after that- it all started off all nice and civilised: entrees, champagne, even some impromptu opera from a woman whose teeth I still have nightmares about.

Then, it all quickly degenerated when an local band came on, and started ripping into some Fleetwood Mac covers, then some of thier own songs.

And all of a sudden I was 20 again, bopping away, pashing a pretty girl in the mosh pit (Sally, of course!), hundreds of kilometres from home, drunk off my ass and just not giving a shit.

Woo!

Shell shock

.308 Magnum + absolutely no experience + fox@100 yards = bruised shoulder, bum (where I fell on it) and a surprisingly large, sticky crater.

Gotta love the rural life… once my ears stop ringing.

Damn you Adobe…

The thing I do for money is program, in Adobe Flex. And one of the little niches I’ve carved for myself is doing 3D interfaces.

I’ve hacked Papervision3D pretty extensively to make this niche- Papervision is a pretty revolutionary 3D engine for Flash/Flex, although it *is* a little obscure to use.

For simpler things Away3D is probably easier, Papervision is quicker however.

But enough of those comparisons. Most (actually all) of the 3D stuff is based around navigational interfaces- menus and so on. It’s sort of a ‘wow factor’ kind of thing.

So, after studying and hacking at this 3D stuff for about 6 months, I reckon I’m pretty good at it. I can quickly and effectively whip up a nice 3D animated menu, secure in the knowledge that it would take someone else AGES to reproduce, giving me an edge so that my increasingly insane boss can’t actually fire me, regardless of how many reality checks I throw his way (which never end up well- the promises of riches and stock options are wearing thin, given that these guys, in an effort to save money, simply stopped paying tax one day, about a year ago. This can not end well, and I said as much once, and got screamed at for about half an hour).

Then yesterday, I decide to check out the new Adobe Flash Player- the thing that plays those funky little animations in web pages, and noticed it can do this.

Simple Flash Player 3D demo

It does, natively and in about 3 lines, what it took me a full week to code and do in Papervision. What you’re looking at there is Flash having 3D capability, built in.

I should be happy that my life became so much easier. And I will be.

After I get that time back I spent learning something I don’t need anymore…

Nah, it’s all good. I’ll have to start putting some demos together playing with this new Flash and posting them here. It will make a nice change from bitching about the boss and old girlfriends

Zaza

Many many moons ago, I was unemployed, half-heartedly part-timing at Uni, and living on the beach. I surfed every day, ate free, wholesome Hari Krsna food for lunch, and that was about it really.

Needless to say, I was very pretty And like most pretty young things there wasn’t a lot going on upstairs, other than, boobies.

Somtimes food, but mostly boobies.

One day, I was paddling in from a session at my local break, possibly saying ‘dude’, when I noticed long, honey coloured hair flopping about next to a mini-malibu. ‘Hello, I thought, boobies!’. I paddled over, saw a young girl about my age trying to get into shore and not quite making it, and did what any hot blooded man would do in that situation, and offered her a tow in holding my legrope.

“Tank, you, you ‘ave saved moi liff’, said the lovely young lass, with a French accent that drove pretty much all thought, what little there was in there, out.

‘I am Zaza, and you vill neffer see my pussy, but here ees my number, you mus’ scratch eet in your wax’, she continued.

And so began some of the more confusing months of my life. Zaza, true to her word, never let me play with her ladyparts- just as well in retrospect as I had actually very little experience with them at that point. It would have been disappointing.

But she did insist on teaching me to kiss, and sleeping draped over me whenever she stayed over, and once loosening a tooth when I accidentally touched something naughty when I snuggled back. She was extremely vocal about my lack of conversation about other things than surf, and demanded I be more interesting, which I dutifully complied, reading obscure philosophies (Sartre, not that obscure really) so I knew what the hell she was going on about half the time, as she rambled on about her degree in another city she was doing part time.

I was smitten, and a little frightened of this emotionally violent and confusing, yet oddly satisfying relationship, and I wanted it to continue forever.

And then, one day, I called her house, and she had gone. The shared house I was in dissolved that week, and this was before mobile phones, and even the Internet (the Internet was there, but emails were not widely available. I used a Telnet session to access Pine on the University servers! If you know what I just talked about, feel old) was not as useful as it is now for stalking tracking those you love and have lost.

I pined for a good year. And, slowly, by degrees, I got over it. I concentrated on my Uni, met other less entertaining women, some of which even let me see thier pussies, and eventually filed it as one of those experiences that have no explanation, but will always be there as a cherished memory.

(wavy lines) 15 years later, she turns up on Facebook.

And now I can’t think.

Sorry

I really, really have no excuse.

I could list reasons, such as still being in the same crap job working for the same egomaniacal psychopath (I use these terms in a clinical sense), spending more time with Sally in the afternoons (Woo!), gittin’ a gun, and discovering that harvesting feral rabbits for cheap puppy chow is so much fun, it should be illegal (but it’s not, I checked), stopping smoking, then subsequently discovering that I can ride a pushbike 30km without dying, starting the process of becoming a full-time parent (Edan’s mum is re-enlisting in the Army)…

And so on…

So, it’s back to you kids. What should I entertain the two, nay three of those that still check this page with? I can do kids stories, crap nerd jokes (there are only 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary, and those that don’t) and meaningless rants about dumb bosses and curiously dumb, and equally curiously continually employed co-workers, so give me a subject.

Or attention.

I like attention