I'm an uncle!

I can just see it now.. that funny/seedy uncle petrol_pumper that gets pissed on red wine at the family christmas dinner..

Like *I* need to prove anything..

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS d-- s: a- C++++ UL+++ P++ L+++++ E--- W+++ N o-- K w--
O M V- PS+++ PE Y PGP t+ 5 X++ R+ !tv b+++ DI- D++
G-- e* h-- r+ y+++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Random update

I heard yesterday that I'm my CIOs nephew!

Wow how cool is that!

Hopefully I'll hear some more interesting things soon.. there's obviously a bit of a rumour mill grinding away somewhere here.

My brothers girlfriend is just about to have their first baby! Which is really cool. An extra member of the family!!

Not much else to report. Currently clustering a couple of webservers and MySQL databases together which is OK but not exactly game testing.

I've got a new baby

She's not great in bed, but she has a really great out-going personality!

Christ how sad does that sound.. :-)

What else can be done?

For the past few weeks I've been in denial. I've not been thinking that anything is at all wrong with Tomoko and I. I didn't want to face the truth about our relationship.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s I had a long term relationship with a girl named Tessa. She was from Tassie like me and we ended up moving to Sydney together when I found I needed to in order to get a career going. In the last 2 years I felt like something had changed. I wasn't sure if it was me or her that had shifted but something was definitely amiss.

I spent the last year of that relationship unhappy yet not talking about it. Tessa seemed almost permanently on my case, I really didn't love her anymore. The last 6 months of that relationship was, of course, horrid. So why did I hold on so long?

I think there were a few reasons:
o Didn't know what I wanted (do I realise what I'm giving; is she the one?)
o Scared to (will I find someone else)
o Didn't want to hurt her feelings

Essentially I think all of that can be put down to the feeling that I hadn't lived life yet. Just too scary!

At least, that's my current analysis of that period.

I've just had a conversation about very similar feelings with Tomoko. Funny that isn't it?

I'll have to do what I wished Tessa had done.

Say "I'll make it easy on you".

-=([TMX-77])=-

I've got it. Did the knowledge test this morning at the RTA, got my ticket, and picked up the bike at lunch. Had to get back to work.. How much fun was it!

• Shat myself turning out of the bike shop.
• Rode in a bus lane.
• Hit neutral at 30 clicks.
• Crept up the side of cars at the red light and made an ass of myself stalling when it went green.
• Did 70 down the freeway with my indicator on.
• Stalled.
• Freaked out when someone passed me in my own lane.
• Got yelled at by a wanker in a minibus.
• Followed another learner with his indicator flashing *chuckle*
• Realised my own indicator was still flashing.
• Pulled over to check my L plate was still on and almost lost balance.

And I've gotta ride home tonight! Woohoo!! (I'm shittin myself)

The notepad of the internet

Internet Explorer users: Don't click this link.
Click this one

Seriously, it's about time to step into the 21^st century.

Tomoko takes the weight off

Well what an interesting week it's been. I was starting to suspect something was up with Tomoko from Friday. Straight after arriving she didn't seem to happy but I put it down to jet lag. When Friday rolled around and she seemed to be moping I began asking "What's up? You look like you're hating it here". The reply was home sickness.. But she didn't wanna talk about it so I was suspicious.

I tried to make her laugh as much as I can over the last couple of days but it's had a very short lived effect.

Last night on the way home my thoughts were black. I couldn't shake the feeling that something was going on that she wasn't telling me. So I finally confronted her with it. Straight up, what the hells going on and don't tell me home sickness. She's such a bad liar.

She made a mistake coming back. Her feelings have changed but she didn't realise until coming back to Australia.

...

I didn't know what to say at first. I guess everybody makes mistakes. I kinda feel sorry for her that she had to come all this way, and spend all this money, in order to sort out her feelings. Student visas aren't cheap and 6 months college isn't either. I wasn't angry. Actually it was good to see her look so relieved. It was an obvious weight off her shoulders.

So she's started looking for a place to live. I hope she gets the hell out of my apartment.

I'm a bit upset, but hey, I've been through so many emotional break-ups before it just doesn't have the same affect on me anymore. Not saying that I'm a cold, heartless bastard or anything. Just jaded :-)

So where to from here? Probably another couple of months of meaningless sex with strangers. It seems to be the cycle. Maybe this time I won't meet anyone for a while? Try to be the playboy some people assume I am.

Anyway I should be able to concentrate on work a lot more now. I'm setting up a lot of xen boxen to test out our infrastructure changes. Oh and I'll be checking out nomachine some time soon to which will be a nice change from daemons!

Speaking of demons, and I mean the personal variety, I met a real life Microsoft geek last week at a friends party. "Oh so you're a programmer? What language?" "Too many, so I'll just say Microsoft". Man, those guys should get a life. I mean, come on, you don't try to impress people with how many languages you know. Especially when there only Microsoft specific. What's that? VB, VC++ and C#? It's not impressive even to other geeks such as myself.

Learn brainfuck or something and get back to me :-)

**waltzes out singing that's life**

Hyosung GT250R

I'm pickin this baby up after I get my license next week. Put down a deposit yesterday and all the finance came through and everything. It's my first set of motorised wheels, ever! Finally I can legally hit the road on my own. Fuck yeah!
The anticipation is killing me. Sweaty palms. Moist. Wanna get the fuck out of Sydney. Gah!
Alls I need is the damn license.

BattleNerd

Today I had what could be called my first run-in with a co-worker. I'm working what could be called an R&D role, checking out new stuff as we have ideas and trying to figure out if we could fit it into or have it replace parts of our current infrastructure in order to lower licensing costs (free ourselves from vendor lock-in) and decrease the amount of fscking around our IT department has to do.

We've been assigned a block of 12 IP addresses on our local sub-net to do whatever we want with. I've also got a couple of quad xeon's with large discs and ton's of RAM to play around with.

Anyway, we've decided (me and my manager) that it'd be nice to have an rnd sub-domain hanging off our internal DNS system so we can easily address stuff and create an index of all our current stuff at the base, so anyone wondering what us lazy pricks are up to can just go to rnd.OUR.DOMAIN.gov.au and have a bit of a browse and mess around.

There's a guy over the other side of the building who apparently runs most of the network here. He's an Indian dude with a really thick accent that makes it next to impossible to hear what he's saying most of the time. So I go up to him to ask about getting this set up.

Warning: this is basically what I think the dude said. As I noted before he was a hard one to comprehend.

petrol_pumper: Hey bro, I'm petrol_pumper; heard you were the guy to speak to about getting a subdomain sorted out.
BattleNerd: Oh yes well you see it's quite impossible you haven't even filled out the appropriate forms yet I'm sorry I just don't think it's going to be possible.
petrol_pumper: Ah yeah, I've already spoken to Mr. CIO about it, he said it would be fine and that<int>
BattleNerd: We didn't know what the risk is here it's not possible we run Microsoft server and it's very delicate network not what you are used to you can't just go around asking these things oh no that's not the way we do things around here oh no!
petrol_pumper: Uh, ok well how do we go abou<int>
BattleNerd: I don't know where you think you are or where you came from but let me tell you that it's going to be quite impossible I won't be able to do it unless I have the correct forms filled out and anyway I'm in charge of this whole network I don't have time to do what you want and anyway we have 100s of Microsoft servers here that need my attention we can't just let you go plugging in your own stuff what did you want to run anyway?
petrol_pumper: bind 9 on Linux; I've used it befo<int>
BattleNerd: Oh we use Microsoft server here we use Microsoft for everything it's a lot easier than bind very very much easier than what you us<int>
petrol_pumper: ktnxbye.

This dude was a total loony. He reminded me of the freaks you'd see at college that think they know everything and will basically fight you to the death if you try to impart them with any of your own knowledge. Woe betide your hide if you should hint that you might know something they don't. I dealt with these people years ago, in school. Very surprised to see them working professionally with the same attitude. I'm beginning to think that those people who asked me if I'd worked in government before, and were wondering how I'd get along.. so is *this* what they meant?

I'm going to call the Indian dude BattleNerd.

Later on when I was talking to Mr CIO about my experience, he told me that when he first came to this company he had a little chat with BattleNerd. Anyway, Mr CIO was questioning BattleNerd about the links to the outside world we have here. Apparently we have a frame relay link to several other offices around the state. Mr CIO asks BattleNerd how many red, orange and green packets we have. BattleNerd, not having a clue what Mr CIO is talking about, goes into a tirade about how he thinks frame relay works. Along the way, he figures out that orange and red must mean "bad". So we don't have any orange or red packets - only green.

The attitude displayed by BattleNerd is a major source of frustration for Mr CIO, but that's another couple of pages of short stories.

Clearly, BattleNerd doesn't know anything about networking. Much less TCP/IP. He probably doesn't even know what a protocol is. He doesn't even know how to use traceroute or any of those fundamental networking utilities. All he knows how to do is ping. Example, last week the proxy server goes down, and The Rebel(my manager) asks BattleNerd why, what's happened. BattleNerd pings the proxy server machine and says he doesn't know it should work.

Is this why companies are so scared to use anything that doesn't have warranty and support? Because their staff are basically useless, and without 24/7 phone support they would be unable to fix anything that goes wrong?

How else would this companies network still be running with people like BattleNerd at the helm?