well, started my new job. second day in i'm told fairly large redundancies are imminent. lovely. apparently my position is not on the list of those deemed expendable, but still doesn't make for a very comfortable atmos. much of the day spent trying to fix a problem with one of the servers, turned out to be upper case 'C' instead of lower in one of the jserve configs.

read advogato on the way home most of the time, print it at work and then scan through it on the tube. noticed that gman's entries end up being dribbled down the side of the page one word at a time. recon it's the < div > tags you're adding. just thought I'd mention it. then again, maybe it's netscape's fault for not printing properly. could of course find a way of bunging the whole lot onto the palm, which would also save on paper. how about adding advogato to avantgo? must look into it...

l8r...

well, happy 2001 and all that. last year was pretty good on a personal level, crap on a professional level. hoping things will be much better this year. new year celebrations were nicely sedate, spent the time with my so and parents.

quick plug to get rid of some crap lying about the flat : if anyone wants an Abit BH6 motherboard and is prepared to collect said item from my flat (battersea, london) then it's yours. the catch? knackered bios. yes i know that makes the thing pretty useless, that's why i bought a replacement (long story as to why it happened, suffice to say i was careless with the upgrade util and i needed a working board quickly). anyhoo, i'm sure it's of use to someone who either knows where to get a replacement bios chip, or is confident enough to risk hotswapping one out of a working machine. email me if you're interested (orlando at mindless dot com).

8 more days to go before the new job. spending the time documenting all that's up here (pointing at noggin). pretty sure the department will implode soon after i leave. i'll be the last of the original team to go, 8 people since i started over 20 months ago. sniff.

off now to figure out what happened to all those emails i sent yesterday, cos they sure as hell aren't in my inbox...

i've done it at last, well, almost. they are sending me the official offer today, should get it tomorrow, which means i will be able to hand in my notice before the end of the week. i feel a weight has been lifted off my sholders. nervous certainly, but i think i've made the right decision. the job is almost completely what i want, in other words loads of apache, solaris, load balancing, configuration, fault finding etc, not emailing and sitting in meetings all day.

and in other news, not very much. bought my brother a light box which was anything but after i'd lugged it all the way back to the office. i have yet to get it home. thinking now that i don't really need to as i'll have to bring it back again to send it over to him.

nick left yesterday. after having talked about it for over two months it's still odd to see an empty desk where there used to be a big pile of crap. great guy, shame he's gone so far away (half way round the planet far away). we never really had the time to get to know eachother properly, the problem of knowing someone thru work first i suppose. that and i have yet to beat him at yak-paddle (don't ask). i felt honoured to inherit his starwars lego, though i have yet to retrieve the speeder bike pilot from under his desk draws.

must go home. she must be wonrdering what the hell i'm doing here at 7pm.

l8r.

Very interested in the current thread on software reliability, something i've been pondering over for a while now. not much to say about it that others haven't already said. for me the sad thing is that so few people (particularly in the commercial arena) put quality so low down on their list of priorities, and seem to get away with it because low quality has now become the norm. i had a picture tacked to my fridge for a long while of the mechanism inside an old safe. what appealed to me about it was that aswell as designing and making a functional mechanism, the makers had gone to the trouble of engraving the parts with incredibly intricate designs, designs that unless you took the thing to pieces you wouldn't normally see. this meant pride to me. pride in your work. pride knowing that you've done something well.
i'm not saying that the coders (sysadmins, etc) today necessarily take any less pride in what they do, but that they so often don't have a choice. and that this lack of choice is imposed on them by a system that is more interested in making obscene amounts of money than making products that work.

folks here may also be interested in this, an excellent article that apeared on /. a while back about the people who code software for the space shuttle.

and in other news, i've had a job offer! picked out of nine candidates apparently. saw the company for a second time yesterday, met with two system architechts. tried my best to answer their questions, but came away feeling like i hadn't really impressed them, so the offer this morning was a very nice surprise. i now have the weekend to think about it. my feeling at the moment is yes.

got to fly, the palm is chirping at me. "Outage scheduled". OS patches on a solaris box, i have to make sure the web stuff comes back up again. then meeting S at the gym. should be home for 9 if we're lucky.

l8r.

22:34 - posting this thru a shiney new installation of kde2 on my fbsd box. liked kde1, love kde2. perfect for the home setup, S uses it instead of 95 without any hassle which is cool. i think blackbox would phase her a little, so i keep that for the more intense, minimalist moments. awaiting delivery of the new computer desk on sat which will be a blessing after sitting infront of this horrible little thing.
now for m18, hoping it's going to be a little more stable under fbsd than NT (he says cursing as netscape crashes..no i will not admit that IE is better, it's the pricipal!).
audio bliss courtesy of buena vista social club.