narshada

I'm looking forward to this weekend since last Saturday I spent the whole day helping out with PAT testing on all the electrical sockets. Because I'm an electrician. No, wait - I'm an IT guy.

Apparently I had to be there for turning the servers off and on again, which we didn't get around to, so I have to go back in for another fun filled Saturday a week tomorrow. Except Neil, my line manager at work and the one guy I really trust there, thinks the big bad boss might take issue with me claiming for overtime, so I have to have a conversation with the large fromage on Monday to make sure it's ok to do another Saturday. If he doesn't want to pay me then he can go fuck himself and the testing won't get done. I can't take a day in leiu as I give a lift in to 2 guys, sometimes 3 and of course Zoe is working in our call centre now too. I have a day off = people struggle to get to work.

In addition to my new role of electrical tester, which is on top of IT support for two head office sites and six stores around the country, network admin for said sites as well as managing 3rd party suppliers/support, managing the IT dept as a whole, programming intranet sites and javascript applications for the website, being in charge of creating web pages for new stock for the website, managing the DNS records for the site, looking after antivirus/spyware/spam, looking after every fucking thing that runs on electricity and has buttons, right on down to ordering cartridges for printers - I came back to my desk the other day to find several copies of a support contract on my desk with a note from my boss that read:
"Read through this and highlight any problems before I sign it off."
"Phew," I thought to myself, "this is where my years of experience with contract law finally pay off! Oh shit, hang on, I did my degree in FUCKING COMPUTING!"

The whole situation sucks. We moved out into the fucking ass end of nowhere because the boss fancied a rural view from his office window. No thought given to staff and the inconvenience it would cause us - never mind the extra cost of going from driving 12 miles per day to 42 and no one got a pay rise to cover the cost. Add to that the fact that we have regular power cuts, (last time was Monday and the generator failed to kick in, meaning I had to run to the server room ready to shut things down if they couldn't get it going in time.) and apparently are likely to get snowed in at some point and it's just a barrel of fucking laughs.

I've been in a shitty mood off and on for days, partly due to nicotine withdrawal. I've been smoking a fair bit of the herb up until recently, (but seriously, can you blame me?) and now I've run out. I want to cut back a bit so I haven't bought any more, but as I type this I would seriously consider maiming a nun for a couple of spliffs.

Anyone who gets where that's from will have my immediate and lifelong respect and possibly a pint bought for them.

So on to some good stuff.
I've finally managed to fix my intranet. It's been broken for a while but since no one really uses it, it hadn't been brought to my attention. The weird thing is that despite the code for the part where users log tasks and the code for the part where I log tasks being identical apart from one line, (and that line was to email me the results - if I log a call I don't need emailing to tell me, so I left that out,) the user version didn't work. Since the only person to log calls is me, no one noticed until recently. I even had to show a couple of colleagues how to use it the other day, (it's basically a four part web form... sheesh!) which pissed me off as it's been around since July and I've sent several emails out explaining not only how to use it, but why it would benefit them and me to do so. *Sigh*
Anyway I spent an enjoyable hour or two with my PHP book rewriting the section where it connects to the database and now it works - huzzah! (Although I did get an odd call logged earlier with an incomplete reference code, which did worry me slightly. Ah well, that's for next week.)

So it's Halloween and we had plans to meet up with Kristoph and theknives for drinks but unfortunately Pinklet has been feeling a little off the last day or two and it got worse today. She's been asleep since about 9.30.

This weekend I am planning on nuking my laptop and installing Ubuntu. Yes, I'm ditching Micro$haft and going open source. It means losing my games, but I rarely play on my PC anymore since I got the 360, (I'll have to buy the Orange box on 360 & I'm not a big fan of FPS's on consoles as I prefer KB/mouse but at least it means HL2 Episode one will play instead of moaning about my graphics drivers - which are obviously fine because HL2, Portal and HL2 Episode 2 all play without a problem you stupid machine!) and also it means losing photoshop, which scares me, unless I use something like WINE, which allows you to run Window$ programs on Linux or else run Windoze on a virtual machine.
Most other stuff will be bundled with the OS, including Open Office, which is just like Microsoft Office, only apparently not shit, so that might be nice. It also has mp3 software, and firefox 3, so my browser will be identical.
The other option is to keep windows and run Ubuntu on the secondary partion on my HDD. That way I could keep Potatoshop and my games, plus be able to check websites I've done on a windows box. (although really, I could do that from work...)

I dunno, choices choices. I'm way more excited about Ubuntu than I think I probably should be, but that's partly because once I'm running Linux, my Geek training will be complete. You can't call yourself a complete Geek if you run Windows.

Geek checklist:

• Job in It
- check

• Interest in Star Wars/comics/sci-fi/anything by Joss Whedon/videogames/toys, that borders on the obsessive.
- check

• Visits Slashdot/Forbidden Planet/Thinkgeek/Penny Arcade regularly. (Bonus points if you have a wishlist at or piece of merchandise from one or more of those sites.)
- Checkety check.

• Been asked to "fix my computer?" by almost everyone you know at least once.
- Yup.

• Programmed something from scratch.
- Sure thing.

• Watched people's eyes glaze over as you animatedly explained something 'cool' like DOM scripting, how PHP connects to MySQL, how Spiderman originally got the black suit that became Venom or why George Lucas should never have been allowed back behind a camera (citing 'Empire' as evidence)
- Oh yeah. In fact, didn't I see you glaze over a couple of paragraphs back?

• Can't understand how some people don't 'get' The Matrix and virtually creamed yourself in the cinema the first time you saw it?
- What's not to get? They're inside a computer program that overtakes their physical senses, fooling them into believing that the virtual world is real. It's like Boltzmann brain theory or Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation.

• After seeing the Matrix for the first time, you wondered about the power of any computer that could continuously render that level of visual detail (even taking into account perceptual filters and LOD algorithms for peripheral vision,) run real world physics and collision detection on millions of objects as well as keep track of thousands of residual self images and sentient programs - and then wondered how awesome Half Life 2 would run on it.
- Damn straight skippy!

• Can configure WiFi networks as second nature or have hacked into WiFi networks local to you (bonus points if they were secured.).
- Yup. A lot of people secure them but don't change the router's default password.

• Runs Linux at home.
- Well I will after tomorrow!

What are you currently geeking out about?