Older blog entries for Boris (starting at number 109)

So now I'm unemployed again. My contract ended on Monday. This came as a surprise to all involved, as everyone else thought it was at least Friday. Contract Services notified security to revoke my pass. They didn't notify me, my firm, or my manager about this, so nobody else knew. This came as quite a surprise to me on Tuesday morning when I turned up for work and was refused entry into the building. I had to get my manager to sign me in as a visitor so I could at least clear out my desk, and finish up stuff.

Quite reasonably all parties involoved were more than a little annoyed about the way my contract ended, especially me. I'd been after my manager for weeks to try and get a definite finish date, but he couldn't get any information about it.

Whats even more stupid is that although they need people in the department, they can't hire anyone. They can hire contractors, but only for a year (because legal is scared of the permatemp problem Microsoft had). So they let us go, then hire more contractors.

My firm told me that they had a position available at Microsoft in Redmond. There were a few problems with this:

• I don't like Microsoft, and I have ethical problems with working for them
  
• Redmond is on the other side of Seattle, and it's about a 3 hour commute given Seattle traffic
  
• Microsoft don't pay contractors that well.
  

So here I am updating my resume, and I've decided to go back to Ireland for 3 weeks and visit family and friends.

...and then there was one. Probably in 2 weeks there will be none. I've not been officially told yet, so I guess I'll keep coming in until they stop paying me...

Scott finished on Friday. Management have told me that they can't renew me or hire me after the year, but they can replace me with another contractor. How stupid is that?

Clinton didn't get called up (yet). There are a few linux guys still here, but none who are doing 32 bit validation. I guess one of them will have to learn.

So, now I'm the last contractor in our department. It's a bad situation too. The second last contractor, Scott, is a Novell guy. During the last round of layoffs they fired a Novell engineer, leaving just Scott and Clinton. Clinton is currently back in the army on reserve duty. Theres no idea when he will be back. This leaves us with zero Novell people. Actually half a person. One of the 64 bit linux guys will be taking over Novell duties, but he will be also have to do 64 bit stuff...

No word on my job, but I've only got a couple more weeks before I'll find out... Most likely I'll be looking for a new job soon...

It's a bad hardware day for me.

First fibre channel card I try to use isn't tagged, so it can't be logged in the database. I put it in the pile for tagging.

I pull another card to use, and I find that the insertion point (the shiny metal part) is loose and has broken the connections from the card to the socket.

Third one I pull is fine. So I try to insert a Adapetec 3950 into the system only to find that some idiot had screwed the insertion point in backwards...

I hate UnixWare.
I HATE UnixWare.
I HATE UNIXWARE.

I'd much rather be spending time with my wife than trying to get this damn unixware install going.

Ahem. Thank you. Nothing to see here. Move along...

So I woke up at 4am with hiccups. Then I got them again at 7:30am. Now to see if I get them at 11am.

I had a skin biopsy a couple of days ago, and got a few other skin problems sorted out. Now I need to wait on the results.

One last thing I've found is that writing Windows code in either Visual C or Borland Builder is a total pain. Borlands implimentation is somewhat better than Microsoft.

It looks we lost 2 contactors today (1 compatibility engineer, 1 tech-writer). That leaves just 2 (including me). Add that to 2 engineers that were let go, and our department is in pretty bad shape. Still a load of Microsoft people, a couple of Novell people, and a few unix people. Compatibility has been stripped of almost all Microsoft people. It's not good, and it's not pretty.

Bleh. I've got a real bad case of "problems existing between keyboard and chair" this week. My brain feels like it's shut down and decided to go on holiday without me.

I got a great example of the argument for open source:

I've been working with SCO Unixware. One of the cards I have to test has a broken driver. (It's a uniprocessor compiled driver, and I'm working on a multiprocessor system.) These drivers are closed source; the offending company won't fix the driver because they say there is not enough demand for these cards. They won't release the source to us so that we can fix it ourselves.

If this was an open-source driver I'd have a working driver ages ago. Probably all it needs is to be recompiled in a SMP environment.

Hmmm Found a Branston Pickle recipe.

Time to warn my wife that I'll be making something that she cannot stand, but that I miss quite a bit. What is it about America and Branston Pickle? If I'd realised that it was so hard to get over here, I'd have shipped a box or three...