Older blog entries for darkewolf (starting at number 24)

Another year another entry.

Am working at a new place again. Mostly a programming job for the network services department of a fairly large ISP.

The world is all good.

Recently?

Dealing with lots of crap from the Melbourne office of the company. The guys there are useless pieces of crap. Even more arrogant than I am, and know far less (given they rang me up to fix a problem they had pinging across a previously working gateway machine I know we are in safe hands in that office)..

Bought myself a laptop. Installed Debian GNU/Linux on it. Quite a nice install once I got X working and sound working (that took a bit longer).. Thankfully Intel provided free driver source for both the video card and the network card. Eventually I sorted out ALSA and got the audio working really sweetly. And once my creditcard works happily once more I'll get more ram for it and a wifi interface.. Only real fault with the damn thing is that it 'freezes' for 1 or 2 seconds now and again. Although the XP install on it does that too so it might be a hardware fault (bah!).

I really need to consider finding better paid work with more incentive for being at work. The morale here sucks (the CEO has his pets and treats everyone else like shit) and I know I am very underpaid for the work I do (although admittedly my income isn't unhealthy). So tempted to go back into R&D or pure development. Or maybe purely network management, am sick of having to handle client installs of our products (especially the legacy pieces of shit our salesfolk keep selling)... mmmm networks...

Beannachdan oirbh.

Gods, how long since I last posted here? Of course, I could blame LJ on that. Given that I use LJ for most 'online journal' type activities (and my IAM.BME page).

What has been happening? Dropped Debian developer status for a bit. Needed a break from overly technical stuff. Got a job at a fairly good company. Positive share growth, positive cash flow. Heck, they have employed me since feb. so it can't be all bad. Except for morale :(

Got tonnes of tattoos recently *smirks* and piercings and stuff. Been buying a tonne of books. Plenty of little userlevel hacks on my machine at home, primarily a book / resource management system and an image catalog database..

Na Diathan leibh.

Bored, not working. No job, and nothing in the market it seems.

Bored enough to totally rewrite the website and database for http://cyberpunks.org. Runs faster now, looks nicer, has user accounts. Drinking much mead, but thats okay. Fixed bugs in mathwar, and working on packaging the new xconq for the testing/unstable/foo release. Maybe i should start playing xconq again, as my machine seems to be degrading and cant play many other games. However, I do have the definitive triad of horror movies now on DVD, The Exorcist (extended version), The Omen and Rosemary's Baby. That coupled with my growing collection of definitive sword movies (Braveheart, 13th Warrior, soon Beowulf...) I should be in good stead. Beannachdan oirbh.

In the idle time between mid-December, and early January, whilst waiting for the hiring to be done again, I got bored. Perfected my image catalog (well, my script to add images is buggy, it freaks on spaces in filenames, but since most of my image store got renamed a year ago, its not too much of a problem).

And then I got really bored, and started working on a book catalog system. Fully searchable, catagorized book collection, about 200 books in and still typing (books can also be defined as wishlist and on order.). The final addition for it will be cross-linking book extracts to the entered titles (take notes from a book, and have it automatically linked when you search for the title), and ability to cross reference scans (images) to each book title.

Not much else to do, except wonder what happened to my Gimp install. One day it decided it was not going to display anything that involved a font (only showed dotted boxes instead of characters), upgraded it, same thing. Removed dot-directories and files, still happening. Was not happening to any other gtk based application. Bitched at the machine for a day (i have had huge and random font problems recently), tried to rerun the Gimp, and it all worked fine.

Oh well, got made reduntant 4th of October, and due to the loving tech industry at the moment, there aint any jobs out there.

Got to the stage of using up all my payout to live, and now on government payments (*sucks*) and blanket mailing companies in order to find a position anywhere.

Bah. The boss and CEO are in a meeting with the financial directors of the parent company. Will we exist after lunch time? My bet is nope! :)

Payout might be good, will let me pay off some debts and look for a nice job :)

Its been a long time since I have even considered entering data into this system. Used to be working at mBox.com Ltd, but got fired (Decision of the Directors) so they could post a saving on their end of finacial year report (pffft). My boss quit the next week in disgust.

Searched around for ages (well 6 weeks, which is ages when you have no income) for a new job. Finally found one closer to home, same pay (sucks), and less work load. Basically paided to admin the unix side of the network and write code on Solaris machines that process datafeeds from stock exchanges. Exciting stuff.

My Family life is different now. No longer living with a housefull of children, doing the fight in the family courts thing with the mother of my son.

Doing much less coding at home recently, spending more time researching stuff.. But started recently back at programming a gaelic-english lexicon/dictionary (I am learning gaelic and its much quicker to do searchs on the computer then thumb through a book). Plus I got bored and decided to catalog all my images (800megs of stock images / nice photos). Nothing good on freshmeat to do what I wanted, so I am 90% of the way through writing it myself.

Slan leibh mi chairaidean

woohoo, my managing director handed me a piece of paper signed, as a waiver, protecting all my out of hours hacking and contracting from IP claims from the company.

And I have managed to explain to the powers that be that using some source code i found online would be a useful component to modify and use. I was adding some functionality to a commercial MTA, with a big and clunky interface that involved huge amount of testing etc.. etc.. But I decided to grab a simple smtp proxy, hack around with it, and added the same functionality as a small component.

Blerk!

About to go on a 7 day vacation/holiday. Not a great time for it at work. Two of our major clients are about to go live with our system and I wont be there to babysit them.

I think you can tell when you have become a corporate slave(I am just a humble corporate slave, working myself into a corporate grave), it's when you feel guilty taking time away from the office.

Mind you - I do enjoy where I work, and leaving for any time tends to mean i miss stuff when i need to see whats going on.

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