mykrocosm

Another great day… free coke zero, free lollies, and I cracked the non-blocking sockets stuff. The big gotcha you have to know when googling on Python is that there’s so much outdated stuff indexed… ancient tutorials, incomplete manuals, and old websites hosting third party libraries that have long since been made part of the standard install.

We celebrated our first month in the new house tonight! It’s already starting to feel like home. I enjoy climbing up the steep hill in the evenings, knowing that when I reach the top, I’ll be unlocking the door and walking into OUR place.

My ride to work couldn’t make it today and my throat was feeling a bit crap anyway so I set up office on the bare dining table, nothing else around, no distractions, just one window open with a nice view across the Seacliff hillside. I’m pretty chuffed with my day’s work, nailed a few things that have been bugging me for a while. Wrapping my head around some of the new code has been frustrating but I feel like I’m getting somewhere now. Apart from one awful MS Access application the VPN works great, it’s just like being in the office! With people connecting to our intranet in Adelaide from Queensland, England and China, it really is a shrinking world.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Many months ago, the company in their vigilance decided every employee needs Equal Opportunity Training, which basically consists of an hour-long session with some guy bouncing around out front. Dozens of sessions are scheduled and we get to pick our own timeslot. The secretaries come around to record our preferences.

A few days later, they realise that everybody picked the more popular timeslots. Each employee gets an email advising them of their new, randomly assigned timeslot.

The next day, they decide to move the timeslots around again. The new email reads like this : “If you were in timeslot 3:45 on Wednesday, you’re now in timeslot 10:15 on Monday”. And so on.

Later, more emails arrive adding forgotten employees to their new timeslots, and everybody is soon very confused.

Just when I figure out my timeslot, I get one more email. I’m told I don’t need to attend the training after all, because they “cannot cater for hearing impaired people at this time”. Nor can they cater for a colleague of mine who at the time was on crutches.

So the Equal Opportunity training goes ahead, minus the disabled employees. But not to worry, they assure us, there’ll be a new round of training in three months for all the people who were on leave and missed out, and they’re sure to be ready for us then.

Three months later, the secretaries come around. We get to pick our timeslot… again. Of course I pick the best timeslot… again.

The next day, I get an email….actually, it turns into quite the email exchange. I’ve taken some liberties putting it into conversation form, but the gist follows :

TD (Training Department): Your EO Training has been changed from timeslot F to timeslot C. An Auslan interpreter will be provided at this session.

Me: I had better learn Auslan pretty quickly then!

TD : Are you kidding with me or for real????? This was HR’s idea, so if we need to cancel it let me know, PLEASE.

Me : I don’t know any Auslan at ALL. Of course if the interpreter is cute I don’t mind having one anyway!

HR: I’m not sure if your earlier comment about learning Auslan was a joke. If you were serious, please let me know!! No point having someone interpret into a language you can’t understand!!

HR (continued): There are overheads and hand-outs, but only five pages in total. You can’t get the whole picture from the handouts. A lot of the talking that Philip (the trainer) does is telling stories.

Me : Perhaps the instructor could be persuaded to write up his anecdotes for posterity, a copy of that certainly would be enlightening. I do already have the handouts from the first round of training, which I’ve read. Since I have all the information there is available, there would be no value in myself attending the course after all.

HR: I agree that there is no value in you attending a regular session. However, it is a requirement of all employees and your circumstances do not make you “exempt”.

Finally we work something out. It turns out they’re about to write the official company policy, which will be ready in about 2 months. So we agree that in lieu of attending the session I can read that when it’s finished.

That just leaves the question… if the policy’s not even written yet, what did every single employee in the entire company just get “trained” in?

Sometimes it can be a little frustrating when your company has a certain way of doing things…

Me, to Interstate Contractor : You do need those items. I’ll courier them over.

Interstate Contractor : Can you ship it Express Post, I find they deliver here much better than TOLL.

Me : No worries, I’ll send it now. You should get it tomorrow or the day after.

< 2 minutes later >

Me, to Receptionist : We really want to send this Express Post, as TOLL takes too long.

Her : We usually courier with TOLL.

Me : Yes, we’ve sent this stuff before with TOLL and they take ages. But it turns out that Express Post is quicker for these parcels.

Her : Ok. What’s the shipping address I need to give TOLL?

Me : Here it is. But if you could ship Express Post, that’d be great.

Her : Ok, no worries.

Me : Let me know when you’ve sent it via Express Post.

Her : Sure.

< 2 weeks later >

Interstate Contractor : Yay! Finally got the package. I see you sent it through TOLL again.

Was home sick again yesterday - I didn’t even go near the computer, believe it or not.

You know, it’s a bit suss. Last year, hardly anyone in our little office got the company flu injection, and we seemed to enjoy great health while the rest of the company was laid low. This year, nearly everyone in our room got the flu injection, and we’ve had multiple waves of sickness.

It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

I’ve posted before about our Thursday curries from Curry Chong. We’ve recently started mixing that up with the odd delivery from Shankers - they have a $7.50 lunch time special. The first time I ordered Chicken Vindaloo and there was only 4 pieces of chicken floating in the curry sauce. It was a bitter disappointment compared to the wealth of meat and rice I’m used to in my favourite $7 combo from Curry Chong. In my hunger I was forced to eat a second container of rice. After that I pretty much wrote Shankers off.. until today.

I went with Shanker’s Beef Vindaloo. I was pleased to see a decent quantity of meat this time, and let me tell you, their curry packs a hell of a punch! My order was medium heat and it left me feeling dizzy and seeing spots in front of my eyes. Shit! This is real curry! You’ll feel it all over.

Shanker’s are clearly suffering from consistency issues - some people who enjoyed their first order weren’t as happy with today’s. But this restaurant is bringing a new experience to the table, literally.

Bang a gong! The Great Adelaide Curry Challenge is on!!!!!

The regular water deliveries got screwed up somehow, so Mark and I launched a lightning raid on the EPD department upstairs and made off with 4 bottles. The office administrator tracked us down through eye-witness accounts and we got an good scolding … now I know why they call her Mum.

We’re all on water rations now - half a cup of coffee each

We’ve got the CD images for Fedora Core 4 at work, but I’d prefer to have the DVD. Unfortunately, HTTP downloads seem to choke on files greater than 2 gb, and FTP is firewalled.

I found a little-known way to recombine the CD images, thanks to a small utility called Jigdo, the template files FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo & FC4-i386-DVD.template and an obscure forum post here.

First I used WinRAR to extract all the CD images to a single directory (C:\fc4\), explicitly not overwriting any existing files.

Then I ran the jigdo command:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file mi -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
Found 1855 of the 1856 files required by the template
Copied input files to temporary file `FC4-i386-DVD.iso.tmp' - repeat command and supply more files to continue


Uh oh. I repeated the command with the pm (print missing) parameter:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file pm -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/ linux/core/4/i386/os/isolinux/isolinux.bin


Now this already exists in C:\fc4\isolinux\ so it should have been picked up. A bug in jigdo-file or the template perhaps? I downloaded the file again from that URL just in case, and it turned out to be the exact same size and date. I placed it in the root of the search path (C:\fc4\), and ran jigdo-file again:

C:\jigdo\jigdo-bin>jigdo-file mi -i FC4-i386-DVD.iso -j FC4-i386-DVD.jigdo -t FC
4-i386-DVD.template c:\fc4\
Found 1 of the 1 files required by the template
Successfully created `FC4-i386-DVD.iso'


Mounted the ISO in a VM and it booted. Sweet!

Colleague just had a baby (well, his wife did). Welcome to the world, Chloe Alyce, and best wishes to mum and dad!

(Hmmm.. That’s the third baby named Chloe we’ve known of in the last six months…)

It’s Thursday, which means it’s Curry Day here at work. Every week (for the last year or so) a rostered driver gathers all the money and collects our orders from Curry Chong, this awesome stall at the market. We now have 13 employees involved in this little ritual, which means the box can get pretty heavy, but on the flip side each person now only has to do it once every three months or so.

Here’s my old favourite; lamb on the left, Thai green chicken on the right. Excellent curry! Props to Matt who drove this week. And yes, that’s a triple scoop of sambal chilli on top.

Hmm.. If the Vitamin C didn’t do the trick this sure as heck will!