st pauls

dress down day today for charity, and its the usual misture of bad jeans, white trainers and t-shirts tucked in. who tucks a t-shirt into their jeans and when has the looked cool?. who sees simon cowell on tv and thinks i want to dress like that fella and be smart and casual at the same time.

some good news on the job front. not for me but the unix guy who sits next to me and who was getting a hard time from his boss. he got a new contract at a very good bank (much more prestigous than this place), and he is going to resign next week. it all happened in a couple of days for him. he looks relieved and i am happy for him because the guy he worked with was a complete prick, and i have been in that position before and its bad bad bad. hopefully something turns up for me soon as well, though thankfully i don't work with assholes, so i think the gods of fate moved him up the list ahead of me as his need to leave was greater than mine.

its the end of the week and i had t submit my times sheets. this is the end of my 8th week here. was quite surprised when i saw that. it sounds like a long time, but also it feels like a longer time since i left my last contract. you can see how people can end up staying in jobs for months and years and not notice.

hadn't been down to st pauls for my lunch this week as the weather was a bit dull and showery. went today. its a nice spot. i have a new mobile phone with a decent camera on it so i might start taking some more pics.

cycled to the gym yesterday but would rather have been playing football. i think i am going to start studying for an exam this weekend if i can get my sorry ass motivated. its been 7 months since i took an exam and thats a long time for me. need to keep pushing and keep the pressure on. am training hard at the gym and i want to leave my job, and so all the conditions for getting study done are in place. if i land a good contract doing interesting work i will never get certified in SQL.

thats all folks, take care.

today i have mostly been listening to noel gallagher - there is a light that never goes out. i wanted to post the new single from interpol instead but they played it last night on the radio and i hate to say it, but i didn't think it was that good, and i only post songs i really really like. the new single just sounded a bit 'meh'. their previous stuff was wicked and paul banks solo stuff sounded better.

weirdo

another week and its same as usual at work. you know the score by now and there is really nothing else to say.

had a call a couple of days ago about an interesting job that is paying more money and is in the west end, which is even better. london bridge is lame, where i am now. have not heard anything back from them, so i guess they don't want to call me in. i suspect there will be lots of these false alarms between now and the end. oh well, no bother.

as its looking like nothing on the horizon i thought i would start looking into maybe taking a week off for my trip to the states. i have a friend who is going to be working in new york over september so i said i would try and go out there for a couple of days before heading out to LA for a few days. have found a good week, when klaxons will be playing in new york at the beginning of the week on saturday or sunday and then the charlatans will be playing on wednesday in LA and then its LA galaxy v new york redbulls in LA on the friday. thats 3 good things i can go to in the space of a week and will keep me occupied. also i only found out about klaxons touring the states today and it was a coincidence i posted them in my last post. i will ofcourse ask a couple of friends to come along and as is usual they will make excuses, but if i don't go it won't be because of them.

anyways, thats all folks. no football this week or last week. we are struggling for numbers as one of the guys has gone on holiday to ibiza, even though he is married and has a kid. i thought ibiza was for 17 year olds taking ecstacy and listening to techno and trying to get laid with an equally drugged/drunk young lady, and a couple of the other guys have gone to ireland.

today i have mostly been listening to the charlatans - weirdo. audio drops out a couple of times on this clip but not for long. also the organ sounds reminds me of the song 'hot thing' by prince, and thats got to be a good thing.

15:41

it think i have been at my job now 7 weeks and am starting to notice the place is thick of politics. lots of friction between various departments and a quite a bit of bitchiness going around. i don't say anything and just keep my head down. aside from a few comments about just how shambolic the network design is, i don't make any mention or criticism of people.

anyways, i had noticed that one of the unix admins who sits next to me was getting a bit of a hard time from someone in his department. the guy who was being an ass, and i had him figured as one 2 minutes after meeting him. it was glaringly obvious. it makes you wonder how these people survive in their jobs when they are so clearly pricks. so i was talking to the unix admin on friday and he told me he was thinking of quitting because he just couldn't work with that prick. we shall see what happens, but its not a good sign of things to come. hopefully i get out soon before a similar situation arises in my department. it could happen. the politics is like a thick fog across the office.

i also had another person act really surprised when in a conversation i said i didn't have or own a car. christ its like i have leprosy or something. its like they can't even begin to envision how i can survive. what is wrong with these people. bloody hell, i am surprised they don't all have electric wheel chairs so they don't have to walk around in the building. my legs work fine thank you very much and unlike them i don't see my own body as a burden. also i think they think i am weird in that i could afford to buy a bmw or mercedes but i choose not to. its like i am mental in the head or something. why would someone not buy BMW when they have the means to?. its madness.
not wanting to start getting all tyler durden but i just hate the job and if i started buying shit i don't really need it would mean i might have to stay longer doing it to pay stuff off, and i don't want to put myself in a position where i might have to stay 5 minutes more than i have to. the things you own end up owning you.


i also got a cheque from the tax office for £30 because i overpaid, so i decided i would give the money to charity. shit, that money could have gone towards a mercedes.

on the subject of my legs working fine, it was the last day of the tour de france and i throught i would do a bit of a time trial on my bike as i cycled to the gym. saw cancellara doing a time trial yesterday and thought i would see how deep i could go as well. quite deep as it turns out. my previous best was 16m 52s and today i took a minute off that and did it in 15m 41s. i had to jump a few red lights and took fast corners leaning it over like valentino on a yamaha, but i surprised myself. i might have to try and beat it next time i go. anyone in a car would be hard pressed to get there faster and doing it my way means its cheaper, its better for the environment and better for my health...and they look at me like am weird.

anyways, today i have mostly been listening to klaxons - echoes. enjoy.

there there

in the last week i have had 2 friend requests on facebook from 2 people i used to know. one of them was a school friend who is now an IT contractor and was one of the people i was referring to in my 75% of IT contractors are pricks, post i did a couple of weeks ago.

the other is from idiot tech boss who i worked at the internet company with a few years back and who i constantly slated as being lazy, a fraud and a chancer whose sole purpose was to talk shit.

why would these people send me friend requests on facebook?. the fact that i don't mail or call them should be a little hint. what makes them think i would want to share any details of my life with them, given the fact that whilst i knew them i never did and it was fairly obvious i thought they were idiots.

i am not into the collecting of friends in facebook thing, that people get into. i know some people that have 70o friends. i might have spoken to 700 people in my life but there is no way i would want to update these people with my status of pictures or anything like that. maybe if i was 16 it might be the type of thing you would do in competition with your friends because you don't want to be seen in school to only be having a few friends, but i am not 16 and i am quite happy with my 25 facebook friends and don't feel the need to add too many more. if someone i like sends an invite i will accept it, but not for those who i think are assholes just to get my numbers up.

i ignored both of the recent requests. i am actually due to meet up with the IT contractor prick in a couple of weeks as a few guys from school are all meeting up. i wonder if he will ask me about the facebook snub. i will do my usual and say i hardly check it and am thinking of deleting my account because of privacy concerns with the site. that usually does the trick.

cycled to the gym last night. its lovely on the warm summer evenings and i also got a new phone that runs android and i got an app that lets me measure the time and distance i cycle and my max speed and average speed and other stuff. its very good and its free. anyways, its turned every bike ride into a competition now and i find myself trying to beat my personal best times or my max speed. i only average around 24km/h for the 17 minutes it takes me to cycle to the gym from home which is not bad considering its central london with traffic and in my head i imagine i look like Fabian Cancellara or Alexander Vinokourov on a time trial or on a 140km solo breakaway at the tour de france. Vino is a monster of a bike rider.

today i have mostly been listening to radiohead - there there.

my days

depsite the way i might sometimes come across, i do assume i am a dumb ass and i don't know everything and when i do work the first thing i ask myself is whether i did it wrong.

take the other day as an example. i was given an ESX server to install which was in a remote datacenter. i did the install but i couldn't see the HBAs when it was done. not being a wiz at a esx command line shit, i figured it was probably me that did something wrong so to check it decided to go back to the comfort of something i know well, and i installed windows 2008 on the server. it took 6 hours because i was doing it all remotely. after a few more hours of running utilities and diags i figured it might not be me that was doing something wrong. after talking with the hardware guys it turned out that it had not one, but TWO faulty HBA cards in it and all this after i had been told it was a working server.

the other day i was on a server and its array battery was complaining that it needed to be replaced. i asked them who i needed to call to get it replaced and was told that they don't. eh?. yes, when the batteries die we made the decision not to replace them?. er...ok. why?..i asked. its too expensive.
oh, ok. well RAID controllers are expensive and fault tolerance on hard disks wastes disks space and is expensive so you might as well not bother with those either.

today i got handed a list of servers to check but i couldn't get onto the iLO's of any of them. i must have tried all of them which was about 20 servers, and i couldn't get onto a single one. maybe it was me and i was using the wrong name, or i might be on a network that doesn't have access or maybe i am just being an idiot. turns out i am not the idiot. they are.

i told my team leader i couldn't get to any of them and he said it might be because the names were not in DNS. i thought he might still think i didn't have their secret 2000 line hosts file on my pc, but i do now and told him. he told me it might not be in that file and might not be in DNS either. er....ok. are we supposed to remember the IP address for the iLO of every server?. i don't think i have the mental capacity to do that.

i also need access to virtual center to check some virtual machines. i put in a request to get added to the group 2 weeks ago. they still haven't added me. i called the people and they said they would do it but they haven't. i have sent emails, and followup requests but nothing is happening. i think i have chased them up on it 7 or 8 times and yet the call is still in the queue and not moving or being resolved. am not sure what else i can do. i could try and find the people that deal with it and stand at their desk and say, "stop surfing the web and add me to the fucking group so i can do my fucking job, you cocksucker", but i don't think that is very proffessional.

they have multiple domains for production, staging and development servers. one of the domains has the letters DEV at the end of its name. you would think that this might be the development domain. you would be wrong. the domain with DEV in is actually the UAT/Staging domain. the actual DEV domain has what is a seemingly random string of characters and numbers in it and the prod domain is labelled by geogaphic location. other domains are just given the same name and have a number added from 1 to 9 at the end. i don't know what they do. i am too scared to ask.

also not only is there a domain boundary that seperates servers there is a physical network boundary, so you not only have to use the right account to get to a server, you have to do it from the right network to access that server. it means you end up having to remote desktop into various utilty machines that are shared on each network and from there you can then remote to the server you need. its complete madness. there are indigenous tribes of people living in the jungles of south america untouched by modernity that could design a better network infrastructure than this.

i think they are doing this to deliberately confuse me. thats the only explanation i can think of. its a big conspiracy against me to confuse me and make me go mad.


god, its so frustrating. the tiniest task is such an ordeal.

PS: i didn't get that job i went to see on friday. not dissappointed despite my current situation. different skills sets required. i don't do solaris, or reuters or sybase or netapp storage. they also wanted windows server and citrix which i do know a bit about but no idea why they called me in to be honest. i suspect they were desperate as they are looking for a particular combination of skills and they are struggling to find them.

today i have mostly been listening to ....macabees - no kind words

friday

the sunny weather has subsided and the days are quite cloudy and showery although still quite warm and humid this week. its not nice especially if you are travelling on the tube.

won't mention anything about my current job. you know the score already.

i did have some good news in that i have an interview on friday morning which will be for a job in the server team of a small bank. its such a small bank in london that i had never heard of them, and i thought i knew everyone in this town. because its small it looks like it will mean i will need to know a lot about a lot of different things, which is just what i was looking for. i would rather not join another huge bank where they stick you in a team doing some crappy task for the rest of your life.
the other good thing about it is that its back in the city of london which is way better than london bridge which is where i am based now. i know its only half a mile away but i hate where i work now.

i had to go to one of my old jobs to email some information to the agent, as hotmail and everything else is blocked at the bank. its good that i have some contacts in this town that i can call upon in an emergency.i have a new little sony xperia x10 mini pro, and i can check my hotmail on it, but i can't open documents. if you are looking for a new phone and don't want an iphone or another phone the size of the brick, i can highly recommend it.

anyways, we shall see how the interview goes. i might get it, but obviously and not unlikely, i might not. its just nice that someone wants to see me, and doesn't look at my cv and think i am an idiot.

cycled to the gym last night. i don't usually cycle for my evening gym session but because its so mild i thought i would. its an extra work out and its nice cycling back in the half light just after the sun has set. have also been training hard and i don't think i am in the best condition i have ever been but its close.

today i have mostly been listening to ou est le swimming pool - jacksons last stand. i don't like the name of the band. they should change it. does it offend you yeah, is another good band with a lame name. anyways, ignore all that, and listen to the tune. its wicked.

tired pony

had to work saturday in a couple of datacentres where they were having a re-organisation and a bunch of servers were moving from one place to the next. it meant that i would miss the hottest and sunniest day of the year, but because i ended up working from 7am till 10pm, it meant i could count it as 2 days work, and so could charge them for 2 days. quids in and i will have to buy me some sunshine in southern california.

had to get 3 trains on my way home on saturday night and having woken up at 5.30 i was struggling to stay awake and i got home at half past midnight. i nearly fell asleep on the train which would have not been good.

today was sunshine, cycling, gym, laundry, ironging, world cup final. spain won and they deserved to.

its the start of another week tomorrow. i shall still try and escape and we will just have to take each day as it comes.

today i have mostly been listening to tired pony - dead american writers. enjoy.

raining sunshine

and the feeling today is to leave. some days its stay, some days its leave. today is definitely a leave day.

at least its hot outside. lovely beautiful sunshine raining down on london town. did my usual lunchtime ritual of going to st paul cathederal and sitting in the gardens in front of it. its full of office workers at lunchtimes. i can't be sitting at my desk or just staying in the building going to the canteen. i like to get out at lunchtimes.

i noticed that a lot of people on our floor come in dressed casually on a friday so i decided to do the same today, even though the other 2 guys i work with wear trousers and shirts every day. one of them saw me and said my jeans and t-shirts would not be allowed. i shrugged and said i am sure it won't be a problem as lots of poeple are in casual dress and its not like we have to meet clients or anything. he shook his head in dissaproval. i shrugged in that way that says, you should tell someone who gives a shit.

i wonder if i am subconsciously trying to provoke something. my teamleader asked me the other day if i was familiar with one of their projects and if i had seen the documentation. i said no to which he replied i should ask. how can i ask about a project that i don't know exists?. did he really think i, a new person that has been here 4 weeks, would know what projects they had lined up with out them telling me about it. its like them assuming i know what projects morgan stanley have going on at the moment. its common knowledge isn't it?. doesn't everyone know that, even people that haven't or are not working there?. prick. i can ask about stuff but its all also up to them to give me information they think i will need for my job. why would you assume the new guy had project specific information even if you hadn't told him.

god its painful being the newbie. these assholes have been stuck in their jobs for years, and are never going to leave. they have no idea how difficult it is coming into a new environment and they assume that everyone has their networks set up like they do. idiots. am really feeling to leave soon. i can't get stuck here doing this.

oh, and they stiched me up. i have to work tomorrow. i start at 7am and will finish around 7pm and have to travel between 2 datancenters. thanks assholes.

anyways, i will post some music when i get home. at least the sun is shining. have a lovely weekend

today i have mostly been listening to she wants revenge - tear you apart.

excuse

only posting as an excuse to put some music up at the end of the post.

work is same as always. had a good few hours whilst installing some servers and it was nice to concentrate on one thing, as opposed to concentrating on nothing. that was on tuesday afternoon. rest of the time its been lame, but i have been getting my cv out there. i could whine about it but even i am getting bored of whining.

football tomorrow night. i need it bad as always.

today i have mostly been listening to the gaslight anthem - here's looking at you kid.

75%

whats that warm liquid seeping out of my ear and down the side of my neck?. oh i know, its my brain that has been turned into mush and is slowly melting away. this 'job' is so painfully dull. its fucking hard sitting at a desk all day doing nothing and you know that with each passing day your are getting more stupid, and someone with my limited intellect can not really afford to get significantly dumber.

i was asked to log into some servers to check drive space. fucking boring. when i tried to get to them i couldn't and it was saying cannot connect to remote host. thats odd. i asked one of the other guys if he could get to it and he could. how strange?. he then told me he could resolve the name because he had a host file on his pc. err...you guys use hosts file?. fair enough, can you send me it. i kind of half expected it to have maybe 10 or 20 entries in it. it didn't. it had 2,200 individual hosts specified in it.

It turns out they don't use DNS for one part of the network. they use host files that are copied to individual PC's. its fucking insane. 2,200 hosts specified in hosts file that needs to be copied to each PC and its not done by default, so newbies like me have to discover they don't have name resolution across all the networks with out it. i suspect they are embaressed to tell you that when you first start. by this point i let my thin veil of contractor proffessionalism slip and said, 'do they know that DNS has been invented that takes care of this?"

so thats what my days are like. frustration and confusion, without actually getting anything done and it just scrambles your brain. its not good to spend too long in a place like this. you might start to think this is normal. one day you might go to another company where they know how to do stuff and you might find yourself in a meeting for an infrastructure project and it will get to the bit about name resolution and you will find yourself arguing against using DNS and suggesting you use hosts files instead, at which point they will take your building pass off you, and escort you from the building and you will be a laughing stock. shit, i can't let that happen to me.

to top it all off, i have been told i have to work this saturday and its at a datacenter about an hour outside london. they looked at me with surprise when i told them i didn't have a car. what the fuck are you looking at me like that for. first off, why would you assume i had a car, and secondly, it was specifically promised to me before i took this shitty job that i would not need to work weekends, you cunt!. aarrgghh!!.

i am so not like any of these people. i have nothing in common with them. pay cheque players pulling the wool over peoples eyes. i sat with one of the support teams last week to get a bit more familiar with the systems. i was supposed to have 20 minutes with each person and they were to explain one part of what i they did. 3 of the guys were ok, but everyone else just kept telling me they were busy and to come back later. after a couple of knock backs you start to feel awkward and like you are disturbing them and really putting them out.

their manager asked me how it was going. i told him i hadn't learned too much and i didn't understand which bits were relevant and what questions to ask because i had not done any work yet, and was not sure what my role was supposed to be, and didn't have all my systems access. how do you like them apples?. i bet it weren't like this at goldman sachs were you used to work mister. shambles.

they are all so money hungry as well. i can understand if you are like that if you are earning 14 grand a year, stacking shelves in a supermarket because i spent 5 summers stacking shelves and i have friends who still are. my dad worked in a post office for 37 years and i get paid in a day what he used earn in a week.

for most people money is a big issue especially at times like these, but on friday there were a couple of girls walking round collecting money for a childrens hospital. everyone put in whatever change they had. a pound or two. they then got to a contractor behind me and he straight out refused to put any money in. he didn't even make an excuse like he didn't have any money on him or no change. he just said 'no'. even a couple of the other guys thought he was joking and said 'are you serious, come on mate', but he steadfastly refused. what a fucking scum bag. you are an overpaid contractor and you can't even spare a pound to put in a bucket for charity. here's hoping you never need the services of a childrens hospital any time in your life of your children, not that you most likely will have any, because no woman would want to get impregnated by a tight ass piece of shit like you.

why are IT contractors such scum?. why do i have to be associated with these people just because i am an IT contractor?. i know 4 other IT contractors, 2 of them are overpaid tight ass scum, the other one is an asshole who has just split up from his wife, and the other guy is a good bloke. that means 3 out of 4 are pricks in one way or another. do the maths, 75%. i have just proved it statistically. the numbers don't lie.

stonewash jeans

its dress down friday at the bank and as is usual with people who work in IT it is the usual mixture of stone washed jeans and baggy faded t-shirts and shit white trainers and all of it looks really old.

mate, how many times have you washed that t-shirt and those jeans. everything is faded to greyish colour after being washed 5000 times. i suspect some of the clothers were from when they were students 10 years ago. i don't want to sound like a fashion nazi but it don't look good and none of it is even remotely stylish or nice. they will get the latest iphone on the day of release and pay silly money for the latest laptop but when it comes to clothes i suspect primark must be full of £400/day IT contractors buying jeans for £10 and 3 t-shirts for a fiver.

had football last night and it was a steaming hot evening to be playing in. considering we haven't played in a month my fitness was actually quite good. no aches and pains this morning which is good. have noticed that since its been quite hot i am cycling faster and i have knocked a minute or two in the time it takes me to get to the gym.

speaking of cycling, the tour de france starts tomorrow. its one of my favourite sporting spectacles. nothing beats football but the tour is still awesome and its way better than wall to wall coverage of wimbledon which is on now. who gives a shit about tennis. its a game for rich people. no one played tennis at my school. you know why?. because we didn't have £100 to spend on a tennis bat and we didn't have any courts and we didn't have the money to pay for a club membership. its an elitists game. we had a cheap £5 football and had jumpers for goal posts. thats why we play and love football. they may as well televise fucking polo and yacht racing for all the relevance it has to us .

...and i don't know why they are all getting hard ons for andy murray winning wimbledon. he is a sour scot with no charisma and if he wasn't a tennis player he would be doing adverts for mr muscle toilet cleaner, on the basis he is a puny wimp. i hope nadal smashes him into oblivion. .....not that i give a shit about tennis. i shall be watching the world cup and the herculean supermen in the tour de france.

have a lovely weekend

didn't post any music yesterday after i got in from work. was straight out again for football. will post something tonight.

UPDATE:
today i have mostly been listening to the flaming lips - do you realize. a thoroughly lovely song. i could have posted a live performance but there weren't any that were really good quality on youtube, so i just picked this version which is a clear version of the audio only. you need to hear the words and the sentiment to understand what i nice song it is.

shinebox

been sat with another team for 4 days now. its been about as useful as a one legged man at an arse kicking contest. basically the stuff they have been telling me could have been explained to me just as clearly if they had drawn a few visio diagrams. there is little value in sitting up here with them, despite what the bosses think. also seeing as no one has told me exactly what the remit of my role will be, i don't know exactly what is relevant or not. its all fun and games here.

just sat with one of the guys that was talking me through the windows domain structure of one part of the bank. with out getting techie about it, it was a complete mess. which idiot came up with that strategy. it basically means you end up having to have 5 different users accounts to log into a server, depending on what server it is. they have 9 domains in the develelopment environment and 3 domains in UAT and 2 production domains, its ridiculous. i think by my occasional responses of 'oh really', 'thats different', 'interesting' as it was explained to me, might have given away what i really thought, which was 'you do know that this is a horse shit way of arranging your network?, you do know that, don't you....?'.

still, i did follow the golden rule of contracting which is never to offer an opinion even if someone asks you, and even if you are asked, don't be too critical. the idiot who came up with the dumb ass plan is probably still working here, and they might not like it if some contractor who has been there 3 weeks, says its the shittiest and most unintuitive design he has ever seen in his not incosiderable career in IT.

in other news, i am still applying. not a sniff of anything coming through. maybe i am the dumb ass. there i was mocking other peoples network designs and yet the people that see my cv might be thinking i am the idiot. actually thats not plausible. its probably that mid summer slump as people take holidays and things slow down. even when i take the train in the morning, its not the usual mosh pit it usually is. something will come through soon. it just depends on how long soon is. please get me out of here. pretty please with sugar on top, get me the fuck out!.

sat in on their weekly team meeting today. 1 hour of talking about processes and raising particular types of tickets and requests. basically the kind of knowledge that is valuable at this bank, but completely useless anywhere else. i just glazed over and was watching the film goodfellas in my head whilst they were rabbiting on about it. "go home and get your fuckin' shinebox". what a classic film.

tonight is the first football in a month. world cup has been on tv and its been essential viewing every evening and seeing as it only comes round every 4 years, that takes priority over football. it takes priority over everything, but there is no game tonight on tv so we can play. its lovely and warm so it should be a nice evening for it.

today i have mostly been listening to ...to be filled in tonight when i get home.