karma police

the guy that i work with that decided to work from home this saturday, which means i will have catch 2 trains to go to the datancenter, got a little bit of payback from the karma police.

him and one of the other guys were given around 20 servers to build for one of the project teams and he ended up doing 3 of them while the other guy did all the rest. clearly not impressed at doing most of the work, the other guy sent a mail when it was all done and also added a list of the servers and who they had been built by, hence showing that he did nearly all of them and the other guy did just a little more than fuck all. he was not happy last week and was going on about how in all his years in IT he had never been stiched up like that by a colleague before and made excuses for why he had only done 3.

i am glad he got stitched up. he has put me in the shit on saturday night. he lives a 30 min drive away from the datacenter and owns a car but is working from home that night, so i have to do it. part of me was thinking i might cycle but it will take me just over 2 hours and thats with me emptying the tanks which i don't think i could do at 3am. otherwise it could take me 2 and half hours or even 3 hours and i really don't want to be cycling down un-lit country lanes at that time of night. today i asked one of the managers at work to make sure about work organising cabs home for us, and it turns out they aren't. we will have to pay for them and then claim them back later, although one of the guys said it can take months to get your money back. i plan on being gone in a few months. clearly i work with, and for, a bunch of cunts.

anyways shithead is working from home again today. personally i wouldn't let contractors work from home unless they were having a kidney transplant or something equally as serious.

anyways, it was a much needed 3 day weekend just gone. i had forgotten how nice it is to not start the day woken up by an alarm and then get onto a packed tube train. these are things i could quite comfortably do with out. feeling fresh and rested and although i have to work saturday and it is going to be an all nighter, its ok because its only a couple of weeks before i fly away. weather is also nice after a whole week of constant drizzle, so things are looking up. i also booked a ticket to visit an automotive museum just north of los angeles, which has lots of cars from the 1930s that were made in france in an art deco style. it looks like an amazing place. i do like my cars, despite not having one, unlike some people, who have bmw z4's, which actually proves they don't know anything about cars.

today i have mostly been listening to biffy clyro - living is a problem because everything dies. it would be a bit obvious if i had posted karma police by radiohead, though it is a great song. they televised the reading and leeds festivals on tv over the weekend and biffy were on it. to be honest i didn't think their performance was that great but it did remind me how great this song was. mumford and sons were on and they played well. the libertines were on and i just find their generic indie guitar music very boring. guns n' roses played but as usual they made idiots of themselves by turning up an hour late and getting booed by the crowd. axl doesn't help himself when he does shit like that. arcade fire were good. that was about it. as usual the bbc and radio1 DJs that were hosting the tv coverage just sat there saying how amazing everyone was even when they were clearly shit. i'll be the judge of who is amazing thank you very much. i don't need someone who is being told what to play on the radio and is in the pocket of record company executives, to tell me.

enjoy

declined

got a call about another role and declined it. the money was a bit low and it sounded like a 3 month project till then end of the year, after which i think it would have been over. i would be better off staying at my current place where my contracts runs out at the end of the year as well. no gain in taking it.

i got a couple of weeks till my holiday, and then i get back and then its almost october. i will just need to make it through that month and november and then i am home free. december in investment banks is dead. change freeze across the departments and people winding down, means it almost feels like a month off. it also mean i can write a full 6 months placement on my cv and complete this project as opposed to shuffling dates around and having a gap, where i have to say i went travelling or some other bullshit.

its not what we wanted but its where we find ourselves and although i whine, i do have it very good. i don't have any stress most of the week, i get to leave at 5pm on the button monday to friday, i get paid too much for the job i do, and there is as much over time as i want so it means i can earn even more. yes, the work is mind numbingly boring, i don't really speak to my work colleagues, i work in a lame part of town and i don't have any sense of worth or value of what i am doing but apart from that its peachy and most people have it so much worse than me.

speaking of overtime i have to work next saturday and its going to be a late one at our remote datacenter. it came down to me and one other guy that had to do it, and you would have thought given the fact he has a car and lives a half hour drive away from it, he would have done the right thing and said he would do it. wrong. he said he wanted to work from home and so i felt i had to volunteer to go as only one guy other that could do it, would take him nearly 3 hours to get there, and it would be shit of me to say i was going to work from home and make him drive all that way. it means i will have to arrange for a cab to drive me an hour back home at 3am from the middle of nowhere. thanks you asshole.

its the same guy that said he couldn't believe i don't own a car. its the same guy that goes to the gym every lunchtime and then eats a packet of cheese afterwards for lunch. its the same guy that drives a bmw z4 convertible, which is a girls car. its the same guy that gets allocated all the easy projects because the management at work know its all he can handle anything more complicated. its the same guy who once told me he didn't like it when i described someone as an IT cunt. you get the picture.

have a lovely weekend.

today i have mostly been listening to the killers - when you were young. its a good song. its a great video.

arrows

turned down an interview at another big investment bank today. it sounded like the same job i am doing now but with a different sign above the door. the penny has dropped and i have figured out that these large investment banks all tend to be roughly the same. would like to go to somewhere smaller or a hedge fund or something like that.money was about the same so there was not too much incentive to go for it on that side of things either.

3 and a half weeks till i go on holiday. am not working this weekend and we have monday off as well. i need the break, as i am working the two weekends before i go on holiday. won't complain as its money, and usually its a 12 hour day so you end up charging them a day and a half or two days. i don't mind long saturdays at work. its blown it out anyway when you have spent most of the day at work, so i figure i might as well have most of the evening as well there as well, coz its not like you get home and then want to go out or anything. that said i feel incredibly tired and only the thought of california sunshine is getting me through the days. i am so so so tired.

weekend was quiet. i worked saturday from 7am till 7pm. long day but that one day paid for the equivalent of the mustang rental for 5 days and 2 nights hotel in LA. when i say it like that to myself it doesn't seem so bad. cycled to the gym on sunday and had a good work out. my god, maybe its the time of year there are so many idiots driving around being complete assholes. i suppose its just london. there are 10 million people crammed into a small space and it means you are never more than a minute or two away from a complete dickhead. thats just statistics.

anyways, i have completed the first of my playlist CDs for my trip. will do some more soon.

today i have mostly been listening to i am arrows - green grass.

RIP

another 13 hour day at work on a saturday, which is actually a short one because everything ended up working fine. feel vey tired. am going to sleep like a baby tonight.

a few posts back i posted a song by a band called ou est le swimming pool. well, yesterday the lead singer commited suicide after a show at a festival in belgium. they were due to release their debut album in october which was due to be called 'christ died for our synths', which is a wicked name for an album. anyways, its sad that he felt he had to take his own life.

today i have mostly been listening to ou est le swimming pool - dance the way i feel.

young blood

constant tiredness. not physically, but just mentally and not because my brain has been working a lot or that i have a really stressful job. no, just worn down and need a break from this city and this life. unfortunately i am working on saturday again, but its only new servers and its never usually a problem. am gasping for a day off.

booked my hotel for when i fly to LA, and made sure it was close to the venue where i will be going in the evening because time will be tight. a couple more nights need to get booked and then that really is it all done. if only i was as good as organising shit at work as i am at organising my holidays. its so nice to go places and everything is booked and ready before hand. have done it a couple of times where its not been so organised and its not fun. i also bought a nice new camera because for some reason unknown to me, i decided to give my quite expensive camera to my sister but now i can take some photos on my hols.

am still applying for other roles. i had something come up at another big bank but asked not to be put forward. i really would prefer to go somewhere a little smaller and less beauracratic and where i can do some interesting work. i have been to enough big banks, this is my 4th, to have started to realise they are all pretty similar and i get bored quite quickly. you've done one, you have done them all pretty much and i don't need to make my cv look better with another big name.

saw a really good job going at a hedge fund but they didn't get back to me. that would have been perfect. smaller environment, lots of technology and also enough money to invest in cool new kit....and they pay well. in big banks you spend most of your time looking at spreadsheets filling in forms, chasing people and doing the same thing over and over again for months. i need to find a job like my last one at the games company, but that pays more money.

was supposed to go to the gym last night but its been showery the last few days and i didn't want to risk getting soaked on my bike. could really do with a good work out though, to give me some evergy.

today i have mostly been listening to the naked and famous - young blood. wicked tune. will be on my LA playlist. the car hire place appears to have got some camaro's again, so am debating whether to cancel my mustang and get one of them. decisions, decisions.

15:33

because i worked all weekend i didn't get to go to the gym so decided to bike it last night for a monday night session. the sun was out, the wind was low, and after a few risks through the lights, between cars and around some corners i managed to do it a record time of 15:33 (8 seconds faster than previous record) at just under 27km/h average speed. that don't sound like much on a clear wide road but through winding streets of london town with traffic and junctions thats pretty good going i think.

booked my tickets for Kele/does it offend you yeah?, in LA on the day i get there. just got to book a couple of nights in hotels and thats me done. i can just turn up and have everything sorted.

feel really tired. part of me wishes i had take more time off. i think i should have. no bother though, as it means i will pack lots of things into the 9 days i am out there. there will be no wasted time just ambling around and not doing anything special. i will need to make the most of every day, and i am sure i will. part of me is already dreading come back here to this city and this job.

am working this weekend, but definitely not the weekend after. i have to work on weekend in spetember but will not do any more that month, and here is hoping i am out of there not long after.

today i have mostly been listening to exit calm - hearts and minds. there are being built up as the next big thing. i think this song is ok. not fantastic. ok.

hubris

saturday at work. shit, but made worse by the fact i am in another building in bishopsgate and some telephone engineers are in and they are playing capital gold through thier tinny pc speaker at full blast, so i am having to listen to some absolute shite old peoples music like ELO and the beach boys which i really am not in the mood for.

one other thing i noticed. this building sits on some of the most expensive land in the world right in the heart of the financial district of london. it must be a zillion pounds per square foot, but they have built it at an angle, left a huge atrium space at the front and also the middle is completely empty as well. i would estimate that 40% of the ground area is not used and has no usable office space on it. why wouldn't they buy a plot of land 40% smaller and get the same amount of office space. what a waste of money. it must have cost millions more than it should have. i believe the word i am looking for is hubris, and maybe thats the reason they can't afford to get rid of the nt4 servers kicking around.

UPDATE:
ended up working a 16 hour day because of issues getting some shitty old NT4 servers running and then an issue with a server that boots from the SAN, that we moved to another datacenter. the people that moved it kindly decided to put in some blank hard drives into it so when it got to the other side it was trying to boot off them instead of the SAN. they didn't tell anyone that they had done this on a production server. it was only after someone esle took a look at it today(sunday) and changed the boot order that that we realised it. it would usually skip the RAID controller because it has no disks, and i assumed no one would have put any in because they were not asked to. why would someone randomly put disks into a server?. why???!!!. had me confused and i was convinced along with others that there might have been an issue with it pointing to new LUNs at the new location and maybe there was some issue with the SAN or data.

also to the brain surgeon that decided to do a boot from SAN windows server. i would love to hear the justification for it, seeing as its pretty much the only server in the entire bank set up like this. why?. what was the point of just having one server in the estate set up like this?. its not common anywhere to boot windows boxes from SAN, so why decide to install one here. probably just to add some confusion. the rest of the network is a mess anyways, so why not, eh?. also they presented 11 LUNs of 34GB to it and then spanned it as a single disk using windows. why didn't they just present 340GB spanned across on the SAN side. surely the performance hit is not that bad on a bigger LUN. it just makes for more checking of shit when it goes wrong. this place was run by comedians.

anyways, i learned quite a bit about booting from SAN yesterday. had not seen it anywhere i had worked before. i will also know now not to take anything for granted, between the time a server is switched off and switched on. someone might add some HBA's or put in some disks, or remove some disks, or take out the memory. basically anything can happen. actually come to think of it, i didn't check the processor speed on the CPU, now that the server is back. someone might have replaced them with something else and not told us. jesus wept.
i am not saying they should be killed, but maybe these people should be made to clear land mines in south east asia or maybe they should be made to give up a kidney to someone who really needs one because its wasted on that idiot.

its been a long weekend. quite lucrative though. its sunday afternoon and i need to get home and do my laundry.

typical

ha!, typical. i just got a call about a job and it was to work for the last bank i worked at before i was at this one. i told them i would pass. there is no point in going there. why go somewhere that you know is shit and that i didn't like first time. actually it would have been a 3rd stint there because about years ago when i first got into IT and was a desktop support person, i worked there for 4 weeks and then left. it was shit twice. i suspect it will be shit again.

still not heard anything about that other japanese bank i got a call about last week. i think the job only went live officially yesterday because i saw it advertised. it would be nice if that came through. i want out.

my trip to the states is all coming together and it looks like this.
friday night - fly to NY, meeting up with a friend and seeing klaxons on monday night.
tuesday afternoon - fly to LA. seeing, does it offend you yeah, on tuesday night.
wednesday afternoon/evening - drive to san francisco, stay at my friends place.
friday - drive back to LA, seeing the la galaxy v red bulls on friday night.
sunday - drive to san deigo and then drive back to LA and fly back to london in the evening.

time is short and i have many people to see about many things in a short space of time. rather amusingly my work still haven't given me the time off, but that is their problem and not mine.

am working tomorrow. i suspect its going to be shit. we are moving 10 year old servers that run windows NT and ancient versions of sql to a brand new shiny data center. god only knows why they are doing this. production NT4 servers. i will say it again.....production NT4 servers!...running on hardware 13 years old. jesus wept. you hope they will notice the folly when they say the words out loud, but they don't. you just end up sitting there in the meetings looking around the room looking for someone else to acknowledge that its madness but no one does, and you feel like you are the only sane person left in the world.

at my last contract we did a project where we upgraded or retired any server that was not windows 2003 or later. OS older than 7 years was considered a risk and obsolete. they have a 15 year old OS running production applications. i am astonished. not just one or two servers either. there are dozens of them that i have seen. what is wrong with these people?.

for the first time, i let my real frustration come out today at work. not good. all day spent messing around on ancient NT4 servers had my blood boiling and i snapped back and made some sarcastic comments in front of my manager. i honestly don't care. in response to a couple of queries from one of the project managers, yes, it is all fucked because its been put in by a monkey, and yes we are contractors and we bill for all our time because this ain't charity, and in response to my manager who queried why i didn't know how to use some random obscure remote desktop software they use on the NT4 servers i replied, no i have never used it before because all the other banks i have worked at didn't download shareware off the internet and install it on 15 year old servers.

christ i need my holiday soon, before i say something that will really upset them. :-)

anyways, enough whining. here is a really nice story about a guy that spent his youth in orphanages and shelters and was homeless for a while but who has now signed for manchester united. thats why we love football. its got nothing to do with where you went to college or how tall you are or if you got coached from the age of 4, or if you had membership to courts or a course. its just about talent and how you apply yourself and its all about what you can do with a ball. its the same game that i played on the street, that i played in park, that is played by messi and ronaldo in front of millions.

thats about all folks. have a lovely weekend. will post some music tonight as network restrictions prevent me doing so at work.

today i have mostly been listening to klaxons - its not over yet. they better play this in new york. they probably will as its not like they have a huge back catologue.

wake up

there's a poison going on at work. thankfully its not in my department but in the unix team. i mentioned one of the unix admins quit because one of the guys is an asshole. well, yesteday another admin resigned because of the same asshole in the department.

i wondered why the bosses were letting this happen but a conversation with one of the guys enlightened me. turns out that there is a group of 4 or 5 unix admins, including the asshole, who have worked at the same banks together for the last 10 years. when one moves, invariably they try and get the other guys in and over the course of a few months that team comes back together. its good if you are in the old boys network, but it ain't so good if you are not. they are too powerful and they have little consideration for anyone else, hence the other guys moving on.

i also learned that one of the guys there is on £850/day. thats silly money and unix admins in investment banks don't get paid that much. really good ones get £500/day. shit hot developers who do C and java can get £600-700/day. unix admins can get paid £850/day if the guy hiring is part of your old boys network and runs the department, as is the case here.

in terms of ethics and politics this is the worst bank i have worked at. i used to know a contractor who was a friend of mine, who worked here for 8 years. he told me he would interview other developers and if they were too good he would reject them because he didn't want any threats to his position that he had built up. thats just cuntish (yes, thats a word). it must be something in the water there that brings out the worst in people.

anyways things with me are same as always. feel tired and fed up. i worked last saturday. am working again this saturday. can't complain, as i am getting paid. the difference between me and them is that i know that the job i do does not justify the money i get paid. i can't pull the wool over my own eyes even if i tried. will milk it for the next few weeks, or maybe months but i will leave one day, and join the real world.

its looking likely i will go to san francisco for a couple of days on my trip. my friend mailed me and said i could stay over at her house, and i do like san francisco. its the nicest city in america.

today i have mostly been listening to the arcade fire - wake up. its epic.

lower chelsea

a wave of tiredness has hit me all of a sudden. it feels like i need to sleep for a few days to get my energy back. its perfect timing because i have to work tomorrow and i will be up at 6.30am, so i won't get my wish for lots of sleep. suddenly 6 weeks to my holiday seems an awfully long time to hold on for. still, its all paying for my holiday.

i booked my car. had to get a ford mustang instead of a camarro because they have all gone. i will see at the desk when i pick up my car if they have any and ask if i can have one instead if there are any around. can't believe they haven't got a single one all of a sudden. mustangs are cool anyway. am also getting together some cds to listen to as i always need a good playlist when i drive. i might be going to san francisco so i could have quite some time on the 101. also booked my ticket to see the galaxy v redbulls, so its all coming together now.

in other news, a job at a bank that i didn't get put forward for twice at the beginning of the year, has come up again and someone called me up about it. i lied and told them i was available immediately and so we shall see what happens now. its a long road before an interview or an offer so we will worry about extracating ourselves from our current contract, when the time comes to it. no need to fret about it now.

thats all. have a lovely weekend.

today i have mostly been listening to the gaslight anthem - the queen of lower chelsea. i got the new album and it had some indifferent reviews in the papers. as usual don't believe everything you read. its a very good album indeed. if you have the means i highly recommend you pick it up.

booked it

work is same as always, and aside from one or two calls that came to nothing, its been pretty quiet with regards to getting a new contract, so i decided to book my ticket to the states for my woefully short 1 week annual holiday. 3 days in new york, which coincides with a good friend of mine working out there, followed by 4 days in LA.

i also booked tickets to klaxons at the bowery ballroom in NY and will book some other tickets over the next few days. does it offend you yeah, (shit name for a band, but some decent songs) are playing in hollywood on the day i fly in, so if i don't get too delayed on my way from the airport i should be able to catch that show, despite landing at 5pm. it shouldn't really take me more than 3 hours to get out the airport, pickup a car and drive to hollywood to make it to the show in time.

not sure what i will do after that. i could stay in LA or i could drive to san francisco the next day and see a friend i used to go to school with and spend a couple of days up there, before making it back down for the la galaxy v redbulls game on friday night. i might go to san diego for the day as well but will see how it pans out over the next couple of weeks. am just relieved to be getting a break. am not tired because like i mentioned before i don't do that much work and there is not stress, but i am just fed up with london and need to get out of this town for a while.

today i have mostly been listening to manic street preachers - its not war, just the end of love. no video...because there isn't one yet.