tedium

the weeks are flying by or maybe thats just as it seems as its very hard to distinguish each day from the next when you work every weekend. it is all just one big blur of tedium. i am working this saturday again, and as its coming to the end of my project i am getting just shit to do. stuff that nobody else wanted to do and got delayed to the point where it cant be delayed any longer, and so its gets thrown into my lap. no bother, as i am definitely not working the weekend after.

i also need to get in touch with my agency and find out when exactly my last day is going to be. i suspect its beginning/mid december, and so i could end up having a couple of weeks off at the end of this year. am thinking of what i could do in that time off. i really would like to get out of london even if its only for a day or two. come the new year, i will be back to applying for contracts again and having to deal with thick agents like the one i have been talking to this week. he called me up about a job at a swiss bank and said he was going to mail me the details. i recieved nothing. i called him back and he said he forgot and was going mail them to me. i recieved nothing. i haven't called him back. if he is too dumb to use email he is unlikely to be able to get me a new contract.

besides, i had an interview with a couple of people at that particular swiss bank, about 3 years ago, and they came across as amongst the most arrogant assholes i have ever been interviewed by. i have had my fair share of asshole interviewers like the hedge fund who wanted to call me in for a 4th round interview because they still weren't sure after 3 interviews, or the idiot that interviewed me in depth about restoring AD with the express puporse of asking me obscure questions that he had clearly googled the answers for in preperation in a bid to make himself look good. mate, if AD restores are common place at your firm maybe you should be a bit more careful.

there was the guy at the oil trading firm who spoke for 30 minutes about his own background and how he had been in HR at goldman sachs for 9 years. i thought i was the one getting interviewed mate and i dont know what relevance his past had to do with my ability to support their network and servers, and there was the amusing episode whilst at a second interview at microsoft when i used the phrase 'google it', and i may just as well have said said cunt, whilst doing a bit shit on the desk and then punching the interviewer in the face, given the offence they appeared to take at my saying of that particular phrase.

i have to put up with all manner of idiots when i am finding a new contract. to be fair these people are the exception and i have met some good people at interviews as well. its just a bit of a tiring process but its part of the game we have to play. am going to need some r&r before i embark on it again.

today i have mostly been listening to paul van dyk - let go. they were playing at the gym the other evening. they usually play lots of pop/dance music and most of it is shit. this is not bad though.

only

worked on saturday and was home by 9pm which is actually quite early compared to recent saturdays. it had been grim walking to the station at 6am in the dark and cold and in heavy rain. was feeling very annoyed about having to work but then i walked past a mcdonalds and they were already open at 6 and were serving people. at least i get compensated very well for what i do, so its a bit shit if i moan about it, as other people have it way worse than i do.

sunday was the only day of the weekend and it was taken up with gym and laundry and getting stuff done. i thought my fitness was ok when i got back from the states after having not trained in nearly 2 weeks, but since then because of work or shitty weather, i have only been to the gym once a week and now i really am weaker than i was a few weeks ago. it was a struggle on saturday and even when i was cycling back home i had no legs and no power in them.

i was hoping to be not working this saturday and was looking forward to 2 whole days off, but i just got told i was needed and i do have to work on saturday after all. just need to keep thinking about them benjamins.

quiet week ahead but thats no change. applied for a few more contracts elsewhere but nothing heard back from them. no bother. the thought of walking into another contract as soon as this one comes to an end is not the appealing at the moment. i need some time to rest a bit.

today i have mostly been listening to nine inch nails - only.

bricks and mortar

very very tired and constant headaches. the weather has gotten cold. thankfully its not raining and its bright but the forecast for this weekend is showery. i am also working this saturday but there is a small chance that i might be done in less than 10 hours which will make a change.

no football this week as we couldn't get enough players together and i had to work late last night anyways. i have only been back from my holiday for 3 and a half weeks but it feels a lot longer than that. its not a distant memory but its hard to believe i was laying on beach in southern california 3 and a half weeks ago.

trains have been screwed all week, and i am working tomorrow and they are always screwed on a weekend when a lot of the system is shutdown for maintenance, so its another fun journey into work at 6am in the morning.

nothing else happening. just work and home. nothing else. no gym, no football no friends, no exams, no cycling, no nothing.

today i have mostly been listening to editors - bricks and mortar. i was listening to this in my mustang driving around LA not so long ago.

broken

i said i would be happy if i managed to get out of work by 10pm on saturday. i ended up getting out at 10.30pm so i will still happy but also very very tired. i was sleepy on the train at 6.30am going into work and i was sleepy on the train at 11pm on my way home. inbetween it was a long and painful day of moving servers between datacenters.

some idiot had presented about 1TB of SAN storage to a server, but it had been presented in 22, 50GB LUNS that were spanned into a single volume at the OS level. exactly what the justification behind that is anyones guess. anyways, it all got fucked up when we moved it to the new storage at the new datacenter. it was a key development server of the equity trading team, who have a reputation for being a bunch of cowboys and this server proved it categorically.

no bother though as it was a 16hour work day for me which means i can charge them for 2 days when i bill them. those equity trading boys made me some money on saturday.

yesterday was cold but bright and i cycled to the gym. the good news is that i am not quite as weak as i was a couple of weeks ago. i can feel myself coming back. i also had football on thursday night and although i was knackered after 15 mins it felt good to be playing again after a long time.

went to see the film the social network on friday night. it was surprisingly good. soundtrack is by trent reznor and its really rather good.

had a splendid day in london town today. on my way to work this morning there were problems on my train line so i had to take 3 trains and had a 25 minute walk to get to work. i was nearly an hour late. at lunchtime i went to meet a friend of mine for lunch, and its usually a 12 minute walk to the station across a footbridge over the river. the footbridge was closed and i had to walk down to the next bridge. it took me 25 minutes. then on my way home my train was screwed again. 3 trains and one and half hours later i got home. it usually takes 45 minutes. basically london is broken. none of it works. its shit.

today i have mostly been listening to sound of guns - elementary of youth. new fresh music.

football tonight

am going to be working the next 3 weekends in a row. no bother. as they say, its all about the benjamins and i will be handsomely compensated. i get the feeling this saturday is going to be a very long one. if i get out by 10pm i will be more than happy. please don't make me take the night bus home.

it does mean that my gym routine will be disrupted but its disrupted already by the weather and i figure its just for a few weeks and then my project is over and i suspect i will have plenty of time to get my conditioning back when i am inbetween contracts. it is quite hard starting all over again and putting all that work in to get back to your previous fitness level, but we have done it before and will can do it again.

on the subject of contracts i applied for another role at a smaller japanese investment bank. sounds like there can't be many techies there and they want someone with a broad range of skills. vmware, exchange, AD, SQL. they even want someone who can administer Clariion SANs. i have done a bit of that but not too much. that will be the only reason they won't ask me in for an interview, but i can't imagine there are too many SAN/Windows/VMware/Exchange/SQL guys out there and i am proficient in 4 out of 5 and have had exposure to Clariions as well.

lets hope they don't turn out to be idiots like that place i saw about 3 months ago that wanted someone who was an expert in Windows/Solaris/Market Data and Sybase. it sounds like they were randomly picking technology out of a hat. i saw that they still haven't filled that role and are still advertising it. idiots.

.....football tonight!!!. we haven't played in at least 2 months and i am gasping to play. i think everyone is. how awesome would it be to play football everyday. imagine getting to play in big stadiums on perfect pitches and getting paid a hundred grand a week. all you shithead proffesionals that end up drink driving, speeding and bar fighting whining about how tough you have it. you don't know when you got it good.

today i have mostly been listening to placebo - allergic. lovely stuff.

2 weddings and a bike ride

i went to 2 wedding parties over the weekend. one was at a very expensive and exclusive private members club in london and the other was at a golf course to the north of london. both were good. i don't mind dusting off my posh clobber and getting dressed up occasionally for a nice do.

i also cycled to the gym on saturday and it was the first time i had been on a bike in almost a month. my legs have felt soft and i knew in the weeks before that i had lost a lot of conditioning, but i didn't realise how much. i really didn't have much power at all, and it took me 20 mins to cycle to the gym (average time when i am not pushing is 18 minutes), and i was sweating like crazy even to do that, and my legs felt shot. there was nothing left in them. conditions were not ideal and there was a slight breeze but that was a woeful time.

thankfully we have the prospect of football for the first time in a couple of months, coming up this thursday night, and that will help to get me back to where i was in the summer.

am working this weekend. i think its going to be a long saturday. i can feel it already. i think i will be lucky to get out around before 9pm. just keep thinking of the money. am toying with the idea of buying a scooter. i hate relying on buses and trains all the time because they will let you down regularly.i mentioned before that my work is full of people with their bmw and audi status symbols. i was toying with the idea of getting one of these.

quiet week ahead i hope.

today i have mostly been listening to maximo park - questing not coasting. enjoy.

2 whole days off

got a call last night about a job at another bank, but i declined to be put forward for it. the guy must have been pretty desperate to ring me at 9pm, but it was a permanent role and not a contract and it paid a lot less. yes, you get holiday and sick pay and shit like that when you are permie, but i don't take that much holiday, and i haven't taken a sick day in 3 years, so its not worth taking less money for those benefits. i want to see if i can land another contract before i consider going permie.

also worked out that i think my contract ends at the beginning of december and not the beginning of january. no bother, it doesn't change my plans. i did apply for a couple of other contracts yesterday and we will see what happens with that. even if i don't land anything it will mean i am off work for the last 3 weeks of december when the weather is usually terrible and so it will be relief not to be commuting and getting up early on dark, cold and wet winter mornings.

work has been ok this week. am not working this weekend which is a relief. have said i will do the next 2 weekends after. don't really feel like it, but sometimes you have to do stuff you don't want to and i was keen to get leave this job after 2 weeks of being here, and in hindsight i am glad i didn't/was unable to. sometimes its better if we don't get what we went when we think we want it. i did an interesting ESX project a couple of months ago and even though it back to the shitty work now, it was good experience while it lasted .....and i have earned some decent cash out of this contract. more than i have ever got anywhere before. don't want to be a michael owen or joe cole and just chase as much money at the detriment of my careers, but it has served a purpose over the last few months and its been lucrative.

anyways looking forward to a full 2 day weekend. am going out to a friends engagment party on saturday night which should be good. the weather forecast is supposed to be good as well, but we all know that the forecast dont count for shit.

today i have mostly been listening to klaxons in new york. posted this for no other reason apart from the fact that i was standing about 10 feet to the right of the person who filmed this. my holiday feels like a long time ago already.

midnight run

saturday evening and its coming upto 7pm and i have been here since 7am. i think i have a cold coming on and its raining outside despite what the idiot weather forecasters were saying about how it was going to be dry all day. their satelite simulations don't count for shit and i have no umbrella and i have a 15 minute walk to the tube station because my regular line is closed. what joy. just need to keep thinking of the money.

...and now my messaging software has crashed and i cant communicate with the other guys in the other teams on this problem we have. mindalign. who the fuck uses mindalign as a messaging platform?. its shit. what exactly is wrong with office communication server. the mindalign service has come back but i can't log into it now because it must have its own directory for user authentication that is not related to any of the 6 (yes 6) domain passwords i have i can't cant remember it. our 6 passwords all have varying expiration and renewal settings so at any one time you are carrying a ton of passwords in your head. i have had nearly 30 different passwords in the 5 months i have been here.

we used to joke about shit like this at my previous jobs whenever we saw it. its called security through obscurity. make something so obscure and complex that even people who have access to the system cant actually access the system. i think i will do what the rest of the guys in the team do and start writing them all down to keep track of them. ha, so much for your security bitches!.

christ i hope i get out of this office soon. it was dark when i left my house this morning. its dark now again. am not in the mood for a midnight run to catch my last train. not tonight.

walk the fleet road

bumped into a guy that used to work at the games company i worked at in my last contract. i asked him how it was going and he said it was shit and looking to get out. it kind of surprised me because he had been there about 4 years and appeared to be content. clearly not. i asked about my old boss and he is is still there even though he had told me he was not happy and was looking to move as well. clearly things have not reached that tipping point where you actually move as opposed to just talking about moving on.

have been back to work this week and its all come flooding back. i had forgotten that the network was designed by a monkey and i have been refamiliarising myself with the madness this week. i might have only been away for 9 days but it felt like i was on a different planet in a different time. back to london 2010 and the nonsensical network i work in. am glad i got frustrated with some of my work because it means i have not reached that point where i think its normal to have a domain end with the suffix -net.com. its like they couldn't decided whether to use net or com so they used both. they also have a domain called qadev. well what is it?...qa or dev?. can't decide so lets just call it both those things. am waiting to discover the proddev network at some point.....and by the way the qadev network is actually a QA domain only and has nothing to do with the development domain, apart from having the word dev in its name. thats all clear then.

got a mail from an agency looking to recruit citrix consultants for a project in the US. i haven't had too much exposure to citrix on my travels, though i am certified in it after i did a course on it about 3 years ago. have barely touched it since. will reply and see what they say. it would be great to work out in the states for a few months. don't want to end up in hicksville but anywhere in california would be good. anyways, like i said, i am shit at citrix so its not really going to happen on this one.

went to the gym last night for the first time in 2 weeks. my clothers are feeling a little looser and i have clearly shrunk down a bit. training was hard last night and i was careful not to injure myself or pull a muscle. i have lost resistance and its at these times you end up doing yourself a mischief. decided to end my work out when it felt like i was just about to be sick.

the guy who i sit next to at work goes to the gym at lunch time 3 or 4 times a week, and then comes back to his desk and eats a whole packet of cheese. 10 thick slices for lunch after training. i ain't looked it up but i am pretty sure it would be healthier if he ate a big mac meal or a pizza rather than a whole packet of just cheese. either way, whats the point of training if you do that.

my friend who i travelled across the states used to do something similar. gym 6 times a week, and then would order a mountain of not very healthy food whenever we stopped for something to eat. do these poeple know it negates their work out?. shit you might as well have a can of larger and light up a red top marlboro while you are on the treadmill.

today i have mostly been listening to editors - walk the fleet road. i thought i would be listening to lots of janes addiction and g'n'r whilst driving around california but i actually ended up listening to a lot of very english bands like editors and the smiths and interpol (who are half english). this is my favourite song from editors last album.

....and while i was away i also read hopes and prospects by Noam Chomsky. someone telling it like it is and calling it out when they see blatant hypocricy, even when its obama, let alone bush and reagan and all their cronies. essential reading for anyone interested in foreign affairs and the reasons behind why things are the way they are. its profound and at a level you never see discussed on the 24 hour news channels and any current affairs programs who appear to be either appealing to the lowest common denominator, plain ignorant, patronising or not wanting to tell us the facts so that we can make up our own minds.