led zepellin

my splitting headache that i have had for weeks is still here. the only time it goes is when i am at football and the gym. the rest of the time, which is spent mostly at work, its there. worked late on friday night again and was finished by about 10:30pm and then was back into work on saturday just before 9 to do another full day. today is my only day of the weekend and once i have had a chance to catch up on some sleep in the morning, cycled to the gym and back, and done my laundry, its pretty much over. 


am back at the hedge fund in mayfair on monday and actually thats a good thing. have been in foul mood this week what with all the shit at work with the chancers, as well as being very tired and not being able to sleep. am going to try a new approach this week. i am going to actively ignore the chancer PM and only speak to him only when its vital. my tolerance for idiots is very low, which is unfortunate for him. 


all the other guys ignore him. i noticed one of the guys in my team gets up and goes to the kitchen or down for a coffee every time the chancer comes over to near his desk. my team leader hasnt spoken to him much since they had a run in a couple of weeks ago. one of the guys in the support team who had been roped in to fix some shit the chancers had done, replied to an email the other day saying he was too busy now to do the work chancer had given him. chancer didnt ask him if he was free to do it. he just sent him a mail telling him to do it that day. it didnt get done. its still not done. 


i think its the best policy to sideline him. i can not work with him or his team of 3 idiots. there is no way of talking them round to doing things the right way. they are too stubborn, obtuse and incapable and i had been getting frustrated with them. i will just accept the situation and cut them all off as much as i can and just work with the developers and their manager at the hedge fund independently. you are on your own chancers. i will still put out your fires, but i will decide which fires i put out and when, so be careful you dont start a blaze that i can not respond to immediately. you might get burned....or i might let you burn.


we did have a good laugh this weekend on my normal project recounting all the chancer PMs catchphrases. he just comes out with the most shit you have ever heard. "we are where we are", "belt and braces check", "so what you are telling me is...", "my balls are on the line" etc. he has half a dozen that he rolls out every time you speak to him and he is infamous for just talking and talking and talking with out actually saying anything of note. he is a bit like this fella. 





still havent booked my hotel in san diego. i think i might do that at lunchtime this week. have got my eye on a place downtown near petco park. its a 20 minute drive to pacific beach and its a nice part of town to walk around in and there are lots of places to eat. i need my holiday so bad!!!!. 


today i have mostly been listening to  led zeppelin - babe, i'm gonna leave you. on my mp3 player i always listen to the same 5 or 6 albums, so the last few days i have put it on shuffle and it ends up playing some tunes i havent heard in ages. i also have lots of Noam Chomsky lectures on it, so you will get a nine inch nails song, followed by noam chomsky discussing US foreign policy in central america, then followed by a smiths song. anyways, this is what came up yesterday on my way to work. no video, but its not necessary. its fabulous. 

escapists

my teamleader asked me if anyone had spoken to me about a contract renewal. he had heard from one of the other guys that they might be going round to some people soon to let them know they might be needed in the new year. no one has spoken to me yet, and i am going to assume they are not going to and plan accordingly. as far as i know i am leaving in mid december and i am going to make plans for a new contract elsewhere. 


chancer PM has been same as always, an asshole, but thats nothing new. his team of 3 chancers have been same as always, incompetent and lazy. i got into work late today at 9:20. when i got there they were in the office but not at their desks. they do a morning breakfast meeting every day which has no one else in it but the 3 of them. at around 9:45 they were back at their desks, but then at 10:15 they all dissappeared again. at 11am they came back and then at 12:15 they all went to lunch. they were back by the time i got back from lunch at 2pm but at 4pm they got their bags and coats and left for the day. £450-500 day for maybe 4 hours work a day. its a great job if you can get it. 


i also got the impression that one of the chancers was giving me dirty looks today. am not bothered as i dont need their approval or camoraderie. i wonder if something i said yesterday to chancer pm might have been relayed back to them. he was piling on tons more work for me to do which was to fix his teams fuckups. i told him i was too busy with other work and that i would look at it the next day. i also said it took a long time to check because i had to go through every little thing because their work was littered with mistakes. wrong VLANs, missing software on servers, software intalled on servers that didnt need it, missing disks, extra redundant networks, missing networks, incorrect DNS etc.... . chancer PM said there might be many reasons why these things MIGHT come about. i said it wasnt a case of might happen, this has happened and it is happening and maybe they should look at the causes of why, because its wasting time and pushing back deadlines for development teams.  


why would someone install a particular piece of software on a server when it wasnt requested!?. its bad enough they miss stuff, but now they are adding stuff when its not needed. chancer PM said it was because they guessed they might need it, to which i replied, yes, judging by the state of the servers, it looks like there has been a lot of guessing. conversation ended 10 seconds later and today when i have been in the same office as him, as opposed to putting out his fires in mayfair, he has said hardly anything to me. thats right fella, stand back. i am too tired and too close to the end of my contract. 


got football tonight. i need it bad. its the only time when this headache i have had for weeks seems to subside. it also went yesterday when i was at the gym for an hour, but this morning on the way to work it was back. am working late tomorrow night and saturday again. i am sooooo tired. 


today i have mostly been listening to escapists - post gospel blues. sounds a bit like arcade fire, which is not a bad thing. 

lies

another friday evening and and saturday spent at work, but it wasnt too late a finish on both days and thats me done for work this weekend. usual suspects were in at work on my project. one of the strorage guys, one of the DBAs, the PM for my project and my teamleader. one thing we have in common is a utter lack of respect for the group of chancers. the quiet hours whilst servers are being moved or patched or data is being copied are filled with stories of what idiocy the chancers have done this week or how they made fools of themselves in a conference call or in a meeting.

also, i happened to look up the linkedin profile of the main chancer and it was quite something. it stated he was the Team Leader for the infrastructure team and that he had built out a new datacenter and all the server infrastructure including AD, Exchange, Citrix, VMware and even some Linux servers. wow!. reading it you would think he was really skilled and must really know his shit. having worked with him and seen what level of skill he has, i would actually place him in the bottom 10% of people i have ever worked with at any of the companies i have been at. also, its a lie that he is the team leader for the infrastructure team. he is no such thing. he is supposed to be a windows engineer like me but he has so little technical knowledge that he spends his days hiding behind excel spreadsheets and shuffling paper, in the hope of appearing busy and also so no one will ask him any technical questions or ask him to deliver a piece of real work. 

its easy to project a false and misleading image of yourself online. shit, if he was that good, why am i the one being asked to do 3 days a week at the hedge fund for whom he was supposed to be building out application servers, which are now over a month late and incorrectly configured?. why do i have to talk to the heads of trading systems development and then implement what they ask for?.  why has it been decided that all the new servers for the trading systems have to be checked by me?. why is it that the storage team ask me to check any requests for new LUNs or storage reconfigs they get from the chancers?. why is it me that has to work with the DBAs to fix issues with the new production SQL clusters?. weird thing is that the so called infrastructure team leader (the main chancer) has not asked me to do any of this but a decision has been made by senior management that i should do it because he and 'the team he is leading' have show they are incapable. 

isn't it odd that someone at a lower level than the self proclaimed infrastructure team leader has been called in to clear up his mess. strange that. 

anyways, no bother. i worked my nuts off last week and fixed all his shit on one complete environment for one of the trading apps. am back in mayfair this week to check over one of the other trading system application servers, but i think it will be easier than this week, because i already did half of them over the last couple of weeks. also my own project seems to be going well and we are just over halfway through. all has gone smoothly thus far. it could be worse. i could be doing such a bad job that a more junior titled subordinate could be asked to take over and deliver the work i should have done. that would be a heck of a blow to my ego. would probably have to resign as my reputation would be in tatters. :-)

today i have mostly been listening to the stone roses - elephant stone. they announced that were getting back together again after 15 years. i do have both their albums and i think they were a very good band, but i thought the music press got a little too carried away with themselves this week. i wasnt one of those hoping for them to reform. i would have actually preferred if they hadnt because i cant help thinking its purely a commercial decision. all those kids that were at school and college and university first time round now work in hedge funds and will pay £60 for a ticket to relive their youths. not me though. this is back when they were doing it for real. enjoy.

champion sound

its been a busy week at work primarily because chancer PM said yes to every application team that wanted anything done and so i had a ton of work to get done in a short space of time. he was bounding around the office today with a spring in his step when i told him things were on target to get delivered and that me and one of the DBAs had also fixed a problem with a SQL cluster as well. in the meantime his own group of chancers are just bumbling along doing something not very important at all, whatever it is.


i havent been in our main office with the chancer and the rest of my team this week until today but my team leader told me that he had a run in with the chancer pm yesterday as well. again in a clear acknowledgement that his own team of 3 chancers (whose contracts he renewed recently) are useless, he asked my team leader if he could do some work on sunday, to which the teamleader, who has been at the firm 9 years, decided to tell the chancer some home truths. he asked him why he had renewed the contracts of 3 people that are not able to do the work that needs to be done, and thats why he was constantly asking him and me, to work on the chancers project when we had our own project to be getting on with. chancer pm was not able to come back with any kind of answer.


anyways, my team leader refused to work sunday, as he and i are working till midnight on friday and all of saturday on our own project, and so its not unreasonable to have 1 day off in the week. am surprised chancer pm has not asked me yet, and i think he won't. i have saved his ass this week by putting out fires at the hedge fund for him, and although he has pushed his luck way too far this week, even a dumb ass like him knows i will tell him to go fuck himself if he asks me to work sunday.


i also booked my hotel in las vegas for when i am there for 2 nights in january, after 2 nights in LA. all that is remaining is to book 3 nights in san diego and any concert tickets and thats me done. i like getting everything booked in advance and organised. its so nice to just turn up and pickup the car and then go to the hotel and pickup tickets from the will call booth. holidays should be stress free, and i make sure everything is sorted in advance so mine are very stress free indeed. just turn up to places knowing everything is sorted.


had a couple of calls this week about jobs at another hedge fund and bank. havent had time to get back to them as i barely get a minute to stop at work. will call them back tomorrow. i am 7 weeks from the end of my contract and i need to start making plans if i can.


football tonight. is cold outside but i think its going to be good. am well up for it. 


today i have mostly been listening to crystal fighters - champion sound. stick with it, as it starts a bit strange but then really gets into it. they also sing about going to argentina. one day.....

bulletproof cupid

have been in mayfair at the other hedge fund so far this week and its been busy. dont really get too much time to just coast along and get a breather and am on it pretty much all the time. all the developers and managers i am working with seem nice. The head of the trading development team, who is a big cheese, came over to me today and thanked me for getting a lot of the problems fixed, which was good to hear. i was worried i was going to be grouped in with the chancers and be blamed for fucking up their project, but its good to know they are not lumping me in with those idiots and appreciate that i am trying to be part of the solution not part of the problem.


The only downer is that i am still having to deal with chancer PM on a daily basis. he is so far out of his depth its just embarressing. we have conference calls with various departments and he just says the most stupid things sometimes. still, at least he is back in the head office and i am in mayfair and he cant come to my desk every 20 minutes asking me dumb ass questions. he did however stitch me up which is not entirely unexpected. it had been agreed that i would be in mayfair for 3 days working on fixing his project and then i was to be in the main office and working on my own project on thursdays and fridays. today he sent a schedule round to all the senior developers and the heads of department saying i would get various bits of the their projects fixed and working on thursday and friday (when i was scheduled to be on my other project).


what a fucking chancer. you help them out. you give them your time and you work in another office in another part of town clearing up a mess his team have caused. you become the person that everyone goes to for all their problems associated with that project and so you risk your reputation in associating yourself with a shuttle crash of a project. you stay behind and try and get as much done as you can in the 3 days, and your thanks for it is that he dumps more work on you to be delivered at the end of the week, when he clearly knows you are scheduled to be working on another project on those days. some people just cant stop taking the piss. i had to let the manager of my other project know and he was not happy and sent a terse email to the chancer saying it was agreed i was his resource on thursdays and fridays.


in the meantime his team of 3 chancers just bumble along completely unaware of anything. i dont even know if they are even doing any work, or for which project. they cant be working on their own project because they have made a balls up of it, and they are not working on my project, so fuck knows what they do to get paid £450/day. maybe they are at their desks with colouring books and crayons, or maybe they are finger painting. i also heard from one the people that approves timesheets that the chancers bill for 7 days a week most weeks not 6, claiming they are working all weekend on building servers. for those keeping score, thats over 3 grand a week each for people that you wouldnt trust with a pair of scissors let alone be involved in build out a new trading platform.


today i have mostly been listening to placebo - bullet proof cupid. this is from the concert film, soulmates never die. its a instrumental piece and is an awesome way to start a show.

dodge challenger

i didnt end up doing a morning till midnight shift on friday. i knew it would be too much and i knew i needed to stay concentrated for late last night as i didn't want to be switching off the wrong the trading system. that would not be cool and would necessitate an early end to my contract.....or maybe not seeing as the chancers can get away with their catalogue of fuck ups with impunity.

it all went smoothly on friday night and i got home from work at 1.30am and found myself walking to the station 7 hours later, this morning to finish off the work. did most of it last night so it was a pretty easy morning, and i was also surprised to see one of the chancers in the office to provide support if any was needed, for part of his project. he appeared to be doing very little and was not seen after 3pm, which surprisingly enough was when the system he was supposed to be supporting fell over. as usual, i got asked to deal with it.

how long does this shit need to go on for and how many times do i need to put out their fires?. well i got the answer yesterday. it will go on for the next 2 months. its been decided that i have to do 3 days a week at the hedge fund in mayfair sorting out the chancers mess, and then thursdays and fridays in our main office working on my project. wonderful!.

anyways, today i booked my hotel in los angeles and yesterday i booked my rental car as well. someone posted a clip of the hertz car rental at LAX, and i thought i had to get one. it kind of goes against my environmental conscience driving a 5.7L V8, but i figure its only for 1 week in a year and so i am allowed. i am going to book a couple of nights hotel in las vegas and also a couple of nights in san diego and thats me done. cant wait.



i also need to start making a soundtrack for my trip like i always do.

rock and a hard place

the firm i work for has taken over another prestigious hedge fund and its for these guys that the chancers project of building new application servers is for. its quite a high profile project and the team i was in is tasked with another important project migrating to a new datacenter and moving existing application servers and building out the infrastructure for it.

thats the background of whats going on. 2 big jobs split between 2 teams of 3 each. as the chancers project has turned into a plane crash, i was constantly being asked to help them out, which is odd because i have been at the firm 4 months and they have been there a year. anyways, today it got more ridiculous. chancer PM who is heading up the project for the new hedge fund, came over to me and told me that i would have to go to the new hedge funds offices in another part of london (near mayfair/picadilly) and sit with the guys there and help them with any issues. he said it was a political move as they were pissed off as to why their shit was all fucked up and had insisted someone be there and work through the mess and he wanted to send someone who would make a good impression and could deal with them and get stuff done. 

so instead of sending any of his 3 highly paid resources that are dedicated to the project he sends me to go there and to put out fires and smooth things over with the guys there. what a fucking shambles of a project manager you are. its one thing to have people laugh at you and undermine you behind your back, but senior pm has just undermined himself. surely in the last week or two he must have recommended that the chancers get contracts renewed and now days later he asks me to smooth shit out with the project they have been re-hired to complete. are you an idiot. the 2 things are utterly incompatible. you cant hire people to do a job and imply and judge they are good enough to do it and then take the opposite view soon after and imply they are incapable of doing it by not asking them to do what you employed them to do because you dont think they are good enough. 

anyways, this afternoon i went to the other hedge fund and sat with them and went through all the issues with them and told them what i was going to do to get it fixed. tomorrow morning i am there again, but in the afternoon i have to go to our main office to work on my own project. i even offered to spend friday morning with them working on their problems even though i am supposed to be starting work at noon on friday and working till midnight on my datacenter project. its going to be a long long friday. 

its all causing friction at work now. the project manager i report to is getting pissed off because i keep being taken off his project and leaving him with a man less, and having to bail out the chancers. he is worried because his (our) project is going quite well and according to plan so far, and he fears that we could start slipping and something could go wrong because of resources being taken away from him. 

something is going to give soon. in the meantime i am between a rock and a hard place. to motivate myself i bought myself a ticket to los angeles leaving at the beginning of january, and i figured that if i work a long friday that will pay for the cost of hiring a dodge challenger for the week i am out there. how's that for using positive thinking. 

today i have mostly been listening to red hot chilli peppers - californication. dreams of californication are what is going to get me through the next few weeks.

we are augustines

average monday at work. 


talk to storage about new SAN LUN for SQL cluster
check new SAN disks are correctly presented to 2 other SQL servers
check application servers have been installed correctly by chancers
audit and plan for moving VMs to replicated LUNs so they can utilise VMWare SRM. (was supposed to be done by the chancers but they said they didn't know how to do it and it got dumped on me) 
fix issues with new production  trading application servers (originally built by the chancers)
get asked to investigate why backups failed on a particular application server (built by the chancers)
speak to EMC about requirements for installing File Management Appliance as a Virtual Machine. (i dont know what it is, but i had to familiarise myself with it in 5 minutes from a document. head chancer said it was a windows server, its not you halfwit)
....and thats just the morning.


senior PM who will be referred from here on as chancer PM, came over to my desk and just dumped tonnes of work on me this morning. i am not even supposed to be working on your project you chancer!. i didnt say it but i gave him the kind of look that effectively said 3 people were hired months before i even started at the firm, to do that project, so why dont you give it to the chancers whose contracts you just renewed. he verbally replied "errr....well....they dont have that particular skillset....errr....". well maybe you should have hired people with the skills to do the job, instead of paying them £450/day to do a job you know they cant do.

anyways, i just tried to get on with it as best as i could. spoke to the Project manager of the project i am supposed to be working on, and he had words and said i would be working on my original project on thursday and friday....and saturday. its the best he could do. there ship is sinking and people above have said that i have to help bail out the chancers. he thinks chancer PM is a chump as well. 


talked the to the other guys in my original project team and they told me that they had spoken to the head guy of the department on friday night after he had a few drinks and he let slip that there was a new project starting as soon as our current project finished in december and that they already had a list of people that they wanted to work on it. the other 2 guys are hoping they are on the list, and i would happily stay on and work with them. one of the guys is permanant staff and has been there for 9 years, and he said that if he got asked to go onto the new project he would ask for me and the other to be signed up for it as well, and would refuse to work with the chancers. we shall see how it goes. i would love to stay and work with my original team on a project. 


in the meantime i have been getting calls from agents recruiting for a large investment bank. its a bank that i worked for about 3 years ago, but since then they have merged with another bank and they need someone. i have had 3 calls in the last 2 weeks about them and the fact that they still keep calling me leads me to believe they might be struggling to find the right candidates. i originally turned it down a couple of weeks ago, but since being thrown back in with the chancers and there only being 2 months left on my contract, i think i might put myself forward for it. its a 6 month project and the money is miles more than i have ever earned. if i dont get it, thats fine, but i need to put myself forward. come december i will be out of contract and what are the odds the chancers get asked to do the new project and i don't. if recent events are anything to go by, thats quite likely. 


today i have mostly been listening to we are augustines - book of james. wicked tune. no video, no need. enjoy. 

15:23

well the weather couldnt last and by wednesday the sunshine was a memory and normal slate grey skies had returned. still, its not been too cold and friday was quite bright, so i cant complain. it hasnt rained this weekend, so i got to cycle to the gym yesterday and today so i cant really complain about the weather. it is mid october after all. broke my record on my cycle to the gym. i knocked 10 seconds off my previous best time and did it in 15m 23s. i got held up in a couple of places and i know its very possible to dip below 15mins. i just need traffic lights, traffic and good form with me, and i am sure i can do it.


work has been ok, but i have found myself sucked back into the chancers project which is a bit of a pain. the senior pm had not been coming over to my desk, since my 'too many shit people on this project' episode the week before, but this week he has been getting me to do more work that should have been done ages ago. to compound things, all three of the chancers have had their contracts renewed. the head chancer who is a complete waste of space, has been walking around with a spring in his step all week. i dont know officially if they have been renewed, but it fucking looks like it, because they are still here and they are still shit. you do the math. the incompetent senior pm has proved his ineptness once again by keeping those idiots on the project.


 it actually beggars belief. in any other organisation these people would be laughed out of the building, but in an organisation that has a reputation of attracting the best and most talented people, they are so far out of their depth, its embarressing. the people you hire and the company you keep are a reflection on you, and in this case the senior pm has demonstrated to anyone with half a brain, that he has no idea about anything. its such a shame that the project they are working has been ruined like this. am also wondering who hired the senior pm because clearly they must be clueless as well. it seems the incompetence runs deeper that i first thought.


anyways, i keep myself to myself and just get on with it. head chancer who seems to think he is co-ordinating the project (he couldnt co-ordinate himself out of a wet paper bag), had been sending me emails asking for status updates and issues earlier in the week. i ignored them. firstly, i dont report to you so you can fuck right off, and secondly the status of anything is it will be done when i get it done. he sent me a couple of emails, but he got the message and after those first two mails and no replies and i haven't had anything since from him. sometimes you can send a message to someone by not sending a message to someone. in this case the message was fuck off chancer.


i also had this weekend off work. it looks like i will be working pretty much every weekend from now till mid december. i will need to find a way to lift my spirits over the next couple of months so am going to book my ticket for los angeles this week. have found a good deal on british airways which is a lot cheaper than virgin, who i usually fly with, so will get it booked. as is the case almost every january, i will be looking for a new contract somewhere, but at least i can be completely refreshed and holiday'd before i embark on a new project.


i bought an autobiography of fidel castro last week as well. have got quite a bit of a back log books to read through as i also bought a book about the iranian coup overthrowing mossadegh and then the overthrow of the shah, and am just finishing off my current book about the congo. dark winter days are coming so will probably have lots of time indoors to read.


today i have mostly been listening to marvin gaye - inner city blues. some musical education that we may not have been around for but that we can go back and redicover and learn for ourselves. enjoy listening to the wonderful voice and powerful lyrics of marvin gaye.

a very late summer

for all the times i whine about shit the summer is, let me start by saying the last few days have been stunning. we had the 2 hottest days ever recorded in october, today and yesterday. if it was july it would be hot, let alone october. you need to keep reminding yourself what time of year it is. the only thing that gives it away are that shadows are bit longer and the sun is a little lower in the sky, if you pay attention to that kind of thing, which i do.

we had out datacenter move again on friday night, and we were done for about 9pm as we are getting quicker at getting things done. went to a couple of bars with the guys i work with afterwards and was back into work on saturday at around 8.45 to do a few more hours. finished up around 1pm and it gave me just enough time to get home, get changed and out again on my bike to ride to the gym in the fantastic weather.

i dont need hot sunny weather in london because i am one of those people who lays in the sun tanning. it just subconsciously makes me feel better if i can see blue sky and can feel the sun. anyways, i did the same today as well and rode to and from the gym in the glorious sunshine. feel sorry for all those tourists who came over in august which was horrible and showery. anyone in london this past week will get the wrong impression of london though. its never like this. they have the records to prove it.

last few days at work i walked down to the river for lunch just to be outside. below is my lunch spot.

today i have mostly been listening to bush - sound of winter. dont bother watching the video. its so shit. is it really that hard to film a band playing their song in a studio, as opposed to filming gavin rosdale with a £100 camera walking a long the beach like chris martin in the video for yellow. anyways, the song is good.