emmylou

the reason they wanted me to start my new job so quickly was that the other guy in the department was going on holiday and they wanted to give me a handover. a 1 day handover. it usually takes about a month before you get up to speed properly at a new place as you get your head round their processes and standards. i got 7 hours. 


needless to say i have been sat at work the last couple of days very frustrated. it seems that there is very little documentation and the other guy who had been there 4 years, just pretty much did what he wanted and made stuff up as he went a long. today i had to work out how to set up network load balancing on an F5 hardware load balancer. i have never used one before and there was no documentation. 4 hours of google later i figured it out and i got it done. in fact, it looks to me like their config is not as optimised as it should be (given my extensive approx 4 hours of F5 experience) but i just did it the way their other configs were done to keep it consistent. 


now normally i would be thinking of leaving a shambolic situation like this, especially as i am on my own for the next 2 weeks and the thought of it just fills me with horror, but the fact of the matter is, they pay me too much to walk away. i would like to think i had some morals and i can not lie and say i am worth that much money and that i enjoy the job, because i am not and i dont, but in 5 days i earn the equivalent of 2 months mortgage payments. when i think of it like that it makes me want to stick it out, at least until something better comes along. in the meantime i will take the money. 


anyways it friday tomorrow. only 8 more hours to struggle through and shake my head in bewliderment as i wonder why they have presented every LUN to every host in all 4 of their ESX clusters, and why 5 intel Xeon blades with ESX and in maintenance mode have been added to a cluster containing 4 AMD ESX blades. 


the techies will understand what i am on about in the above paragraph. for the others, i shall just say you should present the same LUNs to all the ESX hosts in the same cluster. they should not be seeing LUNS that are used in other clusters. there is no need, its messy, and its a needless risk if something breaks or someone makes a mistake. also you cant have mixed Intel Xeon blades and AMD blades in the same cluster. you cant vmotion across AMD and Intel, so why does it look like you are planning to have them in the same cluster. thats a no no....and is basic shit. 


one plus side of my job is that i spend 45 minutes on the train in the morning and in the evening which means i get to read for an hour and half every day. am flying through my book about patrice lumumba and i think i will have it finished in another 4 or 5 days. they never taught us this in history lessons at school and yet this was one of the greatest men of the last century who everyone should know about be informed about how western colonial powers and UN conspired for him to be murdered. 


its why i find patronising and racist films like the one made by the american 'charity' about joseph kony (KONY 2012) and the lords resistance army in uganda so distasteful. these people should be turning their attention to what they can do in the society they are in. they should highlight what has been US policy towards Africa for decades. 
the US support for the murder of the democratically elected prime minister of the Congo and the support for dictators like Mobutu and Mubarak and the racist regime in south africa. they choose not to do this. they instead highlight shocking crimes of black africans against each other and not the crimes commited by western neo colonial powers. the same powers and people that pretend to care about child soldiers but that let a million Rwandans die in 94 and let 5 million people die in eastern Congo between 1998-2004 at the hands of Ugandan and Rwandan forces which invaded Congo. the same people that conveniently overlook the fact that US ally and president of Uganda, Museveni, also used child soldiers.


anyways, enough of the history lesson. i encourage everyone to read about africa. a fascinating continent which has had great leaders and culture and will hopefully have more in the future if only our governments in the west would allow african nationalism and democracy develop and stop looting their countries.  


today i have mostly been listening to first aid kit - emmylou. enjoy.