After the Storm.

After three weeks of vacation I’m now back in the mud. Not only have I started working again, but I’m also on support duty. When on support duty I’m always extremely paranoid for the first day or so, checking our monitoring systems every 5 minutes, constantly looking at the inbox for e-mails and duct taping the support phone to my left ear to make sure I’m not missing any calls or texts that might come in.

To be honest, it’s wearing me out a bit, and I wish I could handle it better mentally.  I should be able to relax, the monitoring system will inform me the second something is wrong with a myriad of text messages, e-mails and whatnot, so there is no need to be this proactive.

Ah, there you go, had to check the monitoring system again. And nothing was wrong this time either. So I had to check it again. Which I did now. Nothing amiss. Still nothing.

As you might have noticed, I used the last day of my vacation to re-design the site once again. The last design, which I downloaded from some Wordpress theme site, lasted for about 9 days before I got dead tired of it. The new design I almost created myself, you can probably see that from the extreme simplicity. I lack the creative skills to create a proper Web 2.0 design, so I’m probably stuck with pre-Web 1.0 for ever. Not that it matters really. So far I feel the design is good enough. There is, however, room for improvement, like on the navigation side.

Anyway.

Here’s another pic from the thunderstorm that hit Oslo a few weeks back. Not as dramatic as the previous one, but still. Enjoy.

The Joker, the Joke and the Other Joker.

Yesterday was April 1st and with the success of last year’s April’s fool joke I decided to pull one yesterday as well. I sent this e-mail to all the people at work:

From: Vegard Skjefstad
Sent: 1. april 2008 09:01
To: All Employees
Subject: Important information regarding your e-mails.
Importance: High
All,

As of the 1st of February this year the new Norwegian Cyber Terrorism Preparedness Act of 2008 became active. The CTPA has been pushed through by the US via the EU and the result is as follows:

All employees who do not hold a Norwegian citizenship will have to send all e-mails they have sent to recipients outside of the Norway since the 1st of February this year to <address removed>, and CC that address on all future e-mail they send to recipients outside of Norway. The e-mails will then be automatically forwarded to the right authorities who will check your e-mails for anything suspicious. Any e-mail you might receive that contains suspicious information should also be sent to the above e-mail address.

Since we’re already lagging behind, it’s important that you start sending your e-mails to <address removed> today or the authorities might seize your computer, or, in a worst-case scenario, the mail server.

Best regards,
Vegard Skjefstad

We’re quite international when it comes to employee citizenship, so it was a good chance that at least one of the people at the office would fall in the trap. Continue reading "The Joker, the Joke and the Other Joker."

Parking.

On Monday the company I work for finally moved in with its share owner since 2006. The plan was to move in with them in December last year, but everything was postponed because the construction work on our floor took a while longer than planned to finish.

Now the first and second floor of the building (we’re on the third and fourth floor) are being renovated and it’s a hassle to find a place to park my bike and by bike I mean “bicycle”, so you wouldn’t really think that it could be a problem. But it is. I can’t use the main entrance because of the renovation work, so I have to enter through the back of the building, then carry my bike to the third floor, walk across the entire third floor, carry my bike up the main stairs to the fifth floor, lock it to the railing and walk back down to the fourth floor to my desk. On our previous office location I parked in the basement parking garage and took the elevator to the ninth floor. Convenient.

You can probably imagine how much fun it was on Tuesday when I was getting the good old flu.

All Your Ore Are Belongs To Us!

I finally got my hands on a Retriever. In the foreground; a giant secure container, a necessary tool for efficient solo mining in .7 and below. In the background; a Hulk, the überminer.

Gine is at work and I’m playing. Too bad I have support and a very bad gut feeling I have to head for the data center tonight. I have no idea why.

Who Needs Sleep Anyway?

As I’m writing this I’ve been awake for 36 hours, minus the 20 minutes of sleep I managed at around 9 this morning. The reason for the lack of sleep is of course work; scheduled maintenance at the data center combined with a full work day before and after. Me and two colleagues had a very efficient night in the data center, moving massive amounts of hardware around.

What surprise me the most is how awake I am. At least I feel awake, but I noticed that I had a hard time focusing on work this afternoon. I don’t think not sleeping is recommended over a long period of time, so tonight I’m sleeping again.

As you’re probably aware, Christmas is coming up and for most of us that means Christmas presents. Personally, I don’t feel it’s important to get anything material for Christmas, a little peace of mind is more than enough. But of course, getting stuff doesn’t make me angry.

That gifts are not important to me (unfortunately) means that I don’t give away a lot of gifts either. A little something for Gine, a little something for her closest family and a little something for my closest family. The great thing about this is that getting the Christmas presents is done in half an afternoon. Still I’m all out of ideas. You got any?