Sunday of my Life

Thanks to the good graces of one of my good friends, I was recently offered a teaching position as a lab assistant for my University. Did I accept? Did I ever!

So last night I had my first real lab, with an unexpected preamble. I was asked to take over someone’s tutorial, just for last night. It wasn’t a terribly long time to prepare, but I don’t think that I did too badly. The students certainly seemed to enjoy it.

(As a side note? When it comes to teaching give me adults every time. Give me people who actually want to be there. Give me people who actually have maturity, and who know how to ask the right questions.)

Because of this, though, I ended up missing my train home, and got home near-on midnight. Needless to say, with a start at 6:30 the next morning, I was a little tired today.

Okay, I was a lot tired today.

Getting off the train tonight, I was getting some funny look. Now, I’m no stranger to people looking at me in a funny way. Been happening one way or another for most of my life. But this caught my — somewhat addled — attention. I didn’t find out why exactly people were staring until I got back to the car. See, my usual winter attire includes two coats. Otherwise, lately, I’m just too cold for comfort.

It turns out that, since I was tired and wasn’t paying attention, I’d zipped the left side of my inner coat to the right side of my outer coat. I think my father only just finished laughing at that.

…

Nope, there he goes again.

So, most Linux distributions have some kind of package manager. At work (because, lo! I got a job! I’m working as a junior systems administrator for a small company that I shall not name). These package managers are a good thing, don’t get me wrong. They compile, configure and place program files in the correct place for you. They keep track of versions, and resolve dependencies. But this dependancy resolution can sometimes be a bad, bad thing, if someone hasn’t paid enough attention in creating the packages in the first place. Let’s take today’s example, the bind9 packages.

Bind9 is a DNS (Domain Name System) server. The thing that turns (for example) sunday.yarinareth.net into the IP address of the (virtual) server. They’re one of the handiest things on this Wide Whacky Web of ours. bind9 itself has a number of libraries wich contain the functionality of the program. So, naturally, it’s dependant on them, because it won’t do squat without them. bind9-host, which is a utility that allows DNS lookups and such, is also dependant on these libraries.

Now, these libraries are also dependant on one another. libisc7 is dependant upon libdns1, and so on. Unless you install the packages which are depended upon first, you can’t install the ones trhat depend on them. All makes sense, no? So, here’s the dilemma I hit today:

bind9-host is dependant upon libisccc0
libisccc0 is dependant upon libisc7
libisc7 is dependant upon libdns1
libdns1 is dependant upon bind9-host

Nothing can be installed, because everything is dependant upon everything else! Aaargh!

PS: The solution to this is to tell it to install all the packages at the same time, but I haven’t had time to do that yet, so, see the above anguished scream.

Quick rantiness to round-out my day, I think. Thanks to the help of a friend earlier in the week, I found seek.com.au’s Graduate/Entry-Level jobs section. This will, I am sure, be a big boon to my job-hunt; finally having somewhere that lists job specifically for my experience level.

Or, it would if people, you know, did this.

I have two complaints with it. Big ones. My usual job search restrictions on there are “Jobs, Graduate/Entry-level, in IT & T, located in Melbourne”. That’s all the restrictions I make. So, in the past few days of looking, I have come across:

35 jobs listed in Melbourne, located in Canberra. Now, when you limit your job-search to a specific city, it’s usually because, oh, you want jobs that are located there, you know? You don’t want jobs telling you “well, here’s a fantastic opportunity for you! You just have to pay your own way to move really far away from your life and start all over again! Hurrah!” And, what’s worse? They were all the same job, listed by the same company.

26 jobs listed that require 1, 2 or 3 years of experience. Hate to break it to you, guys, but that is not entry-level. Entry-level or Graduate jobs don’t require experience, simply because they’re designed for people who have to come in on the ground-floor and work their way up. We don’t have experience. We’ve never had jobs in this industry before. Why on earth do you think we’re looking in the entry-level section if we have experience? If you’ve got experience there’s bigger jobs for better pay to be had in the mainstream IT & T section.

Okay, that’s my quick rant all done and dusted. Admittedly if the jobs in the entry-level section were better chosen they wouldn’t be able to boast as many in there; but at least you’d know what’s in there is good to look at.

I meant to make this post, uhh… something like a week ago, and just kept forgetting…

My CCNA certificate and wallet card finally arrived. Yay me! I’m all official and stuff now.

In the space of two days I have managed to get out eighteen (18) job applications/résumé canvasses. I’m rather proud of myself. Now we just wait to see if any of them bear fruit. Oh, and keep doing more, of course. No stopping me now!

(Further note: Most of the applications were coherent, except for one that I accidentally attached the wrong name — which was, also, the wrong gender to the application, but I quickly sent an errata email apologising for it.)

So we draw close to the end. After two gruelling years of further education, I come close to the end of my qualifications. Five weeks to go. All I need to do then is go and sit my CCNA and RHCT exams externally and I have my full swag of qualifications. I want to do my AusTel Data Cabling certification, but that’s not essential. Would be nice, though.

So now we come to what is possibly the least fun part of the whole game. Assembling my resume. My curriculum vitae. My Document O’ Bragging, as I sometimes think of it. It’s never easy to put a resume together from scratch. What do you put in? What don’t you? I have a lot of qualifications I can list, and everyone loves to see previous job experience, right? When it comes time to put the application letters out there I’m going to be saturating a couple of different industry sub-sectors (not-for-profit and education) with my name.

In times past I’ve applied for a hundred jobs in one go, and gotten three interviews. This I attribute to my resume, my lack of qualifications beyond high-school and my Audio Engineering diploma (which, admittedly, is not useful in all but a select subset of jobs). Now I have qualifications and I have experience (that I’m not planning on admitting to), and so it begins. It’s time to write. If anyone reading has advice on doing it right, drop a comment in, or contact me offline. I think the sum-total of my readership has those details anyway. I also think there’s an ‘email the author’ link around here somewhere. Have a look. I’d love to hear from you.

To be honest with all of you, this is something that has been on my mind lately. One of the side-effects others have been noticing in me from my medication is its effects on my memory.

I don’t remember things.

Seriously.

Someone will tell me something, and ten minutes later… *poof*… it’s gone. I have trouble remembering:

1. Faces and names
2. Things that I have to do
3. Things that I have to tell people
4. Things I meant to put down on this list
5. How to spell words
6. The proper usage of some words
7. The list goes on….

It scares me, it really does. I’m no longer relaiable in how I do things, I can no longer be relied upon to remember things said to me or meetings that I’ve had. I don’t think I can really describe how much fear this fills me with. I can see the difference between what I was and what I am now. I can see the changes this medication has wrought in me; some good, some bad. The bad does not outweigh the good though, and there are some parts of me that I don’t want to go back to being, so I’ll continue wth the medication despite what I can see changing in me.

In a year or two I’ll (hopefully) be employed in an industry where my job will rely upon me remembering everything and so by then I must work out a system whereby I can keep track of what I’m supposed to be doing, and remember that I am keeping track of it. If I cannot do that, I don’t think I’ll even pass my course, becuase as my memory goes, thereby also goes my concentration, my attention span and my organisation skills. Without those I have no hope at all. Partially this post is just me getting my thoughs and fears down inot some kind of format, partially it’s a call for help. I can’t be the only one out there who has trouble remembering things. Are there any practical solutions for a guy in IT to use for this? I’ve tried writing things down, but then I forget that I’ve written them down. I don’t know what I can do but, by God, I need to do something!

Why indeed. Why, if they have a problem at work with the hours I’m claiming, concerns about if the hours I claim actually translate into my work output, if I am, actually, being honest about the whole thing; well why didn’t they ask me earlier? Why give me a weekend of wondering where my pay was? And really, if they’ve got a concern with paying me, why not take it up with me as soon as they recieve my timesheet? It’s just stupid really, it wastes my time and theirs.

I’m writing that at work right now, sitting here at yet another different desk, becuase I can’t seem to keep the one placement for two weeks running, my eyes burning and feeling muscle-twitchingly tired, wishing I could go and have some coffee, but knowing I can’t because I’m already feeling another attack creeping over the horizon.

“Boss,” say I, “did you recieve my timesheet last week?”

“Yes, we’ll have a talk about that.”

Oh lovely, more aprehension, just what I need to add to my already shakey grasp on control. I don’t think I should feel this way at work — I really don’t. Siting here at someone else’s desk, with my mouse cursor on top of the window behind me, ready to tap the touchpad of my laptop and make what I’m writing here dissapear into the background. Around me people are laughing and chatting, and I sit here wondering why exactly I came in here today. I really don’t feel up to it, to all of the things they want me to do. Maybe that’s why I’m here. Becuase I know that in my life I’m going to have to do a lot of things that I don’t feel up to doing, so I may as well get used to it now.

Damn eye — stop twitching.

The ‘talk’ between the boss and myself is going to take place at a time of her choosing, and she keeps walking past my office, back and forth, back and forth, doing various things. I wonder each time if now is when she’s going to do it, but it isn’t, so the suspense and aprehension builds. It’s going to come to a boil sometime soon. I think I need to take a break from all this, but I really can’t.

This will be posted after work, becuase I can’t get a hold of a network cable with which to hook into the network and access the internet. Imagine that — me, the network administrator of this business and I can’t even get into the network. It’s a lack of support that’s killing my credibility in this job, it really is. I get no support from the people I need it from. My requests for resources, denied. My requests for tools, ignored. My questions and concerns about the legality of the software on this network brushed aside. I’m told it’s none of my concern. Well it fuckin’ well is my concern thank you so very much! In the end it’s *my* arse on the line should we be audited! In the end it’s me who gets the fine and the jail time should we be found guilty of software piracy! There’s nothing you can say that will make this go away; you can’t subvert the law. The law says that I’m the one responsible for it and that’s that. Maybe that’s what they’re counting on — having a fall-guy for it. Maybe I’m being paranoid. Maybe a mixture of both? I don’t really know, and if I listen to the message from on high here it’s none of my concern.

I spoke just before of destroying credibility, and earlier than that about concerns with the honesty of my time reporting; and that’s part of what’s happening here. They don’t seem to think, as far as I can tell, that the time I’m claiming for the design work I have done for their website is accurate. Honestly — who are they to tell me that? They don’t know the first thing about doing this kind of work, so why do they think they’re at all qualified to tell me how much time it should take? For every design they see, there’s 3 or 4 that didn’t work out, that didn’t fit the company image, that didn’t come up to my standards. For every design there is 50 - 60 minutes of work that goes into planning and designing the designs, if that makes sense. Then there’s the extensive coding I’ve done for the backend of the website. The scripted PHP data interpreters, the careful design of the database. The work on making sure the site is secure and as carefully controlled as I can make it. And then on top of that there’s the time spent modelling and texturing and animating various things for their products, so I can put them into a flash animation as vectors and allow them to have on their website an interactive guide showing how to setup the various units they have and how to hook them into the three types of TV available in Australia. Really, though, all that work means nothing without a front-end for the site, which is what I’ve spent so much time doing so many designs for, but they won’t choose something. They won’t listen when I tell them I can’t move forward any more with that section until they select what they want from the various designs and allow me to put something together so I can photoshop it, get it looking good, get it approved and convert it to HTML and CSS, ready to stick it onto my backend and get something going here.

I’m doing alot of work for them, but until I have that front end it reallylooks like nothing. But they don’t seem to understand this, not for a second. They seem to have some arbitrary figure in their heads that says “If you claim for this much time, we expect to see this much work.” Well…you are, it just doesn’t look like it. To you it looks like page after page of nonsense code, like page after page of pencil drawn designs, like file after file of things which don’t look like much, but which took hours to create. I have stored on this laptop, and in my visual diary, and on my computer at home almost 100 hours of work. But it doesn’t look like it unless you understand it. And to understand it you have to *want* to understand it. And it seems to me that they don’t want to, despite how carefully I explain things. I could take them step by step through the code creation process, from initial requirements, to Input/Process/Output through Algorithms to Variable Lists to the final point of actually making the code, then debugging, changing, debugging, changing, debugging and hopefully getting it right. Meanwhile this has taken 20 hours or so, and you really haven’t got anything presentable to show for it.

OK…calm down boy. You’re just getting yourself worked up again, and you know that’s not going to be good for you. I haven’t had a panic-attack or even come close to one for a good two weeks now. I’m proud of that, and I want to keep it going. Today is not going to let me I fear. All this, and it’s only 10:30 AM. Seven and a half hours to go.

And Counting.

12:00 PM

OK, yes…so I am slightly paranoid. We just had ‘the talk’, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. They’re still debating whether or not they actually want me to do the website, which is their decision of course. Doesn’t mean I’ll be happy if they choose to have another company do the website after all the work I’ve put into it. Meanwhile though, I still am not getting the support I need out of them in regards to their network. They want it to do all these things that, yes, one day it may be capable of doing, but only if I can work it into the network I want it to be. We are, for some bizarre reason, running Windows XP Home Edition on most of the terminals, and I need to upgrade them to XP Professional before I can do anything else to the network of any significant nature. XP Home is, quite frankly, an operating system made to be used in a home, not a business. Especially not in this kind of business.

I’d love to know who chose the operating system here. Meet them, shake them by the hand, then kill them of course for not taking into consideration any kind of scope for the network, any kind of basic security concerns and for not doing it with legitimate software. I can’t seem to get it across to the bosses that we need to change the operating system before the network can go any further, becuase they see the only opera
ting system that affects the network as being the one on the server. Perhaps one day I’ll convince them to see things my way. And perhaps one day several monkies will fly out of…well, anyway…

Hopefully I’ll be able to convince them soon of the several things they need
to be convinced of to improve my quality of work. You never know…it might happen.

I came home from work today with a major headache and feeling sick to my stomach Now, for most people this is a nice, normal sign of a nice mormal stress filled day, but not so for me. I don’t get stressed in my new job, so why did I come home looking like one of the thousands of stressed out office workers and acting like one of the thousands of mellowed out stoners? Simple. Varnish and Oil-Based Paints.

At work today there was the finish touches being put to the new construction work downstairs. We just had a new office fitted where the undercover parking used to be (the new company call center/tech support area), new facures put onto the stairs leading to the upper level (thank god, no more catching my feet going up the stairs and making a fool out of myself), and two more offices downstairs had just been refurbished (my office and my supervisor’s office), so, of course, they had to be painted and the stairs had to be varnished.

Of course! So simple! No problem! Let’s do it in the middle of a busy work day!

Wrong…so wrong.

I first noticed it about half way through my morning. Stopped in the middle of the network layout diagram I was making to question myself; “What the hell is that smell?” Soon afterwards I learned that the stairs up to my office level were being varnished. “Funnnn,” thought I, “this kind of thing can’t be doing the server or my brain much good.” Around 15 minutes later the headache started. Ergh…just what I neeed. Soon afterwards I was finding it hard to focus and and forgetting what I was doing in the middle of doing it. the new call centre downstairs, already occupied by our call centre staff, was my main port of call that day for trouble-shooting and overall tasks as I hooked each of them into the network and remade their network shares nad re-mapped their network drives and got them back onto the net. It was also the main port of call of the fumes, since all four walls and the ceiling were freshly painted. it was a 30 minute job on each of the 4 computers, and I had to do it at 5-minute burts with a 5 minute break in between each one. It was that or throw up onto the computers. So the headache and the nausea followed me all day at work. Wherever I went, there they were, even out in the cavernous warehouse that is our dispatch section. by the end of the day I was delerious and kind of glad to be going home where there weren’t such fumes. Even now as I write this, every time my heart beats the world spins. Not a fun feeling people, I can tell you now.

On the plus side: I got alot of stuff done at work today…really accomplished alot.

On the negative: I can’t remember what any of it is.

There’s an old saying that I heard many a week ago now: “The first day of your first networking job will serve to show you how little you actually know”. Boy, how true that is, especially when applied to me.

I’ve been lax in my blogging as of late. I simply have had neither the time nor the inclination to write anything worth reading, so I simply haven’t bothered. So, quick update:

Last week I went for a job interview for the position of Network Administrator with . Friday I received an email telling me that I had been accepted to the position and could I start on Monday. So ended just a little more than 15 months of unemployment of one kind or another. Today being Monday, I just got home from my first day of work. I enjoyed it, truth be told. It’s a great working environment with an easy-going air to it and I work with a good bunch of people…and a golden retriever. Keeleigh is..well…she’s big, that all I can say…but very good natured and placid, so she’s good to have around. She drains any tension out of the air. More workplaces should have their own dog.

I get picked up from the station by my boss this morning so I wouldn’t have to walk all the way there (about 3 - 4 km). I believe this ‘pick Adrian up from the station’ thing will be a regular occurrence, which can only be a good thing in my mind. I really don’t relish walking all that way every Monday morning and all that way back every Monday night; particularly when I start at 8:30 and finish at about 5:30 - 6:00. So anyway, got in there today and basically set straight to work. First order of business was to go around and install an antivirus and update the definitions on each of the network nodes and the server, because two of the computers were recently trashed by viruses, so this spectrum of security had been going wanting for a while. Next up I moved two printers around and redistributed shares around the network so the appropriate people had the appropriate printer installed and set to default. That went off without a hitch (almost…one person managed to sever their network cable with their shoe so I had to make a new one, but that’s ok, I enjoy that kind of thing), or so I thought. Within an hour we’d had 5 paper jams (that’s a hardware problem, I know, but still frustrating), and several cases of corrupted drivers (ie: the printer prints gobbledy-gook). The corrupted drivers got me worried, because they weren’t always corrupted, and it wasn’t all on one computer. The fault appeared to have fixed itself though, and if it happens again they have instructions on what to do.

The galling part of the day was the 8 1/2 hours that I spent setting up the Active Directory, DHCP and DNS framework on the server so that they could have:

1. Individual User Accounts
2. A Transparent Section for their R&D team
3. separate resource allocations for the different divisions
4. Personal files stored and backed up with the server
5. Intra-office messaging for management to be able to send messages to individual staff members and admin to be able to do a general broadcast messages
6. For the network to actually be at least mildly secure

That’s a lot, believe me, but all very doable, and I spent 8 1/2 hours today setting up the framework for it so it could be implemented and we could all move onto a more secure future. Doable? Yes. Easy? No. Successful? Hell no. I don’t know exactly what it was I did wrong, but something I did, or probably all of it, caused all kinds of havoc. The front desk could print to the new printer on everything except the application they really needed to. Accounts couldn’t print at all (I solved that one though, bad part was that I don’t know how). The call centre kept dropping off the network and every time the manager tried to hook into the server it crashed with the dreaded BSoD, which just screwed up everyone. *Sigh*..I really wish I knew what I did wrong, but I don’t. I’m going to talk to FunkyTeacher about this tomorrow and see if he can tell me where I erred. So the last half hour of my 10 hour day was spent undoing everything I’d done on the server that day and attempting to restore it to which I was partially successful in. The manager still couldn’t do a remote desktop session with the server without crashing it. Oh well, she can walk over to the cupboard to do what she has to do for the next 4 days until I get back next Monday and have the pleasure of backing up the server, wiping everything and starting all over again. This time, with FunkyTeacher’s assistance, I will hopefully get it right. That is, if he can tell me where I went wrong, cause I sure as hell don’t know.

I did have a good day though, all-in-all, and they didn’t fire me for being such an incompetent, so I suppose it isn’t all bad. Estimated income for this week, after tax: $550.65, which is not bad, compared to the $104.50 a week I get now on government benefits.

Oh yeah, NOTE TO SELF: Contact Centrelink and tell them I now have a job and exactly where they can stick their forms, their phone-calls and their careers counseling.