I don’t know if it is a result of the drought, general changes in the bird population, or me just being more aware of what lives where in Melbourne now that I’ve lived here for ten years!
For the last few weeks, I leave work nearly every day on sunset and there is an enormous flock of crows or ravens in the trees and buildings around the north-east corner of the campus.
The 2007 Staff Attitude Survey is now open and will take no longer than 20 minutes to complete. Please click on the following link to access the survey online via a secure website http://www.voiceproject.com.au/monash.
It’s just wrong in so many ways. Since when has HTTP been a secure website? If this is the staff attitude survey for us, who the hell is voiceproject.com.au? That second question doesn’t seem to matter much since it bounces straight to another company I’ve never heard of, asr1.
I was “volunteered.” Management can’t seem to work out whether we’re supposed to work between 8 am and 6 pm or 24 hours a day. They certainly won’t pay for anyone to be there out of the ordinary hours — but all hell breaks loose when you want to upgrade anything or install anything — “You can’t do that in production hours!” Bah! Who wants to volunteer for the evening? Who wants to volunteer for the weekend work?
Another day, another near miss…. A couple of times a week I meet them, dickheads in too much of a hurry who decide to drive the wrong way up the ring-road at Monash then cut through to the other side. The layout of the car-park seems to encourage them, the entrance is only a little bit past the through road — but far enough that they have to plant the foot and come roaring the wrong way head-on at any cyclist foolish enough to believe that the one-way road will have traffic only heading in one way.
Sound, colour, excitement, food — it must be the annual ITS Christmas party. The time of the year when we must pretend that we’re all bosom buddies and all working towards the same goal…
A large array of inflatable bouncy-castles had been procured — probably at great expense — in order to ensure that all of ITS had “a good time.” There was a small bouncy castle, a jousting thing, a large slide, and a horizontal bungy-jump.
Brrrr! Seven degrees and it feels like its going to snow.
Work work work…
Our NDS is growing and slowing, we’re using new features on top of old hardware, more features on top of old software.
The eDirectory Workstation objects keep a history of users who login to them, in a student environment this grows and grows.
Mr JRB’s SETNAME is going into the weekly cleanup, with a:
SETNAME * /o=Workstation /a=WM:User_History /d /x
Five o’clock in the evening, just about to leave and there’s a phone call; ITS-CAUL1 has stopped responding on one of its interfaces and the switch is reporting more errors on that port than for most other ports at the Uni. A little digging by myself and Biggles and mysteriously it appears that the switch has been changed from 100M full duplex to autoconfigure, which never does.
Oh no! Back at work at last.
Several thousand emails to sort through, fourteen voicemail messages.
Please enter your security code. Bip Bip Bip Bip. You have fourteen new messages, press one for new message. Bip That message has been stored for too long and been deleted, you have thirteen new messages, press one for new message. Bip That message has been stored for too long and been deleted, you have twelve new messages, press one for new message… Bip You have no new messages.
Working on the NetWare servers for Monash South Africa, which was more to do with my work life than my private life, so its been moved to my work journal.
For some reason I’d put my work log in my private website, I’ve removed it now. If you really want to know what I was doing in Monash’s South Africa campus, just ask. All it said was that getting some servers working in Johannesburg was a frustrating and slow experience.
Not an entirely successful day. Since both NetWare 5.1 CDs are not bootable I’ve had to boot the machines from floppy disks, format the hard drives from Novell DOS, then add the IDE CD driver and attempt to install from the CD as D: drive. Unfortunately there seems to be an incompatibility between something in the hardware and the NetWare installation, and it is hanging at or before the hardware detection.
Yay, the servers turned up! Due at 10:00 they arrived a little after 11:00, so I spent the rest of the day with Johanne unpacking and powering them on. Johanne was from the vendor/supplier and never once used an anti-static strap, nor had he ever seen inside an IBM server since they normally sell Compaq, so it was slower than if I’d done it myself, however, they were determined to do all the physical setup.
The three of us, Jamie, Royce and myself, headed out to PQ Africa this morning to meet with Les and see what the temporary site looked like. Since PQ Africa is in the process of moving, we’ve been offered space in Vector’s offices in Midrand, even further out of the city to the north. Drove to Vector to find that the Sun equipment is all present, though still boxed, and the IBM servers are expected tomorrow … awaiting some missing parts.
Our first evidence conclusive that the Monash building really does exist. Jamie drove Royce, George and myself out to the site to see the building. Most of the outside appears to be complete, probably a good thing considering the amount of rain, and the builders have all moved inside.
Adrian being mauled by a lion Today’s photos See the photos page.
Vanity site? Technology experiment? Learning tool? Blog? Journal? Diary? Photo album? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you…
I experiment. I play. I write and I take pictures. Some of the site is organised around topics, other parts are organized by date, then there’s always the cross-references between them.
Its all been here a fairly long time. Like the papers on my desk, or the books on the bedside table, the pile just grew… and it all grew without much plan or structure. I try not to break URLs, so historical oddities abound.
Long ago it started as a learning experiment with a few static HTML pages, then I added a bit of server-side includes and some very ugly PHP. A hand-built journal/blog on top of that PHP, then a few experiments in moving to various static publishing systems. I’ve never wanted a database-based blogging engine, so over the years I’ve tried PHP, nanoblogger, emacs-muse, silkpage and docbook before settling on Emacs Org mode for writing and jekyll for publishing. But the itch remained… I never really liked jekyll and the ruby underneath always seemed so much black magic. So now the latest incarnation is Org mode and hugo.
