jfw.id.au

Up until approximately 10 minutes ago I was readying myself for a week of Oracle training in Brisbane. That was until I received the call. It seems that a server in Sydney has “crashed” and it wont be back online until Wednesday.

My first thoughts were how the hell does a server crash in Sydney mean that a training course in Brisbane cannot be run. It seems that the server in question was the sole server that is responsible for imaging all of the training room PCs and that there is no backup server for this purpose.

It was only after I got off the phone that I realised the true irony of the situation. You see, the majority of the course that I was to attend covered the topic of backup and recovery. So you can see how I find this situation both annoying and humourous.

I’ve just been informed that I am going to lose my carpark space at work effective Monday next week. That makes me an unhappy camper. Oh well. This just provides more incentive for me to get another motorbike :)

I had a fairly crap day at work today, for the most part at least. I ended up having to move 5 desks from one side of the building to the other. To be fair I had help with most of them, but we both had better things to do. I would like to know who decided that moving furniature was a job best suited to the IT department. I mean seriuosly, did they look at the desk and go “Computers go on desks. That must mean that it is the IT departments job to move desks.”

I spent the better part of an hour, possibly longer, moving furniature and sorting stuff out. Time I would have much rather spent on my real work that I have more than enough of already.

The day got lots better at about 4 when a couple of members from another department bought some drinks in for the IT boys. I wont name names, but they know who they are (not that they will read this of course) and it was the best thing. It was a really great thing to be shown how appreciated we are, something which unfortunately doesn’t happen often enough at work.

I know which department will be getting better service from IT in future.

Is! it! just! me! or! does! a! quick! glance! at! the! front! page! of! this! site! show! a! distinct! overuse! of! exclamation! marks!

But seriously. I’ve used an exclamation in 7 out of 10 of the post headings. I think that it is a little excessive, dont you?

Apparently we at work are 1337 H4X0R5!! We fielded a call just now from someone in Byron, concerned that we had hacked their site. As far as we can tell their problem was that they have not been receiving any email enquiries from their website recently. They are in a similar business to us, just in a much smaller scale. The recent activity from the sober virus that sends out german spam has resulted in messages being sent from the hacking victim in Byron to some of our staff.

Obviously this victim didn’t send these emails. Someone else with both our staff emails and the victim’s email has been infected and their machine is faking emails as coming from the victim and sending them to us. However the victim believe that we had hacked their website and redirected any enquires to our staff instead of the victim.

That’s a quality way to do business!

Work had it’s quarterly piss-up, er I mean awards night last night. Now that we are living on the Gold Coast it is far easier for me to attend these things. I scummed a lift to work (you’re a legend Al) and was all set for a night of drinking without having to worry about keeping my intake under control.

Long story short, I had too many drinks and there was no way that I would have been able to drive home had I brought the car. I walked someone else to the cab rank and waited till they got a cab. In my state I figured that a short walk to Pac Fair to catch a bus would be fine. I was in no hurry to get home, so it was all good. I got to Pac Fair and according to the timetable information that I could see the last bus was about 2 hours earlier. Not Happy!

In my somewhat inebriated state I decided that it was not too much of a walk to walk all the way home. Obviously I was far more drunk than I realised. After walking for a little over an hour I realised that it was not as short a walk as I had thought. I hadn’t even made it half way! In total, it took 2 ½ hours to walk all the way home. Near the end of the walk I was sure that I would end up with massive blisters, but thankfully my feet are just sore.

I wont be doing that again in a hurry.