I have been collecting various images for inspiration – most of them official wallpapers from the various albums of NIN. I also have some official tour photos, some amateur tour photos, and some other interesting imagery. I have been thinking, though, that perhaps I don’t want to get a NIN tattoo – perhaps I want one that is about something more general, like industrial music, or even just music itself. However, these categories seem even more daunting to contemplate than just NIN.

I can tell straight away that I don’t think I would like to tattoo myself with something generic like industrial music – it’s too broad. Besides, it would imply that I love industrial music as a whole. I do not. I appreciate many fine artists whose work could be tentatively considered industrial music, but as a whole I do not love the genre itself. I don’t even fully agree with the naming of the genre. That rules that out.

As for music … well, once again I’m getting the whole ‘generic’ vibe here. When I say that I want a NIN related tattoo, it’s not necessarily something like a NIN logo. It’s more about capturing some of the emotions, beliefs and thoughts that are played in my mind’s eye, inspired by the music that NIN create. It would be wrong for me to get a “music” themed tattoo and simply declare that “I love music”. It’s like saying “I love air”. Well, of course I love air. I need it to live. I hold music in the same reverence – I do not worship music as a whole, but I cannot live without it.

However, as I sit here listening to Fear Factory’s Hatefiles album; an album full of some of the best industrial music I’ve heard, I am wondering if perhaps I am artificially limiting myself by desiring to choose something that is only NIN-related. But, even now as I think about it, the emotions and thoughts that I associate with NIN are also associated with Fear Factory and the like, but I believe in a different way.

Some time passes…

However: after listening to Fear Factory for some time this evening, I come to the conclusion that what I think of them, while many of their tracks are energetic, fun, and help me to concentrate on some of my darker emotions – mostly anger, and in some cases hate – these are not the emotions that I wish to get tattoo’d permanently onto my skin. Fear Factory is really great to go absolutely FUCKING SPASTIC to, but they’re not what I’m after in a tattoo. At the moment.

I want my tattoo to have some deeper meaning … something that Fear Factory doesn’t provide. Oh, sure, I still get angry, and I still feel what I believe is akin to hatred toward certain things, but these feelings no longer occupy as much of my time as they once did, back in my angsty teen days. At the moment, Nine Inch Nails’ music provokes some of the deepest emotional exploration I’ve yet to experience from any music. Artists like Cog, Karnivool and Tool also provide deep, emotional investigations, but these artists are relatively new to me, and I would not commit myself to loving them as much as I do NIN just yet. With Cog and Karnivool, both new bands, I am yet to come to rely upon them as a whole – having only released two full albums each, I cannot yet know whether or not in the future I will surely enjoy their music, and I cannot yet know, more importantly, whether I fully agree with the sentiment expressed in future music. I don’t feel as though they’re yet old enough, as an entity, for me to base such a pivotal decision upon.

Tool has released many albums, but I don’t like all of them… not yet, anyway. I am slowly coming to appreciate their older material, but I am presently fixated mainly on Lateralus and to a lesser extent 10,000 Days – both extremely complex and technical albums, while their older material, from what I’ve heard (which is admittedly limited), is not less technical, but more raw – which is not a bad thing. I haven’t yet come to appreciate it.

So, that leads me then to trying to explain about why I like NIN so much – there isn’t a NIN song that I can’t listen to. Sure, some of the tracks from Pretty Hate Machine and With Teeth aren’t my favourites – PHM because, as with Tool, the sound is raw, and Teeth because it doesn’t take the same format as most of NIN’s other work. A quote from Trent Reznor himself:

About five or six songs into writing it, the songs started to sound good on their own and they didn’t need this framework to work together,” and that With Teeth consists of “a collection of songs that are friends with each other, but don’t have to rely on each other to make sense”, however, the album’s narrative arc describes “a difficult journey that begins with a nightmare and ends with acceptance of a new reality.” (source)

And from the July 2009 issue of UK Kerrang! magazine, talking about With Teeth:

The first recorded (sic) by the newly sober Reznor he later described it as a “cautious” album, one that he admits wouldn’t be his “favourite NIN record today”. “Looking back, I can see I wasn’t completely sure of myself,” he said. “[After] I got sober… I took a few years just trying to stay alive and feel comfortable in my own skin before I jumped back into work to possibly fail.”

So, there are some songs that I am not a great fan of. That isn’t to say that With Teeth is not an important album in NINs history and discography (without it, we may not have had Year Zero or any of the following albums!); merely that it is not my favourite entry. Nor is it Trent’s.

So that’s a little about the songs which aren’t my favourite. How about the ones that are? I honestly don’t know where to start with that – there is so much quality in the NIN discography I am almost overwhelmed by the prospect of trying to discuss it all!

In fact, that’s quite a good thing, really. This article is now already 1100-ish words long. I won’t kill my readers interest with an amateur analysis of music. I’ll just list my thoughts.

I really like the song Echoplex from The Slip. Awesomely, each song from The Slip is accompanied by a piece of artwork. As the discussion on the ninwiki page goes:

The artwork may symbolize someone being surrounded by sound, as if it were echoing around them. It may also symbolize walls around the person, which makes sense due to the lyrics making a reference to sound bouncing off of walls.

The lyrics suggest a scenario where someone has been in solitary confinement for too long, driving him or her, to insanity, where “you will never ever get to me in here.” Another possible scenario is a direct link between the lyrics present on this song and “Demon Seed” (“You feel me breathe” on “Echoplex” vs. “I can hear it breathe”). They could also be extremely literal, referring to the solitude of wherever frontman Trent Reznor comes up with his music.

An interesting facet of the artwork is the red scribbling line which seems to pass through and around the inside of the echoplex – this scratching appears in many of the other art pieces for The Slip and suggests that these songs are somehow interconnected and related. My thinking was that I could have the echoplex artwork as the start of my tattoo. It would represent me and how I interact with the world: from behind the safety and security of my echoplex, I allow a small channel – or, I am forced to have a small channel – of communications to the outside world.

The scratching could represent many specific things (stream of consciousness, blood, physical connectedness), but mostly I see it as communication, with all of the aforementioned concepts coming under the communication umbrella concept.

Thus, I need to decide what satellite concepts surround my echoplex. Some will be directly connected via my communications channel, and others, perhaps not. Also, I am thinking that I will have to expand upon the available NIN artwork repository before I can come up with some suitable imagery. No doubt I will be taking concepts from some of the work present on The Downward Spiral, and perhaps some more from The Slip, but perhaps not so literally. So many of the concepts explored in all of the NIN albums are without existing imagery — I will have to get arty and create my own!

Aside from the above, though, so far this week I’ve not really done a lot. I have read through the CCNA material, but I already knew most of it. I was essentially just attempting to mentally plug holes in my knowledge. It was a straight-forward exercise. Until I have access to DDLS I’m kind of stuck for further learning options.

Next week though, I’m having a meeting where I will discuss with my manager what my performance targets will be. Essentially we’ll be setting KPI for my progress to be judged upon. This is essential for furthering my career: in a general sense, but especially in terms of my own knowledge, which in turn increases my worth to Dimension Data.

I’m getting my work mobile phone next week also, which will be nice. Not that anybody, as yet, has reason to call me. Nor I to call anyone else. That will come in time.

In closing, I am very much looking forward to setting my KPIs as I am eager to get moving forward.

A few reasons, which I’ll simply list:

• Financial security
• Employment in my chosen field of study
• Paid-for industry certification through DDLS
• Heaps of useful benefits (discount gym, free internet, phone, etc)

The list could go on, but that’s an overview of what I’m getting myself involved with. I’m really quite excited about it all. Though as with most things I’m excited about, it typically doesn’t show until the eve, or the hour, of the event. I’m excited but I’m also quietly impatient, and a little anxious.

Having said that about this position, I requested some feedback from the people who interviewed me for the Junior Linux Sysadmin position at UQ. They had a lot of good things to say about me, and in fact, they said that I would have been chosen for the position, because I was the best interviewee they had… if it weren’t for some small politics. You see, there were two positions available: one at A05, and one at A06 (for anyone not aware, these are common paygrade descriptors used in government. The higher the number, the more responsibility, and the more you’re paid). They had two successful applicants for the A06-level position and asked one if they wouldn’t mind settling for A05. They didn’t mind. So, I lost out the job only because someone who was better qualified, who applied for a higher position, had accepted the lower pay grade and responsibilities of the position I was after. Nothing I could do about that, really.

They also had some choice things to say about my previous employer, who apparently gave me quite a bad reference. Even though when I left, I was told to “write my own reference” and it was signed by my boss without a second thought, apparently including them as a reference on my resume was not the best idea. The UQ people wouldn’t elaborate as to what exactly was said, but they did indicate to me that I had best rethink who my favourite referees were. Despite this bad reference however, the people at UQ still wanted to employ me.

I was a little annoyed by it, but I’m over it now. My suitability for the position was always questionable. I did my best and that’s all I could have done. If that wasn’t good enough, then so be it. Not to mention the fact that aside from any technical or expertise shortfalls I may have encountered, my previous boss and I simply didn’t see eye to eye on several important issues.

So now, I sit and I wait. It would be nice if I could have a proper holiday between now and starting my new job, but I’ll have another two weeks at good old Nokia Care. Got bills to pay, y’know?

My first interview with the recruitment agency for Dimension Data didn’t go so well I thought. I was quite nervous and it was an unusual setup. I went to the offices of Dimension Data, into one of their conference rooms, and the interview was done with the recruiter via teleconference. So, I sat at a desk, in a room by myself, and talked to a person on a TV screen. I felt as though I didn’t answer her questions particularly well; my answers were pretty disjointed, some things I said were extremely circuitous and occasionally off-topic.

Though it turns out, whatever it was I said was good enough to get me a second interview. With the team leader/manager of the area I could be working in. This interview, about a week later, was much better. I was more confident. I felt as though I could relate to the guy better, whereas from the recruiter I was getting a serious over-corporate vibe that didn’t sit well with me (though I’m over that now I’ve been in regular contact with her). He asked me a lot of questions that were similar to the first interview, though went into more detail. He also asked me a lot of questions about why I liked networks and networking, what drove me to succeed and all those kind of questions.

I was told beforehand that there would be some kind of aptitude testing done in the interview, but it was just him and myself, and no such aptitude test was undertaken. Unless of course it was incorporated somehow into the questions he was asking me. So anyway: I answered all of the questions as best I could, some still a little indirectly (though if you’ve ever read this blog before, you know I can be quite circumspect in my writing), but overall I felt as though I had done better. And he told me so, too. At the end of the interview he said I had done well and it had been a good exchange. I think we probably talked about random non-interview stuff (company benefits etc) for about 10-15 minutes afterwards; which may’ve been a drain on his time somewhat, but I felt as though it proved that I was able to converse normally, and it also proved that he and I could connect on a semi-professional level, which is important for building a professional relationship with someone. Being able to base your work-related conversations and exchanges on a foundation of common ideals, goals, whatever, really bolsters the chances of success I find. If my boss is a person I can get along with outside of work, I get along with them so much better when discussing work-related material.

Yesterday I had another interview for another job at UQ. It was a very tech-heavy interview: the head Unix sysadmin, Unix sysadmin team lead, and a HR person were all present to ask me questions. The two Unix guys loaded up the technical problems and fired them round after round. I feel as though I could have answered many of them better; but, I also answered many quite well.

Typically where I fell down was the interchange between their formal language and descriptions and my own self-taught (aka: incomplete) descriptions. They asked me about the function of a TCP wrapper, and I outright said I had no idea. Which was wrong, because then they prompted me with the keywords /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny — I use these files quite regularly and completely understand their purpose, but had never heard or seen them called TCP wrappers previously. Of course, now that I think about it, that’s what they are. But I’ve never made the connection from function to name before, and it provided me with a nice stumbling block.

A few of the questions I should have simply known. They asked me what two files are involved in the login process of a user. I told them the shadow file and one other, which I could not for the life of me remember the name of. Anyone familiar with even the basics of *nix knows what I’m talking about: the passwd file. But at the time, I simply couldn’t recall. I even made the comment to them that “that was like Linux 101, I should have remembered that.” to which they seemed a tiny bit sceptical.

However, they asked me a question about what needs to be looked after when setting up a single system on multiple networks: I surprised them by asking if it had one or two network cards, and they said to “choose your poison” — so I said, I’ll take a system with two network cards. They said, OK, what’s the first thing you need to do to ensure it works properly? And I told them: make sure that when the system starts up, the cards are assigned the same device name reliably using custom udev rules. They were taken aback, and impressed, by the level at which I had started to check things. I’m thorough, baby.

Of course, later in the scenario I once again stumbled by not remembering the key words “default gateway”, though I did say the magic word “VLAN ID” when they asked me about that. Even though I have no idea how to setup VLANs using *nix software. Their questions were both exploring my knowledge of the working of *nix software systems and also my problem-solving processes. I feel as though, with the technical stuff at least, I could have done much better. I missed out on many simple things I should have simply known immediately.

However, the I felt like the questions from the HR person were almost trick questions. I’m guessing they expected to interview a lot of anti-social nerd types with no ability to talk to humans, because the questions asked were so basic. For example, I was asked what I would do in the following scenario: the entire email system has gone down, but my immediate boss wants me to install a new widget on his PC. Which is more important and which do I attend to first? Haha, I answered, it depends on the temperment of the boss! But seriously, we all know which goes first, though what they were after is what I would say to the boss: I told them, I’d explain to him that the entire email system was down, his included, and that I would get back to installing his doodad as quickly as possible. Just not right now.

They also asked me what the most important aspect of customer service is, and I explained that in the context of IT support, it is to listen like you have never listened before. And also to make the person you are helping feel like their issue is the centre of your universe and you will stop at nothing to solve it. Because whether it’s a case of them accidentally hiding their start menu, or, they’ve accidentally deleted the project they had been working on for the last 6 months, to them, it’s a fucking-big-issue-that-has-to-get-solved-right-now!

I think I did rather well overall in the interview. The two Unix guys were receptive to the typical IT crowd jokes and jibes about users and at Microsoft, so we had a few laughs and got along quite well. I am afraid though that somebody with better technical aptitude may snag the position, because they were really really into that, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, if you’re still reading at this point, congratulations! And thanks.

Now that we have that out of the way, I can continue my little story. Many people are complaining about the state of the public health system in Queensland at the moment. While I would say I agree to a certain extent that it could be better, from my experiences it wasn’t too bad at all. There were some hiccups along the way, and I’ll get to those, but in the meantime I would simply like to say that I have a great respect and admiration for the people working in the public health system. Despite the seemingly lacklustre equipment and apparent poor state of some of the facilities, the fact remains that the staff are able to get the job done, and get the job done well. I’m very pleased with the treatment I received and the way things were handled, but that’s not to say that things were perfect.

I was due to have my operation starting early morning on Tuesday just gone. However, after arriving at the hospital at 7AM, going through all the pre-checks and donning my lovely hospital attire, I was told that I would have to go home because three anaethisatists and two doctors were off sick. It was Melbourne Cup day, though …

I’ll be honest, it was very annoying. I had plans and they were upset. It wasn’t really anyones fault (unless you’re cynical, which I can sometimes be), but it was still annoying.

My procedure was resheduled for 8AM Wednesday, and at around 11AM I actually went into the preparation theatre. It was at this point, while I was laying in bed, hooked up to the saline drip and wearing my ECG tags, that the fire alarm went off. For 15 minutes. I was informed that the procedure wouldn’t start until they were sure it was a false alarm, and it turned out that it was. But that didn’t stop the alarm, mounted in the roof not two metres from my head, from pounding electronic thumps through my already stressed mind.

After that though, I was given the anaesthetic and went to sleep pretty much immediately. I remember the doctor injecting it into my drip, and then a nurse infront pushed through the door, another started pushing my bed from behind me, and I don’t remember anything after that.

I woke up in the recovery room, and surprised myself by not being surprised. They had warned me that when I woke up I might think that I was still waiting to have the procedure and be very disorientated. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t. I woke up and I remember thinking that I was in hospital; I could see a nurse checking my vitals, and then I remembered that I’d had an operation. I fell in and out of sleep for the next few hours while we all waited for a bed to become available in a ward.

Eventually I was placed up on the fifth floor in a ladies ward because there weren’t any spaces in a mens ward. It didn’t really matter that much; in fact it was quite amusing as I was put next to the cutest (yes I just used that word in this context) old lady who so innocently peeled away her bandages “just to see what the doctor had done”.

Mum came to visit me and sat with me all afternoon while I continued to drift in and out of sleep. The painkillers they were giving me made me quite drowsy. Dad and my sister came to visit in the evening, shortly before Annie and Kate. Everyone stayed for a while, but it was a little crowded, so the girls all went to get food while I hung out with mum and dad for a bit. Then Kirsten came back, took herself and my parents home, so I was left to enjoy the company of Kate and Annie for the rest of visiting hours, until 8PM. Actually, they left at about quarter past eight when the nurse informed them to say their “final farewells” — busted! I’m glad everyone came to visit though. I would have been bored shitless otherwise.

After everyone left I had a choice of television (which I paid $10 for the privelidge of using), radio, mp3, book or laptop to keep me entertained. I ended up watching TV for a while, then listening to music, and then at about 10.30PM I went to sleep. I slept quite poorly because I only had one pillow, and the night lights kept me awake as well.

This morning was the most eventful part of the visit — after my surgeon came to check I was OK, I was told to have a shower and then the dressings on my wound would be replaced. I wasn’t too sure how to go about this because I knew the wound was a hole. You see, the operation required leaving an open wound in the small of my back. I knew roughly how large it was going to be, but after the operation, during sleep, and during the checking, it hadn’t pained me one bit. I made the mistake of removing the bandages, and then the packing (bandages placed inside the wound) and checking it out in the mirror in the shower.

Although I knew what to expect, the reality of it hit me at this point. I started feeling ill and I began hyperventilating. Thankfully I was able to ask one of the other patients outside to fetch me a nurse. I tried to control my breathing, and I tried to assure myself I was OK, but I believe I was in some kind of shock situation, and I lost control of rationality while waiting. It got so bad that I felt light-headed, and in turn ill. My arms and legs were trembling with pins and needles because I wasn’t breathing properly. The nurse finally came in, sat me down and calmed me down, while washing the area of the operation, which surprisingly did not hurt at all.

After she settled me down and washed me off, I tenderly dried myself and got back into bed for another nurse to redress my wound. She was cute as a button, softly-spoken and very nice, which helped a lot. Maybe they sent me a cute one on purpose after my little episode. Anyway, the most painful part of the redressing was not when she physically cleaned out the hole in my back, but when she had to remove some sticky residue from around it which was caught on my hair. Sigh.

So, I went home, and I’m alright now. The wound is a little painful when I sit the wrong way on it, but I have pain killers. Though they do make me a little drowsy.

Despite my thinking that some of the equipment looked a little old, that some of the facilities looked a little dilapidated, these are both gross overstatements. The staff at the hospital were lovely and helped me out as much as they could. I greatly appreciate everything they did for me, and I think, even though it’s highly impersonal, I will send a ‘thank-you’ card to the hospital addressed to all the staff. Though it’s probably the best I can do as I think I would’ve come into contact with no less than twenty or so people, not even a quarter of whom I can remember their names.

Thank-you, staff of the hospital. Thank-you very much for your time and care and helpful attitudes!

Saturday night, Carly, Brett, Jamie, Dave and my brother saw The Butterfly Effect at the Caloundra RSL. I have been there previously and the place was pretty dead. I mean, in terms of providing entertainment for young people. The only interesting thing there are the large displays of cool WWII memorabilia including all sorts of guns, scale models of ships and other paraphernalia. Anyway, aside from that the place sucks. Except for the venue to the side where we saw The Butterfly Effect. It’s large and high-tech; the lighting systems aren’t the best I’ve seen (that would be The Met) but they were still pretty good.

The Butterfly Effect were awesome. The support acts were really good too. Sleep Parade who remind me a little of Tool were the first act up, and they put on a good show, even though the crowd turnout at this point was rather poor. Next up were Trial Kennedy and they were even better. Their music had more of a punk/rock sound to it, but it was still pretty good.

Though, after all that, The Butterfly Effect simply blew me away. Even though at the time I had a severe headache and was tired from the night before, I was able to let myself go and get into the sounds. What I really appreciated about their act was that they sound live like they do on CD — ie, they can actually perform the music they create. Which is quite a feat if you have heard anything they’ve recently released. The vocalist really can hit those high notes — consistently. Plus the lightshow and their stage presence was just awesome.

Tonight, I’m sitting at a a friends place having beef stir-fry cooked for me, sipping my bourbon and Coke, and having a good old lol.

I have work tomorrow but that’s OK! It’s not shit work.

Today, instead of sitting at my desk and reading Slashdot for my lunch break, I took my lunch outside, sat in the sun and read my book. It was a lot better. I got to have my half hour (and a bit more — oops!) eating and reading something totally unrelated to work, and I did so while sitting in the sun and soaking up a very limited amount of vitamin D.

Anyway, the other thing that happened today that has seemed to bolster my energy levels is two-fold: I had something to do in the morning, something specific and requiring research, something that I was able to accomplish, eventually. That was, disabling removable media via group policy. I got it all implemented, and it works. The second thing was, from the afternoon’s meeting, I had a task list which I set myself, and made some allowances for times to perform those tasks, and roughly an order, too. So, some structure will see me making better use of my time, consequently I’ll be less worried about just how my time is being spent.

I’m happy at the moment. I don’t even mind so much that it still takes me an exorbitant amount of time to get to and from work (on the order of a couple of hours, nearly), because I can tuck into a book and just relax. I’m good at ignoring the world around me when I have something interesting to distract myself with; a computer, book, game, whatever. It makes no difference. The hustle and bustle of the city and public transport fades away, and I can just enjoy my book.

Still, it’d be nice to have a choice about what I spent my time doing, instead of just using it for travelling. Suppose I ought to seek out employment closer to home.

A further addendum: these are all lessons I’ve learnt during my time of study, why have I been so silly? I guess, it’s more about taking those past lessons and applying them to new circumstances. I think that’s what I’m still coming to terms with.

I find that going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 6am or 5.45am, whichever is necessary, results in me being quite tired by the time 2pm rolls around. I eat breakfast, typically toast (wheat, carbohydrates, fibre) and a cold milo (energy, fats) or milo cereal (all of the above). I have fruit for morning tea: an apple, orange, kiwi fruit or passionfruit and some yoghurt. For lunch, two sandwhiches (four slices of wholegrain/multitrain/high-fibre bread) with ham (filler and flavour – probably no nutritional value), cheese (calcium, fats), spinach (iron), and tomato (good stuff?).

I don’t usually have afternoon tea, but that’s because there’s no time for it. Dinner sees me eating steak or chicken, pasta or baked vegetables.

I rarely snack. I never buy soft drinks, chocolates or other food tidbits. I have my three meals per day, and that’s all I eat. Yet I find my sleeping patterns unsatisfactory, and my levels of energy low. As I was saying, I can go to bed at 10pm or 11pm or 12pm, and the only difference it makes to my day is just how hard it is to wake up in the morning. The earlier I go to bed, the easier it is to wake — but only ever so slightly. I’m always still tired in the afternoon.

I do have a theory however. I believe it’s stress related. Days where nothing much happens at work see me not expending much energy, but I still feel drained. I’m stressed about having nothing to do. Days where I’m full on and doing stuff all day see me drained, but for similar reasons: I’m stressed about not having done enough. I can’t seem to find a happy medium where I am satisfied with myself, for the sake of myself and my employer. I thought that my new job was going to save me somewhat from this, but I was wrong. Today, I didn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve, and I came home tired and stressed.

I get to the point where, after I’ve driven all the way home, I park my car in my driveway, turn it off, turn off the headlights, and sit in silence. I sigh a big, drawn-out sigh, and I think about all the things I still have to get done, and how it all seems so never-ending. I’ve only just started my working life, and I’m already tired of it. Apparently.

I think I’m just whinging, but I know I have a point. It’s not the amount of work I have to do that’s large or particularly stressful, I think it’s simply the fact that I don’t have any adequate mechanisms for dealing with such stress. The parallel I draw between this and my last post is that the burden of choice is huge. I no longer have hard-set deadlines like I did in university with assignments, but now that my task completion is more open-ended and up to my determination and responsibility, I find myself extremely lacking. I expect more of myself; perhaps too much. My employers seem pleased, so why can’t I be too?

I just don’t know. I think I’m worried I’m not “good enough” at all the things I’ve been studying these last few years. I think maybe I’m worried about having wasted too much time, and I think maybe I’m worried about having fallen behind all the other examples of students of my age. I think this is partly why I used to (and once again are) occupy my spare time with so many personal projects.

Matter of fact, remove all the uncertainty from the previous paragraph, and you have the exact reason I’m under so much (self-imposed) stress.

Well, this post helped me figure that out. This is what my blog is for, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned that before, but perhaps not so blatantly.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that for the last 12 months or so I’ve been wallowing a little in my own self-pity. There was an interesting story on Triple J’s hack programme Friday, about how kids — well, young adults — these days are stressed out to the max when it comes to making life decisions. Australia’s quite a well-off nation, and our high-school graduates are faced with so many choices because of this. Straight into work, tertiary education, travelling the world, dole bludging even. The comparison is made to the era of our parents whose career choices were extremely limited. A good example would be my own mother who finished school at the end of year ten, whose only marketable skills at the time saw her placed into any of the following roles: secretary, typist, or administrative assistant. Yeah, you see what I’m getting at?

These days, we have so much freedom in terms of choosing our career paths … it’s quite stressful. The point is made on the programme that it sounds spoilt, but the burden of choice is extremely taxing on our young minds, and it’s not an easy decision at all.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that I’ve never really know what I wanted to do. Parents and teachers always asked during high-school, and even before, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” — which I think stemmed from their own upbringing, and the mindset that you were destined for some arbitrary role in society of your limited choosing. They asked a question which wasn’t relevant to the children whom they were asking. In my case especially, as I’ve never really had any life goals.

I want to own a sports car, and I want to own a house one day. The time frames are pretty undetermined. Though these days I’m thinking more about those two goals, if you’d asked me about those things three years ago, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you. These things do take time.

So for the last twelve months or so I’ve been doing not much with my life. Just studying and working when I have to, and in my personal time, chillaxing. Which is fine, but I think I neglected my self-learning a little. I dropped out of the loop for a while. In hindsight, I can see that it was a good thing for me to have done. I was getting bored with it all, and I needed a change of pace. So I spent time with my girlfriend a lot, and more recently started wasting time playing World of Warcraft.

I don’t mean to say that I’m going to neglect my personal time now that I’ve re-energized myself. I’m going to devote more thought to my personal time so that the time I do spend on myself, and on others, is more worthwhile.

Work has picked up, though. Not my main job, that’s still pretty bland. I don’t care about finance so much. It’s remotely interesting, and I’ll pick up tidbits as I go along, but I won’t actively teach myself about it. My other job however has started off excellently. I’m my own business and I’m doing some research for a guy who does full IT system implementations for small businesses. The twist is that he does it using all open-source software. You know how much I love open-source.

So last Wednesday, my first time working for him, I spent some of the day researching ways to do unattended installations with Ubuntu Linux, and then I spent the rest of the day starting to implement our first revision of system we’re putting in place. I spent the entire day working on my laptop (Arch Linux), logged into his server (Ubuntu), using awesome open-source tools (Firefox, Tomboy Notes, vi, etc). It wasn’t restricting (licences). I didn’t have to learn to speak another language (Microsofteese). I wasn’t constantly worried about lack of documentation (third-parties).

So now even though I’m about to spend my Sunday fixing not one but two Windows PCs for friends and family, I’m not in that poor a mood. I’m going to fix one by installing Ubuntu on it and having all the Windows-only apps run in a virtual machine courtesy VirtualBox, and the other I’m charging for. So that balances out for me!

Anyway, the Ubuntu ISO has finished downloading, so I better get to it.

My job, primarily, is what I’m talking about. To put it bluntly: I’m not enjoying it. Or even more bluntly: it kind of sucks. It’s a glorified tech. support role. It was sold to me as something else. I was told it would be tech. support and development work. I wasn’t really sure at the time what that meant: I suppose my naivety was to blame. Yeah, sure, there’s development. There’s plenty of opportunity for me to brush up on my Microsoft Access skills supporting five-year-old database applications. There’s plenty of opportunity for me to write annoying little VBA snippets that semi-automate behemoth Excel spreadsheets.

Initially I took the challenge as it was: a challenging learning experience. While I haven’t learnt all there is to know about Excel, Access or the whole awesome Microsoft Office experience, I certainly know enough now to be handy in writing solutions based on Microsoft’s Office suite of applications. Hell, I wrote a fucking share portfolio snapshot graph application in VBA on top of Excel. I think that’s something, don’t you?

The problem with that last project wasn’t so much the difficulty of the algorithms as it was the difficulty in understanding exactly what the fuck I was meant to be writing, who it was for, how the output was intended to be presented, and so on. My boss is a nice guy, but he’s the only boss I have. He runs the whole show, and he’s shit as an IT manager. He comes up with ideas with no concept of what it takes to implement them, but expects them all to be done yesterday. So, you can imagine what kind of awesome fun I had with this guy while trying to develop software for him.

But, you know, I rolled with it. I learnt something there about how to deal with adults who want things they can’t have and don’t understand why. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s stressful and at times downright intimidating to have that kind of thing hanging over your head. You never knew when he was going to have another flash of inspiration and decide to triple the complexity of your application.

Not that I was writing anything super-complex. I haven’t even graduated uni yet, though. While I am capable of researching things and solving problems all of my own accord, I don’t yet understand how I’m meant to determine what’s appropriate in the eyes of my employer in terms of the problem solving process and the various metrics associated with it. Time, complexity, depth, breadth; you name a metric, I don’t know it. This is why big business run graduate programs. I should be doing one I suppose.

Though, that’s another thing I don’t know if I can really get into. Big business. I hate the corporate scum-sucking that goes on. Everyone runs around in pretentious outfits wearing ridiculous strangulating ties, black long slacks in the middle of summer with long-sleeve shirts, and uncomfortable non-breathing leather shoes. They sit at a desk in an office, push paper, answer phones, and generally do … what? I don’t know. I hate the image, and I hate looking at myself in the mirror when what I see is myself becoming some corporate bitch. Though it makes my parents proud to see me all grown up and shit, but I suppose that’s the era they’re from.

You know what, I have a theory. I reckon people work better when they’re comfortable. I’m talking about all aspects of comfort: environment, clothing, seating, computer, whatever. When people are in a good mood they do good work. Stuffing everyone into the corporate mould and spitting out oddly-shaped people stuffed inside uniforms of drab pale shirts and standard-issue black or grey pants is not a way to raise the spirit of the people.

I think people should have a sense of self-importance about themselves simply for the sake of maintaining their own self-esteem. On top of that, people should respect themselves and dress appropriately. I do not think that everyone should be limited to dressing in the same 70-year-old combination of slacks, button-up collared shirt, overcoat and tie. Hey, chicks can wear what they like. Why can’t guys?

If you’ve read this far, good on you: seriously. There’s a lot of angst in this post, and I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.

The other night I got totally trashed on Jim Beam Small Batch – though I asked for it. Didn’t eat all day, chugged it down like it was water, and expected an hour or so later to be sweet for a night out in the Valley. Turns out I actually spent an hour or so lying on the floor of a bathroom in my own vomit, alternately crying and yelling about how much I was sorry for ruining my friends night and laughing my brains out about how funny everything was. I was in another world. I’m not eager to do that again but jesus that Small Batch is good shit. I had mine with Coke but you could easily drink it straight from the bottle its that smooth.

Anyway, that wasn’t really the good bit. Did I trick you? Haha. The good bit is I will soon be under the employ of the man behind Dependable Technologies; (let’s hope he doesn’t get any hits from my blog and reads the above paragraph) which is a one or two-man outfit that specialises in, well… you can read it all for yourself on the single page website. This is exciting because as you may or may not know, I am all about that kind of thing. Doing intelligent support work for clients who have real problems, not replacing batteries in wireless mice for people who are too lazy to do it themselves (because “that’s what IT is for”).

I think I’ve said enough now. Oh wait, no. I’m trying to do my tax using the Governments’ super e-tax programme, and it wants to connect to the internet and download my Medicare info, but consistently fails with the helpful message “Unknown exception, please contact the IT helpdesk on… ” At least this year the website is compatible with Firefox. I couldn’t believe that this time last year their website had the audacity to tell me that my browser was out of date because its ident/signature didn’t match exactly that of Internet Explorer. Oh wait, yeah, no, it’s the government. Of course I can believe that. At least things are better this year ’round. Still no Linux e-tax application though.

Sorry, enough ranting. Carry on with your lives. I mean that sincerely.