I am happy to read the chapters and implement the things I learn all day every day; this kind of behaviour is a much more natural learning experience for me. Memorising tables, commands and state diagrams is not. Nor is playing dodge-ball with the sometimes extremely “Cisco-ified” questions wherein a slight misunderstanding of the wording can get you thinking in the wrong direction and ultimately missing the entire point of the question. This kind of misdirection in questions is the absolute worst way for me to incorrectly answer a question. It makes me feel cheated and contempt toward Cisco. Of course the cynical side of me would say that they have to do something to make the exams difficult, albeit the methods they use aren’t genuine. Single-word differences between two command syntaxes isn’t exactly testing the knowledge you would expect a CCNP-level technician to possess. The command interface on every Cisco device is interactive and has tab completion at a bare minimum, so as long as you know the first 3-5 letters of every command you wish to use, you can TAB-complete your entire 6,000 line configuration. Disingenuous. That’s a good word to describe this kind of exam question trickery.

Anyway, I should stop procrastinating on my blog and get back to it.

I enjoy using small and light laptops because I believe this type of machine properly fits the purpose of a laptop. Anything larger than 14 inches diagonal screen size and the corresponding laptop body will no longer fit on the average lap. The term ‘desktop replacements’ seems like an oxymoron to me; what’s the point of a laptop that lives 90% of its life on a desk, tethered to power because the battery only lasts two hours?

Anyway, enough proselytizing. This post is about my new laptop which I have become enamored with, to say the least.

As you can see the shape of the system bears a striking resemblance to that of the MacBook Air. However, the main difference is that the Apple offering is less industrial-looking. The Air has a matte finish to its brushed aluminium lid whereas the Zenbook has a more polished look.

Inside the colour is more ‘gunmetal grey’ (one of my favorite colours) than the more silver-looking aluminium of Apple products.

The laptop weighs just over a kilogram and measures just 18 millimetres at its thickest point. Connectivity consists of a USB2, a USB3, SD/MMC card slot, headphone/microphone in/out, micro-HDMI and mini-VGA. The top of the range version sports an Intel Core i7 2677M, 4Gb DDR3, 256Gb SSD, 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0. Battery life as tested by Engadget is approximately 8 hours with WiFi enabled.

I have installed Windows 7 Home Premium on mine and it is very nice to use. I intend upon replacing my Lenovo T410 work-provided laptop with my Zenbook. Fortunately my employer is very big on the current trend of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ whereby most of the corporate software stack can be accessed through Citrix XenApp. In terms of functionality it’s basically X window forwarding except it works on all operating systems (sidenote: checking my e-mail in Microsoft Outlook on my Google Android handset is probably one of the most ‘haha, this is so dumb but cool’ technology exercises I have recently undertaken).

At first I tried to use Ubuntu 11.10 on this system. It worked OK but wasn’t suitable for use as a full-time work laptop replacement because of the various issues leading me to doubt the reliability of the system as a whole. As mentioned there are a few issues with Ubuntu 11.10 currently:

• Can’t easily suspend/hibernate: requires tweaking with a custom powerdown script which I can’t get working, although reportedly it does work fine.
• Bluetooth support not available until kernel 3.2.
• Some models have a ‘Sentelic’ touchpad, which is not supported by any drivers at present for multi-touch etc. Other models have an ‘Elantech’ touchpad which is fully supported. You can’t tell which you’re buying until you open it up. I have a ‘Sentelic’ model.
• Currently power consumption on all Sandy Bridge CPUs is poor with kernel 3.0.x and 3.1.x; reportedly fixed in 3.2.x though currently there are workarounds which make the system somewhat unstable.

Unfortunately the lack of Bluetooth and poor touchpad support is a killer. In the office it’s not such a big deal but while I am out on site and needing to connect a USB-to-serial adapter to access the console of networking devices, I can choose to either have a mouse plugged in or my phone or the provided USB-to-Ethernet adapter. When working away from the office on unfamiliar network equipment, it’s typically essential to have at least a console and ethernet or console and mouse.

The performance of the system is very good. This is the first computer I have owned with a solid state drive and I am impressed. I have seen other computers with them but never really used them for an extended period of time to really appreciate how fast an SSD can do things. Now whenever I am using any other computer it seems like I am waiting for far too long for anything to happen.

With Windows the battery life is pretty good. Windows usually reports about 7 hours of life from a full charge, though I have never used the laptop continuously for that long on battery, I have seen a solid five hours out of it with two overnights periods of sleep. This may not be optimal, because I have installed Windows from scratch I can’t install most of the Asus utilities, including the “Instant-On” utility which I presume provides some power saving mechanism.

As compared to my last laptop; well, this one doesn’t compare. It is simply better in every way. Even the integrated graphics are better than the old nVidia graphics chip in my Dell. I experimented by playing Grand Theft Auto III on this laptop and it ran quite well.

The price I paid worked out to be around $1760 from a local retailer. They included a free Bluetooth mouse for some reason which I was quite happy with. Unfortunately for me and my insistence on buying the best version of this laptop I possibly could, paying that price meant I missed on on buying the next model down for around $660 cheaper – an i5 / 128Gb SSD model, which can be had on special at JB HiFi. It’s worth it though. With 256Gb I don’t really have to think about what I put on my system. I just know it’ll all fit.

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.

In other words, I’m focusing on the negative and not on the positive, and it’s getting me down a little.

I wrote a huge spiel about exactly what has been going on at work, but I’ve since deleted it, because it might be incriminating (not in an ‘I’ve done something illegal’ sense, more an ‘Someone might read this and WTF will occur’ sense) and it might make me look bad. That’s not important because it helped me come to the conclusion, and that’s what is important: I don’t get along with my boss. Not on a personal level, and not on a professional level. It’s as simple as that, and I can’t do anything to change it except get a new boss. Which I am working on.

Aside from that, I went out Tuesday night to the Down Under bar in the city with Carly and Annie, and although I don’t have a valid student ID (it’s about a month expired), they let me in anyway. Presumably because I’m really not that old and also because I had two chicks with me. It was alright for a while, until they started playing the shitty music. Vengaboys, that “Boot scootin’ baby” song, etc. Need I say more? It reminded me of highschool. It was ridiculous, and I got tired and a little grumpy. So I went and sat down while the girls danced, and some guy approached me and asked me how I was going, and we had a little chat. It came to the point where he told me he had uni at 9AM the next day, to which I replied “bad luck” — but not in an empathetical way. It was kind of malicious, and although I don’t know your name, I apologise for venting a little on you, dude. I’m sorry. Hopefully next time I see you I won’t be in such a sour mood.

Which brings me onto my next point which is that club Blink is awesome. It’s on Friday nights at 299 in the Valley and it rules. It’s like someone went to my Last.fm and just copied and pasted all my favourite metal and rock into the playlist. With some nice extras added to break up the mix. Plus they have happy hour $3 basic spirits from 9PM until 10PM; $3 bourbons! What more can you ask for? So I was there last night with Annie; I had hoped Bruce could come but apparently he was stuck at work. On his holidays. Yeah, you read that right.

So now as I sit by myself in the girls’ loungeroom, recovering from my hangover, while everyone else is at work, I bring this post to you. I think later I’ll play some WoW and see what Bruce is up to.

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.

Anyway, I was having similar feelings towards my uni graduation ceremony. Not only did I have to wear a crazy square hat (called a mortarboard I found out) and some robes, I would have to pay $55 for the privilege! Well, I was outraged. A little. Not really, I just didn’t feel like paying that much for something I didn’t really need to be at anyway. Though thankfully, friends and family convinced me otherwise. I went, and I’m glad I did.

Wearing the robe and mortarboard was a good feeling. The ceremony was held at QPAC in South Bank, and after robing up before the ceremony I met with my mum at the art gallery. This meant walking around in public in my academic dress, and that made me feel good. Aside from the other graduates I saw (there were 390 that day; the largest ceremony ever apparently), I noticed that nobody else was wearing robes. And although statistically speaking it’s probably unsafe to assume the people I saw didn’t have degrees, the fact was that I was graduating that day and they weren’t.

The ceremony itself was pretty long; as mentioned, there were almost four-hundred graduands to be handed their certificates. This length wasn’t helped at all by the various guest speakers chattering on. Most of them were welcome, but there was an MP there, Mike Kelly, who seemed to make a rather round-about point on how important our degrees were. His speech was the longest and most awkward. He was a private practice lawyer before working for the ADF for 20 years and then turning to politics. His language was interesting as it he used some typical legalese, but combined with the bluntness of language only 20 years of ADF service can create, it came out a little strangely. Anyway, I digress.

I sat with my fellow graduands for about two hours total, with the preceding speeches and ceremonial back-and-forth providing some interesting introduction to the entire affair. After all, I haven’t graduated from uni before yesterday, so it was interesting to see just what went on. The process of handing out the certificates was straightforward, and nobody messed up their order. Unlike the ceremony on the day before where someone placed in position 44 accidentally sat in position 244 and missed out on their special moment.

One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that the ceremony itself was held in the Concert Hall at QPAC. All of the graduands were seated on-stage, which was interesting, because it was the same hall where I’ve seen a few acts previously, most notably Ross Noble. It was weird to see things from the performers’ side of the stage lights. They’re very bright by the way.

What I found super-awesome though is that while friends and families from outside were being seated, the music team were playing some songs on the huge pipe organ. One of the songs they played was the Star Wars theme song which I had a giggle at. It was epic to hear it played on the huge organ though.

So now I’m going to get my certificate framed and put it somewhere people can see it I think. I also think that I might go on to do my masters, or maybe another degree entirely. I can’t see myself settling into a work-only lifestyle, unless the work’s particularly challenging.