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Seems to have come awfully quickly this year.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to 2008 either, especially as 2007 only seems to have just gotten going.  The joys of being ‘old’.

I managed to book one of my days of holiday off on the 24th, which will give me a nice long Giftmas break.  My last day is Friday 21st and I’m back at work on Thursday 27th.  Just today I was asked to do two late (1.30PM until 9PM) shifts, 27th and 28th of December.  This is good as it means I get a little more time to drive down south after Christmas (it also comes with a little more cash in my pocket).

I’ve barely begun to buy the necessary items for friends… I have a few covered, but I’m stumped for ideas.  When I think about what I really want, I’m pretty low on ideas… I don’t really have any needs and as I’ve been earning more cash for the last few months I’ve been able to afford a few bits and pieces for myself (e.g. a fancy push-bike).

I’ve scraped some ideas together and updated my Wish List... the item I could really do with is a decent pair of stands for my Quad 11Ls… I’m going to start some reading now in the hopes of updating it with a specific stand that suits my needs.

What surprises me the most is that what I really want isn’t something that I or anybody else can buy… I need money to do it, but that’s more of a means to an end.

Ah, well, maybe when I win the lottery…

The first update in what must be well over a month… the biggest change in my life has been at work (I’m sorry to say).

As part of Sun’s drive to maintain profitability they have begun outsourcing some of the more basic work to partner engineers in Poland.  This has both pros and cons:

The plus side is that I no longer have to deal with some of the more mundane problems like disk swaps, memory DIMM replacements and so on.  It also means that, as Sun made a profit, I got a bonus.  It wasn’t much to write home about though… my quarterly bonus was calculated as 128% of 0.8% of my base salary (don’t ask), except in my case, they worked it out pro-rata for the number of months I’d been working.  In the end I took home a whopping £67 (pre-tax) this month(!)

The downsides are that Poland get their hands on some calls before we do… in the longrun this can cause more work for us.  As well as this, Sun had to let go a number of employees.  Fortunately the large majority of those let go put themselves forward for voluntary redundancy, so I like to think it worked out well for most involved.

Guillemont Park, the main campus for Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), now has a desk:engineer ratio that is looking a little underwhelming.  During the last two weeks most of us have moved desks; instead of being spread out over two sides of the building, we’re now all on one side, and I believe there may be plans underway to move engineers from another building to the now vacated side.  This is all rumour though, so who knows what will happen.

I’m happy with my desk relocation; it’s obviously not great to leave behind people who I’ve been working closely with, but the benefit to me is that I’m now sat in an OS/kernel/software community.  Over the coming months I’m trying to move into a more software role, although I will still be expected to handle other types of calls as they come in.

Furthermore, I am no longer in a team that deals exclusively with a large telecommunications company based in the UK… I now support this company, as well as a number of other important Sun customers, including investment banks, telcos and so on.  I am a member of the so-called ‘elite’ team.  (it refers to the customers, not the engineers!)

With some team members leaving, there was cast-off kit going round and somehow I’ve managed to upgrade myself from a single 19” CRT with Sun Ray to a dual-headed 19” flat panel Sun Ray config.  In terms of desktop real-estate, this mirrors my home setup, which is handy.

Hope everybody is having a good December… don’t forget to fire up xsnow!

For the past few weeks I’ve been going to Mandarin lessons at Reading University on a Thursday night, right after work.

The first few were pretty slow: basic vowel and consonant sounds, introductions, etc.  These things I’ve muddled my way through during my time in China.  Certainly a few knowledge gaps were filled in the first couple of sessions, but there weren’t any major revelations.

So far we’ve covered: introductions, farewells, counting (another thing I’m pretty good at…), basic strokes and characters, family members and some general conversation.  Our instructor, Congxia, is forcing us to concentrate on pronunciation and the four tones early on in the hopes that the lessons stick and we all go on to become accurate speakers… as opposed to relying on native speakers ability to work around our shortcomings.

Last week’s lessons was really good.  I have a whole raft of new words that I need to learn… really useful things like classmates, workmates/colleagues, how to ask for a waitress without calling her a whore, etc.

As I’m at work this weekend I nipped out on my lunch break to get a Subway and an A6 notebook that I will work on tomorrow morning to make a decent English-Mandarin, Mandarin-English dictionary of words I’ve been taught.

As ever, no updates recently.  I just don’t really do much that’s worth talking about these days.

The past week has been pretty poor, on the whole.  On Sunday I managed to slip while walking down the stairs in what I now realise to be very impractical slippers… I was walking down with a finished bowl of cereal, a bottle of milk and the cereal box.  My feet came out from underneath me, I shot back, landed on my back and proceeded to slide all the way down the stairs at what seemed like breakneck speed!  I reached the bottom at roughly the same time as my now broken cereal bowl and the vast quantity of milk that had escaped from it.

What I find odd is that my back is absolutely fine, but the first few days were very uncomfortable to sit down… presumably my coccyx got a slight beating on each and every step on the way to the bottom.  It’s much better a week later, but still hurts slightly.  I’m hoping this will go away soon.

Otherwise the week has been a time for plans and Wikis… but none of them really played out the way I’d hoped.

Thursday evening I came out from my Mandarin class at Reading university to find some local scally had decided to pop my driver-side window for the fun of it.  I guess it’s my own fault for leaving my TomTom cradle attached to the windscreen… this time the fact that I’d left the glove compartment open to show nothing was in there helped.  Nothing (I know of) was taken, but I had to drive home in the cold.

Yesterday I had Autoglass replace the window through my insurance… a £50 excess and I got a same-day service.  I’m very impressed with this, top service.  I just wish I hadn’t needed to find out!

I foolishly bought a roll of 50ASA B&W film months and months ago… unsurprisingly, I never did manage to use it in the UK, but comfortable in the knowledge that Vegas was 30C average, I took it along with me, and ended up shooting it on our trip to the Grand Canyon.

For a 50ASA film it’s actually rather noisy; presumably because the emulsion is so old by comparison with the likes of Ilford HP5 (a 400 speed that has similar properties in terms of noise)... but I really quite like it.

I’d expected a very smooth, low contrast film, but that’s not really how it turned out… it’s nicely contrasty and while it has plenty of grain, it’s very small and adds to the film.

Here’s a Grand Canyon shots that I edited very quickly (8-bit in the GIMP)... click for a larger image:

So, last week I was in Las Vegas on business… I’d planned on holding back until I had some really great photos to include with a proper beefy blog entry.

I’ve just got my 12 rolls of film back from Peak, and I’m very upset to discover that every single frame that I took with the F100 I bought second-hand the day before I went away is out of focus. I was using Vlad’s Sigma 24-70 1:2.8 for most shots, but not all… I took a whole bunch with my 50mm 1:1.8 and a few with the 28mm 1:2.8, and these are also OOF.

I had originally planned to shoot a roll, take it to a one-hour processing place and see how they came out. I later didn’t bother, figuring that the chances of the metering not working, were very slim. I guess I was right, the metering was bang on… admittedly the scenes I was shooting were bright but fairly low in contrast.

Instead, it appears that the focal plane is misaligned in some way… serious bummer.

When scanning through 35mm frames all of the photos look great… but tbh, I was really hoping for some good shots this time. I knew I had a few killer ones from the Grand Canyon… the kind that I could put into a photo album for the future. No such luck.

It’s my own fault, I guess. I shouldn’t have been so blase about it all…

The only positive is that all of the F3 shots (another six rolls) appear to be well in focus. I shot at some low shutter speeds for many of them, so a fair few will be lost to camera shake, but overall the exposure and focus look good.

Once I’ve scanned and sorted through, I’ll get some up.

UPDATE on a closer look, it seems that the film back does not have a pressure plate to hold the film flat… serious bummer.  I feel stupid for not realising until now, but then again, is it something you’d normally check?

So, for the past few days CompSoc has been squarely offline.

Why?

noisy, the main server, went down following what we believe to be a motherboard failure.

Our temporary solution has been to move the data disks from noisy to the (very) old server, tall.  As you can see, things are up and running again, mail is being delivered (slowly) by bump.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be looking into replacing some hardware and buying new hardware to help prevent this happening again… that said, on a budget it won’t be easy—short of a cluster there really was little we could have done better.

Just been doing my regular 2-minute refresh of the clipper website and it looks like Hull and Humber have just this minute crossed the finish line.

Not a bad first race :)

See tinyurl.com/yomhej for the full details.

Nothing new here, but about time that I posted something truly awesome on my blog.

This is a guy with some serious imagination and skill.