www.lewiz.org

Sometime last week my new boss called me and a colleague into the ‘goldfish bowl’... first thoughts are always negative ones and as I’m still learning the ropes, I assumed that I’d ballsed up somewhere along the line.

As it turned out, I hadn’t… Steve wanted to offer us the chance to participate in Sun’s annual conference for engineers (CEC), this year being held in Las Vegas in mid-October.  The thing has been running a fair while now and by all accounts is a chance to meet other ‘Sunnies’ from around the world, do a bit of tech swotting-up, and get incredibly drunk in the evenings… certain tales I’ve heard haven’t limited the drinking to just the evenings, either.

Unsurprisingly, I jumped at the opportunity and earlier on today, I booked a flight to Las Vegas.  I’ll be flying from Gatwick on October 6th, and flying back on the 11th.  By the sounds of it, I’ve got a window seat (my choice—less being disturbed by other randoms) flying direct, non-stop to Vegas.  As the conference is during the week, hotels are supposed to be dirt cheap—this basically means that Sun is putting is up in a decent posh hotel.

As I find out more about what’s going on, which ‘break out sessions’ I’ll be attending, and what I’ll be doing on my free Sunday before the event, I’ll get some updates posted.

Until then, I’ll be answering the ‘phones.

Since starting my new job at Sun I once again have the option to buy a bike now for a tax incentive. The idea is that I cycle to work in return for a close-to 50% reduction in final cost to me. As I live quite close to work and am keen to get “back on the bike” (in a purely bike-related way, of course) this seems the way to go. To be honest, it seemed the way to go last year, but I didn’t pursue it hard enough (i.e. when they didn’t have the size I wanted, I gave up… I think I also got a car shortly afterwards).

But now, things are different. I’ve got the car and the tummy to go with it, so buying a bike becomes a sensible idea once more.

After talking to the two bicycling Chrises in my life I have come to the following conclusions:

1. A recumbent is not suitable because I don’t want to: a) break my legs; b) kill myself going up hills; and c) not see over the hedges


2. Racing bikes are uncomfortable if you just want to toddle around like I do


3. Touring bikes are probably in a similar class to racing bikes… on the plus side they have lots of storage space


4. Mountain bikes are big, clunky and have unnecessary suspension (weight, effort up hills, etc.)


5. Hybrid bikes… ah, I think we’re onto something here

So, I want a hybrid bike. It’ll hopefully be more practical for toddling around… I should be able to do tarmac and towpaths and the like.

So what do I want from a bike:

1. Mostly on-road use (minor roads, country lanes, not the M3)


2. Light off-road use (towpaths, well cycled paths and the like)


3. Not getting covered in crap (also known as mudguards)


4. Storage space (for cameras, lenses, film, waterproofs)


5. Hopefully something that doesn’t look like crap

(this is actually rather interesting as the last time I bought a bike my criteria where quite different. I wanted something to go off-road, that had no mudguards, no storage space, and had to look good)

Chris Gerhard ruled out a rather good looking Scott Sportster P1 I was eyeing up… it had front suspension. I was liking the fact I could lock or unlock it as required, but Chris convinced me it just adds weight. This got me thinking… logic tells me I want a nice light bike, but these days I doubt that the extra 2kg the suspension adds is really all that significant compared to putting me on top.

Anyway, since then I’ve decided to concentrate my research into a couple of different bikes.  I basically picked a bike that looked suitable from a bunch of different manufacturers:

• Scott Sub 10 – looks nice, has all the spangly bits.


• Trek 7.5 FX (disc) – a little cheaper than the Sub 10, also with disc brakes.  I don’t know that these are really a plus or not.


• Dawes Discovery 601 – another nice looking bike, lots of people seem to say good things about Dawes.  No disc brakes, but it specifically mentions mudguards and granny trolleys.  I’m put off by the really low ‘racer’ rating Evans have given this bike.  Sure, it’s not a racing bike, but does a rating this low indicate I’m going to be achieving a maximum speed of 15mph?  Probably not… from what I can tell, those Evans ratings are bollocks.


• Bianchi Camaleonte IV 105 – Evans gave this a way better racer rating; who knows why?  I always found the tilty handlebars on my old bike quite comfortable for some things… not sure if this is a plus or not, does it indicate wider-than-average handlebars?  Or the same size, but with less space for regular holding style?

This is about as complete as my list is so far.  I just picked hybrid bikes that fit my price range.  The next step is to go and pester Chrises and work from there.

http://blogs.sun.com/lewiz/ now exists!

I’ll probably be sticking the techy stuff on there from now on, probably.

Talk about a mouthful…

This Monday I started a new job as a support engineer in the Solutions Centre. There are product/technology ‘verticals’ in the solutions centre, and I’ve joined the BT group… this isn’t actually a technology vertical, it seems to be a remnant of an older model where verticals were built around customers and industries instead of products.

Starting a job as a permanent Sun employee means a number of things:

1. I get an awesome-looking yellow Sun badge (I’ve still not actually got this… hopefully I should be able to get it sorted on Wednesday)


2. I get to have a blogs.sun.com blog!


3. I get to actually speak with customers and help them resolve their problems (as opposed to engineers in my current temporary position)


4. I get to forget everything I’ve learned as a lab guy


5. I get more money

This is actually not a very representative list of what new stuff happens. There’s a lot more to it than this, but it’s hard to properly talk/explain about things that I’ve not yet done… I’ll attempt to motivate myself to write a follow-up entry once I’ve felt my way around some now.

There are also a couple of downsides to taking this new job:

1. No more messing around


2. No more access to the good stuff in the lab (I guess I’ll have to tag along to the organised tours)


3. No more root access to a bunch of production servers

And of course one really big thing that will change is my boss—Paul.
Over the past year (to the day, I think) I’ve learned absolutely loads of stuff about Sun, working in a company, being a member of a global team, dealing with engineers, and of course about how the global labs work (which I get to forget).

Now seems an entirely appropriate time to say thank you to everybody that I’ve been working with… Paul and David, the other lab guys (so that’s Chris, Anton, James, Liam and (sort-of) Wilson), wdvs, Keith, JonCA, PTS people (Chris Gerhard, Tim Uglow, Matt Finch, John Alderson, Mick Mullins and plenty more) and the other lab guys around the world.

So… thanks a lot, it was fun :)

Lewis: (lewis.getAwesomeness() * 2) > vlad.getAwesomeness();

Vlad: So if you get your awesomeness and multiply it by two you’re only then better than me? Weak.

Lewis: Yeah, I clearly got that wrong :P

Just recently we’ve had the 18th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and since then a few interesting tidbits have popped up.  Most interesting was the report that a newspaper editor is get the sack after printing a short advert in the newspaper.

The advert read: “Paying tribute to the strong mothers of June 4th victims.”   According to the BBC News article at news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6733611.stm the editor called the person who placed the ad, asking about the significance of the June 4th reference, such is the way the incident has been suppressed in the media.

Every year around the anniversary police and army presence is increased.  This is made easy by the fact that Tiananmen Square itself is like an island: there is no official road access, pedestrians must instead walk through subterranean walkways.  On June 4th policy and army men were checking the bags of people entering the square before letting them in.

Interestingly I dug out a photo of a police riot van I took earlier on this year.  This is a van that means business and I doubt that the presence of small round openings in all of the reinforced windows escaped the attention of any would-be protestors.

This photo was actually something I was messing around with before I decided to write the post.  You’ll see a rare guest apperance in the corner, and the funny colours are due to a cross-processing plug-in for Photoshop CS3 I was messing around with.

Well, today I decided that I’d do as Liam had done a week or two ago, and clean out my trusty MS Natural Keyboard Pro.

Now, I’ve been using Natural keyboards for quite some time… I used the first one they did, now called the ‘Elite’ model, then I moved onto some other one that was built like a tank (a tank with holes, as it went down in flames when I poured a can of Coke into it), followed by the one I cleaned out today… it might have a name, but I call it the plastick-y one with the grey bits that came after the one built like a tank.

The cleaning went fairly well, I washed each key by hand and they’re probably dry by now.  Unfortunately I also managed to lose one of the keyboard springs (I never saw it… I suspect it never even existed!) and at the same time break one of the legs at the back.

I’m fed up of cleaning my keyboard now (and will get pissed off quickly with a flat keyboard) so I decided to see what Google Checkout could offer me today…

for a mere £26 eBuyer would have sold me the new super-duper fancy black USB keyboard (pictured above).  Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite good enough, so I managed to find a cute £4.49 USB wireless mouse I could use with my laptop… dang, still 51p short!

Eventually I settled on the keyboard, a 4-port unpowered (on purpose, I don’t like chargers) USB hub and a rather sexy-looking 1m green RJ45 cable.

To be honest, I could have probably done better, but the cable will no doubt be useful for attacking people (I had Chris in mind), so I went with it over an even cheaper RJ11 to BT-style ‘phone cable.

Total cost to me: an hour to clean and break my old keyboard, and £25.72 for all of the above mentioned good stuff, including delivery.

Google… I love you!

I was just browsing through some of my exported photos (i.e. the full-res images before I resize, tweak and sharpen for web) and spotted these.  I’ve no idea if I’ve posted them before, but it’s clearly not a bad idea to post them again.

12-year-old English learners

9-year-old English learners (from some other random school)

Me… with a very 70s haircut… weird stuff happens when you don’t cut your hair!

 

At the 130th birthday party (combined ages of my Mum and Grandma) on Saturday I spotted that a certain brown roll seemed to have gone uneaten and was making its way slowly around our table.

One thing led to another, which in turn led to another thing, which led to the bap being named Billy… anyway, every single person (young to (very) old) at the 130th birthday party took part in a sensational photoshoot with Billy.

To see the full set visit http://www.fajita.org/billy/

Seriously… what happened to all of the sanely priced flights to China?

Back in the day a flight cost £350 direct.  These days you get to pay about £600 for a return flight that changes somewhere random like Dubai or Moscow.

It’s pretty crazy stuff.