Archive for December, 2009

Christmas is really not that exciting in our household. Parents are both working on Christmas Eve and Day. I asked my bro “What day is it tomorrow?” and he replies with “Um, Friday…” (instead of Christmas). In the morning I asked him “Do you want to open up your presents?” in which his response was “Maybe later”. No excitement.

But no I’m not going to rant about Christmas, about how “fake” it is or how it’s not really about the birth of Jesus Christ or instead of how it should be about the birth of this man. I’m going to rant about something else. So tell me…if you have been friends with someone for 8 years, would you bother to see them one last time before they fly off to another country for 6 months? Or would you call them up when it’s past midnight telling them you can’t make it WITHOUT giving a reason and say something like “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow” simply due to the mere coincidence that you both decided to go shopping (not together btw).

I had something really interesting happen to me the other day.

This guy who I met in first year uni decided to talk to me. I don’t remember how we met or even his face till I saw his display pic. Only thing I do remember was that I gave him a copy of Office 2007. I think a lot of us techies use it as a way to get to know someone, they require something computer related and you offer it to them, it’s like sex…but not. So anyway, this guy who hasn’t bothered talking to me in the 3 years decided to contact me all of a sudden, gave me the usual formalities, how you doing, what are your plans etc etc and then was pretty honest about his intentions, saying he wanted Windows 7. He suggested to me to give it to him on a weekend, in the city (as if I’m the one asking for a favour). I told him Weekday in the city and for him to discuss the place/time later. One week goes by and nothing. He finally contacts me again asking about Windows 7…and this is a guy who will be doing honors next year (god help Australia’s medical industry). He also had the nerve to ask me to write him instructions on what to do. I simply said “Insert disk…follow onscreen instructions” (FYI, Microsoft really did make it that easy…). He offered to pay me if I upgraded his laptop for him, I contemplated the idea but thought that a) I wouldn’t get a good deal 2) No way am I accepting any responsibility and 3) I’d prefer not to see you again.

I ended up giving him the disk, we talked for a minute, again…the usual formalities and I bailed straight away. It was also one of those awkward goodbyes where you say goodbye and end up walking in the same direction. I simply walked a bit faster, didn’t take notice and entered the sexy Macquarie building (oh god is it a nice building, the NCSS kids will be visiting on the 7th so maybe I can show them around!).

There are some people you keep around because they are of use and people you keep around because you enjoy their company. Wish more people would start a conversation without some kind of hidden agenda.

Also I would like to talk about my internship at Macquarie. I’m loving it.

They threw me in the deep end, wasn’t expecting to do any real projects but they gave me two high priority projects to conduct over the 12 weeks. The first one is a Java based webapp. It uses spring, hibernate, jboss, sybase db and of course java, merged together in get a memory hungry webapp! I’ve actually just completely finished it two days ago so it was quite exciting. I learnt so much along the way (a lot more than the shitty 13 weeks of major project that I had to pay to do).

People I work with are extremely lax. My buddy is a gamer who plays LoL and got another guy that reads reddit!

When people ask me how I find Macquarie I find it extremely difficult to answer. I usually reply with “oh it’s really good” and I feel like people don’t believe me and are thinking “Pfft, as if working for a major money sucking corporate company will be any fun”. But in fact I don’t think I’ve enjoyed work so much before. I actually look forward to starting work rather than constantly thinking about how long till home time.

My next project is a lot bigger than the one that I just did. I’ll be porting the existing app to unix (from windows  which shouldn’t be tooo difficult I hope), also have to port the framework from Webware to CherryPy AND make sure the odbc libraries are compatible with the various DBMSes under unix. It’ll also be nice to strip out apache from the list of dependencies and solely rely on cherrypy to do the file handling. It also needs to access various files on a windows shared drive so that’ll be another challenge (hopefully to be solved easily via samba).

If you understood the previous paragraph…you’re probably in the minority, don’t need to congratulate you since I’m not talking about tesla data mining mainframe access initiators>.>

Anywho, I’m gonna head off to bed now…need to wake up for the boxing day sale at EB Thinking of getting Dragon Age, Tekken and possibly a bunch of pre-owned games.