Had a bit of a “life is great moment” yesterday because life right now is pretty damn good. I have a good job, stabile economy, I have the best wife ever, a wonderful son, a Ferrari driver is leadning the championship, the sun is shining, my allergies have calmed down and Diablo III has turned out to be as replayable as I wished it would be! As a matter of fact, the only one negative thing I have to report now is that our faithful projector finally gave up! I bought it back in February 2006 when I was enjoying two salaries per month for 3 months and it replaced my TV in my apartment. Countless nights was spent playing World of Warcraft on my computer with mostly Discovery on my 100″ screen. When I moved into Helena it went into storage because there was no room but when we built the house it was one of the first things that went up and at first we enjoyed movies and TV shows there but since Sam was born it has mostly been used for watching Formula 1. So much so that when my son walks into my mancave he’s disappointed when there are no cars. The lamp in the projector had an estimated lifespan of 2000 hours in “full power mode”, 3000 in “eco-mode”. Of course I had it at “full power” but it still went way beyond 3000 hours which I think says plenty of the quality of Panasonic!
But now we’re faced with the decision of either trying to find a new lamp for it (about $400) or buying a new one for $1200. Had you asked me a year ago I would have said “neither” since we hardly watch anything there but we’ve just begun to enjoy movies in there again so …
Me and Sam at the Bergian Garden
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PjGtPiM_iO0 … just watch …
A week ago Blizzard finally released “Diablo 3”!! If you wind back the clock to 2001 I actually took 2 weeks off from work to play “Diablo II – Lord of Destruction” so you can imagine how much I’ve been looking forward to this game! The biggest difference though isn’t in the game itself, rather that I’m a husband, father and homeowner now. That doesn’t give me much time for playing computer games! Fortunately for me I have the best wife in the world and she’s given me a lot of time to play in the past week because she knows how much I’ve been looking forward to the game and love gaming, so although she doesn’t like it when I go into my crypt, boot up the computer and put on my headphones she still respects it.
But the game is just so addictive and the “just a little more” and “I just wanna try this as a different class” feelings are all over the place so no matter how much time my wife gives me it’s never gonna be enough for me to do all the things I want to do in the game. But I’ll survive. After all, at the end of the day it’s her that I wanna fall asleep with and wake up next to.
Oh, and the game kicks ass! .. too bad Blizzard is screwing it up so hard with all these server issues, which you kinda saw coming when they said “no offline mode”.
Maybe I should make it an item in my calendar once or twice per week to stop and appreciate all the good things I have and stop worrying and bitching about the other stuff.
Like this story about baby-Grayson. I totally don’t care about the Facebook part of the story, more about the story that these two parents knew their baby was going to have birthdefects and not live a day yet they went through with the pregnancy and made it the best 8 hours they could. And here I am bitching when Sam has a bad day or two.
Actually for the past week he has been very easy to deal with and he’s the bestest boy ever!! 🙂 But he’s a bit monotomous – he loved the first half hour or so of Rio so he wants to see that over and over again and he has a thing for “Puss in Boots” too. Guess how tired we are of those two movies by now, but out of all the problems to have that’s one of the better ones.
Woke up at 5 am today. Everything was silent and calm but I couldn’t sleep. So I went up and played some Diablo III until either the wife or son woke up. At 8 am I heard my wife was awake so I crawled back into bed. After a while we realised it was 8:30 and Sam have never slept so late so I decided to check up on him. And found him sleeping in his own vomit. Sometime during the night, because this was dried up vomit, he had thrown up and alot of it. And that kinda sets the tone for the day when we’re feeling guilty for sleeping late and playing computer games instead of just quickly open the door to check up on him 🙁
If you think this place is a bit unstable right now it’s because last week we transferred servers to try a new place out. And that worked pretty well although their services and support was a bit lacking so we managed to press the price of the old place and get a virtual server running there so hopefully this’ll be stable enough. Talk more when I have a chance…
I’ve worked for 4 days here now and time for to write down some first impressions.
So far it’s the professional IT team that I wanted our IT department at Vinge to be and the crew at Carema almost was. Here they share alot of my views that my work is to give service back to the organisation. It’s not to sit on a throne and use my power and deflect every issue that’s not specifically on my table, it’s to listen to what the organization wants and needs and do my best to service them. And it has the clear lines of first, second and third line that was severely hampering is at Vinge and where a bit grey at Carema. And it’s the only placed I’ve been employed at where I wasn’t given Domain Admin access to the network, here I get the access I need to do my job. Which may sometimes get in the way of doing things but it’s a good sign that they really do believe in high security and live up to it!
Those were the pros. As for the cons, the only one I have is that I’m sitting in the middle of a very open office with alot of people. That’s not a bad thing, at Vinge we were three in one room and later we got that down to two and that was pretty sweet. At Carema it was an open office aswell but we atleast had some screens that separated things. And I had a screen wall behind me so I didn’t have alot of people that could see my monitor, here there are atleast 6 people who at any given time can check what I’m doing on my monitor. That has the effect that I can’t do much private stuff here which again goes back to being the professional place I want. Ask me again in 6 months if that’s a good thing or not cause I don’t know yet.
When I started my career back in 1996 at Min Dator I was the new guy for a while but grew out of it so quickly I don’t even remember it. Then when they merged with Pulsen it was a merger and it was to completely new offices so I wasn’t the new guy much, since I knew half the crew already and noone else knew where to get the best lunches either. And when I worked as a consultant you never really had the problem of being the new guy since you worked there for a few days or weeks and you got a new assignment. And when I started working for Vinge I had already been there as a consultant on and off for a few years so I wasn’t the new guy there either. In fact I’d worked there longer than most of the other people I worked with.
But then I changed jobs and started working at Carema and I was totally the noob around there. I didn’t know anyting about their IT platform, I didn’t know servernames, logins, I didn’t know where the printers was, where the bathroom was or where to get lunches. But my ace was the fact that I was working next to my cousin so he gave me alot and forgave all the gazillion questions about stuff. But after a few months there I got into it and knew the place pretty well.
Then I changed job again and started working at Thomas Cook. And already again I’m the new guy! And I hate it, feel like such a noob! I mean I’m all for learning new things, experience different things and stuff but I do wanna know what server to login to atleast to do my job! Although I’m confident I’ll learn this place just as well as Vinge in a few months, I just don’t wanna take that ride again this soon.
As I posted the other day Sam have been ill for a few days but on Saturday he was getting better and didn’t have any fever or throw up or nothing. But we saw already on Friday that he was getting more and more cranky and needy. Maybe it was for all the extra attention he got when he was ill and the fact that he got anything he pointed at for those 3 days, but he’s has been annoying as hell all weekend. Or maybe it’s a phase, we don’t know, but no matter how or who we ask the answer is always “that’s normal”. So I took him to kindergarten today to see if they can straighten him out and 2 hours in and they still haven’t called. But it’s hard to be home with home just because he’s cranky and bitching about wanted to be carried around all the time just because he can’t be arsed to walk himself.
And it’s particularly hard for Helena. I don’t know if it’s the maternal instinct or if it’s the fact that 9 times out of 10 it’s her that he goes to but she gets really stressed out with all this. Or maybe I’m just better at ignoring it but if this is the way he’s gonna be from now on I don’t know how we’re gonna get through it. But as always people adapt so hopefully he or we will.
I’ve been working at Thomas Cook now for three days and I can’t really say I’ve been all that focused. Because kindergarten called my wife during lunch on wednesday that our son Sam had a 40 degree fever and we should come and pick him up. Which she did.
And he’s spent 2 nights throwing up (we ran out of clean sheets at about 3 am this morning) and a fever that we give him some pills up his ass for and he’s almost normal again for a while. But basically he’s back in the soffa watching TV with that “I’m too tired for this shit”-look. And it’s really painful for us to go through this again, it wasn’t that long ago.
But when you go online and you read about shit like this and you’re reminded that we’re pretty lucky it’s only a fever and some vomiting, it could be a helluvalot worse.