It’s been nearly five months since my zero faithful blag readers have heard from me. HELLO FAITHFUL READERS.
I guess I’ve been a bit too busy with work, travel, and work to update.
This site runs Jekyll and I recall that at some point I migrated from vanilla github pages Jekyll to one of those two-branch solutions where I compile the page myself before pushing to master, ensuring that I can actually use 3rd party plugins.
I loaded it up today wondering how on earth I was going to remember how to deploy my site to actually publish this post. Then I looked at my Rakefile. I love finding out that I planned ahead… if only I could remember where I stole half of it from…
$ rake publish && git push --all
Thanks, past me!
Anyway.
I could give a long talk about everything I’ve done since I moved in in August, but it turns out I have photos:
I’m used to the fact that I live in Sydney now. Work is going well, I’m settled into my apartment and lifestyle.
I still miss my friends and family. I miss my boyfriend, who won’t move here until July. Mostly life is awesome, I think being a little lonely for a while is the universe trying to keep me balanced.
Today I signed the tenancy agreement for my new apartment. It’s gorgeous — a sunny little studio at the city end of Glebe, with a raised partition for the bedroom hidden behind a half wall. The walls are covered with artwork: silhouettes of birds, leaves, trees. I’m in love.
I got to Sydney at 10:30am on the 8th of August. Took a cab from the airport, dropped my bags at the hotel, pulled on a clean shirt and ran straight out the door to go to the office and have a social lunch with my team.
I went from the office to the bank, and activated my account. From the bank to the nearest Optus store, picked up a pre-paid sim card, and finally from there back home to tell everyone my new cell number.
On the Friday I went supermarket shopping, applied for my tax file number, met a friend for lunch. By about 3pm I realised that I’d run all of the errands set aside for my first weekend.
I was going to start flat hunting in the middle of August. Instead, I went out on the Saturday. My new place is the second of ten that I viewed that day… The more apartments I looked at, the more I wanted this one.
I submitted my application at about 9pm Sunday evening; by midday Monday, it was accepted.
So far, working at Google is a lot like attending university.
The first few days are showing up, being given stationery and introductory material.
You’re told how to find things, what facilities are available on campus, and how to use your email.
The rest of the week, I’ve shown up at work in the morning and eaten breakfast there, because I was too lazy to have any at home.
I sit at a computer programming for most of the day, surrounded by cool, nerdy people who I can ask for advice, or just generally be social with.
Inevitably, I end up staying longer than I intended and having dinner at work instead of at home. Today was the first day since I started that I’ve eaten dinner outside of the office.
Like assignments, the first little project I actually have to work on is straightforward — I’ve almost finished it. Polishing to do, submission, code review… And like assignments, I’m expecting the second project to be exponentially harder.
My job is just like attending university, only the facilities are better, the problems more interesting, and I get paid to be there.
I’m loving every minute of it :)
that feeling you get when a new thing almost, almost works…. you get it right up to the point of working, and for some reason can’t bring it over the last hurdle
finally, in sheer frustration, you plug in the old thing. the fubared thing. the thing that was breaking everything a few short hours ago
and it works
IT JUST GOES NOW
I need a stiff drink.
I’m moving in a month.
Before they move my worldly goods, the relocation company has to assess the location where they’ll be picking my stuff up from, and the volume of stuff they’ll be picking up.
My tiny apartment is not going to be an appropriate place from which to relocate internationally, so I’ve moved everything to my parents’ place.
Including myself.
I got here yesterday afternoon, with my things and my computer. Setting that up is doublepluspriority, because I need to use it to work on Monday.
Internet Hell: Problem 1
Enter Internet Satan, stage left.
First up, the router is at the other end of the house. This shouldn’t be an issue, because I’ve had wifi signals cross this house before, no problem. But the router is at the low end of the house this time, and I’m setting up at the high end. I set up the desktop, playstation, and my android phone next to each other, and none of them could get a consistent enough signal to actually connect.
Did a bit of hunting around my things, pulled out the best router I own (my little netgear dgn2000) to try and use it as a relay in my bedroom, halfway between the two machines, to boost the signal strength.
Delete two hours of my life trying to get the netgear to play nicely with the rest of the kit; I realised there’s a phone line right where I needed the relay, and all of the computers in question have wifi cards.
Installed the netgear as the primary router & wireless AP for the house. PS3 and android phone connecting successfully; desktop? Not so much.
Internet Hell: Problem 2
So I’ve got a decent enough wireless signal now and I go to connect with the desktop machine.
I get into negotiations with the router and wicd freezes up and hangs, because it’s trying to run an ifconfig command that’s also frozen up and hung.
Meanwhile sudo -i no longer works… In fact sudo anything just hangs, and I can’t connect to my local mpd server anymore either.
(Corrupt routing tables? sure, why not… I’m too lazy to go back and diagnose the exact mechanism by which the wireless adapter was screwing up my machine)
I shut down the machine and that hangs too, trying to shut off apache, ntpd and samba. Out of frustration I try booting into windows.
I hop onto windows 7 and try to connect to the network from there.
I get into negotiations with the router and… Actually no, to its credit the windows drivers for the wireless card managed to create some form of nonfunctioning unidentifiable connection monster for windows to claim that I was connected to… I suppose that’s a better fail case than half the machine freezing up and dying.
By this point I’ve decided that my little USB wireless adapter has been damaged in the 10 minutes of transit and is malfunctioning at a hardware level….
It’s sleep time, so I’ll research a new one in the morning.
Internet Hell: Problem 3
Hopped out of bed this morning and straight onto my laptop to see what I can get in the market of USB wifi dongles, in person, on a Sunday afternoon. In New Zealand. Heh.
Now my connection to the router is dying on me every couple of minutes.
Dying on me as in, the laptop still thinks I’m connected, the router’s still taking new connections, but nothing works anymore.
Okay so this one was just interference from another local wireless network. Changed channel, everything’s fine.
Internet Hell: Problem 4
Hysterical Laughter
I went down to pbtech and picked up another asus wifi dongle.
I don’t know why I got another one of these; the one that just broke is an asus usb-n13, and the drivers for it cause kernel panics in kernels > 3.3
I think I’m just a sucker for wireless cards that come with a linux driver on a disc in the box, so I don’t have to run a twenty metre cable to the box to download drivers.
Anyway, I picked up an N-53 N600…. thing. It runs on a slightly different driver, so maybe I can upgrade my kernel off of 3.0-LTS now.
Got the dongle installed no problem. One thing to be said for these drivers - if you’re happy running an ancient, crusty kernel, they’re great: just compile and go.
….. Aaaand my network doesn’t show up on the scan. I swear I had a great signal last night… Sometime between leaving the house to buy the wifi dongle and now, the router decided to freeze up and stop working.
Reboot the router. Network comes back. Connection stable. Okay. It’s now 17:08 Sunday evening, but at least I’ll be able to work tomorow… Right?
Yeah, so, I graduated with my bachelor’s degree on Monday.
Not thrilled or anything like that.
Here’s me in my pretty pretty regalia :)
