Journal: October 2007

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Cool photo
Tues 31/10/07 (Link to this entry)

It's not often I praise my daily ride in to work, but today I rather enjoyed coming through the woods to the north of Guillemont Park. It was just misty enough to catch rays of sunlight coming through the trees in such a way that I thought I was in Lothlorien, not the grounds of Aldershot Garrison. I nearly ran off the path at one point because I was too busy gaping at the way the rays moved as I passed the trees. It's really difficult to catch this sort of thing well with a camera but I think the above one came out all right :-)

Still here
Mon 29/10/07 (Link to this entry)

One of the problems with resolving never to write an entry when I don't have anything interesting to say is that sometimes there are gaps. It's been nearly two weeks since my last one, though, so I thought I'd better check in in case people started thinking I was giving up the journal (it's kinda annoying when people do that without saying so).

Last weekend James and Kim came down for a visit which I greatly enjoyed. It was great to spend time with them both and get my hands back on a pool cue, two activities which I have greatly missed since their departure from Surrey. We also went to see Ratatouille at the pictures, which was very enjoyable (unlike its namesake, which involves courgettes and is therefore a Bad Thing). The day reminded me just how much I miss them - don't you dare leave it three months till your next visit, guys! :-p

Lately I've also been learning to make ginger beer with Tim Graves, an engineer with whom I've recently been doing some work on an upcoming Sun project. Making beer is kind of like a chemistry experiment, although I'm assured that biology has a lot to do with it too. Hopefully it'll involve less explosions than the average chemistry experiment, though (I say 'hopefully' because if you bottle too soon, the bottles might explode due to excess pressure...).

Sun upper management wants to kill me
Wed 17/10/07 (Link to this entry)

All around work these days there are big motivational posters which tell us the blindingly fucking obvious (for example, "this financial year we want to make more money than in the last one"), but dressed up in fluffy corporatespeak so that they annoy us as well as insulting our intelligence. I'm particularly worried by the one on the left above. Apparently, Sun is now actively discriminating against the blind (Sun workers need 'vision', apparently), the short-sighted (directors are allowed to be as myopic as they like, though), and - more worryingly - the living. Or maybe they mean the execution of programs. Which is kinda obvious - we're a bloody computer company. How is this kind of bollocks supposed to help the company? Can't we spend the printing money on something more productive, like maybe a noose for whoever came up with "Accelerate our business!"?

Back down south (but less south than before)
Mon 15/10/07 (Link to this entry)

Well, I'm still miles south of my homeland, but at least now I'm on the right side of the Channel and the people around me speak roughly the same language. The journey home went smoothly and I've had a nice relaxing weekend slugging around and recovering from all those early starts (the new guys work funny hours so they can go home early on Fridays, so I followed suit. I didn't know half six even existed in the mornings!). Below is a photo of the amazing sunset I saw from the plane (you can see the wing in the bottom of the picture).

The Orange Box got unlocked this weekend so I've spent a fair amount of time playing Portal, HL2 Episode 2 and Team Fortress 2. All three are very, very good, so if you're thinking of buying the package then I would say go for it. Portal in particular is brilliant - very clever, quirkily funny and occasionally brain-melting (in a good way). I can now also give away my free copies of the original Half-Life 2 and Episode One, so if anyone's interested drop me a line. It's not every day you get free stuff off a Scotsman!

Wenigstens bin ich nicht amerikanisch
Thu 11/10/07 (Link to this entry)

I've been feeling pretty embarrassed about my complete lack of German-speaking ability while I've been over here, but today I saw something that heartened me somewhat. At the restaurant tonight, I heard a large group of Americans at a nearby table trying to order their meals. It's the first time I've heard the legendary "if the waiter doesn't understand you, speak more loudly and slowly" tactic employed in real life. It was painful to watch. At least I made an effort (even if I did get confused between fourteen and forty the other night...).

Today was a productive day at work. One of the things Michael seems to do a lot in the German lab is loan pieces of hardware to engineers who need them temporarily on a customer site, so I spent a fair bit of time tracking down bits and pieces which will hopefully make a customer somewhere very happy (or at least less angry).

We also upgraded the power supplies on a 15K this morning. The 15K is one of Sun's biggest servers (around the size of a small elevator) and has six large power supplies, each of which is rated at 2000 watts. These sit in two large shelves on either side of the machine. These also needed to be upgraded, and weighed as much as a potato sack (a huge, awkward potato sack, that is). Needless to say, upgrading this beast was a fair bit of work, but thankfully it all went swimmingly. This is a good thing, since 15Ks can cost six-to-seven figures...

My flight home is tomorrow evening and I have to admit I'm looking forward to it. I never thought the day would come when I'd be looking forward to hearing English accents all around me, but here it is. It's going to be good understanding what people are saying again :-)

Italienische Restauranten für den Sieg
Sun 7/10/07 (Link to this entry)

I've always liked Italian food. Just as well, really - the presence of two Italian restaurants in the village has turned out to be something of a lifeline for me. The only other eateries I've found have been a Chinese bistro (meh) and a Turkish takeaway (a whole world of no). With the hotel restaurant bizarrely being closed at weekends, I have been very grateful for the presence of the Italians. This is particularly due to the fact that I can read the menus more easily since they're in Italian, not German!

I've had a very lazy weekend. My acute discomfort due to the language barrier, coupled with the worrying knowledge that there are train strikes on, meant that I wasn't overly keen on venturing into Munich. I wasn't massively bothered about Oktoberfest anyway, since neither beer nor sausages excite me at all, but I felt a little guilty for not taking the opportunity to go and at least take some photos of the festival.

Instead, I went for a wander around Heimstetten with the camera. There's not too much to report, I'm afraid. It's a fairly small village with not much going on. In fact, that's probably its best feature - it's very peaceful around here and one gets the impression it's one of these places where everyone knows each other. I've spent a fair quantity of this weekend lazing on a bench in the park reading, the sun being pleasantly warm but not bright enough to burn. It was very enjoyable in a lethargic kind of way.

I spotted the above poster on my way back home. Of all the things to remind me of my homeland, did it have to be bloody Rod Stewart? Now I'm haunted by the idea that people around here will identify me as being from the same country as him, and perhaps even hold me accountable for his existence. I think I need to learn the German for "no, no, we think he's a national embarrassment"...

Erwähnen Sie den Krieg nicht!
Sat 6/10/07 (Link to this entry)

Well, here I am in Germany, and my initial nervousness about getting here has been replaced with confusion - I don't really know what's going on most of the time. It is incredible how alone one can feel when separated from understandable human language - even the inability to read streetsigns becomes very frustrating after a while. That being said, most people I have met have tried their best to be accommodating and a majority have spoken at least some English, so it's not all bad on the language front.

The inn I'm staying in, the Gasthof Eberle, seems to be a traditional family-run place. My room's nice and big, with some entertaining curvy bits on the furniture that look like they're straight out of some Sun marketing material. I was pleasantly surprised to discover free wireless internet access too, hence my ability to post this entry today. I've stitched up a panoramic shot of the room below (click for a bigger version):

As a sidenote, the software I used to create this panoramic shot is really impressive - it did it all automatically, which is not bad at all given the quality of the source material. The relevant bits are Hugin, Autopano-SIFT and Enblend.

Work looks like it'll be an interesting experience. Michael, our full-time guy in Germany, left yesterday to go to America so I'll be on my own with his two new interns for the whole of next week. I've met one of them (the other was off sick), and he seems a good bloke - and his English is good, which comes as a great relief. Hopefully over the next week I'll be able to train them up well enough that they'll cope after I'm gone until Michael gets back.

In the car park outside Sun's Heimstetten location they have a Blackbox, so passers-by today were greeted with the spectacle of a poorly-shaven Scotsman in a big hat taking a photo of himself next to a big black shipping container. I like to think that I'll have bemused some of them a little - payback for how confused I've been these past few days...

Nein, nein, ich bin SCHOTTLANDER
Wed 3/10/07 (Link to this entry)

As I type this I've just finished packing for going to Germany tomorrow. I'm feeling somewhat nervous about the whole affair; I've never flown before, I don't speak any German, and I hear it's pretty difficult being a veggie over there. Oktoberfest is on, too, so I'll probably be expected to partake of a ridiculous quantity of sausages and beer. I'm not sure which is the more repulsive out of the two :-p

I was going to write a longer entry tonight but it's half eleven, I need to get up early to get to Heathrow, and I'm bloody knackered after my weekly badminton session (I was playing well tonight - made a couple of really nice saves at full stretch. God, my arms hurt!). So, since it's late, I'm going to bed now. The gods of hotel internet access permitting, I'll make a couple of posts while I'm over there - otherwise I'll be back on Friday the 12th. Auf wiedersehen!

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