Aegir’s Rantings

Woke up at six, had a really weird dream where I was at some train yards, and there was an old railcar from the 1920’s. Probably all made up in my head. The name, ‘Gardiniar Railmotor’ stuck in my head for some reason. In the dream I was talking about it being really historic to my mother, and then it kinda flashed to some point further up where I was in a train yard or somthing.

I’ve played too much of Pikka’s Queensland rail set that’s in testing. Way to much.

Sat on the ‘net for a bit in the morning, ate rice bubbles, got ready for work.

Got to EDC, the new place I am working for four weeks. Went off to site, some place up near Edinburgh airforce base. Absolute pig of a day. The weather went back and forth from nice cool breeze, but stinking hot - to slightly cooler, but very, very humid. And flies. I had atleast fifteen chasing me around today.

Had to run fiber from an ETSA pit into a building, easy said, but everything kept shitting up. Couldn’t of had more things bugger up.

Anyway, it took all day, but it got done.

Reformatted my desktop PC when I got home, also came home to a finicky wireless router. Damn that thing is shitting me off. It randomly decides to drop connections, to lock me out of the configuration, it also decides to refuse connection altogether. I couldn’t even get it to send packets to my fathers laptop today. I’ll see how it behaves tommorow. If it’s still buggering up, then it’s down to Hardly Normal (Harvey Norman) to get it replaced.

So now I’m sitting here contemplating sleep, and seeing if Liz will return an msn message I sent her.

Oh wells.

Australian beer commercials rock. And I need the toilet.

This entry is coming in phenomenally late. My last quarterly work placement, at Flinders University, Information Services Division. More specifically, the Data Comm’s mob. This was to be the same stuff that I had already done in my first workplace, but the working environment was far, far better.

My first day almost turned quite embarrassing, as my father drove me in and almost go their a quarter of an hour late. Good thing the boss wasn’t in that day, and wouldn’t be back for a day or two. So no harm was done. I did the whole meet and greet thing, and got straight into work.

I’ve been doing all sorts of things this time around. Unlike my first true cabling work placement were I was mostly just running cables, no terminations, no frame work, nothing. I got exposed to quite a lot more this time around. Whereas in my first work placement, I was told that I didn’t know what I was doing, and would only bugger it up, this time around the people I was working with actually showed me how to do things, and were patient enough to do it quite often. As there were major parts where my skills were lacking.

Few interesting things I learned. Floating floors in server rooms are amazing. Whoever came up with the concept of floating floors, with the air conditioning being fed under the floor and up through vents deserves a medal. Makes it so much more pleasurable to run cables. Second, the customer is almost always brain-damaged. They might tell you that a network point is buggered, but quite likely, it’s their computer. Third, don’t cross two phone lines over. Locks both lines up at the PABX for a good five to ten minutes. Fourth, regardless of what the documentation says, those cables Telstra, or god knows whatever cabler did it before, are probably higher up in the ground than what it says. Get ready to fix it when the builders tear it up with a big tractor. Fifth, comm’s cabinets can be hidden in the most James-Bond’eque places.

I learned a lot on the job, how to terminate with different sorts of mechs, running cables in duct and terminating, testing with the giant Fluke testers (Worth $15000+), telecoms troubleshooting, data troubleshooting, working with cabinets and so forth. I learned how to terminate and read the documentation for distribution frames, both Krone panels and Avaya frames. Avaya frames being far superior to the Krone variety by far (Much cleaner, tidier, easier to manage and do phone moves).

So I’m glad I got placed at Flinders Uni, closer to home, close to school, already knew my way around a bit, there was an ATM nearby for the many food purchases I made. Overall it was good.

I find out this Friday where my next work placement is, judging by how well I got along with the other coms workers, I should hopefully get placed up at Flinders again. I’ve already had two work placements there so far. The first was doing more IT work, lots of server configuration, desktop support, deploying systems. Also did a giant network audit which was rather boring, but an interesting look at the structure of a medium sized network shared across numerous separate groups with different needs. It was good though. I’m looking at getting qualified in as many different things network wise as possible, from structured cabling, telecoms, all the way up to desktop support and network administration. I’ve really taken a liking to network configuration in particular. I want to be as qualified in as many things as possible by the time I leave high school. Then I can decide whether I want to pursue further study, or jump straight into work.

Well, looks like I’ll be making a habit of blogging about things way after they’ve happened.

My laptop, the wonderfully quirky Extensa 2000 (2001lm), was taken into the shop a month back, had the screen replaced (Dead pixels galore) powersupply replaced (Fizzle fizzle bang), and I requested they fix some case damage. Well, they replaced the screen, which came free with two dead pixels (What a bargain), and replaced the power suply (The new one is much sturdier and better built, Liteon as aposed to the old Hipero, hitero, hitreo, fuck I cant remember the brand). And the case damage? Well, they gave me a little glad-bag with the pcmcia shutter that had fallen out, and didnt fix any of the case damage. Infact, where they had to pull the case apart to connect the screen to the mainboard, they didnt reassemble it properly. Pfeh. But atleast I have it back.

Strangely, the filesystem cacked out on me on saturday. I’d never seen Linux go through that, but sure enough, it wasnt just the filesystem, about a hundred or so bad blocks in almost exactly the precise centre of the drive. I flushed the entire drive out with some 0’s, wrote /dev/zero to /dev/hda from a live disc then reinstalled. Now it works fine. The disc checker in Linux still finds the bad blocks, methinks it’s now cornered them off so that the system doesnt use them. If it acts up again, I’ll take it to the shop again to have the HDD replaced (And maybe get them to fix the damn case, or atleast ask them if I’m allowed to do so without voiding the warranty).

Back to the subject of blogging about things way after they’ve happened, as part of my ePortfolio, I’m supposed to keep a journal for my traineeships work placements. Mighty good thing that I already have a weblog and have already made entries about previous work placements . So before I wrap up this ePortfolio thing (Atleast for assesment on monday/tues/wednesday, whenever), I’ll have to do one really long post about my work at Flinders Uni. Infact, the entry will be so late, that it’ll be a week before the next work placement. Hopefully I can get placed back at Flinders.

Oh, and about the dead pixels on my screen, the laptop just spawned a third one, on the far lefthand side of the screen. Its a bright cyan little fella who so far has managed to keep out of my way. Atleast he isnt as intrusive as the dark-dark red and bright green two that sit near each other about an decimetre into my screen from the top right corner. Bah. Why can’t all dead pixels be more like my little shy cyan friend?

Yeap, changing the site design, yet again. Building it off the old Wordpress Classic theme. Trying to ‘professionalize’ my site up, as I have to do some major work to it to get it ready for this ePorfolio crap that I have to do for school.

Hmm, maybe putting the ePortfolio on my site wasn’t sucha good idea, now I have to do too much more bloody work. Ahhwell. Too late now.

Edit: Hmm. I think I’m just about done with the new theme for the site.

Edit #2: Surprising, my site now renders correctly in Internet Explorer. Except for the header text which is in white for some god-unknown reason. I’ll try and fix that.

Allegedly my site does not render correctly in Opera. Pfeh.

One of the more interesting things I’ve read lately.