I’ve been working too much last year, and haven’t had much time for anything else, I logged roughly 400 hours of overtime and 1500 hours of on call duty just in the last six months of the year.
But we finally got a closure on the big project we were working on, and I am currently in intensive training to get back on track and ready for the new years challenges.
Currently I’m doing training on VMWare ESX and related topics, and I have already been trained on the HP EVA systems, next week I’m going back to France to recieve training on Mid-Range (RP\RX7xx0 | RP\RX8xx0) and Superdome systems, that’ll be great fun for sure.
I have even booked a weeks vacation to a spa-hotel in Prague in March, so that’ll be great for relaxing after all this training.
Thankfully I have also done some research on taxes, and discovered that I have actually payed too much tax (I hope) last year, even though I surely did exceed my base pay by quite a few percent!
And I finally got a dedicated power-line to my servers in Tromsø, so now we will hopefully have more than 20% uptime on this and other sites
Well, I should probably go on and tell you about my summer.
I went to London for a week in June (phew, got away from the country on my birthday, no surprise birthdayparties then) and took a look at all the regular tourist attractions, like the Tower Of London and Madame Tussauds.
The trip wasn’t too bad either, payed only 800€ for two people at a three star (built 2007) hotel just north of Liverpool Street Station and the planetickets.
I went crazy at HMV (as usual) and bought lots of DVD’s, including the X-Files box-set with 9 seasons and the movie (seriously, had some trouble getting that into my bag).
Since I only took a week vacation from work (since I only had 4 days payed vacation this year) I’ve mostly been sitting in the empty office at work doing nothing (but still getting payed) and having some issues with the heat, seriously, it’s been like 30+ degrees here in Oslo for quite some time.
Yesterday I went for a long desired purchase though, I finally bought a new bass guitar (last one I bought was in 1998) which was quite a upgrade from the previous one (a Jack & Denny 4string passive shit) to a brand new Cort Artisan B-4 with active pickups and equalizer.
The bass has a lovely mellow tone, with rich bass and treble sides, which means it’s nice both for blues and the occational slap\pop, and I can even use a toggleswitch to use it as a passive pickup system (if I would run out of batteries e.g).
Otherwise, just slacking, eating, sleeping, being a retard.
Since my last posting I have been doing some electronics shopping,
For one I did buy a dSLR camera, to be more precise I bought a Nikon D40 (with stock lens 18-55 and a secondary lens with 55-200).
So I am out and about doing some photography, trying to learn to master all the features of the dSLR (Mind you, I’m terrible).
I also did buy a used playstation 2 with dual controllers and DVD remote, and I got it at the cheap price of €60, which isn’t that bad really, so now I’m foraging Ebay for great games I miss
Also, I am concidering buying a house outside Oslo since the houses out there cost the same as a random apartment in downtown Oslo (roughly €220.000).
I just bought a new car (well my old one is basically falling apart) and I’m currently just waiting for the handover, if you wanna take a look at it be my guest
Also I stopped smoking last week (sunday to be pricise) and I still haven’t smoked one cigarette!
Nothing new otherwise, just trying to go more and more solo at work, and also get more and more overtime
I’ve finally found out what I’m gonna work with (well it’s almost decided) at HP, I’m gonna work with highend Integrity servers and highend tapestorage, which is very good since I have never worked with any of the platforms before, so I hope to learn lots of new stuff
Otherwise I’ve been home for 4 days in Tromsø to celebrate christmas with my parents and siblings, it was nice, and I ate lots of good norwegian christmasfood
However I was disapointed that there was so little snow this year, we only had like 5cm (2″) while we usually have 2-3 meters (6-9 feet)
I’ve also been working on installing a new services on my servers, a music streaming frontend called “Subsonic” that allows you to index mp3files and make playlists via a web frontend and download the playlist, great for work!
I tried installing it on linux first, but I _HATE_ debugging javaerrors in linux so I gave up after a few hours and installed it on a windows server instead.
Otherwise nothing much new, gonna buy a new car in january, just have to figure out what car, I have set my budget to 250-300.000NOK (31-38.000€ | 46-56.000$).
Well, I finally moved back to Norway (not that Ireland was so bad, just the country).
I’m currently staying in Tromsø until the 10th of November where I will be assisting in an installation for work (I’ve only started in the job today and will already have my first installation from Saturday)
Nothing much to do here atm, just watching TV and relaxing waiting for the work to start, however I did find a beautiful bottle of Laphfroig 10 year old at the airport (recommended by vidarlo) and I just have to say I _LOVE_ this whisky, the Irish ones don’t even come close.
Well, I’ve just been to Norway for 2 weeks (most of it in Narvik, where we have been putting toghether the NaITparty).
It has been two interesting weeks, and I even managed to get sick over the course of this trip (well, mainly because I was in a dry and cold soccerhall for 1.5 weeks), and I’ve even seen some snow (yes we get snow here early!).
At the moment I’m sitting in the airport at Oslo surfing some wireless connection and being bored (I was even so bored that I downloaded and installed a MSN and SSH client on my phone :D)
Well, that’s it for now, I will be in Dublin in a few hours and will only stay there until next weekend, THEN finally I move to Oslo for my new job \o/
