sparkling tenuous

My LJ has been abandoned, neglected, left for nought...but I still have a slight presence on the web.

http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=522617858&ref=profile

It's finally come to pass and I've just spent a week working with my new employers. I have yet to receive my office and building passcards and there doesn't seem to be a central search engine for the raging torrent of important and semi-important websites/resources that I'd need to survive - but it's still been a revelation so far.

A few of my external impressions have been disproved - for example, Micr0s0fties aren't actually as stuck up as I'd made them to be, bar a few exceptions - and a few things that I'd suspected before this are actually true, stuff that I'm not in a position to reveal, unfortunately.

One of the major things that I've been having to get used to is hotdesking, which means that I have no permanent desk in the office, having to occupy any available desk when I'm at work.  Due to the limited office space, employees on the go are encouraged to stay away and be on-site or work from home. 

That's a really cool thing - with remote access, I'd only need to come to the office for managerial meetings and administrative stuff like handing in expense claims.  At the moment though, I'm on a 90 day training plan, which means that I'll mostly be in the office until I start working on my customer accounts. 

One thing that I've noticed about most people is their willingness to talk - some more fluent than others, a trait that seems directly proportionate to the the height of their positions on the org chart.  That's management I suppose - but on the whole, the top managers here seem a lot more intelligent than elsewhere.

Talk about travelling into the bowels of the beast.

I've joined M1cr0s0ft. I will only officially have signed over my soul on September 15th, but yeah.

And it was so easy for me to accept. There was no way in hell I could turn down 56% more pay. There was no way in hell that I'd stay in D4t4c0m.

This happened 2 weeks ago, but yeah.

My next job will be away from end users masquerading as IT consultants. I will try my best to make sure of that. Unfortunately, due to some twist of fate, that moment in time was pushed forward by another 6 months, thanks to my accepting a slight increase in salary and penning a contract. By slight, I mean slightly less than 10%. At first appearance, most people would call me a whiny little mutt - but considering the fact that my team members and I are being paid less than the industry standard for Level 3 support, it's a victory.

Heh, I love consoling myself, justifying my continued presence there, glazing over the little details. Little details, which occasionally add up and snowball and become giant white elephants in the middle of the room.

I came to the job from a senior position and a position of authority - only to be managed by a clueless muppet, who would then be usurped by another clueless muppet but with fangs. Thankfully, that coup didn't fully materialise but I've had to live with the fanged muppet's blatant attempts at assuming control and asserting authority. There has been some reprieve of late, but I'm pretty sure that that won't last too long.

'Course, I'm just complaining because I'm the fanged muppet's sounding board.

At the very least, I'll be away from work for a few days (attending my sister's wedding in KK) and will try to ignore the mountain of cases in my bin - I think that was 17 at last count. Doesn't sound like much? That's 17 different customers clamouring for my attention, needing troubleshooting to be done and research to be carried out. There aren't enough hours in a business day to work on them all at once. The only saving grace is that some of them take days to get back to me and some don't mind the wait.

All this is because we're short on Exchange people, so if you're an Exchange person in Malaysia willing to rack up valuable experience working on behalf of Microsoft Australia, do please send me your resume. If you know of anyone who is, do please tell them to send me their resumes.

I can't believe Spurs are actually fighting for it. It doesn't help that United were half asleep in the first half hour either. Come on you reds!

I'd been postponing on watching Shoot Em Up, afraid that it would be another one of those highly rated but ultimately mundane action flicks - but it was just fantabulous! Slugfests galore, wit, a hero of heroic proportions and a hooker played by Monica Belucci. What more can you want in an action flick? I was pleasantly surprised and rather highly entertained.

My rerun of 300 in HD was also surprisingly quite watchable - the high resolution detail goes very well with the visual and dramatic stylisation - and a great movie for the appreciation of eye candy and cinematography alone.

'Course, you need a widescreen panel for that, which are getting cheaper. After quite some time in the wilderness, I finally caved in and got a reasonably priced 22" LCD monitor and I now understand what all the fuss was about - since most movies are distributed in widescreen format these days. Gaming is a bit of a sticky issue though but most new games do have support for widescreen resolutions.

And with a Q6600 at 3.6Ghz on air and a couple of 3870's in crossfire, gaming's bound to be quite a bit enjoyable. ;)

It must be the being out of practice for so long - I feel like I have so much to write about and yet when I try to put words together and assign the nuances that make me me, the gesture disappears into an airless expanse of imagination. It's like trying to catch wisps of vapour, the steam from a boiling soup, the smoke from a lit cigarette living its three minute existence.

It's been such a long time that I'd forgotten what password, amongst the myriad of passwords I use, is the one for lj. And so, like so many other sites in times past, I dutifully clicked on the ubiquitous Forgot Your Password? (AKA click here you idiot).

I suppose there's some little application out there that remembers these troublesome annoyances - oh wait, there's one right on my iPhone! Love it to bits, I do. It's not officially available in Malaysia, and probably won't officially be available for the iPhone's launch in Asia (2008) either, but you can get them locally - albeit with a bit of hackery. Just don't get one from a shop, they sell them for arms and legs. There's no such thing as a local warranty and you might as well get one off of a friend who's coming back from the US or Europe, provided you also get a hardware or software unlock to allow for local use. Or you can browse the lowyat.net Bulk Orders or Garage Sales forums for a good deal, which is how I got mine.

Oh and have I mentioned that my iPhone is the dog's bollocks? ;)

I spent a nice and cosy New Year's eve with jaclyn, swishing beef wagyu strips in kelp-bonito flake soup, the method otherwise known as Shabu Shabu. My New Year's usherings seem to get more and more laidback as the years roll by and I'm not even fazed by that. Which is good-good-good-gooood-gooooood. Heh, Jeff Dunham's a barrel of laughs. "Silence! I kill you!" "Are you pissed off-fah-fah?"

My 3 weeks of leave before and after New Year's was just fantastic, especially with the mountain of work that's been piling up at the office, ever since my team of 7 went down to 5. I still love solving problems, though I hate some customers and dislike a colleague or two. And I really hope that I can get the raise implied at, come year-end review time. It would make it worthwhile.

Oh well, time to sleep.

...where have I been? Mmm, yeah (annoying boss in Office Space).

Everything's been mostly hunky dory, unfortunately - no dramas here. That's what you get for being content and fed to bits, if not feeding self to bits.

Talking about food - jac and I have just started a food blog. I know, they're a dime a dozen these days but we've always wanted to do one. http://dinnerisserved.wordpress.com

I think that I've gotten used to the Sydney office. The cacophony of Australian accents sometimes rising, sometimes falling. My department counterparts in particular tend to be rather quiet though. They seem rather reserved in comparison with the Tier 2 guys who are a rather chatty lot.

My tech lead, nathan, is also more the introvert than I'd originally thought and his geekiness is confirmed. ed is unassuming and easily embarassed. bupender is the more talkative one, which isn't really saying that he's that talkative. rhea is off on a planet of her own. The platforms guys aren't very chatty either - except for the sociable Matt.

I suppose it's a consequence of being together for years - they have a low staff turnover for the Sydney professional team, though it's probably too short of a time for me to make a valid observation.

Else, as I've been telling everyone here who's asked - it's business as usual.

Last Sunday, a broken front zipper foiled my attempt at getting another good look at the city. I did manage to visit Market City at Paddy's Market, which was basically Petaling Street squeezed into one large building. I visited Chinatown, which someone commented to as being pointless since you could call Sydney itself Chinatown. And I basically wandered around aimlessly, hoping no-one was looking at my nether regions.

This weekend I hope to focus my attentions on the Powerhouse Museum, Contemporary Art Museum as well as the international car show in Darling Harbour. Yes, we have those in KL too but they tend to be rather underwhelming.

Otherwise, it's business as usual.

It's pretty ironic for me to go all the way to the city and not find a single cybercafe or wifi hotspot and to come back, walking from Macquarie Centre along Talavera Road to find an open network - on a lark, sitting at a bus stop. In front of my temporary office, no doubt.

It was a quest, indeed, getting there in the first place. I sat at the bus stop outside Macquarie Garden for an hour at 12, waiting in vain for Bus no. 292. So I walked down to the nearby KFC to have lunch and only started off at 2.30pm, finally getting the bus I needed and getting the bus driver to break 50 dollars for change.

I had no idea where to get off and just followed the majority of passengers get off the bus - to find myself at Queen Victoria building. A nice steampunk-ish building but entirely too commercialised.

I didn't fully realise the extent to which Asians populate Sydney - something that my colleague once mentioned - and could identify Chinese, Korean and Japanese. It was bewildering at first, but grabbing a map from QVB proved to be important. And despite the fact that I was carrying a map (or maybe because I was), I got stopped for directions by four different people. Guess they must think I'm local.

I walked down to Darling Harbour, and went past King Street Wharf (which wasn't as inviting as the pictures in the guide that I'd later see). Then I walked up to The Rocks, which was rather too polished and refined to be the charming little old place it could've been. From there it was Circular Quay, where I had a magnicfient view of Harbour Bridge and the Opera House and it's wide steps and pavilion. By the time I'd done all that I was pretty tired and sat down at a Starbucks, which to my relief had iced venti hazelnut mochas.

All in all it's been a good day of sightseeing. I know I haven't seen the half of it yet but I already love the citiness of Sydney. The well made pavements, sharp buildings all around, the urbanity of it all. Tomorrow I'll definitely be out again - targets being Sydney Tower, Paddy's Market, Sydney Fish Market and whatever else I get to see along the way.

I'm sitting here sipping a coke, smoking a cigarette in the living room, in an interlude of Life playing on tv (I have no idea what channel it's on). The ads are weird, just like the signboards that adorn the shops and sit atop street poles. Like the houses and low-rise apartments that look almost too nice to be real. Like the cars that aren't familiar and the cool weather on such a low altitude. Australian rules football and rugby instead of football.

The locals call McDonald's Maccers and it has a McOz meal - a one patty Big Mac with beetroot. Beetroot! (A pretty good combination by the way) Sandwiches at work cost 5 Australian Dollars - around 15 Malaysian Ringgit. Basil costs 3 Aus$ and change.

And the biggest scourge - the local mall closes by five and the supermarket closes at seven on normal days. 7 pm!

The pavements are paved though and I'm living within a 10-20 minute walk away from the office, depending on which route I take. I just learned that I'd been taking the longer route, and had hauled at least 10 kilos of shopping bags going the extra 1 km (there's a hill :P ).

Oh by the way sweetie, download Life and see if you like it, then watch the next month's episodes 'cause I'll be watching them on the telly. Also, I've watched House 4x01 and I'll probably be watching the next 3 weeks' episodes too.

It's been zen so far - I can't wait for the weekend when I can begin the tour of Sydney in earnest. My Sydney colleagues aren't much of a talkative bunch though, probably due to their being together for years. It could be an Australian thing but judging from the extreme chattiness of the Tier 2 team right behind me, it's probably just the zombification of being at work in one place for so long. Still, it's probably me being effectively the new guy and a competitor who'd closed 38 cases last month, compared to the closest Sydney guy with 25. Else, they're just disaffected and discontent.

I love the weather though, except for today's highest spring day temperature for a hundred and twenty six years. Maybe Australia's subverting my fondness of it in that ironic way that the universe tends to spit in your face. Maybe.

I love you sweetie, you'll get well soon! Hugs and kisses. OXXOXXOOXX

I'm in one of those ADD fueled maelstroms of thought that you can only have when nothing in particular is happening and you're idly sitting, cradling an iced venti hazlenut mocha - jiggling it ever so often to fling off the condensation. And when you have four Firefox windows open with a minimum of five tabs in each - one bookmarks folder each for football, tech, blogs and blinks.

*blinks - those blogs that provide linkage

The tough part is trying to remember that ghost of a thought that seemed worth writing about just a few moments before, only to be overwritten by something else. And something else. And something else.

It's a pretty flippish and floppish world we live in, this world of fast news and little snippets and quick digests. It's that need to keep abreast, to run with the frontrunners and be in the vogue before millions of other people turn it into one of those things you've done ages ago that n00bs have only just picked up. Last year's music, last year's news

I supposed I'm not too different from a yuppy getting the latest Civic (I actually would love to have the Asian one but not because it's the in thing to do, of course), a fashion afficionado buying into the latest fad, an audiophile procuring the best new hi-fi equipment and so on and so forth.

Ultimately, it's my way of dealing with an ever changing world, and ever increasing age. I refuse to be one of those old fogeys (they can be much younger than you think) who insist that things aren't what they used to be and forever hark back to the old days.

I have a front row seat to the roaring Mig 31s that have been doing practice runs over Dataran Merdeka. I love jets, I used to love 'em to bits as a kid. Not sure why I never wanted to be a pilot so I think it might just have been gadget envy. Oh yeah, afterburners. ;)

The human lcd screen on the Dataran Merdeka field isn't very exciting but I suppose after that fantabulous display of mass human coordination by Samsung (it's on Youtube somewhere), some internet surfing bureaucrat just needed to have it.

I'm normally disinterested in Merdeka Day celebrations but the 24th floor at work does provide a non too shabby view - though my focus will be solely on the Migs.

Still, I wish the fuckers wouldn't so nonchalantly close down roads for bloody rehearsals. And it's going to be such a pain to get to work on the 31st - I picture myself finally getting to the office an hour or two late.

The axiom of tackling the easier problems before the harder ones doesn't apply in the support line. While we can prioritise personal tasks and delay those that need the least attention till later, all cases in support are of equal importance and have the same objective. Fix the problem, address the issue, get what the customer wants. So the one case I have that's been on the backburner for weeks has to be finalised and closed now, before I even start addressing the easier case that also is of pressing need.

It's a logic loop - one of those programming errors that belays any action, that instils inaction. And the worrying thing is that I revel at the going back and forth and back and forth, all as an excuse to procrastinate and prevent any work from actually being done.

To be fair, it's just the one case and a unique one where I'm to provide what I perceive to be a lengthy recommendation - I have to be specific, tedious and technical. But it may be that I'm just over-complicating what may actually be a simple task and that the customer doesn't really have the same high expectation as I picture him to have.

I'm off to do that now. If there's one thing I'm learning at work, it's to never, ever let cases drag on for too long. It just pulls everything else down - especially when one is as busy as I have been for the past 2 weeks at work.

Speaking of which, our Australian managers were over in KL the past week - darren the medium-head honcho for a major part of the Microsoft account and david who's the business manager for initial response, dev, apps and plats. I'm not too clear on the specifics but I know that we report to dave via ms. pure fluff and dave reports to darren. It didn't really make much of a difference to us in KL, since they were here on what I assume are the quarterly KL ops meetings (hence the appearance of many other Austalian managers) but it did result in the KL tier 3 team getting lunch in Grappa. And that was basically that.

There are many flaws to the method of management, and melodramatically so because of the nature of the business - call centre people being by definition a chatty lot, many of whom are rather non-technical despite the technical support job description. The basic flaw to KL operations is that upper management is quite unwilling to invest any further than necessary into operations, as the entire premise of the KL branch is to reduce the cost of call centre operations, generally half of which is still based in Australia. This rather nasty situation is underlined by the following facts - a) there are no salary increments, b) there are no bonuses or incentives and c) there are very little opportunities to further one's career, not for genuinely technical people anyway. 'Course, there's still the promotion aspect of things and if the management acts astutely, they will change my status to senior engineer. Otherwise, I'll last at the very most, a year in the company. Minimum I would think is 6 months.

It's a shame, really. I genuinely love problem solving.

I'd always thought that Curacao was some place in South America. Must've gotten it mixed up with Caracas in some Freudian pattern recognition slip.

A few weeks ago jaclyn and I got ourselves our own fish. They're right this moment swimming around on top of the coffee table.

Introducing Bruce, the lustrous aquamarine and navy blue Siamese fighting fish. He's so badass he's been known to attack his own reflection, which is why he has his very own jar.

We got 5 guppies - Olga and Cornelia. Unfortunately, Chuck, Fredericka and Winona's bodies were found dead a few days after being relocated to our home. No foul play was suspected until the two ghost catfish turned into the one. Casper, RIP, with a suspiciously mutilated tailfin. Beetlejuice is a prime suspect, due to him being the largest fish left in the tank, while the random cardinal tetras (Fish #1, Fish #2, Fish #3, Fish #4, Fish #5) can't be identified due to them being quintuplets.

And not to forget Angus, the leafy tropical plant who's currently undergoing rehab for a drinking problem.

Two weekends ago I drove down to Ipoh with jaclyn on a day trip to attend her extended family's reunion dinner. It was multinational. Literally. There were Americans, Germans, Ceylonese, Indians, Chinese and North Borneans. Make that just the one North Bornean. Quite a bit of an eye-opener, since my extended family is quite the homogenous norm for Sabah - Kadazans and Chinese (except for the lone Malay who'd caused a bit of a stir when he married in).

It was a whirlwind of quick introductions and unexpected cheek to cheek hugs. Bewildering at first. And then, once the initial novelty of being the new person wore off, there came the usual poking and prodding that relatives do - which unusually was a lot less than I'd expected, given the number of people who were there. I suppose it was politeness, having met me for the first time. And of course, it was my good fortune that they themselves had, some of whom, not seen each other in years. That too, paired with my propensity (and jaclyn's) to slink away from all the attention, not having the stomach/stone-walled faces/interest to dive into the small-talk and repel the maybe maybe not snide insinuations that dog-tail tongued relatives tend to have.

But it was all good, a long overdue visit to jaclyn's hometown. And it wasn't the least bit as daunting as jaclyn seemed to make it to be.

ps.
If anyone remembers the Petronas ad with the Malay looking boy speaking German - he's actually half-Ceylonese and half-German. And to put things simply, without going into 1st nephew, 2nd nephew or 15th cousin removed - jaclyn is his aunt.

I've been wanting to write this post for at least two password expiry resets.  I'm not sure how many = signs I can append to my work login password that I can remember, but it now numbers three. 

Suffice it to say, I've been contentedly going about daily matters.  Working long and hard.  And filling time away from work with all things needed to preoccupy myself - play, jaclyn, food, tv, movies.  It's all fine. 

I suppose all I need to do is to fill the time from now till a year from now, until I'm able to change jobs and take that level up that I apparently haven't availed myself to.  I'm undervalued and somewhat ruing the fact - but the experience I'm gaining from my job right now is priceless, so I'm only biding my time. 

I'm off to Sydney on September 30th and will be working there for a month till October 27th.  The ruse is training but I frankly don't understand what I have to learn from my counterparts in Sydney that I'm not already learning on my own, on the job.  It's all a ploy to keep me bonded to the company, I suppose, but since my plan was to stay for a year anyway, it's pretty good.  No worries.  Good on ya mate. 

It's going to be an adventure, since it'll be my first time in Australia, but it's not the first time I've been overseas.  jaclyn's been stumped at my lack of enthusiasm but I guess I'll remain unenthusiastic until a) I have my plan ticket in hand and b) I've discovered what to see and do in Sydney.  Plus, it is going to be time away from her and that's going to be a downer too. 

How the hell could they confuse a VW beetle with a bloody Camaro?
That and many inconsistencies says that Michael Bay is full of shit. ;)

But the special effects alone were well worth the effort.

It's almost surreal being here, almsot free, almost idle, while everyone else toils away at the daily grind of work. 'Course, I should be studying (and I most certainly will be) for my exam tomorrow but I think I shall take in the complimentary day of study leave that I have today. 5 days exam leave and 10 days study leave, in addition to my yearly 25. My, my. That just about makes up for all the local public holidays that I won't be enjoying.

It's bright and hot just a few steps away from where I'm sitting, just under the The Curve's carapace on the Borders end, facing the esplanade and the blue, white and red monstrosity that is Tesco. I think that I've found the replacement to Starbucks Telawi. Starbucks Borders, chock full of other laptop toting people who also appear to not be working. How I envy them if it's their way of life.

But no, I'm not complaining about work. After 5 weeks of taking cases (peculiarly considered a month, this time around), I find myself thoroughly enjoying the challenge and the sense of accomplishment that it brings. There's a healthy dose of competition - Quality of Service and case closure wise - that's spurred me along. And it's always good to get that once in a while customer who responds to a survey and rates you highly. It hasn't been easy - there've been days of fervent research and high busy-ness - but in the end I find myself content. I might even top the KL team QOS standards for the quarter, despite starting late, and wipe the smile off of that full of BS colleague of mine, who's been getting the last few quarterly awards. Crossing fingers.

We've finally found a sofa! At long last, we decided on a greenish-brown thing with chrome stilts that's comfortable to sit on and looks pretty nifty too. Next Monday's delivery can't come too soon. Yay! 1 component down. Proper living room curtains, rug and dining table to go. All that's left for me to do now is to return to Mr. Handyman mode and get those pesky cables tidied up. Love you sweetie :)

Off to dive into some Microsoft Exchange goodness (more like, total real world crap but hey, otherwise I'd be out of a job, right?;).

Australians are a laidback bunch. I've already had 3 of my customers go away on holiday in the middle of a case and a good barrel-ful of them are content to let a case stretch for days on end, working on it a bit at a time. I've even had one tell me he'd been drinking the night before and if I could call him later once his mental facilities returned.

I got my first two VSATs! MS PSS customers are surveyed and tell how they rate the engineer handling their cases - VSAT (very satisfied) means that they rated me at 7-9 on a scale of 1-9 Apparently it's not an easy thing to achieve, and I got two nines.

Aside from the two people (and another who's just left) who are already leaving the team, everyone else has designs on getting out. It's not the most inspiring thing to happen but at least it's given me the heads up. Always be prepared and don't take yourself off the job market. New motto, that.

Toiiinggg. I just can't completely replicate the sound that chand, one of my colleagues, makes. It's become a team motto. An expression of irony and sarcasm and playfulness all rolled into one. You can use it in scenarios such as:

- Getting a 'quality' customer not know how to do something or screw something up
- Directed at Ms.Fluff, who's always oblivious to everything going on around her
- Have some ironic thing happen to you

They're not really a happy bunch, my colleagues. Amongst ourselves we're social and easygoing but that's just a Malaysian attribute, I think. That slapstick comedy we seem to perpetuate at the slightest provocation. 'Course, while all that detached and light banter goes on, something stirs beneath. Dissatisfaction is definitely there and there's the distinct impression that some of them are in over their heads. It's one thing to be able to pick out a similar case in the support database, another thing to understand what the problem is and troubleshoot it step by step - isolating the problem from the thousands of possibilities.

It hasn't been too hard for me though. And having to say that I'm with Microsoft isn't half as bad as I'd thought it would be.

And so it's almost a month at my new office, and two weeks on the job taking cases.

Troubleshooting Exchange Server, ISA Server and Outlook/office issues has been pretty exciting so far - I've gotten the case closure bug and every case resolved feels like an accomplishment. For once, I have tangible goals to achieve and I find myself motivated to reach for them. I can tell you that it's a far, far cry from not having to log and document everything I used to do, to having to record every single email, trying to remember everything the customer and I have said and at the same time trying to resolve the issue. My experience and existing knowledge goes a long way and yet, not all the way, which is good because it pushes me to learn and discover. My colleagues were right in a way, about learning. I've already had to dig for information about how to resolve issues and for a while there, almost felt like I was drowning in it all, but I've gotten the hang of it.

My colleagues are a varied bunch, quiet and loud, meek and outgoing, up front and indirect. My boss is pure fluff. There's even a strained relationship between some of them and the one Australian white guy who's in the plats team. 'Course, the guy's been pretty decent to me but that's probably because he realises that I trump him technically and also because I'm pretty much diplomatic neutral. A friend to everyone, amidst the melodrama and political undercurrents beneath the surface.

I think they all were wary of me at first, trying to gauge whether or not I really was as good as Ms. Fluff made me out to be. But over the past one month I think I've proved myself. I don't have that good an impression of them in return though, apart from maybe one or two half decent techies.

The company situation isn't as rosy as it seemed before, judging by the number of people leaving or wanting to leave my department (I count 6 out of the 9 of us). Everyone seems to have a complaint about something. From my observations (deducted within the first week), it's all Ms. Fluff's fault. She's basically a talentless hack, skilled only in the art of ass kissing and tai chi, not garnering any respect from the team at all and not providing any useful managerial direction. To make things worse, she used to be on the same level as everyone else in KL. Fortunately for me, the Apps Tech Lead in our Sydney team (the entire team is actually split between KL and Sydney) is highly competent and has the reins over apps.

As for home, we've somewhat settled in. Bedrooms are just about complete. All that's left is the living room and part of the kitchen. Even then, there's still a lot we could fill the place with. In time, and with more money. I hadn't really figured that populating the place with furniture would get so expensive but it is. Times like these, I wish money would fall out of the sky in a bag and land right at my feet. :P

It's a surprisingly quiet place - excepting the default mosque prayers you get just about everywhere in Klang Valley. There's no congestion coming out of Bandar Damansara Perdana, onto the Penchala Link. And if you go at the right time, you can get to the heart of KL within 25 minutes. Emphasis on right time. It's a good thing they have me on the 7.30 to 4.30 roster. I've been through traffic at 8am and 6pm. That same 25 minutes becomes at the very least 65 mnutes. Or 2 bloody hours last Friday evening.

Food's a bit of a walk, five minutes to the shops but I think we've gotten the hang of that. As with most condos, it's quite private and anonymous too. Overall, given where I was before, I think it's a huge improvement and only good things can come from here on. :)

A quick update -

1) I've started work at my new company. The (multitudes of) people are friendly and everything's very social - it being a major call centre servicing various big clients. My department serves Microsoft Australia / New Zealand as their outsourced Microsoft Technical Support division and we do Tier 3 - us being engineers directly liaising with customers over the phone and email to fix their problems. I'm part of the apps team and we handle problems with Exchange and ISA Server.

2) My ex-company screwed me over for RM3500

3) We have the keys to our new apartment and have painted our bedrooms. Our newly acquired beds and wardrobes from Ikea await our assembly until we return to Damansara Perdana later tonight.

4) It's been a busy, busy few weeks and hopefully once everything's settled, and once I've settled down, I can get back to updating again.

Until then, have a good weekend!

At long last, we've decided on a place in Damansara Perdana, despite the inevitable trepidation of committing to a place and the justifications one tries to make to decide either for or against. It's at Exclusive, the blocks of condominiums that stand with Tropics, in between Perdana View and Armanee and the up and coming Metropolitan Square. The place is a relative bargain, for its price, with built-in kitchen cabinets, water heater and air conditioners. And with what seemed like a complex question of subjectivity, it was practicality that ultimately ruled over the decision.

Metropolitan Square was new and seemed nice but with it just being completed and still having ongoing renovations, in addition to another block still under construction, it seemed like it wouldn't be peaceful enough for at least another six months. Perdana View was desirable too, but there just weren't any units available.

It's going to be great to have my own place, finally.

precious
drizzling consolation from a gracious sky
just as hands and heads
and cotton
receive - unwittingly, perhaps not
running in a storm of inevitability
or standing against a thousand fates

terrible, its gaze
but to see true its lie
and relish an ocean's reign,
free as in air and wind
and glorious thunder
over a space of endless can be

Suddenly every Tom, Dick and Harry on the internet (well, on digg.com anyway) is an expert on what's best, which would be fine if there was some substance to their categorical claims - but instead, it's all fluff. Complete and utter boulderdash.
Moral of the story:
1. People have defective definitions of what's best.
2. Best is a pure excuse for an absolute and can be so purely subjective as to render it logically useless.
3. People suck.

The search for a new place continues (yes, we've been looking for a place all to ourselves) - Bangsar seems to be out of the equation and Damansara Perdana seems more and more plausible. Although it would be preferable to have a house instead of an apartment, it seems unlikely that there are any available within budget and that fulfill our other criteria. It's a work in progress, a quest of epic proportions at first glance but I think it'll all come down to how hard we want to look for alternatives.

I've just completed a marathon of Naruto over the past few weeks - the entire 220 episodes done, including the 5 from the new series. I'd always wondered what the fuss was all about and while it was entertaining in the beginning, I ended up skimming through quite a few episodes in the end. Still, despite the juvenile nature of the whole thing, I finished what i started. I can conclude that it's something like Bleach - there's cool stuff to see but you often have to wade through a lot of filler to get to it. Any long running series suffers from that, I suppose, anime or otherwise.

I haven't cooked in a while. It's time to use the RM100 convection oven again. I'd always wanted to be able to roast/bake something and I did, over the CNY holidays but it seems like the cooking momentum dropped. Hm, what to cook.

My colleague jacqueline tendered her resignation two weeks before I did. I only found out last week. There goes the department.

The days don't move fast enough at work. Curse this 2 month notice period. Curse you!

I'm not still suffering though. I've felt a great weight lifted off my shoulders since I resigned. I hadn't realised that there was one - I'd just believed that I was going through the motions with my job, demotivated, demoralised. I hadn't realised that I'd lost that passion that used to drive me to train and educate people, regardless of the difficulty involved. And I've discovered that I really don't want to waste my time on people who remain untrainable, despite my best efforts. In fact, I couldn't care less and would rather not train anyone at all. I wouldn't be bothered if I didn't do any training again, ever.

After seven years seeing zombies after score of zombies, I've had it with training, despite the miniscule percentage of competent people. There's nothing worse than working on something (and working hard) when you know that it has little to no effect on the outcome. Or being forced to take up a course you'll only ever conduct once. Or having to write courseware, when there's a huge repository of ready made courseware available.


.....


It seems almost poignant when I think about not seeing my office again, as I walk through the building. I imagine how things would be when I'm gone, how I wouldn't ever want to come back again. A piece of my life to be left and discarded so that I can begin anew. I inwardly chuckle at the building denizens' ignorance, smug in the knowledge that I'm leaving for something better.

The scent of the green grass on the other side. Heh, I'm not deluding myself. It's never really as good as one makes it out to be. And despite all appearances, it's the person that determines their state of mind and their interaction with the environment.

And maybe that's all I need at work. A fresh start. A format and re-installation.

It was quick and decisive, but was it the right choice? It was and I stick by my decision. Ultimately, I may turn out to hate my new job because of this or that factor but at the moment I think many places would be better than this one. Ultimately, being a 3rd tier professional services support engineer might be uncomfortable in comparison with my lax years here but I welcome the change.

It's a large Australian IT services company. I don't have to pick up calls, I just get cases, solve them and tell the customer how to fix their ISA or Exchange problems. There'll be fluent English speaking Australians at the other end of the line. I won't be on call, I'll have my weekends and 40 hour work weeks instead of 48. I don't get local public holidays, but I do get additional annual leave as compensation. I will have yearly assessments and bonuses. And I get that increase in salary over what I get now. There'll be a rotational shift offset of 3 hours to sync with +11 GMT but that means beating KL traffic.

There are cons - I won't have as much freedom to do whatever I want to do but that's precisely the point. Work should be about being preoccupied with work during the allotted period and not having time to slack off.

....

And so I practically put off any other career/business plans for the time being. Time being a few years most probably. Oh well. One does have to earn a living first.

I've finally done it. I've resigned from my job and will be reporting to a new one on the 30th of April.

I've taken a step out of my comfort zone, at last. And while it may be a delaying tactic, work-wise, I'm not going to have to train anymore. I won't be in a dead end company either.

Unfortunately, I won't be totally free of customers but I'll be spending most of my time on technical stuff anyway.

( Just too bad we didn't have a quality camera on hand. )

...was absolutely smashing. Fantastic. Fantabulous.

!!!

Some bands suck when they're live, some are just so so but Muse rocked the hell out of the house. And while Mathew Bellamy (I've only just found out his name) didn't really say much to the crowd except 'Selamat Petang' and 'Terima Kasih', it was the music that mattered and Muse's music truly shines when it's played LOUD. Thundering, grandiose, majestically orchestral rock. I didn't even know the frontman played the piano - he was pretty impressive - and his guitar skills bordered on virtuoso.

It didn't matter that jaclyn and I were probably among the oldest people in the audience. Or that our cheap seats (the section we wanted had already sold out) had no backrests and strained our backs.

If I could complain about anything, I was (as well as the whole Stadium Negara) left wanting for more after they played the last song, saving the best for last with Absolution. Even a headache (jaclyn had an eyeache) didn't ruin it, it was that good. 'Course, I haven't actually been to a live concert for a while (and no notable bands either) but this is one experience I won't soon forget.

Our V day dinner was lovely. We were concerned about being late for our reservation but getting to PJ Hilton from Bangsar was a breeze as Federal Highway was quite free and easy going towards PJ. Once there, walking our way through the hotel, we were inundated by pairs of heart shaped balloons, each pair silver and red and clinging to the tables of the lobby cafe. Cute.

The final destination was Genji, a fine dining Japanese restaurant upstairs. The place was a mish mash of modern styling in front, to the Japanese themed old wooden beams criss-crossing the ceiling and walls made to have that abstract paint/worn look. The Japanese parasols that hung upside down from the ceiling in descending size were quaint and the dark hardwoods of the tables and chairs brought a rustic feel to the place. It was a jumble of things, not all Japanese, but it lent a unique atmosphere to the whole restaurant. It was lively and well lit, cozy and friendly.

Our food was well presented, my Valentine even lovelier, even though she was sleepy and nodding off in between courses (poor sweetie). I especially liked the fact that they served real Wasabi (grated, not the usual green wasabi paste) and how my beef was excellently done, nice and tender.

We capped the night with my bungled up rose (the waitress ruined the surprise and jaclyn was on to the ruse in a flash) and a Valentine Card photo session provided with the dinner. It was Valentine's Day commercialisation at its finest but I didn't care. It was lovely all in all.

Unfortunately, jaclyn fell ill sometime after - succumbing to a stomach bug - and is still sick today. Ironic, our first V day date out (last year I cooked a candle-lit dinner) and she doesn't get to bask in the glow. Poor sweetie.

Nope, it doesn't look like I'll be getting my sleep cycle on track anytime soon. Blame it on my finally discovering that I might have been an Indigo Child! :P

But no, really. With nothing to do at work as a rule of thumb, what else can I do but do the minimum required? In my case that means, oh, being a little bit late.

I should be worried about my long term financial future, but I'm still not at all perturbed. Whether it's self denial or a genuine confidence that things will turn out alright, I don't know. I'm too entrenched in the comfort zone to do anything about it, despite it being really good to be financially free, income and debt-wise. But I have a feeling that should such an opportunity arise, I'll know it for what it is.

It's the Monday before my week long CNY holiday. I don't have a class to run this week - it being another one postponed - which leaves a free and easy week at work. I'm somewhat ok that I don't have to train but I'm not enthused about being in the office either. I think I'd rather be having work to do at work and be effortlessly productive (training people). It gives me that much more incentive to actually show up at work.

I wonder how much bacteria lives in the gunk wrapped around mouse rollers (and if it's easy to get bacterial growth gel in petri dishes around KL). You know, those antique mouse controllers with balls in them. Yes, they're antique and you should already be using at least an infra red if not a laser mouse. (Granted, there are high precision gaming mouse controllers (particularly the Razer brand) that still use rollers and balls but that's not what your roller ball mouse is, is it? :P)

Off to see if these cheapo business PCs can run Europa Universalis III or not.

Deep inside I knew that I didn't really need to prepare because the class is postponed, even though we were about to begin.

It's late and I'm procrastinating on tomorrow's start of a 3 day course. It's a new course that I haven't conducted before, and software that I haven't really played around with but it's literally made up of components of other software that I have much experience in. All that's needed is for me to click through and familiarise, and to my credit I've actually poked around a bit, except that in the 3 hours I've spent since waking up from my evening nap, that really only accounts for half an hour of exploration. The rest of it's been spent fixing a late night snack, managing my BT downloads, surfing my bookmark folders, trying to play weboggle on a wonky connection and general procrastinatory shenanigans.

Heh. I suppose that's the only way for me to work, especially when in all likelihood this will be the only time I'll have to run this course, ever. No, I have completely no remorse whatsoever.

Last night, my ideas.doc file grew a few lines, thanks to a rare philosophical discussion with my sweetie. It's been a slow accumulation but I think that writing my ideas down as and when I get them is actually quite effective. As in, duh! 'Course, that can only happen at the oddest times and when I've already happened to power down my laptop or am somewhere not in the immediate vicinity.

It's no biggie though, my XPS M1210 - Core 2 Duo with 1GB of RAM, 80GB HD, 9 cell extended battery (for an incredible 6-8 hours worth of surfing) and DVDRW - works like a dream, starts up within seconds and manages to do it all on a light and small 12" screen footprint. 'Course, it doesn't have the refined stylish looks of an iBook or a Vaio but when cost is an object, I rate functionality over style. I can't wait to be able to afford to get an iBook and a Vaio on a whim though. *Cue lust for all those other gadgets I'd love to have too.

My gaming rig is in need of an upgrade, not for the lack of things I can upgrade to but for the lack of quality games that I'd want to be able to play smoothly, without graphics/cpu lag. PC gaming's reached an impasse over the last one or two years and my good ol' X1900XT's still keeping up quite passably, more than passable when you consider that both it and my cpu are clocked beyond their default performance rating and I've been able to play most games at their highest quality settings. The dearth of next generation games is probably due to the Vista delay and Directx 10. That's where all the PC gaming action is going to be, with new graphics effects and more polygonal calculations. Luckily, I haven't suffered much because there are no shipped Directx 10 titles yet and the graphics card I'd want to upgrade to (ATI's codename R600), isn't on the market yet either. But wouldn't it be nice if I can buy and consume more, more, more!

So do we all think, us slaves of economy.

Jaclyn and I got our Valentine's Day gifts early this year. I got us some cool looking Bausch K rings, and she got us a pressure cooker. I'm not sure where to go for V Day dinner though but I'm pretty sure that I don't want to go to a restaurant in the middle of KL. That seems to limit things a bit, but there has to be a decent place to spend a nice evening in outside of the city centre - outside of places we haven't been to before, that is. It just needs finding.

jaclyn has a phobia of pressure cookers - those old style behemoths that would rock and rumble evilly, threatening to explode - but this modern contraption made only a harmless hissing noise as it let a continuous and harmless jet of steam off. Pretty cool. I now have a fool proof method for cooking tenderised beef, which was the validated result of our experimental pressure cooked goulash. That didn't turn out exactly how I'd expected but I now know what pressure cooking does to stuff. Oh the diabolical plots hatching in my head. :P

My colleague's Malay wedding was typical of all Malay weddings. Go to designated place (hall, kampung house or roadside in a suburb), be told to proceed directly to eat, watch bride and groom from a distance as they sit together away from everyone and wait for your chance to congratulate them and then go home. It's actually an efficient means of celebrating as there usually tend to be hundreds of people coming over, so by allowing people to come anytime within the alotted timeframe you reduce the chance of overcrowding. And you don't have to prepare too many tables for the guests at any one time. All of which worked perfectly for jaclyn and I, as we'd been reluctant in getting up and only paid a visit to the proceedings at 3pm, which was well towards the end of the 12 to 4pm stated on the invite. Lots of empty tables and besides the remark 'sekarang baru datang ye?' (you've only just come?) from an anonymous stranger, it was a quick and easy mission completed.

No such thing as fast visits to Kadazan weddings but that's a story for another day.

In local news, Bangsar Village II has opened, finally. Unfortunately for me and the rest of the men in the vicinity of Bangsar, the place caters largely to women - with two thirds of the shops comprising of boutiques, salons, beauty parlours and the like. Bangsar seems very much to be a dining and shopping district, rather than a party district these days. The many clubs and pubs that used to line Jalan Telawi have been replaced by fashion boutiques and only the sturdy bars remain.

The remaining drinking establishments are no longer as full as they used to be. Where the sidewalks used to hustle and bustle with night revellers and reverberate with a palpable excitement, they're now sedate with the languid gaits of people taking things easy and shoppers browsing their way through.

Blame it on change. Over the years, the focus of party people and investors alike has been attracted to the Hartamas and Mont Kiara area, leaving Bangsar in it's wake. The result? Bangsar has lost its old mojo. The atmosphere is but a pale comparison of what was.

But I'm a sentimental person deep inside, and while Bangsar is no longer the place I once knew it to be, I've always had an affection for it that still hasn't diminished over time.