I had hoped that by yesterday I would be able to reveal the happy ending to the laptop saga. But it was not to be, and although I am not quite at the ending just yet, it now seems certain what way this will go.

Now, it wasn't clear from my entry on Monday that my ex-laptop was my work machine. I ran around the corner to the nearby Apple Dealer (MacBook Pro 4GB, pre-solidbody model, but only a few months old for all that.) Their technician looked at it over night, and pronounced it a deader, swapped out the hard drive and the battery into a spare MacBook Pro they had while they waited to finalise the order for a replacement.

I talked to my boss, he talked to the guy in Purchasing, and the Apple Dealer called me to say that everything was going great, she needed to get one final confirming email, and then I'd have a brand new MacBook Pro, solid state body, sexed up display (which actually I don't like, but anyway), etc etc.

The odd thing was, for completely bogus reasons that don't belong in this post, the company had stopped buying new Macs a couple of months ago. I thought that Purchasing would have known this, and felt all clever for having found a way around the block. I hadn't gone quite as far as encouraging everybody else to fling soup into their machines, but it was something I had been considering for next week.

My boss arrived in my team room this afternoon with a long face, and I knew that my workaround plan had failed. He saw how unhappy I looked in response, and started trying to find another way around it.

"Can you even do your work without a Mac?"

We all pulled faces, and muttered, and I admitted in a small voice that yes, I could (and I used to - it was just much more unpleasant), but he went off anyway in search of a Mac. After all, transferring apps and files from one Mac to another is trivial, while migrating to a Windows box will probably take me a week.

So, he found a Mac for me, a temporary old MacBook with 2GB of RAM for a month, until someone leaves and I get his MacBook Pro. And it could be a lot worse, of course, but my evening plans were originally to pick up my new shiny machine from the Apple Dealer and copying my apps and settings and documents, so the revised plan of grumbling on LJ, doing some housework, and then rowing just isn't up to much.

Current Mood: listless

Yesterday I was working from home, all set up on the kitchen table where I could stare out the window at my neighbours going past, where I was close to the kettle, where I could easily make myself some toast to nibble, or something else to eat, as I continued working.

My plan was that I would heat up the soup I made over the weekend and eat that "at my desk", then later take a break and go for a walk with Tesla. She's in heat again, and needs a lot of exercise, while paradoxically she actually gets less exercise because we can't chance letting her off the leash.

Anyway, that was the idea, I would spend my lunch break with Tesla as opposed to actually lunching.

And then I threw an entire bowl of soup over my laptop. RIP.

Current Mood: irritated

I'm in Copenhagen for the day, at an intensive meeting for one of the projects I'm on. I hate these one day business trips, getting up early, seeing a city through taxi windows on the way from the airport to the office, and then back again.

Still, it's nice to be in Denmark for a change. Most of my business trips are to Riga, flying AirBaltic in a Fokker 50, bouncing over the Baltic Sea in a deafening roar of engines and what I can never forget is outdated engineering. By comparison, the flight this morning felt like we were hardly moving, and extraordinarily quiet.

My eyeballs are rolling only because of the early morning I had. There was a half hour conversation about "variable enclosures" that got merged into a CSI influenced dream I was having, and I only just stopped myself from adding a comment, half-asleep, about my new insights. Luckily, my colleagues either didn't notice, or are kind enough not to embarrass me.

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We're on a break now, hence the update.

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Once upon a time, taking a plane was a Huge Deal, involving much preparation the night before, weeks of panic over lost passports and tickets. Now, what with the ease of checking in over the net, just taking a laptop bag, it's similar to an ordinary commute to the office, with a stricter schedule. A couple of months ago I was in the taxi on the way to the airport for a Riga trip when I realised that I had forgotten my passport - since then, I just keep it in the laptop bag.

I also no longer have maps, or even the faintest clue of where I am actually heading to. I usually travel with a very organised project manager and one or two architects, and us techy types just rely on the PM to have the details, pay for everything, and shepherd us about the place. In that sense, it is even easier than my usual commute (although my usual commute is sometimes beyond me, it must be said, and I end up on the wrong bus or train due to stupidity or absent mindedness).

But anyway. Back to work we go. Can I make the rest of the day without quoting Hamlet? I doubt it.

Current Mood: tired

The Boy Band has developed a huge crush on one of the developers, who will be known as the Girl in the Corner. Since he confessed it to me and the Team Lead with No Nickname while under the influence, he has been spending most of each working day in her office, chatting her up and flirting.

The entire floor has noticed, since the Corner the Girl sits in is by the coffee machine. What we don't yet know is whether they have got beyond the chatting and flirting in the office - my suspicion is that they have, given the yawns and giggles coming out of both of them. But the official explanation is still that they are colleagues working on the same area, which makes them ripe for teasing.

Since he stickied my office, I've been looking for a suitable revenge. Obviously, this is the perfect opportunity.

With the help of LooksLikeKate, who can reach higher than I can, I just swapped the name plate from his office door with the name plate of the guy Girl in the Corner shares an office with, so their two names are listed there together for all the world to see and know. I'm hoping that somebody will notice soon, as my holidays start tomorrow and it would be disappointing to miss his reaction.

ETA: I meant to add, knowing my tendency to put my foot in it, they probably just now had a discussion about how they should just be friends, and the Boy Band will be all depressed and morose.

Current Mood: giddy

I met the Team Lead With No Nickname cycling into work this morning, or rather he came up behind me. So we cycled the rest of the way in together chatting. Except that he is a lot fitter than I am, so the conversation was a bit one-sided and what I did contribute was between gasps for breath.

My defence is that there was a strong head wind, and I'm not a morning person at the best of times.

The Wannabe Tester is supposed to find out today whether he will be made permanent, since his apprenticeship ends at the end of this month. If he stays on, I'll obviously have to think up a new nickname for him*. Our manager wants to hire him, but because the Q1 financial results of the whole company weren't as good as expected, the CEO put all hirings on hold. I'll be really angry if they don't find some way to keep him on, because despite his many annoying habits (stickying my office, telling everyone I'm his mother) he knows what he's doing. And I like him, he makes me laugh and (much more importantly) he laughs at my jokes.

Anyway, he's been kept hanging over this contract since the beginning of April, so as you can imagine his motivation isn't the best.

* In the office, we've started to call him the Amazing Human Pancake Hoover**, but I couldn't be bothered typing all that every time I mention him. The same goes for Fluffy the Wonder Boy, which is a shame because it really suits him. I will have to ponder this.
** He has a legendary appetite.

There was a work do yesterday afternoon, and the consultants (Wannabe Tester, LooksLikeKate and the Lanky Madman) were left unsupervised.

Since there was also a major system crash, they didn't have very much to do. So they decided to sticky my office. It was altogether too bright and confusing for me arriving with a hangover. Although I like what they did to my plant.

Our company has a new CEO, and on Thursday morning he will be at a question and answer, getting-to-know-you meeting.

Over lunch, we were thinking up some questions to ask.

"What's your favourite pub?"
"What's your policy on nude jogging in the office?" (The Lanky Madman is an avowed and passionate nude jogger. Apparently.)
"Are you having any trouble at home?"
"What's the capital of Belarus?"
"Do you have any teenage daughters? Where do you live?"
"What are my chances at employee of the year?"
"Where's Wally?"

I'm put in mind of a scene from Catch-22

I talked a few weeks back about how I am kind of fluent in hex encoded ASCII. I also handle other datatypes encoded into hex, but I'm not so familiar with them.

So today I found a bug with a certain configuration giving me what looked like hex garbage at the end of every file. I fiddled around until I isolated where it was coming from, and then tried the same configuration on a different platform. There was the same problem, except this time I could decode it from ASCII.

"read"

it told me.

I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to figure out whether any other datatype gave me the same message on the original platform, but to no avail. Tomorrow morning I try again, on the second platform, to see whether it will give me a hint as to what I'm supposed to be reading...

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In other news, this evening I saw a great house - I'm going back again on Saturday morning with some questions, and if they are answered satisfactorily, I will make an offer for it on Monday. I'd give a link, but can't find it on the "for sale" site anymore...

I'm gaining a certain fluency in reading hex encoded ascii.

Because it is the last working day before Christmas (and a week's holiday), my test report ends with a line in 1 point Times New Roman saying "and then I woke up and it was all a dream".

Of course, nobody is going to read the report until after the holidays, in the grim reality that is January, so maybe it won't be seen as quite so light hearted then. Ah well.

1) There is something very disturbing about being near somebody who is so fat and unfit that they breathe noisily when just sitting down at rest. This has happened to me twice recently, and it was all I could do not to snap at them.

2) My new work PC is very shiny and elegant, but I can't say the same for the software on it. Fucking Outlook 2003 keeps reconfiguring itself so that instead of me only reading and sending messages in plain text, an empty Word document pops open. It took me two days to set everything up the way I like it, and now I have to keep redoing things. Not to mention that I only get a message alert when a message goes to the Inbox - since I try and filter all of my messages to other directories, only spam usually goes to the Inbox, so I may have important mails from colleagues sitting unread until I get a message that says "Ass fuckery young grillss". Smashing.

Current Mood: grumpy

1) No jeans allowed on customer site in Milan. I've just had to rush out and buy myself a semi-smart suit, on a shopping trip that managed to cost me €20 a minute. Eek. I was trying to keep my credit card expenditure down this month, and I'm really bugged that I could probably buy a nicer suit in my size, for less, in Milan itself.

2) My schedule seems to be: depart Helsinki 8am Friday, arrive Milan 10am, start working I guess around 11am. Stop working at some unspecified point. Saturday, start working at 11.45pm, stop working at some unspecified point on Sunday. The email from the project manager states: "Seems like the working hours are a bit wierd... What should we do. You may wanna sleep a bit as well?" There is somebody else there at the same time, so we could work it in shifts, except that we have different competence areas - he might be able to answer the questions they'd ask me, I wouldn't have a clue about the questions they'd ask him. The only good thing is that the flights on Monday mean I miss the whole working day...

I'm not an all-nighter person, probably because I don't drink coffee. So I'm planning on bringing a large bottle of coke with me, but who knows, I may have to partake of the coffee anyway. It is Italy, after all.

At least I can do some sight-seeing on Saturday.