Well, everyone will no doubt be thrilled to hear that I got me a new job! Yay. This is good as the people in my current job weren't really prepared to pay me after the end of this year, so finding someone willing to keep giving me money fits into my world domination plan quite well. It does mean that I'm going to have to become an expert in what I actually do (otherwise, what's the point?) and that thing is going to be security! Not shooting-at-bad-guys-with-guns security, more making-sure-people-build-systems-correctly security, with a fat dollop of documentation on the side.
It's been fun in my last placement. My most enjoyable moment was probably the trader who phoned me up, spoke very quickly at me before hanging up again. Figuring out what the hell he wanted was actually a fairly interesting challenge.
I've been playing with Sun's Solaris recently. I mentioned in my last post that I'm having to use PostgreSQL for a work project and it happens to only be supported on Solaris for my purposes. I've been finding out that it's basically the same as linux, but purposefully more difficult. Still, it has ZFS, which is amazingly cool, so that makes up for it. Just need to wait for that one to be ported to a sensible OS.
One of the great advantages of having a real job is that it really makes you appreciate the holidays which you're given. For example - I'm on holiday for the next couple of weeks until the new job (yay!) starts in January. To celebrate my first non-working Monday in at least a month, I'm having toast for lunch. This is something I'm unable to do in the office, unless I get some at 9:30 and hang on to it for a few hours. This isn't something I'm likely to be very successful at.
Of course, holidays are meant to be for going away to sandy beaches, skiing in the snowy alps or other such frivolous activities. However, inspired by a lack of ability to pay for anything, I'm increasingly becoming happy to just sit around and do nothing. In this particular case, "nothing" equates to doing the dishes, hoovering, tidying up, sorting my clothes out, packing a bit for the trip to Manchester, doing the dishes again because I ate toast, re-packing etc. etc.
I've just realised that I want to go back to work. :-(
Today is officially the first day of my new job, but given the time of year, I've decided to take my first week off. I've already been emailed stuff to do though, so I'll have to do some sort of hitting-the-ground-running thing when I start for real in January.
This can only be a short entry, I'm off to sit in a car whilst someone else tells me what to do. Happy Christmas to all. Hope it's snowing somewhere :)