In about six hours a taxi will pick me up here and take me to the airport. In these six hours I have to finish packing my bags and catch a little bit of sleep. At last, I'll get to know this thing called jetlag. Here it's nine o'clock now, in Mountain View it's one in the afternoon. Quite a difference for sure.
My flight leaves at six in the morning, will have a 2.5 hour stop in Amsterdam and meet some family there, that's very nice. :-D Around noon (Dutch time) I'll continue my trip, a direct flight AMS->SFO, takes about ten hours. And hopefully not too boring...
Got everything sorted out, I hope. Printed some instructions, including phone numbers to call in case of panic and/or emergency. Will stay in a hotel for two weeks before I can get into my apartment there (there are more visiting employees than apartments ;-)).
Anyway, time to put everything that isn't in a bag already, into a bag. And hope that it'll fit.
A whole week passed again, pretty quickly. Making long days at work, learning a lot, and fortunately today also in a slightly less passive way. Yesterday I really got to the point where just reading things and watching presentations got too boring. So today things got a bit better, it all felt just a little bit more useful.
So hopefully next week things will continue like this a little bit. Got only five more days, because next weekend I'll fly over to Mountain View! That's where the real training will start...
Oh, and it does feel a bit strange that SlashDot was where I found out first about the 2007 edition of [http://code.google.com/soc/ Summer of Code]. I wonder if this is because of me, maybe I didn't find the right mailing lists yet. Not that I can participate anymore this year... ;-)
(TGIF == Thank God It's Friday! It seems to be the "Hello Weekend" celebrated at the end of the Friday in most Google offices.)
Another week in Dublin passed already. And the first week at my new job. Had a great time! From Wednesday I just worked from my desk, no more introduction stuff. Read a lot of things, learned a lot, asked a lot, all that kind of things. Getting to know everyone, getting familiar with the system, getting used to working with post-2002 computers (I've never had so much power on my desk! ;-))... :-D This is what my time will look like for now. Lots of learning, lots of reading, loads of new knowledge. A little bit chaotic, maybe, but I hope to deal with it properly, and hopefully I'll find my system.
As you probably expected I can't get into details though. Had a great time, at least! But ... I didn't get a [http://socrates.homelinux.org/gallery/California/imgp1017 Noogler hat]!!! Wilmer is, again, not pleased. ;-)
So it's Wednesday already, I already had my first two days at work. The first two days were mainly an introduction programme though (and IMHO not really aimed at the engineers), although yesterday I did see my desk for a while too. Today I can go there immediately and get used to everything, hope that I can use my desktop machine, etc... It's almost nine already so I should really leave now. ;-)
And I just see here that actually it's freezing here! -4 centigrades! Time to get a warmer coat, maybe... It's actually colder here than in The Netherlands right now. Wilmer is not pleased...
... if the guy right next to me in the supermarket is trying to use his [http://www.postbank.nl/ Postbank] (Dutch bank which used to have a bad interoperability record) card? ;-) And in other news, I got myself a year supply of flour because [http://www.tesco.ie/ Tesco] never heard of small quantities... ;-)
Anyway, I finally managed to connect to a nearby WLAN network in my own apartment. No need to sit in the hall anymore. :-D Went to the pub with some colleagues yesterday (including two people who interviewed me back in September), got to know my mentor (that's how they call the person who helps new employees with settling in the company) already. Great!
That's all for now. Let's see if there'll be Futurama or Simpsons on TV again tonight.
In a week I'll be in Dublin already. My flight will leave at 13:00 and will arrive 13:35. (Don't you just love timezones?) So then I'll hopefully post more frequently.
Got one week then to get familiar with the city, and on Wednesday I'll have my "one day home search", which means someone will show me eight houses and I can make a decision and hopefully move into that house pretty soon then. :-D Until that happens I got temporary accomodation just around the corner from Google, so that's great. I can walk to work. :-)
Have to say I'm looking forward. It'll be an exciting time, I'm pretty sure about that.
Meanwhile I'm just trying to relax a bit. My long semi-holiday is almost over. Planning just the last things I can do while I'm still here. Meet some people, instruct my successor at my former job on Friday, etc. It'll be strange to be away from here for so long...
And of course I'm happy that testing.bitlbee.org is back in the air! It also helped me to find some very strange bugs that happen when using libevent and epoll and running BitlBee in ForkDaemon mode. Did you ever see processes receiving each other's event notifications? I did. ;-)
It looks like blogposting bores me very quickly. ;-) Until my move to Dublin I won't be posting a lot here, never intended to.
But at least the site is running on a decent machine now. Not a P2-233 with hardly enough RAM to run SpamAssassin but on my good old dual P3 with a couple of Xen VMs. The frontpage loads in about one second now, instead of more than five. I'm working on a nice (mail-, web-, etc) server setup that will hopefully work perfectly for a long time while I'm faaar away.
Plans changed a bit though. I'll go to Dublin on the 29th of January, first day at work will be on the 5th of Feb. Gives me some time for exploring the area, hopefully finding a nice house, and the important things like a bank account and a social security number. So by then the news will hopefully appear. And probably some pictures. :-)
Until then I got a nice vacation and enough time for experimenting and meeting with friends and family while I still can. And emptying my old room, throwing away stuff I don't really need and getting rid of some other things in some way. I'm not too fond of moving, really. :-/
Just back from a short trip to Belgrade, and now I'm in the last days of my current job. As I could expect, time is running out, and there's always more to do than I thought, also thanks to having some "bad luck" with the only server with only one hard drive (yes, I know RAID != backup) and broken backup software. Suddenly it turns out that debugfs is not quite the best data recovery tool after all. ;-)
Meanwhile preparations for Dublin started. Looks like I'll go there on the 17th of January already to spend the rest of that week on an introduction tour through the city and another day for looking at some houses that might be good for me.
Meanwhile I didn't have too much time for hacking. The new BitlBee Jabber module isn't completely finished yet, I'm afraid. Would be nice to find some time for it soon...
Oh yes, and the following quote is making me a bit nervous: "All systems administrators have their horror stories. For me, it was setting up a HP Color Bubblejet under Linux using ghostscript before linuxprinting.org was alive. Well that was a piece of cake compared to what I am about to describe in this document."
I know how terrible the Linux printing hell is, so maybe I should go for Maildir after all... ;-)
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