3 week update
Apparently I forgot to blog last week…
After two four day weeks this one has felt incredibly long I can tell you! But good stuff has happened. Antony Stone, previously an associate with Sirius has come on full time as our services manager (as of last week) so this was his first full week in the role. He’s got a lot of good visions, especially with regards to the wiki which as you know is something dear to my heart ;)
Been fairly quiet on the support front with a few small issues and a couple of big ones. I’ve come to realise that while I love *my* mac, I do not love other people’s especially when they need to be connected to network printers.
On my last two project days I have spent time creating a virtual host and setting up a Drupal installation on it so that Mark Taylor can play around with Drupal 7 before we upgrade. It’s been really interesting actually as I’ve never had to do this before. While I have quite a bit of Drupal experience I’ve only ever set it up on configured web servers and I installed it by copying everything over to the server by ftp (FYI, if you’re feeling lazy a great ftp tool is FireFTP, it’s a plugin for Firefox and it works really well).
I’ll write a fuller blog post on that later this week but suffice to say it was a good learning experience fraught with learning and muppetry (on my part). It’s all set up now so come next Monday Mark will be able to have a play and hopefully on Tuesday we’ll look into what modules are currently being used and what we can use in our new site. It’s prompted me to realise that I really ought to upgrade my own install of Drupal. Even if I don’t use the project management system any more it won’t do for it to be sitting around all broken and stuff. Maybe I shall force some of my final year and second year friends to use it for their dissertations or group projects. A task for another day.
In other news we have a workshop this coming Monday so most of the NOC staff are coming down. Kelly and Antony went to Gradwell last week to ask leading questions and have a workshop on how to diagnose problems. This is what will be covered in the workshop. I made my infamous brownies for the Gradwell people and have been requested to visit but give sufficient notice so they can brainstorm what cake they want me to bring… Not sure if I should feel happy they liked my baking so much or hurt that that’s why they want me to visit! I’ll go with the former, I have a happy nature - it’ll be easier :D
We’re also going to have an early celebratory barbecue/lunch because Sirius turns 13 on the 19th of September! Cue the loud music and band posters as Sirius becomes a teenager… This could get messy folks ;)
Going to my first Surrey LUG meeting this weekend as it is being held here - so two four day weeks then a six day week. Hopefully it’ll be nice weather though. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Willow xx
9th Fri Sep, 15:30Well...
That really was a busy one. One of those weeks where the minutes feel long but the days have flown by. I woke up Tuesday thinking it was Wednesday then this morning I couldn’t believe it was Friday. Very strange.
Had a few bigger problems this week but we’ve managed to handle them. Had a couple of ruder customers also but through sheer polite badassery (it’s a word) and a slight change in policy I haven’t heard a word from them since. I feel good. Also had some stranger problems though I forget which and spoke to some customers I haven’t spoken to before, most of which were lovely. On the subject of lovely; a couple of weeks ago a customer wrote a poem for me. Made my week lol.
I have finally accepted that I am the geekiest person in the office. It took a while but I’ve come to terms with it. We were talking about Star Trek and, while not a Trekkie myself, I realised I’d seen more than a few of my colleagues. It was the final nail in the coffin. Where to go from here? Should I play up to my girl geek status? Hide away? Learn *more* geeky stuff? I don’t know, we shall have to see.
Thinking of learning about xmonad today and increase my screen real estate up to two monitors. I had two on my Industrial Year and I seriously miss it. Though slightly *less* necessary, we do have a few spare monitors floating around. If you’ve never tried multiple monitors, I urge you to test it out. It’s brilliant. I found it especially useful for programming actually because then I could research whatever I was unsure of without having to switch windows which was quite lovely. This time I think I’m going to tile a bunch of terminals just because I have so many perpetually open that it makes sense not to tab them because I really do need to keep an eye on them. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Last weekend was OggCamp which was absolutely awesome. Met up with some people, turns out: people on IRC are real. Who knew? Madness. Anyway, there was a big picnic on one day, I made lots of brownies and fed them to people. They were generally loved and are now more famous. In fact, I even gained a ‘cloak’ on IRC as ‘master-brownie-maker’. Pretty chuffed actually >_> This is what happens when you feed freenode staffers good food ;)
This weekend is free of anything so I think I’m going to do more server stuff. I’m also getting back into doing some art work but cartooning instead. Previously I’ve done digital art, photomanipulation, I draw and sketch a lot. I don’t paint though, I’m terrible at it, except watercolours and only sometimes. I’ve also experimented with the odd drawing of characters, manga for example and that sort of thing - as opposed to still life etc. But this is my first real practice of cartoons and comic type art. I anticipate many long hours in front of the computer… But then, that’s no different to usual!
Have a good weekend all.
Willow x
19th Fri Aug, 17:24Forward planning
This week has fair blown past. It’s been quite nice really. Lots to do but not too much. Some new things to work on, new alerts to comprehend and new info to put on the wiki. Muchos interesting. A rota has been re-implemented for Paul, Jon and myself as of next Monday. I hadn’t realised how much I’d missed it. I’ll get a whole project day a week which will most often probably be spent on doing wiki stuff >_< Last Friday Affan and I stayed *very* late working with emacs to do more cool stuff on the wiki which…eventually worked. But more in the pipeline - I’ve got a long to-do list when it comes to the wiki. On the other hand, I told one of our customers about the pages I’ve been making about their infrastructure and he seemed kind of jealous - *smug*. It’s nice to know I’m on the right path and doing some good.
Finally started looking at the physical implementation of GTD which is pretty cool. I’m looking forward to all the filing and stationery. No, really. I’ve got a bit of a thing for all that stuff, I blame my mother. I don’t necessarily *use* any of the filing tools I ever get - or I didn’t used to - so I’m glad of a real excuse to buy lots of shiny stationery! Yeah, I’m sad, whatever :P
I’ve vaguely organised with Mark to GTD my life a week on Tuesday (when I know I’ve got some spare time and he should be around). It means some reading ahead though so I’ve got homework!
In other news OggCamp is this weekend which should be super fun so my friend is coming over tonight and we’re going to make cupcakes and my famous brownies. Good times!
Willow xx
12th Fri Aug, 17:08When the going gets tough, the Tough get planning
It was project-planning/description time in the GTD workshop this week. We were looking into how to plan a project: the ways to plan; principles; brainstorms; outcome visioning and all that jazz. Very interesting. Especially to see how many of those things I do and how much I don’t. The Five Steps are:
1. Define purpose
2. Outcome Visioning
3. Brainstorming
4. Organising
5. Identifying next action
I think I’m not great at point one, I’m a bit vague sometimes. I do a *lot* of numbers 2 and 3 and if I’m passionate enough I over-organise *everything*. I’m always hazy about next action: I should do this! or that! or both! or something else! YAY! Pretty much sums up how I think. But it was good to know that I was getting some things right. On the other hand, when it’s something I’m interested in but don’t feel I always the time to dedicate - like setting up my server - my planning goes out the window.
I know what I want, mostly. I have a vision, sort of. I have no brainstorms, no organisations and about five next actions, in no particular order. So…yeah. I should probably fix that - there’s a plan for the weekend! Maybe I shall mind-map it out and scan/photograph it for y’all.
Work week itself has been good, fairly quiet so I got some good stuff done. Got another emacs workshop scheduled tonight to do more wiki things.
Paul left us this week for the glory of the downstairs office to do some project work which appears to have done him some good. He managed to work on something that’s been bugging him for a long time and with any luck he’s worked out a fix that could be implemented tonight even. That should make him happier…maybe?
Any other business: I’m organising a real life monopoly event: http://reallifemonopoly.eventbrite.com you should come :D
Willow xx
5th Fri Aug, 15:335 months!
Wow, can you believe it? It’s gone so fast!
Good week this week. Slightly calmer than last week which meant we were able to focus on some of our processes, sort out some of the little things that were affecting our efficiency. Process is very important in this sort of job and we’re constantly trying to optimise ours. But it was nice to take some time out to reflect on how things are progressing.
We didn’t do a GTD workshop this week but Mark managed to apply some of its principles to the way we deal with user requests. Although I know what I’m doing in the moment it was good to look at the ways in which we actually do (should) deal with tickets.
Other news - I’ve decided to start building myself a server with a spare PC I had. I used to wonder how people even *had* spare PCs, I mean, wouldn’t you sell them? Or do something with them? Well now I understand and also, I’m doing something with it! We do a lot of work with servers, databases and virtual machines. I’d like to see how these work on a smaller scale that I can work on from home. And most importantly - that I’m allowed to break!
Wish me luck!
Willow xx
P.S. Happy Sysadmin Day
29th Fri Jul, 17:26New people, new work!
Far busier week this week than last. Luckily we had a new guy join us Jon who has picked up the job very swiftly. He seems to have settled in nicely and is fitting in well.
That meant that with I was able to work more closely with some client engineers, and our own Senior Architects on some trouble shooting and problem analysis. It was very interesting albeit a little intense at times but ultimately very useful. It was good to get an insight into the minds of the people we’re working with because if we know how they think, we can learn how they build. Maybe? Who knows? But it was certainly useful and a lot of the stuff we looked through will be useful for the next time we see a similar issue. It was pretty hard-going and kind of relentless on two separate days. However, we fixed some stuff and analysed some other stuff which I guess means it was a success!
I’ve been assigned some homework - namely to read a book about MySQL which is going in my weekend bag (joy). But it’s good to have a sort of structure, not enough free time, or free time spent doing other stuff when no-one requires anything from you kind of sucks. Teaching yourself something you don’t immediately need to know, or don’t realise you need to know, can sometimes be difficult because you don’t have the motivation necessary.
That said, I totally forgot to read chapter 2 of GTD which means I have to read *both* chapters before next Friday’s session. Today’s session was good despite that. We were talking about the actual ways in which you organise yourself and the processes you need to put in place to keep yourself organised. Looks like a good tool, I can really see how it can change the whole way you deal with a workload. We shall see soon, after next Friday I think we’re all going to be putting it into practice! That will be definitely be interesting to review…
A.O.B. Been revamping/rewriting some website stuff as well as sketching out some ideas for a potential customer. I’m going to try to keep on top of my various websites, keep them trim etc. If you’re interested (though they’re all works in progress) http://salixsys.org so yeah, don’t hate :P
Have a good weekend,
Willow xx
22nd Fri Jul, 17:30That string that can't be googled
So I was looking at old blog posts and I saw my one about looking for the string: ‘why does lvsnap_lockfile still exist’ And the fact that it was a not-quite-google-whack. So I thought I’d google it today and, whaddya know, 5 hits now. Three hits of which are me! The tumblr blog post itself, my tumblr blog and the blog page on my website. The two others were:
c# - Will calling a File.Exist put a lock on a file? - Stack Overflow
and, slightly more worryingly:
Does slavery still exist?
www.anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/slavery.htm - CachedWhat most people do not know is that slavery still exists. It is not a thing of the past. His Royal Highness The Duke of Gloucester, GCVO (a cousin of the …OK, so it’s been two months and I was supposed to check ages ago. But still, there we go, it takes *less* than two months for your ‘google whack’ post to get onto Google. And for someone as unknown as me, that’s probably an achievement? Not sure, I don’t know much about how Google finds all its knowledge. It’d probably be a worrying answer. Anyways, learning++
Willow x 20th Wed Jul, 23:36
SUPER Learning
I know I mentioned at the beginning of my time here that I was learning a lot. That’s still the case everyday but in the last week this has intensified. The previous two weeks I was on holiday, check out http://canadatokathmandu.tumblr.com for my travel blog if you’re interested. I went to Greece for a week, it was awesome but this is the work blog so:
Got back on Friday which was spent catching up on everything (and working of course). Then last Monday we had an all day workshop with everyone in the NOC staff, absolutely everyone, which was awesome! We’re at a lot of different skills sets so part of the workshop was making sure that we *all* have some basic diagnostic skills and if we already knew some uses for them; extend that knowledge.
I’ve said it before I’m sure but I’m very new at this sysadmin/managing services malarkey so I really enjoyed the workshop because it’s helping us get the tools we need to work better. It also meant we all met up for the first time. I knew most people from before but it was definitely nice to all get together - plus there was a barbecue which is always good!
There was a meeting with our main customer on Tuesday out of which came some good stuff. Most important as far as I’m concerned (on a personal level) is the fact that we’re going to visit the client as individuals for a day or two at a time. I’m looking forward to that as well. It has been becoming increasingly obvious that in this situation a better-than-average customer relationship is necessary. Sometimes a distant relationship is fine but when you’re working as closely as we are then getting to know each other is very important.
Improving our knowledge of each other, both teammates and clients can only be a good thing. I’ve always held that communication is incredibly important so now that we’re improving our channels of conversation I think a lot of stuff will improve.
The middle of the week was suitably hectic for post-holiday me then today we slowed down a little for a personal/professional development meeting. Took an hour out to discuss the book/life-management system of Getting Things Done. Definitely looks interesting. It’s going to become a regular thing, every Friday afternoon I think. The best part was working out what your ‘next actionable item’ is. Once you know the very next thing you can do, it’s a relief, and even if that this is asking stuff of other people, you know that you are working on the next step to completing your project. It’s a good way to work.
Even if I find the next steps hard to absorb, the lesson of granularising (yes, it’s not a word) your workload and tasks can only be good for you. I think that may actually be why I sometimes miss Starbucks. While here there’s a lot things I need to do, manic moments and all that jazz. But the tasks aren’t always well-defined and there’s a lot of steps that aren’t specific to try to diagnose the problem. The thing about Starbucks was that on your shift you’d be assigned a position, you’d be on bar, till or floor. So you’d be making drinks, serving customers or clearing up. And each of those positions has specific steps which you can do. It may get repetitive and boring, or crazy manic. But you’ve got one job to do, with specific steps and a specific goal. That kind of situation can actually be quite calming, you can autopilot it sometimes. Your mind is calm and (generally) not too harassed.
Those are my musings for the day anyway, I hope you didn’t read them if you thought they were boring. Nag me on Twitter if you want Greece photos btw, they’re on facebook some of them but not all.
<aside>I’m going to see HARRY POTTER TODAY. WOO!</aside>
Have a good weekend,
Willow x
15th Fri Jul, 16:09Two week update
So last Friday I didn’t blog ‘cos it was my birthday \o/ I am now 23, joy! That was a fun week - I fell off my bike and covered myself in blood which was not very dignified. But I’ve healed remarkably well and Kelly and Mark got me a helmet and gloves on behalf of Sirius for my birthday. They also got me tassles for my handlebars, a bright pink hooter and beads for the my spokes of my wheels! Going to have fun decorating my bike this weekend!
It’s been quite busy lately, a few new problems from various customers. My favourite scam of the week is someone calling up a user to tell them that their internet service was contaminated and all their emails had viruses attached. They then persuaded the user to go to a website and download some remote desktop software so they could control his computer. They showed him a bunch of false ‘error messages’, told him his ‘computer encoding was faulty’ and his ‘security code had expired’ but it would only cost £73 to fix. Luckily the user clocked that this was a more than a bit dodgy and promptly phoned us. But that’s a new low in scamming users…and pretty cunning. We reported him to the owners of the software he was using to get access: LogMeIn who have blocked his account. Pretty successful day I think.
But yes, lots of work going on. Last week Mark Dave and I also did some good wiki restructuring so hopefully when we hire some more people it might make some sense!
Speaking of which, a few interviews were conducted this week. One for a project manager, one for another weekday support staff like myself and one to work weekends. In fact my friend Luke actually applied for the weekend job so keep your fingers crossed!
In addition to writing this I am writing a big ‘handover’ email for the other guys at Sirius as I’m going on holiday! Two weeks off and 7 days in Greece! If you want pictures etc. they will be on my flickr and probably over on my travel tumblr: http://canadatokathmandu.tumblr.com
Happy fortnight everyone!
Willow xx
24th Fri Jun, 15:29It feels like it’s been a really long week. Or lots of stuff crammed into one week! A week of milestones too.
It’s just been pretty busy. We had our first staff meeting for a couple of weeks - caught up on the other departments which was nice! Everybody has had a higher workload this week so I think we’re all looking forward to next week when everyone’s back in the office. TGIF and all that jazz.
Milestones then. We reached a major milestone in our project for a customer. One of the examples of high workload - learning on the fly and uber amounts of building. Quite glad I wasn’t part of that! But the first step has been taken so we should be very proud of our engineers :D
My own personal milestone: I have successfully ‘racked’ my first server! From attaching the rails to the rack to configuring the server itself - I did all of it! With a fair bit of help lol. But anyways, I have been informed it is a geeky rite of passage so yay!
Interesting weekend ahead - opening up the offices for the Surrey LUG meeting before heading into London with Paul, Affan and a friend Tom from Uni. Then coming home and making a lasagne of epic proportions and a tiramisu to match. I thought I’d feed the Sirius bods on Monday as part of the Sirius Lunch Club. Should be interesting - it’s a lot of cooking! Wish me luck!
I think that’s all for now; have a good weekend!
Willow xx
10th Fri Jun, 16:03Ice cream and sun screen
What a beautiful week it’s been. Long, arduous, intense but beautiful. Which is good.
I’ve done some more work for another customer I don’t have much experience with, I feel like I’m learning the ropes a bit more. I’ve also managed to draw my line manager over to my pro-documentation side! Quite chuffed about that. He also did some restructuring of the wiki and we’re collating stuff which should make everything easier to find. Eventually… when we’re finished. It’s looking a bit like a Forth Bridge kind of task - without the new magic paint.
Anyways, a more structured wiki can only be a good thing and with sunbathing and ice cream both happening on my break, it looks to be a good month.
Plus it’s my birthday this month! And I’m going on holiday, good times ahead.
Willow xx
3rd Fri Jun, 15:343 months!
Goodness me, that went fast! Here I am at the end of my third month at Sirius. It’s definitely been an interesting ride. Lots of new information. Definitely feeling much more comfortable here, like one of the team :D Not only am I learning technical work type stuffs I’m also learning other things about my fellow co-workers which is cool - I love knowing other people’s backgrounds, what makes them tick etc.
A couple of us have made plans to go see a show next month as well and to hang out once a month outside of work. Which is nice as I don’t really know anyone here still so yay for making friends! One of the guys has lived in Addlestone but hasn’t really seen much of London so we’re going to show him the sights!
I’ve actually already been out with a guy from work once already - we went to see my cousin’s excellent dubstep band called The Gentleman’s Dub Club. They were completely fabulous. It was definitely nice to spend time with new people. The gig was held in a student union though which made both of us miss being students.
Anyways, looking forward to a bank holiday where I don’t have to work - or indeed do anything! And to the months ahead.
Have a good weekend!
Willow xx
27th Fri May, 15:3424th Tue May, 12:48
Too long an interval...
Hmmm, what with two bank holiday Fridays and one very busy one last week I am shockingly behind on blogging.
So…what’s happened? Uhm a LOT! I did my first two shifts from home. On the three days between bank holiday weekends Steve and I covered the Helpdesk and Support pretty well with Paul off on holiday. All quite interesting.
My first home shift was…difficult. I didn’t have access to our VPN for the whole day and thus to all our internal documentation until the end of the day so that was fun. The Monday was far better! I quite like doing the NOC from home I think!
In the last couple of weeks the more engineering types have been doing a huge amount of project work which is pretty cool but I think they’re getting a bit tuckered out XD This has meant that last week Paul and I were holding down the NOC/helpdesk fort which was not too bad.
This week however has been a little different… Paul has been on holiday (again!!) and Steve is one of the aforementioned engineering types and his valuable knowledge have been need on the project work. So this week has been more overwhelming and more stressful. Mostly because Paul has taken all his supreme helpdesk knowledge with him to Cornwall. I’ve fixed most of the problems, I like to think. And, more importantly, I’ve written the answers down so the *next* helpdesk person we hire won’t be quite as screwed if one of us goes on holiday. Which is nice. It also means I have a delicious moral high ground from which to poke Paul with a pointy stick until he writes down all his hard-earned knowledge. Also nice.
This has been a hard week for everyone I think but we’ve powered through it quite well and a nice long sleep and/or lots of alcohol will hopefully make us much more chipper on Monday morning. With any luck!
Have a lovely weekend boys and girls.
Willow xx
13th Fri May, 15:29A string that can't be googled
I searched for:
why does lvsnap_lockfile still exist
today and got no results. Not a very difficult search string one would think. I had no quotes, no exceptions - nada! So now I’m posting it here, ‘cos I’m a loser, so that this will be the *only* result. Heck, I might even post the reason it still exists - if I ever find out…
Meetings, meetings, meetings...
…are surprisingly useful! At least I think so. Or maybe it’s just ‘cos we’re having constructive ones? Who knows? We’ve been having a lot of them lately and while it’s true that sometimes they can get in the way, personally, I think they’ve been a great help. We’re understanding our own processes better, improving on them. Things are getting better all the time! Not to sound too cheesy… But they really are, I can see the progress we’re making everyday and it’s great to be a part of that. Talking’s important, communication is important, so we can only improve
We’ve been working out where processes are going right and where they’re very definitely going wrong. Luckily there aren’t too many of the latter and the ones there are, we know about.
Learning even more shell scripting/commands this week and going back to my documentation roots. I’ve also been getting more used to how some of our customers’ networks interlace. Where stuff is and all that jazz.
Also been learning about Proxies, how to read the configuration files, what they mean and stuff so I can kick the butt of some proxy issues we’ve been having!
Not much more to say today I don’t think. It’s been a good week, some frustrations but mostly useful learning, developments and fun stuff. Everyone is working hard and we know it’s noticed and appreciated. Good times!
Kate xx
15th Fri Apr, 15:11A quieter week this week than last though not by much! No meetings for me though Paul did get to go to an account management meeting with one of our other big customers which was pretty cool.
For me nothing much happened to be quite honest, I meant to upload the photos but I’ve been getting back so late I never get round to it. The weather has been awesome this week so I’m about to take my ‘lunch break’ and sunbathe for a little while. Quite looking forward to it actually.
I’ve decided I might try and write a little ‘bug-squashing game’ so that we can jokingly squish a bug (or some such) every time we close a ticket and it’ll be a little fun and also keep track of how many bugs we’ve squished that day or week. I’ll have to plot it out but it could be fun. Steve suggested using Pygame to create it which I might well go on and do. I thought it might be interesting to use OpenGL and have a browser-based game but that’s going to be quite involved for what I actually want.
Learning a few more commands here and there. We’re having a lot of space issues on various customer servers so I’ve learned lots of ways to find out how much space is left… always fun and games. Today I learnt a little Perl and re-learned some regex’ing to filter out stuff from logs and parse the Unix time into a legible date.
8th Fri Apr, 17:431 Month!
Woo, so, it’s been 1 month since I started here at Sirius and boy have I learnt a lot! Things are far more hectic this week than they were when I started but such is life.
Incredibly busy day on Monday/Tuesday when a customer server had… a little moment shall we say? But I’m now understanding more about how to locate problems which is cool. We sussed out it was probably down to bad RAM and one of their guys also saw that the kernel wasn’t properly configured - all sorted now :)
Had a training day yesterday which was really great. I got to put a lot of faces to names and my infamous Willow Brownies went down a treat. We had a visit from the head of engineering of our first 24/7 customer who filled us in on what they’re actually looking for from us. It was nice to hear the customer perspective. It gives us a good idea of where we have to get to, I think in some ways, with a lot of new hires everyone was trying to keep up with their idea of what was going on. Now we’re all on the same page.
In other news - we finally finished the computer/monitoring stuff! We ordered everything on Friday and it was delivered on Monday morning in a huuuuuuuuuge box. Paul put it all together that afternoon and we got round to setting it up on Wednesday. It’s only running two of the screens at the moment but when one of us has a spare minute (which are few and far between atm - as it should be!) we’ll get right on that. I’ll post the pictures in a separate post - when I get them all uploaded.
A.O.B.: going home this weekend - woo!
1st Fri Apr, 14:31It's getting busy
My fourth week is coming to a close…
It’s been much busier this week, I think I was being lulled into a false sense of security! Evidence of this is the much later blog post - I’ve been working non-stop ^_^ It’s been much more intense in some respects but the streamlining of various processes is going to lessen the blow I think. Every night when we ‘handover’ to the next engineer there’s a whole bunch of things we have to go through. What’s nice is that with the new processes in place - checking emails, checking lists of work to be done, things to be especially watched - after a few clumsy steps, this is really going to make everything easier.
We have a training day next week I believe and that’s going to be really useful. Looking forward to that. It also means I’ll get to meet some of the people I only talk to on Jabber. It’ll be nice to put faces to names! Lots of learning, really fast.
Our internal wiki is getting even better and Ben is creating some awesome tools. This job is only going to get more involved and these are going to help us a lot I think.
Still looking forward to Document Freedom Day next Wednesday though I have an shopping list of *epic* proportions. I’m going to have a nice relaxed weekend in advance of much late night baking on Monday and Tuesday. Going to make my first ever Carrot Cake. Should be interesting.
We have finally, FINALLY, ordered the parts for our awesome monitor-driving computer. Steve has requested he gets to build it so hopefully it should be up and running next Monday/Tuesday right in time for the BBQ. If I remember I shall take some pictures…
That’s all folks!
25th Fri Mar, 17:213rd Week's the Charm
Hi,
It’s been quite a quiet week this week. No terrifying alerts, or at least, not for long! This week I did some good work going through the backlog of issues/tickets that had been raised but not had any futher pdate on them in a while. We had a few things that were fixed but just no-one had gotten around to updating them. I tell you, our to-do list is much shorter now! It’s cut out a lot of the noise which allows us to focus on what’s really going wrong. With Kelly being back also it means that a lot of things we were unsure about, what we support/what we don’t support is being cleared up. This will make us a bit more efficient and better able to get on with our job. Always a nice position to be in.
I’ve been having a look into the Twitter API thing and it’s probably less complex than I think it is. My main problem is my inexperience including these sorts of things in basic webpages. I had a little fiddle with some PHP to do a different job - my tumblr blog is also now available on www.salixsys.org. I’m hoping to do a similar thing with the Twitter posts. I’ve yet to work it out though!
I changed the nameservers over last weekend so my dissertation project is now available at www.aberystwyth.salixsys.org though, as it’s an old installation of Drupal with a fair few outdatred modules it’s having some issues. Big ones. I’m going to work on that at the weekend. Steve however has been looking into the new version of Drupal for a possible re-vamp of our website. I’m not sure what I think about it. Some stuff the navigation for example, seems to be more sensible. And yet somethings are completely unintuitive. I think I will try a Drupal 7 install on a different subdomain (and merely update all the modules for my diss) to get to grips with it, see how it really works. I think that often it can be quite easy to use from a developer point of view but a simple user might not be able to get their head round it quite so easily.
We haven’t gotten as far as we would have liked with specc’ing up the display box. Picking out the bits you want is somewhat more difficult if you know what you want it to do, but not how! Plus there are so many variations that when you have other work to do it can be a bit overwhelming!
Still looking forward to Document Freedom Day, do email Laura at sales@siriusit.co.uk or drop her a tweet: @SiriusCorp if you’re interested in coming. I bought a new baking book so I might even make something from there, in addition to “Willow Brownies” of course. Please let us know if you’re even vaguely interested, that way we know how much food to get! I’m rediscovering my baking-fu, after quiet moment after Christmas, by making lots of cupcakes for my landlady’s granddaughter’s birthday - a fun weekend ahead!
Talk to you next week!