Work

Well I have survived my first three days at work. The first day was tough. A huge shock to the system after nearly 5 months off ! It is getting better though as I get to know the people and the product. Seem like a great bunch of people to work with. Will get to know my fellow work mates even better this weekend during the 3 DAY COMPANY TRIP TO NAPLES. How sweet is that! Talk about joining just at the right time.
Anyway, enough for now as I am tired as and need to get up a little earlier tomorrow coz I was a little late today. (Who ? Me !)

Edinburgh Photos

The rest of the photos from Edinburgh have been uploaded. Click on the pic.

It's Been A While

I couldn't very well update this blog too regularly considering the name. A brief update. Spent four great days up in Edinburgh over last weekend. Caught the train up there and back. Amazing seafood birthday dinner down in Leith. Managed to survive turning 30.

Signed my job contract on Thursday and dropped it off at the office. My work is a stones throw (ok .... a large stones throw!) from Tower Bridge which is an awesome location. Start work on Monday. Scaaaary.

Spent yesterday arvo and this morning checking out places to Live. I think we've decided on Islington. Seems like a nice area. Reasonanly central. Now we just need to find a place to rent!

Will post some more Edinburgh photos soon.

Man of Leisure No More

Just got a phone call from my recruiter, and after a 5 minute chat about England winning the ashes, he informed me that the company I interviewed with yesterday want to make me an offer. Thank God! The company is pretty small (not quite 20 developers) and writes real-time electronic trading software. Is going to be a huge challenge but should be fun. Start Monday week. Looks like I will have a happy birthday after all!

Krakow

Only two more cities left to post, Krakow and Prague. Krakow has a beautiful old town square and castle. (It was one of the few major cities to escape severe damage during World War II). My photos don't really show off much of the Old Town or Castle though. Maybe I was suffering a bit from photo fatigue! That said, I am very happy with some of the more abstract ones which could've been taken anywhere! More photos here.
Krakow satellite map, courtesy of google maps yet again, showing Wawel Castle (bottom) and Town Square (top). Wikipedia entry for the interested.

Interviews continued

Brief update about the work situation. Had another interview this afternoon which, I think, went ok. Called my recruiter to see if i had had any feedback from mu interview on Monday. Apparently they were "sitting on the fence", whatever that means. They said I was ok technically but they werent sure wether I would fit in personality wise. Well, I guess their recruiting was working well in one respect, because I felt the same way. I told my recruiter to tell them I wasnt interested. Maybe a bad move, but hey. Will know sometime tomorrow wether I got the job I interviewed for today. Hopefully ..... wish me luck.
Am heading up to Edinburgh, Scotland for the weekend. Nice change of scenery for my birthday. What! Don't tell me you had forgotten. Shame on you. Will be in touch tomorrow to let you know wether I have joined the land of the gainfully employed.

Warsaw cont

We didn't get off to a good start in Warsaw. After getting off the overnight bus trip in a rather frazzled state, we jumped straight into a Mafia taxi (a dodgy taxi which rips you off - apparently, according to all the tourist literature we read AFTERWARDS, they are rife!). After arriving at the hotel with our lightened wallets we crashed for a bit before heading in to town. The Old Town in Warsaw was quite scenic. Amazing considering it was pretty much flattened during the war, and then rebuilt in the old style. Apart from the Old Town I don't really have much good to say about our time in Warsaw. A handy hint for Warsaw Train Station, buy your tickets in the underpass if you can. It saves you time, especially after you waited in line for half an hour only to have the person behind the counter to shut up shop for no apparent reason!

Interviews

Well my "face to face" interview on Thursday turned out to be a written test which took about an hour. Some curly questions again, but a few were repeated from the telephone interview which was handy. There was no other interaction apart from here is a test, call me when you're done. Call, hand over the test and then leave. I thought I did ok. There was a whole section on database stuff for which I had no clue. Rang my recruiter and it turns out that they were happy with my results, so I have another interview tomorrow morning (Monday) 9am. I have no idea what to expect from this one.

My Friday arvo interview was pretty interesting. Once again I arrived, only to be handed a "test" to be done and 30 mins to do it in. Wasn't too difficult. Find a couple of bugs in some C code and reverse a string. After 30 mins the cavalry arrived and we went through my answers. They seemed happy enough. The next hour or so was pretty much a standard interview. The finale was a bit of an open ended question where you are expected to ask questions etc to get the full scope of the problem before continuing. Didnt do so well on that. Turns out it wasnt a complete failure as I got a second interview with them too. Not sure about the second interview with these guys either. The recruiter hinted that the questions in the second interview would be more kind of logic/thought process stuff. Should be interesting.

It is actually turning out to be a little bit stressful all this job hunting. I can't wait until its' all over. I will either be a very happy or sad boy by the end of next week. We shall see.

Interview Fallout

My phone interview this morning was succesful so I have a "face to face" interview tomorrow at 9am. This is in addition to the one on Friday at 2pm. All of a sudden I am looking forward to relaxing on the weekends again !! Hopefully my days as an unemployed bum could be drawing to a close.
Warning, the rest of the post will probably be of interest to about 20% of you. Read at own risk of severe confusion and or boredom.

-- TECH RANT BEGIN ---

My phone interview today was "succesful" in that it got me a face to face interview tomorrow, but from a knowledge point of view I was a bit patchy. Scary some of the questions I was a bit vague on (not to mention some of them totally clueless). The job sounds like they still use a fair bit of C (cf C++) so there were a few malloc, void * questions. Yikes. Secondly the development is on UNIX so there were a few UNIX questions along the lines of "What is a zombie process?" and also fork/exec. All Operating Systems 101 stuff really. I probably could have answered those questions straight out of uni but they had me scratching my head today. Hence I spent today brushing up(*) on some of those basics. Undoubtably they will have completely different questions tomorrow !!

(*) Invested in a subscription to Safari Bookshelf yesterday. It has come in very handy already. Basically it gives you online access to a huge array of computer/technical books for US$20 a month. No it isnt overly cheap, but to put it in perspective, its only about a pint a week (hmmm ... on second thoughts ....)! The only catch with it is that you can only have 10 books on your virtual bookshelf at a time, and any one book has to stay on the shelf for at least a month. That doesnt seem too bad though. The selection is excellent. First two weeks are free so if you are vaguely interested you should sign up. (You will need a credit card though.)
While I am on a tech reference rant, currently the C/C++ Users Journal has a limited offer of 12 month access for U$20. This gives you access to 12 months issues, plus all the back issues. FWIW.

--- TECH RANT END ---

Warsaw Part 1

Yes taking the overnight bus from Vilnius to Warsaw does save you a nights accomodation. No its not worth doing. Look at those shot eyes. Ouch.

Reality Check

Just a brief update on what I am up to. Still looking for work. Had a phone interview today which was successful, so I have a followup face to face interview on Friday arvo. The company looks pretty good so fingers crossed. The phone interview was very technical, luckily the recruiter had clued me up a little bit as to what to expect. It actually seems like a pretty good idea to do a quick 15 minute phone interview first before calling people in. I also have another phone interview tomorrow morning, with a ridiculously large American organization. We'll see. Should be interesting if nothing else.

Doh ...

Ok. Well it seems to work now after changing nothing. Still, Firefox is a much better browser. Use it. Save the world.

Whoops ....

Just tried loading this page with Internet Explorer and noticed that the title image doesn't load. Whoops. Will have to have a look at that some time. It means 50% of you are missing out on the life changing title image that accompanies this page. Or maybe it is just my version of Internet Explorer.
Anyway, the easiest way to solve this is for all two of you reading this blog is to download Firefox and improve your life.

Trakai

Trakai is a small town located about 28km outside of Vilnius. We caught a local bus out there, which meant cheap but no aircon. Luckily it didn't take too long and we managed not to completely melt. The Castle on the lake is ridiculously scenic, although up close it looks a little over restored. Still, better than it falling down forever I guess. This place is definitiely worth the day trip from Vilnius. When it came to catching the bus back home we managed to get there by the time it was standing room only. Decided to see if the driver would mind if we sat on the entrance stairs by sitting there and seeing what he did. Instead of telling us off he handed us a paper to sit on so we didn't get our asses dirty ! Try that in Oz. Best of all, we got to be the door chaeuffeurs for all the people who got on/off all the way back to Vilnius !

Satellite Map. This interactive map is pretty cool too. Unfortunately most of the photos on the interactive map site are far more interesting than mine, so look at mine first to prevent disappointment. If you are really interested, the Wikipedia article is good too.

Click on the photo to see the other photos .... Consistency be damned.

Vilnius, Lithuania

After Nida we caught the bus most of the way across Lithuania to Vilnius, the capital. (It's also when I started reading Anna Karenina which I've only just finished. I thought it would be a good idea to read Tolstoy in Russia, but unfortunately I didn't get around to it IN Russia! FWIW : it wasnt bad, bit of a slog at times.)
Vilnius is a great town : plenty to see and nice relaxed atmosphere. As you will see from the photos, our hotel was pretty, well, how you say, Soviet ! Photos here.

Nida, Lithuania

Unfortunately the photos from Nida really arent that exciting, but I didnt want to leave the place out of the blog as it was quite interesting for several reasons.
For brevity ...

• it is located on a narrow stretch of land known as the Curonian Spit which may be doomed to erosion in the future,
  
• a few kilometres further south is Kalingrad, an outpost of Russia. You could see the jeeps driving up and down a road through the sand dunes patrolling the border on the horizon.
• the beaches are great and the water much better than Parnu (for a start it isnt brown)
  
• the traditional houses scattern through the town are very cute.

We spent most of the time kicking back on the beach or, surprise surprise, having a beer. That said, we did exert ourselves one day and do a 50km bike ride, mainly because we way underestimated the distance ! The town itself was quite bizarre. It mainly caters to German tourists which meant it was quite expensive to stay there (at least compared to most places we stayed). It also meant that German was a lot more common than English, so A's German came in handy again for booking bus tickets and the like.
Anyway, as usual the photos are here. Check out this satellite photo to see the location.

Abandoned Soviet Missile Base

From my diary. 11th July 2005.

Photos for those who don't like to read.

After arriving in Klaipeda from Siauliai (Hill of Crosses) at about 10 in the evening, we found our HI Hostel, thankfully not far from the train station. After checking in we inquired about the tours for the Missile Base that we had read about in the Lonely Planet. Apparently the woman who normally did the tours was away, but the woman at the hostel thought she might be able to arrange something for us. Cool. We would sort it in the morning.

Next morning the woman said she knew someone who could take us if we were still interested. Yep. The guide arrived at about 11, a young Lithuanian guy who was home from studying in Vilnius (I.T.). We dumped our backpacks in his red Nissand (just fitted), jumped in and off we went. It was to be about an hours drive to the site.

After about an hour we turned off the main road onto a gravel road in to Zemaitija National Park. People swimming in lakes surrounded by forest. Followed the signs to Military Exposition (in Lithuanian..) and finally we were there, pulling up in front of a large barbed wire gate. There were a couple of other cars and a rangers booth, all deserted. Could see the top of the missile base, four concrete domes and a stage in the middle. There was already a tour happening so we had to wait 15 minutes or so. While waiting our guide told us more about the base. When it was built the Russians covered it with plastic trees to hide it from satellite photos. According to the Americans, it didn't work.

The ranger came out from the site, bringing out the previous tour group of three. A discussion followed in Lithuanian between the ranger and our guide, the gist of which I thought was "no dice"!. But it turned out that the ranger was happy to unlock the place and let our guide show us around while the ranger took another group which had arrived while we were waiting.

Through the gate we walked over to one of the four missile domes which covered the missle silos. Rusty metal and flakin ....

Oh man. I just finished writing this entry and somehow when I went to post it I lost everything from here on. Aaaarrrh. Hmmm. I think it may be lost forever. Enjoy the photos .....

Jog Blog

For those hitting the road over the weekend, running in the Perth City to Surf or the Adelaide Marathon (B you're nuts) : *** GOOD LUCK ***

Local Tickets For Local People

Woohoo ... got my League of Gentleman tickets in the post today. Sweet. Not until the 4th of December though, so will have to keep the precious things safe until then.

What else have I been up to. Not a real lot. Been in touch with a few recruiters. Not a real lot of action on the job front though. Next topic.

Did something very nerdy and went to an Agile Development (thats software speak for you non techies) get together in a pub last Tuesday night. It is a weekly social gatehering where people who are interested in Agile Programming get together and network/swap ideas and drink copious amounts of beer. Was pretty good.

Spoke to a friend in Adelaide this morning (Hi B) using the new google talk app. I'm sure it is probably just like skype as far as the VoIP thing goes but it was pretty cool. Basically if you have broadband you get free phone calls over the internet using your computer. You need a gmail address to use it. If you want one I might give you one if you ask nicely .....

The travel photos will resume soon. It is just that the next lot are from the Soviet Missile Base and that deserves a decent explanation which requires a bit more story effort than the usual entry. For now here is a quick taster.

Kew Gardens

Made the most of a fine English summers' day today and headed off to the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. The garden itself is pretty amazing, but the highlight for me was definitely the glass sculptures of Dale Chihuly.

Check out the photos here.

Satellite photo.