Waiting for a Hammer to Fall

Sigh. The very last few days has been very very hectic. More so because the year's end approaches, thus, every single item that was scheduled to wrap off in 2007 should and has to finish before a relatively long holiday which in my case, started tomorrow. Which further means, that this blog won't see any updates until December 27th, 2007.

Anyway, i had been working in various different companies for what? Three years and five different companies. Yet, this marked the very first time i was eligible for year's end bonus. My first ever year's end bonus, by the way. I had agreed with my manager about my performance in this semester (which lies somewhere between Good and Exceptional) and my report has been filed to the Human Resources whom will later settled on how much (usually, it was somewhere between two and three times of monthly stipend) each employees would receive as his/her respective semester bonus. It was probably one of the benefit of working in somewhat governmental company. But is it something that i really really want? Despite the pluses, i found myself longing for a little bit of comfort. A comfort provided by writing several thousand lines of codes. Meaningless words with colorful blue and green (depending on your IDE, of course) but magic none the less.

Whiner.

Back in the Game

I've got a call this morning (early morning, earlier than i'd love to) from my IT department senior. He was in Semarang at the moment installing Oracle Business Suite at our office branch in Semarang. He's calling asking me how fast am i in building a simple CRUD (Create Retrieve Update Delete, for you unfamiliar with IT) web-application. I had never been good in estimating projects, so i say, quite fast if i'm using PHP and MySQL. He said, can you make it before the day's end? I said, confidently, that i could. So, he sent me an email about the data which would become a base to the said application.

I clocked in earlier today, and checked my email right-away, and there you go, with a quick glance i counted three main tables, with another three identity tables used as constants, and so forth. However, i see my problems looming right from the beginning.

I fired my favorite text-editor and begin typing.

It was simple at first, i began to create a form, blank fields, a button, and some script to handle the queries. I was done in a half-hour for one CRUD cycle. But, as i was more comfortable with PHP (i've never done PHP coding for four years), and everything is starting to come back, AND i was adding another CRUD cycle to the application, i began to twiddle, and suddenly i was absorbed by the design and modularity. I started to separated each functions, and entities into its own classes (as much as you could doing an Object Oriented Programming approach with PHP, that is), and meanwhile, my manager asked for a minute brainstroming (which turns out takes about thirty minutes), one of my friend had bought fresh fruits (rujak) and somehow decided to bring the food at my table to which become a sudden attarction to my other office-mates, my Messenger buzzing with my senior asking about the progress AND proposing new requirements, i was delighted and surprised that i could come up with something like the image shown above this post before the day's end. Of course, the application was still buggy, but if the work order was done correctly, there won't be any misfire results.

I feel exhilarated. I missed the old feeling of having oppressed by deadlines, given a challenge to create something in a small time-frame, and to do something that i know i was better at (at least, better than having to sell a product, for an instance). Is it time for me to get back to school? Well..

A Violation to the Commitment

This is bad, i've made a commitment to post at least once daily during the work days. Now, the working hours almost done and i've got nothing to publish. Apologize, but i think that i had to scrape this one day off the chart, and babbling into an utterly random and non-sensing bubbling about things. Things.

I liked my office's internet connection. That, and the fact that there's always free food and coffee. But most of all, it's my internet connection. And i was the sole person who had the key to the gateway between the office numerous terminals to the internet world outside. How sweet can it be? Yeah. And oh, i had a several hundred of Gigabytes free space, and tons of DVD-Rs, so, i figured, while i'm here why don't i use my internet for something i really liked? Like, for instance, downloading movies. After all, when downloading movies, you'd only needed to provide the torrent files, and let the computer do the rest. I just checked out each morning to see which one of the files done downloading, and most likely, adding new torrents for download, and burned the content to the disc, brought them home in the evening, grab the snack and watch them as i drifted off to sleep.

However, i had a pretty strict code in downloading. As you must've been aware, downloading via torrent is a potent and a sure way to kill your bandwidth. So, i was applied the same rule of my clients (the 250-ish employees in my office) to my own downloading task. But only if the clock said that the hour was still a working-hour. After that, gaaaaaa.. let the greed begins.

Pretty dull life, if you asked me. I know i needed a change, a more dynamic and challenging roles both in work and in life. But until i found out what 'dynamic' and 'challenging' means, i would be pretty content enough with my current life right now.

Recently seen:
- Heroes Season 2 (pretty dull)
- Dexter Season 2 (exciting)
- Bionic Woman Season 1 (zzzzz....)
- Chuck Season 1 (mmm.. Yvonne...)
- The Simpsons Season 19
- Survivor Season 15
Films:
- La Dolce Vita (1960)
- Dr. Strangelove (1964)
- Tokyo Story (1959)
- North by Northwest (1959)
- Audrey Heburn's Complete (!) Collection
- Many more classic films in my downloading queues...

MMM.... Gotta love the Internet. Gotta L-O-V-E the Internet.

Running out of Ideas

Okay, i'm running out of ideas right now. Oh, i had several in-writing posts but i deemed that they were too early and immature to get notified publicly so, they were as of now, merely gathering dusts at my Desktop. Moreover, i was scheduled to attend a one-day seminar at Microsoft Indonesia later this day for whole day. I was wondering wether i should bring my genuine Windows Vista powered Toshiba or my MacBook (which of course, no Windows installed) just to mock the attendants.

Anyways, i grow more and more uneasy in this place, and i should figure to look for another job more inline with my core (a loner, an introverted, a basement Java developer), because i had thought that career-wise i won't go anywhere in this place.

Recently, some employees were promoted and rotated. To my dismay, i've seen some of the brightest guy in this office were overlooked. I've been working with Billing & Collection department for the last couple of months regarding their online billing system. And i was genuinely surprised that Mr.A was promoted as a Manager where as Mr.B was not. I've been working with both Mr.A and Mr.B and in my opinion, Mr.B was much more smarter than Mr.A. It is clearly shown on his feature, his way of speech, his body language, and his quick wit in understanding the new system. However, this Mr.B was known as the man who overly critic, when he doesn't like about something, he would say it, out loud, regardless of who he talked to. Well, i'm not seeing this happen for myself (often), but some of my senior colleagues confirmed my suspicions, and they were agreed that Mr.B was the one who should promoted as a Manager instead of Mr.A. Further, this was twice when Mr.B was overlooked for a promotion. According to one of my senior colleague at the Accounting department, Mr.B was the one who created the Accounting system from scratch in this company. He said that before Mr.B, my company hasn't any fixed accounting system (i don't know shit about accounting, so i can't vouch about how's a company who doesn't have any fixed accounting system could proceed with their financial statements. I just copied what my colleague had said, verbatimly). That wasn't a small accomplishment. But, because Mr.B wasn't affiliated in any way with PT. PLN (Persero), he was surpassed by some guy from PT. PLN (Persero) who later become a Manager at the Accounting department (rumor has it that Mr.B and this Manager weren't exactly the best of friends). Mr.B was instead appointed at Billing & Collection department. Again, his contributions weren't small, he had a huge portion in developing the Billing & Collection system. And again, he was overlooked. Now, there's a vacant position as a Manager at the Accounting Department, and me and my senior Accounting department colleague anonymously agreed that he deserved the position, though of course, my colleague, being a senior had a very good reasons to doubt that it would be the case. He has seen more brightest guys were overlooked simply because they were too critic. Obviously more than i've already seen, and i've seen quite a few.

Let's see what would happen then, meanwhile, if you know any delicious vacant position where i could be working closer to my root (a loner, an introverted, a basement Java developer), i would glad if you'd be so kind to inform me.

HijackThis

"Dude, the user at the finance dept. had a problem with his computer"
"Wait, aren't you guys the IT department? Why don't you and go?"
"Dude, are you kidding? It's PC and Linux! We're Mac users, we're IT artists"

However, given the circumstances, this 'IT artist' had to dwell into a Windows-based environment, and had to deal with problems originated from the 'non-IT commoners' about their IT. This, includes can't connect to printer, my Internet Explorer was slow as snail, can't connect to the Wireless, et cetera, et cetera. Most of the time, these problems emerges because simply the 'non-IT commoners' were too darn stupid ignorant to Googling for the solutions and instead ring the bell of a known IT department oblivious to the fact that this 'IT artist' had his hands already full with a) deploying the reporting tools of the Billing application because the vendor's billing application is stupid and can't do more than simply print, we don't want to do that, b) waiting and installing the new hubs and make sure that the network connection remains 'seemingly' online to the end user while doing so, c) migrating the portal application to a new server, while monitoring the progress of the new portal being built, d) creating presentation (with Keynote. Flashy, elegant, and creative-mind-poking-fun alternative rather than that stiff, boring, no-fun-at-all, creative-mind-killer Microsoft PowerPoint) for the next internal IT staff and the Content Management vendor minute-meeting, and e) figuring out what the hell the user with IP of 90 doing with the internet that he's got the whole bandwidth assigned to him flashing red at my monitor.

Anyway, with time, i became more able and fluent in dealing with the user. Lately, when they had problems with the internet connection, the first one i checked on his/her terminal would be the malwares, worked almost every-time.

I encountered the first problem with malware about three weeks ago. A user came to me that she can't open the treasury application which of course, web-based. I was mulling for almost an hour with her terminal (her IE in particular), while propping my MacBook accessing Google everytime. After several tries, i found this tool, HijackThis, and small instructions somewhere in the internet relevant to the problem. With one click, here and there, and her IE works as well as new. I accused her because the problem was clearly caused by the stupid IE toolbar that she's been installing WITHOUT permission, and the stupid IE toolbar won't uninstalled easily, thus, keeping the IE crashed down. I force-remove it the hard way using said HijackThis.

The next problems were easier from there, when a user asked me about his/her IE slowing down, i would immediately look at his/her IE toolbar, and almost everytime pointed it accussingly to him/her and asked him/her unkindly 'Who installed this stupid toolbar?', the look on their faces were priceless. I would ran HijackThis, and voila, for three weeks, several similar cases, i haven't experienced the situation where HijackThis doesn't solved the problem.