Aquarionics

Today, I had two interviews.

Tuesday was a day of Recruiters. I was woken up by a recruiter, I was then phoned by two more in the next hour, one of them set up an interview for a Helldesk role for the following day. I pointed out I already had an interview for that day, but she said I could come in later, which was nice of her.

Wednesday was a day of researching, where I spent most of it learning why I hate Active Directory, which is a simple idea that someone has tacked ‘functionality’ onto in the hope that one day someone will shout “Jenga” so they can start all over again.

Thursday was today, and began early.

I arrived an hour early for my interview. This was almost deliberate. I’d aimed to arrive half an hour early, because then I’d have half an hour to find the place before I needed to be there. The job was at HIBT to be, basically, network admin, help them develop the network, and bring my l33t linux skillz to the department. I think I did fairly well (I hope I did, I find out in a few days).

Then I went to London to talk to the recruiter. The recruiter told me that I should get a suit and a haircut, and rewrite my CV slightly, but that my interview technique was good and the CV was well written (apart from the missing bit). They didn’t put me forward for the Helldesk role (overqualified) but they’ve another coming up soonish.

Then I bought tea (Drury is great) and came home. More stuff to write, but pizza is here.

My life hacks, how I work from day to day, etc.

Daily

My life is run by an aqwiki which contains all my contacts, projects and events (And is both hidden behind a http auth system and backed up daily to several locations, natch). I’ve put an edited, static copy of the front page up here as an example. Note the “TODO” list is just an inline search for “TODO:”, to add something to my todo list I create a wiki page of the problem and put “TODO: do this” which gets replaced with “DONE:” when completed.

The comics list is a aqwiki macro which reads the wikiPage “ComicsData” and generates a list of webcomics I should read today. The table of contents is generated using Javascript (And doesn’t work sufficiently to stay, unfortunatly)

OS

Most of the time I’m working in Windows (XP-SP2b), because it’s far more responsive and I can play games without rebooting. The server (atoll) runs Debian GNU/Linux sarge (testing) branch (probably sticking to sarge when it gets released).

Applications

AqWiki, obviously. Browser is Firefox (Couldn’tLiveWithout extensions: Linky, Tabbrowser Extensions, Web Developer Toolbar (Or just EditCSS).

Workrave sits in the taskbar whinging at me every 10 minutes, 45 minutes, and eight hours respectively to get off the computer and do something more interesting.

I use Bloglines for keeping track of syndicated sites, gaim for the myriad of messaging services and IRC, slrn for usenet (Meaning, obviously, PuTTY to connect to my Linux server, which is running leafnode2

Graphics with Paint Shop Pro

Email

Atoll, the server, runs exim and dovecot as an imap server. All mail is filtered though procmail. Each mailing list is then sent to a usenet group under Leafnode, anything remaining then goes though Spamassassin, and then if it survives that hits my inbox, where it’s read with Thunderbird if I’m at my computer or mutt over ssh if I’m at someone elses. I have squirrelmail installed for web-based email should neither of those work.

Text editor

Edit+ or gvim under windows. Vim under linux. Anything else is Just Plain Wrong.

I’ve been mucking around with Aquarionics’ commenting system for a while now. As much as I tend to whine about my Driving Test article becoming a mecha for all people who have failed their driving test, it’s become invaluable as an example of what happens to E²’s threading model, display and comment navigation once you get to ten or twelve comments deep. Amazingly the model’s holding up well, but the display was confusing (You couldn’t see which post a reply was to) and the navigation was confusing (People clicking ‘reply’ thinking they’re commenting on a post, when in fact they’re replying to a comment).

So, I’ve mucked around to it to make it a little more obvious (the aforementioned article being the best place to see the effect).

What do people think?

Today, I visited the Job Centre.

Although I have the interview on Thursday, and should really be spending most of my time bringing my Active Directory skillz up to scratch, I’m obliged to visit the Job Centre a couple of times a week to see if they have anything new. I can do this online, but I wanted the exercise.

The touch-screen terminal asked me a number of difficult questions (“What industry”, “Do you have a car”) before giving me both of the possible jobs on offer this week for a l33t Web Developer with sysadmin skills.

I could either work in Scotland (Which is, apparently, within 10 miles of Letchworth or London) as a VB Programmer.

Or I could work as an assistant for a marital aids mail order catalogue.

Somewhere in here is a lesson about meta-data, and it only being as good as whoever types the document in, but to be honest, I can’t be bothered.

So I’m baking a fruit cake, before I become one.

If anyone has a spare gmail invite they’re not using…

Mission accomplished, thanks