Customer Service...

Yesterday, I woke up to find my DSL line no longer working quite right. I was cut off from the net. Well, mostly, I did use the dial-up to get to the football score I was looking for.

Eventually, I decided to call up the big phone company and after about 15 minutes I was connected. The guy answering the phone was obviously first-level windows support and tried his best to help me. The first bit was to have me reset and power on and off my modem/router. I'd done this about ten times already, but I gave it another try. Didn't work. Then he tried to escalate my call. Being Sunday in Switzerland, this wasn't the easiest thing for him to do, and it ended up being impossible. So, he then started with my router configuration. I'd mentioned it'd been working fine for several months and that I'd not changed it. It was possible that it could be a hardware problem, but not the configuration.

Not having any other options other than my suggestion that there was a problem with the DSL line, he suggested I do a factory reset of the router. There was no way I was going to do this, after all, it'd been working fine for months. I suggested again that it was probably the line. He decided that he'd make a call to see if this was a possibility.

Yep. There was a problem with the line, and a number of folks in the neighborhood had already called it in. So there goes an hour of my life and I ended up with a cold pasta lunch yesterday. Magically, this evening the un-reconfigured DSL modem was once again functioning perfectly....

Four Years!

I just passed the four year mark of living here in Switzerland. Now that I've got a job and my German is good enough...guess I'm here for good.

Thinking in German.

One interesting thing I've noticed about working totally in German is that I get used to doing pretty much everything (except for coding) in German. What this means is that I've actually slipped into thinking in German whilst working.

The past few days I've noticed that the couple of rare events where I've had to speak english, it's been a bit difficult switching back. Not horribly difficult, but it's taken a minute or so to shift gears.

Back at home, where I deal with many things in English, it's not so much a problem. Go figure.

We went to a curling class on Friday, I'll have to write something up about that in the near future....

First day at work!

Today was my first day at the new job. I'm not going to really say too much about it. After all, I prefer to separate my work and personal life. However, there is just one thing I want to say about the day. Somehow, I managed to survive an entire day speaking pretty much nothing but German. I had some doubts I could do it, but I did. What was surprising, is that I actually got comfortable speaking German and was able to relax and enjoy it.

The end of the dream.

Well, it's happened. Someone hired me and so my life of "Living the Dream", as many of my friends call it, is soon to end. I'll be starting the new job on the 1st of October. I'm actually quite looking forward to doing something constructive again, and it'll be nice to have a paycheck as well.

I've been pretty busy with all sorts of things of late. We just got back from a trip to the US. There was some good kayaking to be had and the weather was pretty good for the most part.

I took a break from blogging as my camera wasn't always working as well as I wanted it to. So I went out and got a new Olympus E-410 with a dual zoom kit. I've now added a 25mm pancake lens that makes it really, really light for hiking. I expect to take quite a few more pictures with the new set-up. I'm also really enjoying having a D-SLR, as it's a much nicer experience taking photos than to look at my old S40's little screen.

The Euro '08

On Sunday I was lucky enough to go to one of the games of the European Football Championships 2008. We managed to get four tickets in the lottery. Even better, we managed to get them to a game that Switzerland was playing against Portugal.

Switzerland didn't do so well during first two games, losing both. Still, it's always fun to go to a game in St. Jakob Stadium. I hadn't been to a game in Basel since we've moved to Thalwil and so I was looking to see what the upgrades to the stadium were like.

It was fun watching the game, and surprisingly Switzerland won. They played a good game, though many of Portugal's starters did not play. Still, a win is a win.

The only big drawback to the game was the incredible amount of cigarette smoking going on. So much, in fact, that there was a haze in the stadium.

Remote maintenance of servers...

I'm going to geek out a bit with this entry. Apologies to you non-techies.

To keep myself entertained during my time between jobs, I've decided to get myself a server to host a few projects I've been working on. I don't want to host them on a home sever because a home server is too noisy and too warm. Besides, I'd have to share the outbound traffic with my web surfing. So, rather than getting more bandwith at home, I can just put the server in a data center for just a little bit more money.

And there's the issue. It's in a data center. Behind locked doors. No monitor or keyboard. So, how do I access it? An Serial-over-IP device would be cool, but they're expensive and don't do much. I've looked into IPMI, which my server supports, but It needs a VPN to get out of the local network. I've found a KVM-over-IP device that looks pretty cool, but I need to get it shipped out from the US.

But, there's always the option of putting a DVD in the DVD drive. Most of the time it won't be used. In fact, I'll probably not use it unless I need to do an install from the console. So, I'm thinking having a Linux live dvd might be a good thing to keep in it, just in case of an emergency. I got Puppy Linux to work, but it doesn't have LVM in the package, so it looks like I'm off to figure out another option with a different distro, or trying to work out how to get LVM into Puppy Linux...

At least it keeps me out of trouble.