Tuesday May 17, 2005

Superhero Tea Breaks

Something I find about support here is that is can be either very busy, or not at all. Since I have gone on to a permanent shift I find it much easier to manage my queue and workload. I never seem to be fighting against a horrendous backlog. This is nice, but on quiet days, what are you supposed to do? I toyed with reading through tech notes for a while, learning new stuff slowly. But I found that to be a waste of my time overall, because I would decide to do it one day and we would suddenly have a busy month where I have no time to do anything other than work. Of course, I forgot everything I had read on the quiet day.

It's certainly a dilemma. I don't want to waste my spare moments of life browsing the internet. Then again, that's assuming that browsing is a waste. There are many interesting sites out there to look at, along with the ones I like to check over regularly as they contain a few personal interests. It would be nice to think I was slowly but surely developing my mind through all this spare time, that's all. I'm sure many of you out there know what I mean. It seems to be a bane of this particular line of work. If I'm working on a project I try not to touch the net because procrastination may set in. It's quite impossible to do that here though, as when a call comes in, you deal with it through to the end as quickly as possible. There is no time wasting. But in those moments (like now) where there are no more calls to take, and you're wating for a customer to e-mail you back with an error log, what can you do? Does anyone out there have favourite sites to check in their spare minutes, or any suggestions of a way to fill in time?

Monday May 16, 2005

To My Fans

Does that sound big-headed enough for you?

I have had quite a few e-mails and comments now, and blog entries I have noticed about me, of all people (here, here and here, for example). I feel quite suddenly famous. And so I feel a little sad and responsible for painting a 'bad' picture of a career in support. All the comments have been very nice, and thank you, but many of you seem to think I view my job as low or worthless, which is far from the case.

It is, however, very common among my peers to view a 'support' job as the worst job you can get. Whenever someone asks me what I do, or hears I work for Sun Microsystems, they get quite excited, until I shyly admit that I do support. However after being a Windows Sysadmin and web dev for a year prior to this, I consider this quite a large step up in the world. What a hellish job that was...

Basically what I mean by residing at the 'bottom end' of Sun is that statistically, I'm probably one of the least recognised, least paid of their employees. I welcome corrections if I am wrong. I enjoy my work very much and actually look forward to coming in every day. I don't think many other people can boast that much. So, quite the contrary, I am not negative about the job, I'm merely making the most of a negative vibe about support in general which would hopefully spark some debate or attention, and it has ;)

Back to the SunRay Part V

I return, after two weeks away from my support desk, to my wonderful and valued customer base. I bet they have missed me. My first cases have been faulty disks and SunRay 100's, so we're off to an easy start which is a relief, I seem to have forgotten how to do everything. The call logging software here is far from perfect, which is a shame. I'm sure I could make something much better myself. And I can only remember how to do a Hello World program in Java. There's a web based version which is supposedly quicker and more stable, but my browser seems to be killed off every night by the server cleaning itself up and I wouldn't like to put all my eggs in one basket. So I stick with the slow and steady Java client. Bosses here discovered that it becomes much faster if we connect to Singapore via a router, as the database is held there. True, the queue loaded in about 3 seconds instead of 20. But then the rest of the desktop was somewhat lagged. Nevermind all in a day's work. I don't think I'd be able to do my work any quicker if it was faster to be honest, as when I suddenly had speed it was almost too fast, I couldn't think what I needed to do next and my brain ended up slowing the process down more than ever. I realised it had developed it's own methods of using the time it took to refresh or save something, by working on other documents that needed to be updated in between. When there was no lag I felt I didn't have a set pattern to follow anymore and it left me very confused. I love the human brain.

I'm back on track now though, everything's good. I feel like I have been a service to society today too; I discovered a nasty bug on Blogshares and reported it. I was able to login to someone's account and do whatever I wanted. It was quite a tough moment. I haven't been a member for long and don't really understand how it all works as I haven't taken the time to find out, so in reality when I had full access to a premium member's account I had no idea what I could do with it anyway =D Of course I have the kind of conscience that could never have abused that position, I certainly wasn't trying to hack into an account, it was just an accident. So I reported it to the user and hopefully the flaw is now being fixed. I feel all warm inside and stuff. And I got a little reward, hooray! Perhaps I'll look into Blogshares more when I have a little time. I've a feeling it could get quite addictive.

I didn't have a very nice weekend, unfortunately. I haven't felt very well so spent a lot of it in bed. Hey wait, that sounds like a great weekend! I rented out some movies and a game and had quite a fun time really. Hopefully this week should pick up and I'll find some kind of social life. I haven't mentioned my latest venture for personal development have I - I'm learning the drums. Quite a strange thing to do but it's going really well so far and I really enjoy being creative again. The lessons aren't cheap but I've bought a kit now and I don't think I'll need loads and loads as I seem to be picking it up quickly. My kit should arrive this week so I'm quite excited about making some noise. I imagine I'm ok at it due to having played the guitar for some years (badly) and being relatively good at Dance Dance Revolution. A lot of strange hobbies have developed from spending too much time in my own company... perhaps some day I'll be in a band, I'll update you on my progress so you can all go out and buy my album ;)