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#87: Work and play

Sep 10

Posted by gus in humour, musings, work | No Comments

It was my work Christmas party last weekend. “Christmas party, Gus?! But it’s September!” I hear you say – well, yes. It was officially known as a “summer barbecue”, but considering that it was the major social function of the nationwide office calendar for the year, and also that it was mostly pissing with rain and not barbecue weather at all, it was essentially the Christmas party.

During the day, we did laser clay pigeon shooting, a treasure hunt and my personal favourite activity, duck and goose herding with a sheepdog. Fantastically amusing to watch and more fun to do, I felt just like I was in a farm story or something. Shouting “away to me!” and watching a dog make an anti-clockwise circle around a flock of running geese while you usher them through some gateposts is definitely an amusing way to spend some time. Nobody knew that was coming and it was a great surprise.

The evening was the usual sort of affair which started out civilised and degenerated into a massive piss-up, as any good office party should. I danced like a total loon, as I always do at Christmas parties, and drank a decent amount of wine. Myself and a couple of others managed to sneak off with a bucket of booze at the end too and carried the party on back in the hotel bar which was a great laugh. I did feel the consequences in the morning, but had an absolutely fantastic time and wouldn’t change it at all. Even the drive home was a brilliant laugh, discussing all the drunken quotations and dancefloor moments from the night before. You can always tell a party’s been great if you feel completely ruined the next day but don’t regret a moment of it.

I bought “Rock Band” for the 360 on a bit of a whim as a payday present at the end of last month, and it’s properly awesome. There’s something that’s just brilliant about singing and playing the guitar at the same time – makes you feel like a rockstar even if you’re useless at it. Brilliant stuff!

#82: Friday

Jul 25

Posted by gus in musings, short ones, work | 3 Comments

I really like sun. I really like Fridays. I really like drinking Diet Pepsi.

That is all for the moment. Today is a good day. :)

#81: Sun

Jun 30

Posted by gus in cars, computers, football, geekery, musings, rants, work | No Comments

It’s been a lovely weekend. My best friend Matt and I held a bit of a barbecue and gaming evening at his house on Saturday which was great fun – Sarah, Louise and Jo came round and we played Monopoly, baseball on the Wii and Guitar Hero. We also got rather drunk which was fun, until such time as I got a phone call from my brother saying that he’d had a car crash. It turned out that my parents couldn’t drive and neither could I, but I got a lift down to go and see him as he sounded a bit shaken up on the phone.

When I got there, it turned out that the car that hit him had driven off with a broken radiator – my brother’s car was in a pretty bad way, so they must have hit him pretty hard. I just let the police do their job and gave my brother a comforting arm round the shoulders – not a lot else I could do really. I’m unsure if they’ve caught the people who did it yet or whether that’s still in progress.

I watched the European Cup final last night, thought it was a brilliant game – Spain totally deserved to win as they were all over Germany from about 15 minutes in until right at the end of the game. Torres scored a lovely goal, and Spain were unlucky not to get two or three more.

It’s rather hot today. Work is going alright, but it’s a bit loud thanks to the 3 HP DL140s running by my feet. Configuring servers is a noisy process!

#75: Oh please.

Apr 17

Posted by gus in humour, musings, work | No Comments

One of the main aspects of my job is being a PHP developer for an online e-commerce platform which sells flights, hotels and holidays. As most online merchants will tell you, selling stuff online and allowing electronic payments can be a risky business, as there are lots of people out there who will try to put expensive transactions through on stolen credit cards, hoping that the goods will be dispatched and they’ll be able to do a runner before the card is reported stolen and blocked by the bank.

Selling flights is no different – there are a lot of people who will try and put expensive flights through your system and pay with a stolen credit card. You can usually spot these fraudsters a mile off – they try to make bookings to dodgy lawless places (Lagos, Accra, Addis Ababa, Johannesburg, Nairobi etc) that usually depart with the next few days, invariably with a card registered under the name of a third party. We’ve been selling flights online for a long time under various different platforms, and as such we have a fraud checking system that highlights bookings that might be fraudulent for review.

A little while ago we got what I think is probably the moodiest, dodgiest and most obviously fraudulent booking we’ve ever had on our system:
- The route is Dubai to Accra via Addis Ababa and Lagos
- It’s due to depart in three days’ time (20th April)
- The flight is with Ethopian Airlines
- The email address is registered in Ireland, despite the card being registered in England
- The name on the card is entirely different to the name of the person booking

I wonder who on earth thought they could get away with it?!

#71: Wordpress

Apr 2

Posted by gus in musings, short ones, work | No Comments

I’m now on Wordpress 2.5 – it’s very, very shiny indeed. I approve!

Work is busy, life is busy etc. Can’t complain at all :)

#67: Tuesday

Feb 19

Posted by gus in musings, procrastination, short ones, work | 2 Comments

It’s Tuesday, and this is awesome!

(Yes, I’m a little bit bored in the last half-hour of work, and I don’t have a lot to write about.)

Tuesdays are actually my favourite day of the week. I go to the gym on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and so I don’t get home until later on, and then have to make dinner and don’t usually get to sit down and relax until about 8pm, which is nasty. On Tuesdays, however, I get home at about 6pm and I can immediately start my relaxation. Win!

I am listening to my recommended radio station on last.fm, and it’s actually pretty good – I’ve heard a few things that I shall be following up on. If you fancy listening too… click!

#65: Untitled

Feb 5

Posted by gus in computers, geekery, long ones, money, musings, work | 1 Comment

It’s blog o’clock.

After having made myself ache by playing with my powerball so much, I decided to learn to start it by hand (as this is apparently what the pros do). It was quite easy once I worked out how, with the help of an excellent YouTube video. Don’t mind the dude’s cheesy voiceover, just watch exactly how he holds it and what he does and copy it. You’ll get there soon enough.

Unfortunately, I bottled out of deleting my Myspace account last week. I never use the thing to edit or do anything with my profile, but I’ve realised that I’m far too nosy to get rid of one of the only methods I have of looking at photos of old friends. I am sorry to have to admit this, but it seems that Myspace has beaten me. Perhaps in the future I will be able to break the hold it has over me!

I have been working at home a lot more recently, I have to say that it’s absolutely awesome. I also got a substantial pay rise from my boss, which I was very pleased about. To celebrate, I bought myself a nice shiny new 22″ monitor to put on my desk at home, so I now have an awesome dual desktop setup going on. I also paid substantially less than the price Amazon are currently quoting – something more in the region of £150, which was very, very reasonable. The monitor itself is fantastic – picture quality is superb (particularly in World of Warcraft, which is absolutely stunning at 1680×1050), it looks brilliant on the desk and it makes doing all my work a whole lot more pleasurable.

I transferred my level 61 alliance rogue over to Kloopy’s server recently, after he got back into playing WoW regularly. I’m just about to ding level 65, and it’s all going very well so far. I’m using Jame’s Alliance Levelling Guide, which has got mixed reviews from people in the past, but I have to say that I find it very easy to follow, and I’ve managed to get four whole levels in not a great deal of time. I’ve not played an Alliance character in ages but it’s all slowly coming back to me. Playing on a PvE server is also very different to the PvP servers I’m used to, and I find being able to level without the threat of being ganked to be a dream come true.

I also ordered myself an 8-bit tie the other day. They look great – see for yourself! (Kloopy and I realised afterwards that we probably should have taken the photo while not staring directly at the sun, however)

#60: 2008

Jan 2

Posted by gus in musings, work | 2 Comments

First of all, I hope that all of my readers had a brilliant Christmas, and I wish you all a very happy New Year. I’ve got a few resolutions, but a few of them are personal and so I won’t be bombarding you all with details of them.

One resolution I can tell you about though is my desire to get to work on time from now onwards. Ever since I started this job, I’ve had a persistent problem with getting here on time. I was OK at first as I wanted to make a good impression, but after a couple of months I started to lapse a bit, usually in pursuit of ten minutes more sleep in the mornings. Nobody said anything, so I never gave myself the psychological kick up the arse to actually sort myself out.

The reality was that although people noticed that I was always 5-10 minutes late, nobody ever said anything about it. There were a few jokes made about it but always for a laugh, and management never told me off for it. I’ve always known that my lateness was fairly unacceptable, but I think I was just content with allowing it to happen, provided I could get my extra time in bed in the mornings.

This is not going to happen any more. I have now decided that I will get to work and be at my desk at 9am every day from now on. It can’t do any harm, and getting up earlier will also enable me to have breakfast in the mornings and function a bit better during the day. Here’s to the future!

#59: Problems with lime-management.co.uk and Galileo

Dec 20

Posted by gus in computers, geekery, work | No Comments

I got an interesting phone call last week at work. An colleague at one of our offices couldn’t get into a certain website (http://www.lime-management.co.uk) to make bookings. They could see the front page, but whenever they tried to log in, the site would just “stop” and then eventually time out with a “Page cannot be displayed” message.

I tried the site in my office, as well as at home and on a couple of other IP addresses, and there was no problem with it at all. Using different browsers created no problem at all, and even different operating systems (I tried from both Linux and Windows) weren’t a problem. The only issue that the boss and I could come up with that it was some kind of bizarre group policy setting, because the colleague’s office all runs on a Windows domain, whereas my office does not. However, this theory was disproved when I tried a PC at the remote office that wasn’t a member of the domain and the problem persisted.

I decided to try a different internet gateway in the hope that there was some issue with the primary router at my colleague’s office. Obviously this would still be a major issue, but at least it might offer some explanation as to why this problem was manifesting itself. We have multiple internet connections to each office, not just for redundancy but due to historical reasons, so this was a good time to test one out. Unfortunately the problem was still there.

After scratching my head for a minute or two, I tried out a couple of traceroutes. The first was directly to the website itself (194.154.164.72) and completed without a problem. I’d noticed that the login to the site handed off to booking.lime-management.co.uk (57.66.83.59) and so tried that as well.

This is where the problem became apparent. The traceroute halted on the second hop with a message: “192.168.0.252 reports: destination net unreachable”. This surprised me, as that IP belongs to the router which deals with that office’s connection to the Galileo GDS system. It was here that I realised that a slight oversight had been made with the configuration of the primary router. Galileo servers use IPs in the range 57.8.x.x, and we’d added a static route to the primary router to offload any traffic for 57.x.x.x to 192.168.0.252, without bearing in mind that the entire class A 57.x.x.x range did not belong to Galileo.

I changed the offending route and subnet mask to 57.8.x.x and 255.255.x.x respectively, and the website promptly started working with no problems.

(this entry has mainly been put here in case anyone else ever has a similar problem and searches for it)

#58: It seems we’re human after all

Dec 19

Posted by gus in females, humour, long ones, musings, theatre, work | No Comments

The panto has been and gone, and you can see me hoofing about a bit here if you have me added on Facebook and have the “Video” application. I’m the guy who comes on stage after the dog and then dances at the very left-hand side of the video. If you don’t have me added on Facebook, search for “Gus Luxton” in the London network. My picture is of me posing in a mirror in a stripey shirt and pinstripe trousers.

My birthday (last Wednesday, December 12th) was brilliant – many thanks to anyone who sent me birthday wishes by any medium at all! Being 23 is a little scary though. I logged into last.fm a couple of days ago to look at my recommendations and it came up “Male, 23, Hertfordshire” at the side… I actually had to do a double take as I realised that I was old.

I am seriously looking forward to Christmas and having some time off work. I enjoy my job and it’s been very rewarding of late, but I am shattered and just need a week or so off to actually draw breath and get back to feeling human again.

Sorry for the short sentences and the formal style – I’ve just updated Livejournal for the first time in about two months with an absolutely massive post, and I don’t have much wordiness left in me.

It’s the Secret Santa at work tomorrow, and I have to say that some of the people upstairs are absolutely ruining it. They watch the present box like hawks, and as soon as anyone brings a present up, they’ll run over and check who it’s for so that they can make a note of who bought what for who, and hold them accountable at a later date. For those who aren’t familiar with the concept of Secret Santa, it’s where you put everyone in an office/club/group’s name in a hat and randomly draw one each, so you get someone to buy a Christmas present for. There’s a budget of £5 in our office, and the (unofficial) idea is usually to get embarassing or amusing gifts. The main point of the whole thing is that you don’t tell anyone else who you have, though – that’s why it’s a “secret” Santa and you can get away with buying some very amusing things indeed. I am currently devising a scheme where I will be able to get my gift into the present box without them noticing.

I met up with Xsara this evening for the first time in a while. She’s doing alright and looking well. I thought she’d disappeared off the face of the earth but no, I was wrong. It’s a good job I didn’t eBay the DVDs she left at my house like I was planning to…