Coredump

We had our team’s Christmas dinner at Twist (which, incidentally, was the caterer for the company Christmas party in Speedzone, The Fort, last Sunday). The food was great — loved the roast beef, and oyster (the hollandaise was a bit icky, though). And for Php500++, the buffet was a steal.

We exchanged gifts, basing on the gift registry wiki we set up. Here’s what I got:

Before the dinner, we had our year-end team performance report. Guess who came out on top. And for those endless parsing of log files and lab-environment setup, I got a rip-off iPod nano. Yay. (I’m having it replaced with a real one, hopefully. Hehe.)

Christmas gift exchanges, that is.

Here at work, we’ve also set up our own. Unfortunately, we only have until Friday to pick Php300-worth gifts for our Kringles. To, er, “facilitate” the process, we put up a wiki where we can anonymously post our wishlist and gift preferences.

I know, that takes away the creativity, but we’re so sunk in work that we’d rather do this down-and-dirty rig just to keep up with the holiday spirit.

Some of the wishes are pretty interesting, though. Where can one find a sake bottle, for example? Who would have thought of a “Bratz Petz Dogz“?

Resting in my hotel room right now, after the year-end global planning and report conference for our company.

Things are peaking up. One thing I must say about this company: it’s visionary. It’s willing to change even when the changes would mean disruption and sometimes pain. This kind of out-of-the-box thinking is what makes this company tick.

I was looking at my colleagues, some 500 or so packed in the hotel’s grand ballroom, and I can sense the electricity traveling across each engineer as the CEO laid out the company’s vision for the next five years. I think to myself, “What is it they see that I don’t?” They all seem so happy, despite all the setbacks.

Maybe it’s what turns this people on: the ability to transition seamlessly, to constantly move out of the comfort zone. Am I going to miss this? Hell, yes. But like them, I’d be moving out of my comfort zone, and explore other possibilities. This company was the proving ground for my readiness.

Hello, world. Bring it on.

Our teams (Europe, Asia, and Australia) had bowling night at Paeng’s Bowl here in Eastwood.

My group won the first two games, but went away a tad bit behind in the final two. It was a close fight, though — only 15 pinfalls short. Heh.

I was switching between a number 9 and number 11 ball between frames, so maybe that took my game hand off. (Hay, excuses, excuses.)

Rematch!

We have a secret (therefore, widely known and very popular) stash of films and TV series episodes somewhere in the office. This clandestine repository is an FTP server, which probably gets more traffic than the various issue tracking and CRM systems we use around here.

Sometimes, though, it gets tedious logging on to the server, checking for new additions, before finding out what new files to download. Good thing the pirates were sane enough to come up with a “What’s new” page in the root of the FTP server’s public directory. So, I whipped up a very simple script that would fetch this file:

#!/bin/sh
ftp pirate.ftp < <EOT
user username password
get whatsnew.txt
quit
EOT

I placed the above in a crontab, executed daily at early dawn. Then, it’s just a matter of grepping for my faves and downloading them promptly. The download could be automated as well, but it’s a bit tedious and requires more braincells than I can dedicate for this sort of work — much easier to just eyeballing what files I particularly like from the text file.