Coredump

• Work: Gone Unix-hardcore. Our team currently leads Unix training for other infra teams. Shell/Perl scripting occupies a large part of the, er, curriculum. I’m “re-learning” Perl. I’m also amazed as to how open source is being leveraged here. I lurve open source.
• Family: Prior to a change of shift sked, I go on an extended off-shift period of four days. Like, wow! What better way to start that four-day weekend than to slooowly fry in my own oil (not a nice imagery there) here at the airport. Hooray. Love the company, though, as always.
• Others: I still haven’t gotten around to reading Good Omens. Haven’t watched Harry Potter, too. (Why bother? I heard it’s not as good as the book, anyway.) And, I haven’t been online in a while. Smart 3G’s a big bummer. Been getting lots of connection errors lately. Hope it stabilise soon.

Read on and find out how writers like Neil Gaiman come up with those amazing and wonderful stories. Oh, yeah, big Gaiman fanboy here.

Look what I found lying around at National Bookstore, Cybermall:

Actually, it was waiting for me. I was just supposed to kill time, waiting for my passport photos to get developed (I looked particularly icky in those pictures).

I would have gone back upstairs to the office, but the photos would only take 30 minutes, so it wasn’t very “efficient” running back and forth like that. Well, I *did* go up before that, because I couldn’t wait for the bank teller to return to her desk so I can ask for a bank statement. Then after logging in and checking some mails, I went down again, got the statement (very quick, that one — she didn’t even ask for my account number, just my name), and had the passport photos taken.

And so… While killing time, I dropped by NBS, and there it was, this beautiful thing wrapped in plastic, mint condition. I would have promptly bought it, but I still had plenty of time, so I browsed the stacks. I found a few nice titles (Vintage epic books, retelling classics by Virgil (Aeneid becomes The Fall of Troy), Homer’s Odyssey (to The Return of Odysseus), among others. Pricey, though.), and the usual paperback sellers. But I kept ‘The day…‘ close to me, and so when the 30 minutes had elapsed, I went to the counter, paid for it, and went out to claim the photos (which looked absolutely horrible — not that I’m vain or anything).

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.)