2nd Day @ Work
First month, I’m being assigned to the R&D department – a department which revolves around a sole product, Lansa, an IBM AS/400 product. I thought this would be interesting. That is, until they stuck me in the testing department. Documentation testing. Go through the readme files and look for typos. Helpful to them? In the smallest sense. Challenging? Ahahahahaha. Mind-numbing? Absolutely. I mean, I’m sure normal testing isn’t as bad, but since I lack any knowledge about Lansa (and AS/400s), I can’t really test anything more complex than docs. Things better improve. Here’s what a friend is doing in comparison to me:
well, right from day 1 (in fact from about 4 hours into my IT placement) i’ve been doing monthly customer reports for our network clients. this basically involves pulling in a whole lot of network utilisation and response time data from the routers, processing it with a bit of java, producing some graphs, and creating a word document that tells them that we are providing a good service to them. I’ve also been producing similar weekly reports for some customers.
apart from all that, i’m working on a java servlets program that will act as a front-end to our databases (DB2, Oracle and Sybase). The servlet will have to be able to work with any type of database table and will do things like add new records, delete records and edit records.
i’m also doing a capacity planning project for one of our customers, basically involving a whole shitload of network data that I graph, add trendlines, etc, etc, and in the end again tell them that we are doing a wonderful job for them
one of my other projects is helping to set a standard design and configuration for the servers at our USF (Universal Server Farm)…but I’ve only just started that one.
i’m also doing a whole load of databasey stuff (yes, bdm DOES help) and learning PSQL on the side.
…..and finally, i’m also helping our expert java programmer (yep, he’s the only guy i’ve met outside of our uni that knows haskell) in redesigning and rebuilding our main front-end to our DB2 database
but what takes the cake is this:
hehehe……well, you know how they took me to that chinese restaurant for yum-cha as our welcome lunch. well, about a week later, we had a christmas lunch just for the “boys”. it was at a strip-club down the road. it was hilarious watching my managers go crazy at the sight of all these naked women around us!
So, take pity on me. Brighten up my day and page me on my mobile (I don’t have a net connection at work, let alone an e-mail address) while I’m working with a message, or some obscenities… or something (message restricted to 130 chars):
9:30pm (GMT +10.00) 
