August 19, 2005

I'm runned over

A bit more than a week ago I played Paintball with the people from our company.

Yesterday another one organized a round of karting. Was fun too.

But my body shape was not entirely appropiate for the strong karts we were driving. For one I did not properly fit into the seat and was shaking around in it all the time and for the other I'm not heavy enough to press the kart onto the ground as the other drivers and I lost grip very often. Thus I was the last one crossing the goal.

Today I've a hurting back with a swollen spot which has the size of my hand.

If I can choose next time which activity our group should attend, I'll choose Paintball.

August 16, 2005

Zotob outage

This morning our company was struck quite hard by the Zotob.A worm.

When I came into office this morning, my corporate machine was shut down and when I restarted it, it began shutting down after about two minutes. Great... Time for coffee! There I met several other people whose computers also shut down unexpectedly and told me that there has been a virus alert mailed out by the company's IT department and that they're currently working on the issue.

Well, I couln't wait for them and manually downloaded the latest virus definition file for our virus-scanner, updated, rebooted and have been virus-free since that. Well, I also installed Microsofts Patch for the PNP service from Security Bulletin MS05-039 to be on the safe side.

Personally I have been virus-free on all computers I have full access to since I'm working with personal computers. Every machine I work on has a firewall and a virus scanner installed and running.

The corporate computer was only infected because I don't have full access and it is not permitted to install personal firewalls onto it, so it's not my fault :)

August 10, 2005

Dirty WiFi?

Finally I have something which relieves me from having to clean up my walls myself.

This Wi-Fi Speed Spray speeds up your wireless connections by binding WiFi scrubber molecules to the WiFi particles. These molecules then clean up the path to the receiving station.

Great, isn't it? From Gizmodo

I'm colored

Yesterday there was a great group event: Some buddy around here at work brought up the idea of playing some rounds of Paintball over at Dukes Castle.

I took the chance to experience such an event at least once in my life and for now I can say that this surely won't be the last time.

We were 22 people and split up to four teams, two 5-people and two 6-people. Then we pulled up some sort of tournament where each team played two games against each other team and the team with the most wins... well, wins.

Personally I think I've been quite successful and although we didn't explicitly make out a specific tactic in our team most rounds went the way that the other members of my team stayed back and covered the other team in colorful shots while I was going forward at the side of the playfield taking out one enemy after another.

I don't know why I've taken out much more other players than I have been hit myself. Perhaps it is either because our enemies didn't recognize me sneaking up to them or my body shape doesn't make a good target.

Well, a few times some players from a 'non-amateur' team played in the playfield and I don't think we would have had a chance of staying in the field longer than a few seconds against even only one of them...

August 5, 2005

Has consulting a future?

This article on Artima about "What is Consulting?" is roughly a collection of questions and fears which have been floating around in my head for quite a time now because my employment could be described as something like this "high-tech body shop" which Bruce Eckel describes in that blog. And I feel that pressure of the need to increase profitability and revenue almost every day. Altough this has declined a tiny bit in the last few weeks.

August 1, 2005

Weekend roundup

Whoa, what a weekend. Last Friday I was only minutes before acquiring a new car but I just missed the car-seller. He was in the weekend before I could tell him that I finally got my money from insurance on Friday noon.

On Saturday we were grilling and invited a few friends for that. Food was great but much was left at the end. Bought a bit too much, something left for Sunday.

Saturday to Sundays night a enourmous thunderstorm was going on around our house. It was like world was going down. Hailing, rain, storm, flashes... full featured of course. Then slowly beginning to settle down and back to normal rain. Going up to check the roof and suddenly out of nothing I thought US was invading us. Enourmous "explosions" on the upper side of the roof, hail returned! I could count our roof tiles breaking just by hearing them shatter. We turned on the lights around the house and saw hailstones lying around with the diameter of a bottle of Coke. Up into the roof again and we were hurrying to put buckets below the spots where the rain was coming in. Great! This storm lasted for another half hour before it completely stopped.

The next day we checked our roof from the outside and of course we found several holes with (really!) the size of a coke-bottle's diameter. Luckily everything is (again) covered by insurance.

And today I went to the car seller early in the morning, bought my new Fiat Punto HLX JTD, drove to insurance outpost, set up car-registration and insurance, drove back to car seller and picked up my new vehicle! Finally, I'm on my own again, after almost 6 weeks of car-withdrawal...