You spin me right round baby right round

My head is spinning. My brain hurts from information overload at work. Ouch ouch ouch !

You know you're in trouble when you're cracking your brain to understand some really difficult techie stuff at work, then you leave work and go to the gym, eat dinner, go home to bed and start dreaming about solving all those complex issues at work.
Dammit! No wonder I come to work and feel like I've never left. Even my seat feels warm, probably cos my out of body experience dream self was just sitting there not long ago.

On the positive side, I'm amazed at how much memory retention there is considering 3 weeks ago, I was scratching my head like an ape with no idea what I'm looking at. Now this massive jigsaw puzzle is actually making sense and the pieces are falling into place.
Perhaps the dreams about work is my moist human brain's way of organizing and remembering the stuff that's presented to it.

The idea that people need sleep to consolidate memories has waxed and waned in popularity since psychologists John Jenkins and Karl Dallenbach first proposed that sleep benefits memory more than 80 years ago. In the last 10 years, evidence from memory studies in humans and rats, as well as research on the cellular and molecular workings of the brain, have provided increasing evidence for the link.

Moral of the story? If you can't solve a difficult problem, try sleeping on it.

Woodstock

My god, I ate one of the most crusty, savoury and mouthwatering pizzas ever this evening!

Went out with friends to Woodstock in North Fitzroy. This small eatery is as authentic Italian as you can possibly get, with checkered tablecloths, old posters in Italian adoring the walls and the well worn terrazzo floors. If you look closely at the picture on the left, you can even see a real vintage mini Italian car parked on display next to the back wall of the cafe.





The pizzaiola (pizza chef) there clearly knows his stuff. The open kitchen is simple, the ingredients are fresh and used sparingly. All you can see when you walk into this cosy place is the brick and stone oven with a crackling red wood-fire inside and the pizzaiola making each plate sized pizza by hand.




I had a pizza with porcini mushrooms and paper thin slices of porscuitto spread on top. The guys tried other variations of pizza while Steph and Thien had the beautifully made lasagne which was cooked by Nonna (grandma) in the back kitchen. This is what I really needed, a cosy dinner with close friends in the midst of winter.



After dinner, I decided to have a stay in, so curled up at home and dug into a book I'm currently reading:
If You Had Controlling Parents by Dan Neuhearth Ph.D.

Gaps in my brain at work

If you haven't already noticed, I'm sorry about the week and a half gap between the Queen's long weekend posts. I didn't have access to the Internet or the photos in the following days.

Work happened and I was flown up to Brisbane to attend a Project kickoff meeting (4 months after the project started. Which raises the question..... why now?! DUH !!!) and sit through 3 more days of brain numbing data mapping sessions with the IT dept of the company we're taking over.

Being optimistic, I'd say I understand around 60% of what's going on at work now. The pragmatic side of me however would kick that figure down to a more realistic 25%.
Dammit ! *&^*&$^
I can't help but feel that the flow of knowledge in this project is really more like a drip to be accurate.

Why the hell do IT projects love to use funky naming conventions to their systems which mean absolutely nothing?
Let me give you an example: The data migration project will perform an extract, transform and load from FACOM, FROG and PEACE into our target CISOV and MOE systems.
Seriously, what the hell is a FROG system? Does it run on worms and flying insects?
After some investigative work on my part, I found out that PEACE is a billing system. I suppose it would give the consumer a warm flower power kind of fuzzy feeling knowing that their electric bill comes from PEACE.

You know what I really think? This is what happens when you put generation X kids who grew up in the 70s in charge of developing your computer systems. Remember as a kid you used to watch those cool TV series like M.A.S.K (Mobile Armored Strike Kommand) fighting the evil of VENOM (Vicious Evil Network of Mayhem)?

Does anyone see the similarities here?




If it boils down to me having to lock up the senior contractors in a room with nothing to play with except crappy Lego and MASK figurines until they give up hoarding the information and tell me what I need to know, so be it!

Queen's birthday long weekend - Part 2

The afterparty after Hernan ended up at Adam and Thien's new apartment in West Melbourne till 7am.

Getting there was the problem. Have you ever been in a situation where you are stumbling in the cold at 4.30am and can't quite seem to see the street signs because your vision and brain decide to fail you at those crucial moments walking out from a big party? Yup, yours truly was walking around like a lost dog until Thien and Marika drove out on a rescue mission to pick me up far from the street corners I told them on the phone (FYI: Spencer and Kings are parallel streets, I told them I was standing where they met)

Somehow I got home and managed to pull together a few hours of fragmented sleep, before heading out that night to see trance Dutchman extraordinaire: Armin van Buuren play an extended 6 hour set! The theme is a White Party, so everyone put on your best white shirt and pants !


Luke and Amanda dressed up as the Ice King and Princess



A pretty interesting angle of the bridge that links Richmond to the Melbourne Park/Vodaphone Arena. If you ask me, it really looks like the view from the bridge of an Imperial Destroyer in Star Wars.



A long queue for the cloak room inside the Vodaphone arena



The view from the upper rows of the indoor stadium



Hands in the air, reach for the lasers !



A sea of white people (depending on how you look at it)



Guess who I bumped into while taking a breather on some seats upstairs; my dear friend Sarah whom I haven't seen in almost a year! We used to roll together to countless parties and gigs way back in 2003.

I love how these chance encounters happen in big parties. =)


Pretty cool video of 2 acrobats doing their thing above the DJ booth I caught with my camera

Queen's birthday long weekend - Part 1

I just had a rather massive weekend.

First up on Saturday night; it was none other than Hernan Cattaneo playing at Sunny. The South American delivered an utterly delicious set of house and progressive sounds for almost 5hrs! I always love it when the crew at Sunny throw a party. They never use any form of mass advertistment like flyers or posters , its all super secret and hush hush; spread through word of mouth and through their website the who, when and where the next party will be at.


This means no rowdy drunk people to share your dancefloor with, a clued up crowd who are purely there for the music and to see the DJ. This is what clubbing should be about!

A picture tells a thousand words so I'll let the following speak for themselves



A dark and sweaty room with a booming sound system.

Me, Katie and Chops



Janna, a regular to Sunny I always seem to find on the dancefloor everytime I'm there!


Hernan at the helm of things


Thien and Marika spreading the love


Ozzie LA, my absolute favourite DJ at Sunny, who always manages to craft an thoughtfully deep and twisted prog/tribal set. Consistency is the key here!


Katie attempting to do a tap dance with 2 redbull cans stuck to her shoes!


Hernan Cattaneo, Katie's floating head and me.

Brisbane Day 1 + 2

Up in Sunny Brisbane now.....

Day 1
Brisbane is nice! I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised despite all the 2nd hand accounts from friends telling me how boring it is over here and the food is poor with nothing going on in the city. On the contrary, I found quite a few nice restaurants for food and drink and the usual gamut of small shops and stores. I’m staying at the lovely southbank area (bigger than Melbourne’s southbank) where it’s a bit of a tourist strip with the fancy restaurants, cafes and even an artificial beach right alongside the river.

Monday went by in a blur. Straight from the airport into the office and we sat in a meeting the whole afternoon with a manager and a contractor and I could hardly understand anything they were talking about as they knew the systems we were working on much better than I did.

By night, I had dinner at a nice steakhouse along southbank before getting on the CityCat for a scenic ride up the river to Brett’s Wharf and back. River transports like these are a fantastic idea! The catamaran was sleek, quiet and fast as it nipped from pier to pier dropping off office workers, students and city folk to their homes along the river.

I stood at the bow of the boat and just gazed into the Brisbane skyline, mesmerized by the city lights.

Day 2
The 2nd day in Brisbane was crazy, I sat through yet another gruelling long workshop session which could have been conducted in German for all I cared as it sure sounded like they were talking in another language I didn't understand. True to my guns however, I diligently took notes and put on my 'I'm on top of everything' face while ignoring the sinking feeling in my stomach. (Note to self: sinking feeling in stomach might also be due to crap coffee from downstairs)

It was a welcome relief when our manager pulled us out from the meeting early and back into the office for another long meeting with him instead. (definitely better than the meeting in german earlier)

That evening, our small team from melbourne went out for dinner by the riverside. It was nice to have the tab picked up by the company and since it started raining when we were through the meal, we had not much choice but to order dessert and more wine! =)

I'll try and upload some photos if I get the time later tonight or tomorrow...

Back in Melbourne, and leaving again !

I'm still tired.

I spent most of Wednesday hurtling through the air in a tin can with wings, flying from Singapore to transit in Kuala Lumpur for 2hrs, before taking off again to Melbourne.

I hate flying Malaysian airlines. No offence to the Malaysians out there, but comparing Malaysian airlines to Singapore airlines is like comparing economy to business class. Its the small details that count, like attitude of flight staff and quality of meals. I always frown at the supposed dinner that comes with the longer flights: what looks like a small baguette with some kind of stuffing, on a Styrofoam tray wrapped in cellophane. Yuck. Only bonus points I'll give are the episodes of Firefly and Extras on their in-flight menu.

Total flight + transit time = 12.5hrs. You can add another 1.5 hrs to that with Australian customs' warm and friendly methods of screening, x-raying, prodding, poking and sniffing every bag for possible traces of organic produce and illicit materials that might harm their precious farming eco-system. Somehow that episode of the Simpsons where Bart introduces the cane toad to Australia comes to mind as a pretty funny poke at the irony involved. Read more here

Thur 9am.
I really miss the coffee here in Melbourne. Nowhere else I've tried can compare or come close. Malaysia and Singapore was littered with dozens of Starbucks which make the most disgusting coffee I've ever tasted (but my gripe with bad coffee deserves a separate post later on). I got my usual skinny cappuccino with no sugar from Spiga downstairs, was even glad to see the regular blonde barista make my coffee.

Walking into the office and I hardly gotten into the chocolate sprinkled crema on the top of my coffee cup when Vik greets me and asked how the trip was, how the unpacking was going along. Great news, he said. Don't bother unpacking because you're gonna be flying up to Brisbane next week to help the functional team do data mapping at the Charlotte St office.

Huh? What?! I did a double take and pondered on this for a minute. Then I looked out of the window to see the freezing winter wind lashing out at people bundled in layers running across the street before a smile appeared on my face at the prospect of a few days up in sunny brissy weather. A further phone conference later that afternoon with our guys up there confirmed the finer details: I'll be flying up there on Monday morning with another contractor and returning on Thursday.

Did I mention that I like my job and company at the moment? Well I do.



Almost finished unpacking......... almost there...........