melbourne

Coffee (or tea) is ludicrously expensive here in Seoul. Typically four and half USD, perhaps 5USD.

In Korea 5USD could buy a large meal, so it’s totally out of proportion.

I used to think 2.5AUD for a coffee was expensive in Melbourne!

They also do not serve you the coffee. They have to boom with the PA systen over the coffee house environment to announce your Latte is ready.

Scandalous.

One of the reasons I left Melbourne is that a job offer with SGI fell through. I knew the company was in dire straights, but this story on slashdot confirms it.

They wanted me to work on the interface (a Web application) for their NFS NetAppliance products.

Another small issue with my employment is that I had to be sponsored again, which can be a lengthy and expensive process for me to switch companies. Previously I had a working holiday visa that allowed me to work anywhere basically for up to 3 months. An evil recruitment agency Greythorn offered to sponsor me early in my stay in Australia and I accepted, without realising I would be invalidating my Working Holiday visa. I think I would have chosen to switch to another IT contract, rather than be sponsored if I knew the consequences.

So switching companies (to SGI or whatever) had to begin with a tiresome (for me and my future employer) sponsorship process. Big evil Greythorn actually went through a 3rd party to do this. I can’t recall the name of the 3rd party company. I had to pay for a chest X-ray and get a certificate of private medical insurance. Even though I do have a reciprocal medicare card because I am a British citizen. Sigh.

Sponsorship with one of these specialised 3rd party companies who knows what they are doing takes about 2–3 weeks at a minimum. Though as mentioned you have to find time for the X-ray and filling in some forms.

I was sick of being tied to my first sponsorship for two years and as it was so difficult to switch companies, I thought “bugger it” and hence I left Australia and I am now in Korea.

I stayed in Australia for about 9 months and if I did stay an additional 15 months I would have been able to apply for residency in Australia and been able to pick and choose my job. Sponsorships are often abusive as my employer knew once they sponsored me that they had me by the balls. There is no incentive for them to give me a raise or improve conditions as they know I can’t switch jobs easily.

I eventually tried Nintendo Internet play on Saturday morning outside Electronic Boutique in Melbourne central.

At first it couldn’t organise a game, because it couldn’t find anyone to play.

Bit disappointing.

After waiting and then retrying I managed to play a couple of Japanese (judging by their names) and a guy called “Jeremy”.

It was a bit laggy at times so some tight “turbo boost” corners were quite hard to achieve.

So in the end it fealt like I was playing some really good computers, as we couldn’t chat afterwards.

Shame they couldn’t see my jumping up and down breaking (again) my 5 year old Tevas. I guess I should buy a new pair although I would prefer an Israeli made sandal from a company I’ve forgotten the name of.

Nintendo should have a system for editing your profiles via browser, so you get to know your enemy better. I tried to put my 13 character email address as my nick. Slightly too long. Doh.

I have a lot to say about IT recruitment practices. Friends and I have been “temping” whilst travelling so I like to think I have good understanding of how the market works.

The recruiters:

• They generally do not know anything about computers
• You’re really lucky if you manage to avoid these people
• You are worth at least 5000 AUD to them
• They only care about certain keywords and years of experience in a particular industry. Make sure your CV reflects that to catch their eye.
• They sometimes forward you a copy of what their client wants in order for you to manipulate your CV to look better. Man-in-the-middle.
• If they’re nice they’ll put your CV into their format and take care of this for you. Not so nice, you’ll have to do it.
• They might get you to sign a hair-brained NDA for the client and then ask exactly what you do during a contract to violate it’s terms
• You’ll get paid via these people weekly via an awful timesheet/fax system
• Usually based out of Collins Street in Melbourne
• They won’t tell you their commission
• They don’t give a flying fuck about you
• If they sponsor you which they probably will do, you’ll have to work for them for the next 2 years and no one else. Sponsorship invalidates your working holiday visa. Great deal, eh? This will probably screw up any hopes of a pay rise.
• You’ll need to call them voice instead of emailing them to achieve anything

The company:

• Usually clueless
• Too clueless to even put an advertisement on a Website such as seek or Monster. Though those sites are rubbish. That’s why they need the human touch of recruiters.
• Usually large
• Usually have a late/overbudget/derailed project to work on
• Usually far from ideal working conditions with staff sporting low morale
• Probably high staff turnover in your section
• They don’t pay in cash. They want company invoices. You should earnestly follow them up on payment if you doing a job directly with them.
• Usually pay by the hour. In Melbourne at least 40AUD an hour. Triple the rate that for some short “on call” job.
• Want you to fill in a timesheet. They will probably scrutinize your hours or make you feel guilty for not working exact hours.
• Usually has some clueless manager/supervisor to bother you
• Loaded on painful bullshit speak – e-commerce, enterprise, portals, firewalls, security
• Really bad communication
• Will have some demented view on security
• Wants you to document stuff in Word or something stupid
• Usually they want you to use Java (if not M$!). Introduction of new (free) technologies with probably scare them
• Other employees aren’t as friendly as you would like as they know you’ll temping for something/someone
• If they want to sponsor you, they will have to pay out the recruiter

My advice is to be calm and not afraid to ask for more money and be up front about it. Because ultimately this torture is all about the money.

Every Sunday in Melbourne I go down to the State Library to read Private Eye, play some chess and perhaps give a speech outside at the “Speaker’s Corner”.

Last week I gave a speech about why Melbourne sucks.

I have given a speech on my travels, the Muslim religion (from my experiences in Pakistan) and almost did one about Organic food. I lost my notebook with the notes about Organic food, so I didn’t end up giving that one. I’ll always come up with some tirade when I meet an Organic salesman besides.

This week I was thinking of giving one about science. That’s because I fealt the need to explain evolution to many of those crazed Christians around and about, and throw in the interesting topic of climate change “denial”. It is very interesting reading Wikipedia’s article on Nuclear Power. From time to time I have to re-read it. It is definitely a hot current issue to wise up on.

I bought a (early Xmas present) Nintendo DS with Mario Kart for a 190AUD. Antoine and I have been playing wirelessly between floors in the hostel we’re staying in. I have never bought a Nintendo before and it is amazing to play such a slick game.

Though it is quite difficult to co-ordinate a LAN game in seperate rooms, as it is impossible to hop into or get instant messaged via PICTOCHAT whilst in another mode.

Paranoid: I am always thinking to myself, what happens if I find a bug? How do I update this?

We tried playing Advance Wars DS with “Direct Play” (as I don’t have the cartridge) and sadly the realtime game mode SUCKS SUCKS SUCKS.

So really there seems to be only Mario Kart as the mobile wireless game. Oh well, we have to start somewhere.

I was hoping to use the DS as a Wireless AP detector. Sadly it is nowhere near as sensitive as my Thinkpad T30. I’ve yet to try Nintendo’s WIFI service. The launch seems to have been done pretty badly. There is only a couple of hotspots in that Australian state of Victoria in places I have never heard of.

There was talk of hotspots in McDonalds. Oh well, all this “free” wifi hotspot stuff never seems to get off the ground sadly.

They must be worried that laptop users are going to leech the Free Internet.

Summer is here in Melbourne, so naturally I would sit in the sun with my favourite summertime drink.

Lemon, lime and bitters. Except there is no bitters to be found in Melbourne.

According to Wig’s Cellar on Queen street, Angostura who manufacture the stuff have had production disrupted by a natural disaster. We can only assume any one of those several hurricanes that rip up the Caribbean nowadays.

Blast.

Though there are a couple of public houses which have the stuff.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was some tool that turned Win32 laptops with a wired network connection into Access points?

I do this on my Debian system with ipmasq and an Ad-hoc configuration whereby clients just need the right gateway settings.

Another idea I had was a box dedicated to cracking a Wireless AP. Once it has the WEP key and a net connection it serves as a AP itself.

I caught the tram 64 down St. Kilda Road in Melbourne today. I picked up 542 Wireless networks with kismet. Some of them were open. I wish I could could have very quickly utilised an open connection to run offlineimap(to retrieve my email). With my current setup it is difficult to get dhclient working after after promiscuous mode.

Paying for Wireless in Melbourne is too expensive. It is typically more than 10AUD an hour. There is this 3G service that Vodafone are pimping as affordable.

50AUD a month for a 300MB cap? I get more than 300MB of mail a month.

Everytime I walk into a library I usually torment a member of staff (I don’t think librarians in the classic sense exist anymore) by asking them about Wifi. I’ll argue it should be free, like the rest of their services.

One member of staff from the State Library concluded an argument by claiming the library isn’t an ISP!

That’s irony.

So last night I’ve been paid and now I am in a spending mood.

I am having trouble deciding what MP3 player to get. I want it:

• small
• be able to store GPG key etc on it
• able to access it from my Debian system easily

I went to “JB Hifi” in Melbourne and:

• Sadly didn’t see the Yepp
• Iriver H10 6G is 396AUD and the 5G is 357AUD. It’s about the same size as the Ipod mini. Still I think it might be too big… I do like the FM radio feature though.
• Iriver T20 has a USB tooth! 1G is 242AUD. That USB tooth means I can just plug it in without additional cables into the back of my Thinkpad, straight into a USB port.
• OMG. The Ipod Nano. Drool. Although it seems to have problems with the screen. Though could it be just a bad batch? They even have black ones. They’re priced at 299AUD for 2G and 4G are 359AUD. I think I like this the most, but can I access it easily from my Debian system CLI? Someone looks like they’ve got slackware on it.

I also found out that the GB Micro will only be in stores on the 7th of November in Australia. That seems to have an add-on which can play music and videos. Argghhh! But I am not fond of these SD flash memory sticks and waiting…