past week summary

wow...the past week was hectic. ran into some bad luck as well, but still ok la...

about the bad luck, what happened was this. we are given one hour to have lunch. last monday, i went out at 12.30pm to eat. i came back to the office with another 10 minutes to spare. so i punched my card (bad move) and proceeded to the pantry to read the papers. i was already feeling weird at the time. i don't know what it was but there was just a bad vibe going on in the office at that time. i didn't care much about it, and concentrated on reading the papers. suddenly, i heard a loud voice calling out for sim, my colleague. i turned my head towards the origin of the voice and to my horror, my boss was there! in a split second, i saw my supervisor was looking at me in a strange way and i quickly folded the papers and went to my workstation. (if you were wondering, my supervisor did warn me about the boss' dislike of seeing his employees browsing the papers, be it after work or during lunch time). on my way there, my boss caught my eye and asked how i was doing and whether i learned anything. my heart was beating fast but i managed to reply that i was doing fine and i did learn something. then he summoned my supervisor and asked him what i was working on. luckily, there was something i was working on, or i'll be in deep shit. my supervisor didn't say anything to me after that, but i guess i shall stop reading the papers in the office.

later that day, another colleague hinted me about something, something which sounds bad, but so far it has not happened, so i think i'll need to watch my behaviour in the office.

on the bright side, i had the chance to go out of the office and go work on site. i was to learn how to do a site survey (climbing on rooftops to check the quality of the wimax signals) and install wireless access points. at least i have something to do and learn instead of being in the super cold office! dammit, it's getting colder and colder. i'm practically shivering despite wearing 2 jackets on top of my shirt.

oh yeah, i also saw the ugly side of the business world. see, this cabling contractor asked our team to arrive early on the site we are working on, and so we did. he arrived soon after, but he didn't bring anything. no drills, no pipes, no nothing. he just looked around at the place and finally decided he couldn't do the job. not only that, he had the guts to ask us to do the cabling works although he was already paid in advance for his services! to rub salt to the wound, he left after a while, claiming that he had another customer that he had to attend to. my team was like, what the fuck? we went to the place for 2 freaking hours, skipping our lunch, bringing all sorts of equipment (which is NOT light) and he just went off like that to attend to another CUSTOMER? are we not his CUSTOMER as well? my collegue got so pissed off at him that he said he will make a formal complaint to the contractor's superior. too cool off, he said he wanted a good meal, and he knew there was a t.g.i. friday restaurant nearby so off we went. the best part is, they treated me to a nice meal...it was so satisfying...not only that, i get to hear some juicy gossips, and some of their work experiences. a nice way to end my working week indeed...

first on-site job

last friday was the first time i went out during office hours to do some wimax installation. it was kinda fun yet funny. fun in a sense that i got to learn something and play around with the other 2 guys and funny because the 3 of us were rookies and did a lot of mistakes before we completed the whole thing. another 2 guys came over later to join us for a late lunch. they joked a lot and somehow, i felt like i was part of the team. at least they don't treat me like an outsider just hogging a place in the office.

the weekend was spent back in melaka. didn't feel like going back at first because i might be going back again the next weekend to take my car up. anyway, i managed to meet up with a few friends for yamcha. felt bad for jin who did nothing related to IT during his training. his office hours is from 10am to 10pm and there's no allowance! he told us that what he do is deliver furnitures, carry furnitures around and doing sales. that's bad.

good news and bad news...

we had a small meeting today in the office pantry and i was some what happy and excited to know that i'm allowed to follow the other colleagues when they go on site to work. this means i might actually learn a lot of stuff!

the downside is, i might have to work long past my working hours as there is no specific time limit to finish the job. there's one instance, which was on the day before i start my training, that they had to work until 2.30am! other than that, i might get a tan by working under direct sunlight.

another thing which i was not so thrilled about is the possibility of me working in shifts! the earliest time to work is 6am and the latest time to go back is 12am! it gets worse, the 2 off days are not back to back, which means i can't go back to melaka if i wanted to! some of the people in my workgroup is already subjected to work in shifts, and i'm still working from 8.30am to 5.30pm because, plainly, i don't know anything!

un-happening weekend

things have started to normalize a little bit for me. yeah, i think i've settled down a bit, just that the lack of transportation is still a big problem. it came to a point where i'm really embarrassed to ask my friends to fetch me around, especially when it rains.

last weekend wasn't such a happening weekend for me. was supposed to go to the computer fair but decided otherwise since my friend told me it was a failure. still, i went over to low yat plaza and bought a new casing, power supply unit and a dvd burner for my pc. tit hian was kind enough to install the components for me. now i can burn out all the downloaded stuff which fills up my hard disks and delete them off, so that i can download new stuff! well, first i need an internet access...which is a luxury i don't have in my rented room... *sigh*

i started to get along with my colleague as well, at least i have talked to everyone in my workgroup (network engineering), though still not much talking on the other side of the office (the customer service and tecnical support department). however, jeffrey seems to be very busy and hardly talks to me...

i forgot to mention this but...

I MISS CLUBBING!!!!!

it's saturday dammit!

and then came the project...

finally, i've been given a project to work on!

the task is to implement a network traffic monitoring software on the company's routers. this is to enable us to check the traffic situation on a particular router. the software is able to monitor the router's inbound and outbound traffic and a few other stuff. what this means for the network engineering department is that they can pinpoint exactly which link is down and rectify it soon.

i don't expect this to be completed so soon because it runs on the linux platform and i'm not really familiar with it. there will be a lot of messing around with the settings and configurations and all but i'm kinda excited about it. although the linux OS has gone through a lot of improvements from the command line interface days (it's available in GUI now), there's still a learning curve to it. i've always wanted to learn about linux operating system and now is my chance. the problem is, i'm required to do a full documentation of the implementation so that if something goes wrong, someone else would be able to set it up from the scratch.

part of me felt proud because this is something the company will be using in the long term. and it also helps developing my skills in the networking area which i am majoring in. i'm not sure if this will help in my final year project, but at least it's something new for me to learn!

that being said, there won't be much blogging around in the office. and today was an exception because i'm feeling a bit lazy as it's saturday!

decisions...decisions...

it's 9.39am here and i'm in my office sitting idle again. looking out of the glass windows of my office, i can see swallows flying around. almost overslept today and now i'm feeling kinda moody.

isn't it weird that sometimes you just have something good which is within your grasp, but you overlooked it? i've been in this kind of situation before, and however hard i try not to feel regret about it, i do. most of the time, i settled for something less and realise later that i've made the wrong choice.

i'm bad at making decisions. i'm not an optimistic person, not really pessimistic, but realistic. i know chances of me striking first prize in 4d is close to nothing, yet everytime i bought a ticket, i hope to strike at least a consolation prize.

my decision to come to kl for my industrial training may be something i might regret later on. to be honest, it was nothing as i expect it to be. knowing how others are coping with their training just made me feel..envious.

email

data communications and telecommunications. computer networks. these are the 2 subjects which i scored lowly for. maybe because there's a lot of topic to be covered for the trimester. or maybe i'm just tired of learning all the theory stuff without actually practising it....until now.

now that i've started my industrial training, it became clear to me that these 2 subjects are the most important subjects when dealing with networks. luckily i haven't forgot them all, though i'm still having a grudge at the lecturer who taught me computer networks. that being said, i'm hoping to learn more things about networking so that i would at least have some skills when i graduate to land me a job.

with the advent of instant messaging, i've totally forgot about the functions of an email. when i first started using the internet some 9 years ago, (wow..that long already?) email was the only way to communicate almost instantaneously. free, web based email started to pop up everywhere and people like me, signed up for a few mailbox. those days, yahoo was the hottest search engine, and hotmail was the most popular free email. when yahoo finally launched their free email, i promptly signed up for it and i've been using it ever since. that's like almost 8 years ago!

my mailbox has since been used to send files and forwarded mails instead of using it for communications...until recently. with no means of using instant messaging programs, i've been using email as an ad-hoc instant communication tool. here i am, chatting in the office with my friends from penang and somewhere else...

cold morning

it's cold in the office. really cold. i think they keep dead bodies in here. and i can't think of what to post...

sleep deprived

i complained about not having work to do yesterday and right after i posted up the blog entry, i was told to go the the other office at plaza mont kiara to help out. my supervisor called me up and asked me how i travel to work and whether i have a transport. he was shocked to find out that i walked to the office as i was just staying nearby. anyway, i think he needed help desperately and called a colleague to send me there.

arriving at the other office i helped out a programmer with his documentation. he needs to edit a lot of the documents and the deadline was today. at first i thought it would me easy, but i had to do a lot of corrections and re-do because he wants to standardise all the documents.

halfway through, we went out for lunch and he paid for me. maybe he felt bad or something but i did have to stay back way past my working hours to finish up the job. he offered to send me back earlier but i just felt like finishing it up for him. i don't really mind because i find him to be quite friendly and not because he treated me to a lunch! futhermore, he is also a graduate from mmu! he took down my handphone number and promised to contact me if he's down in malacca. another female colleague sent me back and we have quite a little bit of chat about the company and my boss. *wink* and so i reached my room at around 7 something before going to dinner with edmund and tit hian. soon chern arrived after we finished up our dinner and we waited for him and chatted a little.

i was so tired when i reached my room that i felt like sleeping straight without bathing. in the end i watched a few episodes of friends and head on to the bathroom. then it was back to friends again. 2 episodes later, i decided to call it a day. but i couldn't sleep! maybe i was not used to the hard matress, or maybe i did not have a bolster to hug on. i don't know what time i finally fell asleep, but i woke up in the middle of the night because there were mosquitoes feasting on my blood! sigh...

this morning i came into the office and was taught how to configure a wireless access point, which i read about yesterday. it was quite similar to a router, just that it's wireless. managed to set it up within a few minutes and by this time, half the networking department was gone. sim then told me to read up on wifi and prepare a presentation...

so i surfed the net for some wifi stuff (though i already know half about it) and stumbled upon a article about the history of sith lords (from the star wars movies). i finished reading it and now i feel so sleepy! to keep myself awake, i decided to blog.

i can't wait to go back to malacca tonight and have a good night's sleep.

boring morning...

just over 2 hours since i've been in the office and i was give 2 big stacks of manuals to read on. it's about how to set up a wireless access point and i am going to configure one later on. it's freaking cold in the office right now and i'm feeling so sleepy! didn't sleep well last night because i was constantly stung by mosquitoes. need to get something to repel them...

i called up a few friends last night and asked them about their first day experience of their industrial training. seems that most of them had nothing to do as well, but some of them had plenty of work.lay wei's company even allowed them to chat online! how i wish i could do that here. i'm starting to feel a bit lonely...

last night also, my sis sent me a message telling me my grandmother wasn't feeling so well. i didn't gave much thought on it until i found out that she was in fact suffering from a stroke. a bit worried about her condition but i had to wait until this weekend before i'm able to visit her.

well, time to get back to the manuals...

industrial training: the 1st day...

it's my first day of industrial training and i haven't been doing much. i came into the office quite early, thinking of surveying the office, but turns out, there wasn't much to look around. the first thing i notice about the company is that both their offices are located on the top floor of a building. let me describe the office a lil bit. the entrance to the office is just a really small door, just like a typical room door. it was nicely painted with the logo of the company, with a lime green background. to enter, an employee must first scan his/her id card at a terminal, something like the touch n go system they use in highway toll collection. the difference here is that you have to key in a PIN code after scanning your card. once you enter, you are greeted with...yet another door, though there's a small area with a table and some chairs. this is where the employees discuss things with their clients, instead of letting them into the office. to enter the office, you need to scan your card again at a 2nd terminal, but this time, no PIN code. i don't have an id card, and i doubt they would give me one, so i just have to press the doorbell whenever i need to get in. and since the toilet is outside of the office, i would have to borrow some colleague's id card whenever nature calls.

once inside, you are able to see the whole office in one glance, surrounded by glass windows overlooking the petaling jaya area. you can clearly see the menara telekom, klcc, and kl tower from the office! anyway, there are no cubicles, just tables with laptops or desktops on it, and they are all joined together. so you can see everyone when they are sitting down and working. basically the office is divided into two parts, separated by a row of cabinets which contain manuals and documentations. on the left is the networking department, whereas on the right lies the customer service department. the pantry is just a small table at the side. on the networking side, most of them are using laptops provided by the company. this is because they need to bring it along whenever they go on location to set up the wireless access points. i understood that they usually work outside, and spend time in office just for paperwork. over at the customer side, well, their job is to answer calls from customers, so everyone of them uses a desktop pc.

around 8.30am, most of the staffs are already in, and we had a small meeting, which is a normal practice for them. i was introduced to all the staffs, and it seems that there's a new permanent worker today as well. after the short meeting, i was given a space at the office, which will be my working table for the duration of my training. not only that, i was also given an IBM notebook (not to be taken back of course, use in office only). as this is the first time they are taking in trainees, they are not really sure what task they should assign me to. after sitting idle for a while, my supervisor in the company, jeffrey took out a router from the storeroom and asked me to configure it to the company's LAN. i've never really tried configuring a router before, but i have seen people doing it. yet, i wasn't able to configure it properly. all those theory i learned in lecture goes down the drain and i asked for help for a few times, before finally getting it right. and i was able to go online. after accomplishing my task, i was left sitting idle again. so i checked my email and surfed around, before a colleague asked me to read up some documentations. i soon got bored and started looking around. it seems that they are having some projects going on, and they need to finish it up soon. by noon, 90% of the networking staff is already gone to do their work on site, including jeffrey. another colleague, gavin, which i became quite close to (maybe because the age gap isn't that wide), told me that, the night before, they had to work on site until 2.30am to set up a wireless internet access point. because the said place wasn't closed for business until 10pm, they couldn't start setting it up earlier.

on another note, i felt that gavin's face looked bloody familiar. i wondered if i've seen him anywhere. and then at lunch, i realised that he's the guy whom i saw during my interview for internship. he was there for an interview as well, but he's applying for a permanent job. he has only worked here for the past 2 weeks, so he hasn't been assigned off office job yet. we talked quite a bit during lunch, and he seemed like a guy i could really click with in the office...so far. he's into the movies, pc gaming and also...CLUBBING!

it's already 3.57pm as i was typing this, and i guess i won't be doing anything else until it's time to go back to my rented room, and maybe eat dinner with edmund...