Το φιτρί αγόρι (colourful life)

Today is my first day in a small internet travel agency in Greece. I left my job in a big ISP saving the world and some manager’s arses. Small company, quiet environment, small PC, and everything is done with windows and Microsoft tools.

Visual Studio, as always, impressed me with new tools that help a lot. But as always too, I could see the the not so good way it has to organize the code. Even I got scared when I saw the code for the automatic templates generated for asp web pages. Nothing is perfect.

Also I started to suffer the first windows problmes. In this case “I couldn’t open a .chm file”. So if you see in your windows a message like the one in the pic when you open a .chm file. Just modiy or create the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001

All credits for this go to Ken.

So I hope I found a good place to work, and not another ISP chaos place.

Sorry picture lost :’(

Today the system administrators played their part. The image you see above (edit: I lost the picture, sorry), is the example of what happened with all webpages that we (developers) visited today. They were making fun a bit with the “transparent proxy” we use when we browse in the office. All the webpages we browse pass through that system so they are able to modify whatever we see.

I was lucky in the beginning because I changed my network card and they didn’t know my “who I am” in the network. But it didn’t take much for them to check why I was browsing “normally”.

One sysadmin told me that there were two options. To turn the images or to translate the text into leet (and have something like this).

Thanks god they disabled the trick before uploading the above picture. I don’t want to imagine the rotation (to upload) and rotation (when watching it) of the poor pic

It’s the first hour of the Saturday and I’m still awake listening to the rain beating on the floor of my alley.

It’s late but I’m still finishing some “job” tasks. This happens when you go commando in programming (but with underwear), and if everything goes well you´ll only make another 4 extra hours, but if something fails you´ll be doomed. A 7 instead of a four made me to stay until now connected (The good and the bad of the Virtual Private Networks).

As always I leave my Blog a bit abandoned. Some times it’s because the lack of free time, but other times it’s because I’m lazy. Not in the mood these days to do much.

I’m still in Athens and still working for that marvellous company who helps me to pay the bills every month. The good of working in a big IT company is that:

• You learn how to move between multiple manager levels.
• You can play the hot potato game with the problems. There is always someone to forward the email.
• You improve your skills in how to solve problems quickly.
• Your definition of dirty coding changes.
• Yeah, it’s my first job here, so it’s experience for my résumé.
• I have in the office 2×20″ screens, making a total resolution of 3200×1200 pixel.
• You save the company with your skills.

The bad:

• You learn how it feels to arrive home at 2:30am after all the day working.
• You receive hot potatoes and you run out of addresses to forward them to.
• You improve your skills to solve problems quickly and in a dirty way.
• You forget about good coding.
• You realize that your résumé needs the experience, not you.
• It tooks 3 months to get a computer.
• After you saved the company. You don’t see a part of the profit.

About friends and life. From time to time I meet the “International Pizza” to go for ouzo and food. The “International Pizza” is a mix of greeks and foreigners who meet to have good time

As objectives to accomplish:

• To learn Greek. C’mon! One year here and I cannot speak it. It’s not so difficult.
• To go to the gym. And also add an excuse to escape from the office.
• To continue some personal projects/ideas. Not only talk about them when going for beers.

And from here send greetings to:

• Sascha, Panos and the International Pizza.
• Kat, her mac, and her 1001 stories. Life is long but I guess she lived twice or three times more experiences than anyone.
• Nazgul2, from Palencia but working and living in another two different places.
• Graci, and his amazing adventures in Belgium.
• Alberto, and his never ending PhD problems.
• Seattle and Andoni, or the two guys who got the job they were waiting for.
• And you, who are reading this.

Note: Believe me if I tell you that I pressed the publish button like 5 times, and 5 times the post appeared in the front page. Then I leave, check the next day and It’s not there. Grrrrr.

The image speaks by itself. 3 o’clock and 6 people in our floor. Using the snow as an excuse, almost nobody came to the office today.

The good of this massive absence is that the office is quiet. No phones ringing, no people speaking loud or interrupting your work. Only the noise of CPU fans and some people teetering their fingers on the keyboard.

Enjoy your snow day off

I guess it’s time to write something for all those friends that have a link here or even have me in their RSS feeds. At least to listen to this heartbeat and understand that I’m alive and I haven’t died abroad/here (choose the right for you).

I’ve been 2 months working in an ISP here in Athens. Despite the big company and the really good opportunities I still don’t have a workstation. In fact I have only a box and something you can name “screen”, but no keyboard, mouse, mouse pad or power cable. I work arround 55 hours per week and I get paid for 40, and even with that my work doesn’t get a defined course/direction/objective. Each week I end up tired and blaming myself for being so stupid and not doing anything, but each Monday I find a reason to continue (that gets destroyed by Tuesday/Wednesday).

We don’t use any kind of software engineering process, even we do not document a word (as a rule, lucky you if you find a comment). And we don’t have a really good plan to organize the work: you’re supposed to end an important project for the company one day but at the same time they do not hesitate in changing that idea to: fix something, develop another thing that has been in the shadow for weeks, or answer pathetic emails (pathetic but really really funny). The last thing that scared me is that the managers are trying to define their business logic from the software. I shouldn’t be the opposite? You define the logic and then build the software to support it.

Last week while I was blaming myself for being so stupid to accept those conditions I received a call from another company. I went to the interview and even for the same money (a bit more)… surprise, they don’t do overtime and if we do we can exchange for free time…. But for some of my managers “those companies doesn’t exist” Yeah! the reality of the coder that became codeer (because I cannot call that engineer). So even if now I live 3 minutes far away from my office, I plan to move to a new job 45 minutes far away. Am I stupid?

But I guess I should not come here only to swear a bit about “bad things”. This is also a nice space to talk about nice and great things. Like my small apartment I’ll post more pictures but this is me enjoying the IKEA sofa-bed (yes! you can come to visit me to Athens!) that took 3 weeks to arrive. IKEA sofa with IKEA tables (the 3 you can see), IKEA chair and library. (No, the notebook is not from IKEA, they cannot do something so good). Stella helped me a lot with the house, so this is her space to receive (another) big EFXARISTO!

I expected the search of a job in a different country to be a difficult task. And it was. I was almost two months sending CV’s. In the beginning, the July/August period (vacations), made the things more difficult: no one was answering. After that, I had a week of interviews, but with not so much luck. Thanks to www.kariera.gr for their webpage (that don’t work really well with safari).

I made some expectations about a job in a travel agency named <censored>, but after developing some kind of test application to evaluate me, and send it to them, I lost contact. So I suppose I was tricked to fix a problem they had for free. Too many mails that “were lost” and calls telling me “we haven’t received it”. But it was uploaded in their servers and they closed my account. (Still you can see it here, last cheched on 25/09/2007, and the url it’s not the name of the company ).

After this slap in the face, I made 3 interviews in one week in “an Internet Service Provider” They went really well, and it seemed a nice place to start my career in Greece. They forgot about me during two weeks, but they called me on Sunday to start on Wednesday, and on Tuesday I was there with a minimalist contract in Greek and ready to sign.

I felt a bit pressed, because I didn’t have the opportunity to think about it, and also ask my Greek friends about if it was complete or not. But I signed because it seemed a good opportunity.

The first strange thing was that nobody told me when to start, even when they called me to confirm if I could start on a specific day, they didn’t say anything about the time, and I had to ask. And still now I have to “ask” to leave, well, I can leave whenever I want but… I guess that if I do my 8 hours and leave the people will look at me really strange.

Well, yesterday (24/09) I did 14 hours here (and I’ll get paid and today(25/09) I’m doing arround 13. Of course each day day more tired, and working more slow. To do the same work, it takes more time, and you end up leaving late (everything starts again).

The good thing is the people. They’re very friendly and they can help you to find the right path if you’re lost. But even if all of them are lovely… I don’t know if the company deserves this effort.

I hope to write again soon