NIrving

Hi All,
To those who don’t know my journey to today, let me tell you a story. Unlike most stories there are no heros, villians or magic pies, just little old boring me and my dream. I left the UK on May 30th 2003 to start my epic journey down under, to live with my fiancee Narelle, which would take me from London to New York, Miama, San Jose (Costa Rica), Dallas, Los Angeles, Auckland and finally Melbourne in around 5 days. I was on a mission to replace our Estonian Development Team with that of a Costa Rican Development Team and had to hire 5 local J2EE developers in the course of a weekend and train them remotely once I landed in Melbourne.

Within 2 weeks of landing in Melbourne I was called back to Costa Rica, this time for a little longer, but this journey almost ruined my new life with my Fiancee as I worked too hard to hand over my role to a guy called Edgar. We communicate mainly through broken English (he was not my choice for tech lead, but he was the best of a bad bunch) and the ancient art of doodles and at the end I was happy to hand the reigns over to this guy and start my new life in Australia.

I then spent the next 9 months trying to earn a living, as working on a Working Holiday Visa is a little too easy for an employee to say “Yeah your great and would suit our project nicely, but we are looking for 3 months to perm.” So instead I worked as

• a delivery guy for Ikea (lasted 4 hours until my driver drove the hire van through a bridge just a tad too short for the roof)
• a call center operator for Telstra Country Wide to gain email addresses.
• a tele-marketeer for AAPT (sorry if you got a call from, but I needed to earn a crust)
• a tele-marketerr for Fuji Xerox.

Eventually I got an interview for the National Australia Bank, where they wanted to employee me as an Analyst Programmer to develop Perl Scripts to nterface into SAP, whilst the rest of the team worked on implementing SAP. I was optimistic at first, seemed to handle the Interview correctly and then when I was finished I was escorted out one of the Interviewers said “Enjoy the rest of your stay in Australia”. I was gutted, but eventually I got a call back to say the job was mine, but I needed to pass some probabity checks. 3 weeks later I was working for the bank in a short term contract (I think I had just over 2 months left on my visa) developing Perl Scripts to convert SAP Data into LDAP for Central ID.

All was going well and then it got better when I met Tristan, as he had to go to the UK to help with IB UK for some reason. I was to take over some of the work he could not do in the J2EE space, and I got my first real development gig, extending HelpDesk and USRPA. At first Tristan was not happy that I was walking in his foot steps, but after some crazy Kung-Fu moves I won him over, and then the next day he left the project to come and work for CBIB. Needless to say during this time I needed to extend my stay and got a Business Visa with the support of my Agency and the bank because< without me apparently the sky would fall down, or something similiar.

3 changes of management later, 2, floor and 1 building move I was offered the opportunity to work in the hallowed CBIB project. It was considered the Holy Grail of jobs in the bank and everybody wanted to be with CBIB. I umm’d and arr’d for a while as I did not want to leave Central ID as it was a great team, but for me it was the best choice. That was nearly 2 years of my life in that team.

The rest you all know, and if you don’t I think I have said enough about my beginnings with the Bank. Needless to say I have had the opportunity to work with some great people, learnt some new tricks and even taught a couple myself. I think the Wiki is testiment to my powers, which is one of the inventions I wished Central ID had and is a great way to share knowledge.

Now there are a number of great people working on this project and within the Bank itself and if I was to name names I think it would take too long and be of little point. Those people know who they are and I tip my cap in honour of knowing you, the rest I give my thanks for letting me part of a great company. I am moving on to greener pastures and a couple of you may know the name of First Point Global as a number of them worked on this project.

It has been an experience for me, some highs and lows and I would invite you to Madissons opposite 500 Bourke Street from 4pm, as my old team has invited me out for some drinks. I cannot afford to buy any drinks due to reasons beyond my control, but you are most welcome as I believe Happy Hour is around that time.

For those wanting to keep in contact my email address is nirving@darkedges.com and for those wanting to ask me TAM questions it is nicholas.z.irving@nab.com.au

All the best for the future of the projects you work on.

Nicholas Irving
nirving@darkedges.com

P.S. I can tell you the secrets of how to get 100% first time on LMS, but it is gonna cost you as no matter how many times they upgrade it I always find a way to beat it.

I was riding up from Anglesea over the weekend when I was talking with Relle about some old shows that I loved to watch in the 80’s. One in particular entered my head as being something I would like to see again and I could not remember the name of it. All I could remember was that it involved kids solving crime using computers, how hard could that be to find?

First thing I found was an 80’s tv website over @  http://www.series-80.net/us/ with has over 123 TV Shows from the 80’s. Then I had to review the shows it had, and found other classics like The A Team, Street Hawk, The Fall Guy and Air Wolf. Towards the end I found what I was looking for Whiz Kids.

It is desrribed as “Richie, Ham, Jeremy and Alice are teenagers living outside Los Angeles. They are also computer hackers who worked as amateur detectives in their spare time. Llewellen Farley is a reporter who is a source for the kids and sometimes asks them for help on stories he is writing. Farley’s brother-in-law is Lieutenant Quinn who also provides the kids with help.” So next on my travels was to find a video of it, and I found some on You Tube, mainly shot from a video camera in front of the TV, and so in desperation I wanted to find the episodes online. Thank god for isoHunt as it had 1 guy with a torrent to the episodes, but @ over 7 gig in size it is a little to large to download in one hit.

Yay, IsoHunt is back. Hop over to http://www.isohunt.com/ to find out all the news.

read more | digg story

I just chose a random place in London in both maps.google.com and then decided to view it in local.live.com to see the difference.

http://maps.google.com/ vs http://local.live.com/

From what I can see there is not much in the way of difference. I do live local.live.com ability to find landmarks quicker, but I prefer maps.google.com anyday.

Today is a sad day, as my favourite Torrent Search Engine has been temporarily shutdown. It is not the end of the world as there are others out there, but IsoHunt was the best. I have often wondered how it works, never to really figure it out, as if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Perhaps I will use it as a development exercise to learn how to do this.

read more | digg story