Work

Well today was the last day I was at the ex-Redcliffe City Council - now Redcliffe District of the Moreton Bay Regional Council.

Was very sad, I quite liked working at Redcliffe - excluding the travel of course.

I didn't really want to leave but had absolutely no interest in going through another amagamation.... so now I'm footlose and fancy free

Was last night and I had a blast of a time.

There was some small depression at the start and at the end, but generally I had a really really good time.

Last Xmas party ever for the Council thanks to the Amalgamations. Good turnout, good fun was had by all.

Lots of interesting re-organisation going on at my old work.

REALLY glad I left there when I did.

What a nightmare.

Oh and since I changed my hosting provider, nobody at my old work can access my website. Why? My old hosting provider was my old work, and until I cancel the contract with them they are refusing to accept DNS changes. So whilst everyone else in the world can see bloodvale.com on the correct IP, nobody internal at the old work can because it still points to the old IP.

Stoopid eh?

Well that's the mentality there, stoopid.

I saw my wife for approximately 3 hours last week

She was on early shift, so she was getting up to catch the 6:10am bus (leaving here by 6am to catch it). So she could sleep in a bit, I was walking the doggies.

I was getting up around 7am or 7:30am (depending if I needed a shower or not), but wasn't getting home until midnight+ most nights.

Monday night I got home at a reasonable time, but Corinne was feeling ill so she went to bed early.

Tuesday night I had a lovely dinner with one of my favourite ladies - Irene. Been fanging for a Cheese Fondue, and as such I couldn't take Corinne because even the smell of that much cheese would make her sick. So I had a lovely 1-2-1 dinner with Irene Didn't get home until midnight+

Wednesday night I worked late, migrating the iQ-link application to a different server / network. Didn't get home until around 9:30pm. Corinne had been told today what her bonus would be - and it's a GOOD bonus ) We're very happy with it, but unfortunately I was a tired old grumble bum and when she was playing around I growled at her Well she DID throw a small glass of water in my face when I was reading on the bed, with the electric blanket turned on :-\

Thursday night I worked late, migrating the SAM pollers to a different network (one which they should have been on since the start, but we couldn't then due to LAN routing issues). However a week wasn't long enough to get the licenses sorted, so it was a bit touch-and-go for a while there on whether we'd be able to move at all. Eventually we got the licenses sorted, but boy was that a drama. Didn't get home until midnight+

Friday night I worked late again, migrating the 2nd set of SAM pollers to a new network. Couple of f*ckups there and during the day I saw an interesting mail from one of my staf / "friends". We were still trying to get the correct IP addresses and ports sorted, and he sent off to BO OSS (my bane) saying "Glenn's at it again, as usual ...." type stuff. Bastard, absolute f*cking prick. I had asked him for these IP addresses over 2 weeks ago, and he didn't do anything about it - and now he has the gall to tell others that it's MY fault. Not very happy with that prick, to say the least. You know who you are, pull your head out of your ass and stop being such a backstabbing bastard.

Saturday was good, did some cleaning and Irene came over for a nice dinner and drinks. She stayed over and we watched some Wallace and Gromit, and just generally talked.

She left this morning, and todays just been a lazy day. Really not looking forward to the next 2 days of work, not after last weeks effort.

My staff who should have been helping me with this all along were not overly enthusiastic, and could have lent me alot more help than they did. Well that's my feeling anyway, but only 2 more days and I don't have to worry about that anymore.

Yay! I resigned today!

After some negotiation my last day will be the 31st of January.

Then 2 months of cleaning *sigh*, then home! Yippee! :-D

Yippee!

Every day I go to the work Sandwich bar on the 19th floor for lunch.

Every day I order the same thing - a Tower burger.

Every single day it's different! Different ingredients! Every day! The only thing that stays the same is the buns and the meat paddy! Everything else changes! It's driving me insane! When I go and order the same food every day I expect it to be relatively the same.

The other week they started putting noodles on the burger for christs sake! Sheesh! The other day I got 2 burgers (for the price of 1) because apparently they'd run out of the big buns so had to put the burgers on smaller buns - so they made 2 of them. Sheesh!

I've had enough. I'm going to the local Burger King for lunch from now on... I don't go to the "normal" restaurant provided because it has seating for 400 people, and there are 2200 in these buildings! So I went to the Sandwich bar which was nice and usually relatively empty - except they couldn't make the same burger every day.. so now I'm going to go to Burger King!

Sheesh how low can you go.

Well today I was lucky enough to be invited on a driver training event with one of our Vendors.

It was good, and we got a certificate at the end to say we'd been on it.

We even got to sit in a roll-car and practice our escaping-whilst-upside-down skills (after being shown how, of course).

During the day we used both cars supplied by the driver training centre, as well as our own vehicles. It was fun working in both, though a little scary when you're flogging your own vehicle!

I was a little concerned as I only have winter tyres and I need them to last me until Xmas 2005, however they appear to have worn well and there is still sufficient tread left on them to last me until Xmas.

The downside of the day is that most of it was in German and I couldn't understand a single bloody word

At first we had a 30min theory lecture - all in German. I just sat there looking dumb (as I felt) and waited.. at the end I suggested that I should leave as I couldn't understand anything of the "theory". The vendor representatives assured me it was 60% crap and it'd be ok out on the track. As it turned out the instructor we had in the morning could speak English so it was ok'ish, but the bloke we had in the afternoon couldn't speak any at all.. so half the time I was just driving around trying to copy what everyone else was doing as I sure as hell didn't know what it was he wanted :-\

Ah well, it just makes me want to go home that much sooner.. not long now anyway.

Well the conference ended early as one of the lecturers couldn't make it, so we finished at 1:30pm instead of 3:30pm. My co-worker and I went for a walk around town for an hour or so before the taxi came to the hotel and picked us up to take us to the airport for our flight at 5:40pm.

Interesting thing here, I only saw 1 set of lights with the walk / don't walk symbols. The rest, you just walked over when the adjacent lights went green.

Today when I checked in I made sure to ask if my luggage was checked all the way through

Though we almost had another stuff-up as our flight that was suppose to leave at 5:40pm didn't leave until 6:30pm. This left us with 10 mins to get from our plane to the other flight at Copenhagen (once again there was only 1 hour difference between the flights). Luckily we caught up a lot of time in the flight and landed 30 mins earlier than expected, so we had 40 mins to get between the flights which was plenty of time.

At Lithuania International airport I found some Makers Mark for Corinne as well, she was so pleased when I got it home for her ) I must say though that Lithuania airport is the smallest airport I'd ever seen - it was tiny! It was less than 50mtrs along the back wall with 1 shop in there, and we spent a good part of 2 hours sitting there waiting for our flight....

The conference was good.

The food was better

Tonight we've been on a site-seeting tour organised by the conference organisers. It was a really good, professional site-seeing tour. We toured the city in a small bus and had a tour guide point us to interesting land marks. We also stopped several times and went for walks around the city. It was fascinating stuff.

They really were under the boot of the Soviets, as I said earlier for them WWII never really ended :-\

During the rule of the Soviets many historical sites were destroyed. Stalin wasn't interested in keeping history, but in subjegating and brutally forcing people to think his way.. and if you didn't agree with his way, you were quickly and efficiently removed. Quite sad really.

Many many old churches from the 14th and 15th were destroyed. The first order would be "Close the church", followed shortly there-after by the 2nd order "Destroy the church". After this happened a few times the Lithuanian's quickly started re-using their churches immediately after they got the 1st order. So when the 2nd order came, they'd say that they couldn't as the building was being used as a musuem or art gallery or some such. That way they saved many a church.

Another interesting site is the main church of Vilnius. Shortly after the Soviet occupation was lifted in 1989 they went to renovate one of the slabs in front of the church to find all sorts of archealogical ruins underneath it that they had known nothing about! It was incredible! There were house foundations and tunnels and labyrinths and all sorts of stuff.

There's a few stories about this church, which I will relate here. The first is the labyrinths underneath it. You see the Kings of Lithuania use to be placed in crypts underneath the church - it was a prime location. Peasants got to be buried in the graveyards in the normal way, but the Kings could afford the prime location underneath the church. Unfortunately as so happens they tend to take a lot of gold and jewels with them, and it became known to grave robbers and crusaders so there was a bit of thieving carrying on. So the Lithuanian's made a labyrinth of the tunnels underneath the church.

That stopped most of the grave-robbers. Rather horribly too, as they were dying of fright / horror. Basically imagine being in this labyrinth having fun robbing away and a breeze comes through and blows out your candle. All of a sudden it's not so much fun anymore, you can't see or hear anything and you know you're in a labyrinth. Suddenly you brush up against a slimy decomposing body and die of horror.

Another interesting find near the church is related to a fairy tale. You see one of the Lithuanian fairy tales tells of a King who fell in love with a beautiful woman, however his mother (and Italian lady) did not approve. In order to avoid the wrath of his mother he had a tunnel built from his castle to the church so he could sneak out and see his beloved.

Well the Lithuanian's use to think this was just a lovely fairy tale. However once they started investigating some of the newly found tunnels underneath the church, they did find a tunnel heading in the direction of the castle so maybe it wasn't a fairy tale at all....

Some other interesting facets on this church - one of the statues on the front of the church has horns. This is believed to be a pagan influence. Lithuania was one of the last countries in Europe to be converted to Christiandom in the 1400's. However a lot of their pagan believes still shined through. This statue is one of them, the other is their Cross which is highly decorated.

In front of this church is the main street of Vilnius. Since they've become independent, they decided that after 6pm the main street would be a pedestrian only zone. How did they achieve this? Well after 6pm some poles automatically rise-up out of the road and block off the road. Unfortunately there's no warning for this and so far 3 cars have been caught on top of the poles

Oh there's heaps to know about this lovely place.. I'm gonna have RSI by the time I've finished typing about it.

I think what I'll do is cover some minor bits here and explain the rest on the photo page.

Lithuania means, in the Lithuanian language, "Rain". They have approximately 200 days of rain per year.

In Lithuania the majority of churches were built by Jesuits during the Reformation. As they wanted people in the churches, they made them fairly modest and plain on the outside but spectacular on the inside.

There is a good example of this where 1 rich main built a church and donated all his funds towards it, even when he died. His relatives (he didn't have any direct family) weren't impressed as they expected to get some money outta him when he passed away. So they buried him just outside of his church and put a placard above his grave which read "Here lies the greatest sinner". Not very nice at all really (the relatives, not the man).

Anyways after the tour we headed to a restaurant outside of town which was just lovely. Fresh seafood and everything. Unfortunately some people had some bad experiences as they put their jackets upstairs in the restaurant and had some things stolen from them. 1 bloke had a digital camera stolen (with all his photo's from todays site-seeing tour), and a lass had 250 Lita (the Lithuanian currency) stolen from her purse (not the mobile phone or the danish Krona or her Credit Cards which were in the same pocket).

If I think of anything else I'll come back and post again But there was so much to see and do...

Oh yes, I just thought of something else.

One of the Dukes previously bought up some tribesman from a remote country. They expected to be slaves, but instead he set them up in his castle as a guard and treated them as royal servants. As such they become viciously loyal to him. unfortunately now-a-days they are a dying race as there are less than 10'000 of them left and their birth rate is not high enough to sustain them.

That same Duke learnt a groovy trick from the Turks. His castle was on an island in a lake - a lake with over 20 islands in it. To get to his castle you had to use his bridges (or via boat, of course). Anyways the Turks also told him to create second bridges just underneath the water that were not easily visible. This was because if / when the crusaders came pillaging in the name of their God, they would be wearing full plate mail. If you had to run, you ran across your underwater bridges. The crusaders think the water is only shallow and charge in after you, only to sink several metres underwater because they didn't take the bridge and were wearing full plate mail. Really sneaky

Well we finally arrived. That was an adventure I can tell you.

I got to the airport in Zürich nice and early so I could try and get seats near Emergency Exits. Unfortunately the 2nd leg of the flight was in a little Fokker 50 and there were no such seats available (though I did enjoy it when the airline check-in girl said she was sorry but the 2nd leg is only a small plane, to which I replied yeah I know it's just a little Fokker ) ).

Anyways for the first leg we were in Emergency Exit seats and all was good.. however just as we were coming down to Copenhagen they announced that if anyone was travelling onwards internationally they would have to collect their luggage and re-check it in. Even though the conference was only 2 days I had some luggage as I had brought a razor and I couldn't take that on the plane.

Now the fun started, because it was then I realised that I had forgotten to ask if my luggage was checked all the way through when I checked-in. So now I was in doubt.

Once we landed I went straight and rapidly to the transfer desk - which was closed sigh

So then I went to the border police and asked them, to which they replied that yes I had to go and collect my luggage.. so I rushed through passport control (and got a stamp ) ) and ran down to the luggage pick-up area to find that the carasole with the luggage from Zürich had a 4-minute wait until the luggage would arrive.

Please bear in mind that we only had maximum of 1 hour here, and the plane was already late. I was not looking forward to this. It was now about 7:30pm and my flight left at 7:55pm.

4 mins finally passed but instead of the luggage coming out the sign changed to "delayed".

D'oh!

After another couple of heart-thumping minutes the luggage started coming out - there wasn't much the plane was over half empty. Unfortunately my luggage wasn't on there! It was now 7:40pm and I had to get back to the plane, luggage or no.

So I went rapidly out through customs, stood around looking for the way back in through passport control and eventually asking a staff member how to get there, rushed through passport control, ran back through the terminal, back through another passport control, and finally reached the gate just as the bus was pulling away!

Luckily my co-worker had warned them and he was waiting there for me. They had to send the bus back but we managed to catch the plane ok. We weren't the only ones there though, there was at least another 3 waiting with us.

Anyways the entire flight from Copenhagen to Vilnius was a bit stressful as I was wondering if my luggage would arrive. We finally got there (the little Fokker 50 couldn't fly very fast - about 500kph). Luckily when we arrived at the airport my luggage did show-up on the turnstyle, so everything was ok. It was sure worrying though.

The taxi trip from the airport to the hotel was fine as I'd already organised a taxi from the airport. We had someone waiting there with our names on a placard so we just jumped in and went.

The conference started the next day at 9am.

Got a work conference in Vilnius, Lithuania.

For those of you who don't know, Lithuania is in Eastern Europe. It is one of the Baltic countries and use to be under the rule of the Soviets. The Lithuanian's call it "The Soviet Occupation". It was not a pleasant time for them as WWII never really ended. First they were invaded by Hitler then the Soviets "rescued" them only to occupy their country in a vicious rule for another 50 years.

Anyway I volunteered to go. I'm actually looking forward to it quite a bit, I haven't been to an Eastern European country before.

When we looked at work we couldn't find any decent flights that'd get us there for the conference and home again in time. So we were expecting to waste most of the week in Lithuania as the only flights we could find would have us leaving early on Monday and returning late on Thursday - even though the conference was only from 9am on Tuesday Until 3:30pm on Wednesday.

However our travel agent managed to find us tickets that weren't too bad. We leave on Monday at 5:40pm and get to Lithuania at 11pm with a quick stop-over in Copenhagen (Denmark) from 6:55pm => 7:55pm. There weren't any direct flights from Zürich to Vilnius so no matter what we had a stop-over.

All is sorted now, we pick up our tickets at the airport on Monday.