Things, Things n Stuff

So ... exciting happenings at work.

Some fairly major structural changes being proposed in my department
which will hopefully mean:

a) More money
b) More responsibility, freedom, and control

All in all, a good, if busy week.

I've been told that our beloved Mayor wants to present me with a
"Mayoral Achievement Award" recognising the hard work (*cough*)
I put into my recently passed course.
If he so wants to honour me, what can I do but accept!
Of course, I've yet to receive my tickets for said event,
and if they don't turn up, will happily forgo getting dressed up
and made to look a prat.

Long weekend this weekend, which is fantastic, really need to rest and recover.
Although madness is planned for Saturday, as myself
and my erstwhile colleague finalise our takeover plans.

Telecom talked recently about accepting the Governments upcoming Local Loop Unbundling decision, and pledging to work with other ISPs and customers to facilitate real and effective change.
I can't say this has filtered down to the people we have to deal with in their Wholesale department, but we have several meetings with them next week and I propose to bang some heads together.

Slightly better day at work today

This week did not start off well!
Some staffing issues, and a few run-ins with other departments left me feeling a bit "meh".

Was interested to see Telecom/Xtra's new Broadband offerings:

xtra.co.nz

The two main problems I can see once these are translated to UBS are:

- The need for increased capacity between TCNZ and the ISP.
- The weird contention ratio(s) they impose on the data through their network

This will once again create headaches for ISPs as customers complain they are not receiving the plan speeds.
Testing that I have seen indicates that the true maximum throughput (even using HTTP from a server right on the edge of the ISPs network) on a 2Mbs plan, is around 1.5-1.7Mbps under ideal conditions.
As the plan speeds increase this will undoubtedly lead to more customer complaints.

The way in which the users traffic is currently delivered (ATM NNI's) sucks!
It costs the ISP so much more to be delivered this way, than say Ethernet, and forces them to use some pretty expensive equipment to terminate the connections.

Once you reach a critical mass of say 3-4 STM-1's, then you can look at an STM-4 which will improve things somewhat.
If you have individual STM-1's TCNZ allocates each user to an individual ATM connection based on some pretty f*cked up logic.
This leads to you have spare capacity on one ATM while your others are maxed out.
Load balancing them is reliant on TCNZ.
With an STM-4 at least you can load balance connections yourself across your routers, and get some measure of sanity.

However that still leaves one single link between you and TCNZ with no redundancy.

Still users will shout "Hooray" until they realise that 3.5Mbps really means 2.5Mpbs under ideal conditions in a lab somewhere - then the "Fair Go" threats will roll in!

Loooong Day

I used to think Mondays were bad!

Was up at around 6:30am to attend a conference thang, hosted by one of our vendors.

Twas .. meh, partly because no one from our company had bothered to read the agenda.
Turned out to be one long sales pitch for crap we have already done better inhouse.
Breakfast was promised and turned out to be pretty disappointing.

Luckily some kind of major outage at work saved us, and we were able to leave early!

Job Burnout ?

Found this interesting link off Slashdot:

fabricator.com

It describes the syndrome know as 'Job Burnout' and the common signs of this.

From the article:

I feel tired even though I’ve gotten adequate sleep.
I am dissatisfied with my work.
I feel sad for no apparent reason.
I am forgetful.
I am irritable and snap at people.
I avoid people at work and in my private life.
I have trouble sleeping because of worrying about work.
I get sick a lot more than I used to.
My attitude about work is “why bother?”
I get into conflicts at work.
My job performance is not up to par.
I use alcohol and/or drugs to feel better.
Communicating with people is a strain.
I can’t concentrate on my work like I once could.
I am bored with my work.
I work hard but accomplish little.
I feel frustrated with my work.
I don’t like going to work.
Social activities are draining.
Sex is not worth the effort.
I watch television most of the time when not working.
I don’t have much to look forward to in my work.
I worry about work during off hours.
My feelings about work interfere with my personal life.
My work seems pointless.

Since I can identify with almost all of those statements I guess I'm suffering from it.
The problem I need to work out, is it the field/career I have chosen, or this specific company ?