Archive for March, 2005

Unplugged at the Roma Bar

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

Saturday morning, having a good latte at the Roma Bar on Cavenagh Street, Darwin, blogging using a Dell PDA over wifi. Just finished upgrading and troubleshooting ICA Solution’s Hotspot here. Seems to be running well; I’ll check up on it in the coming days. The Roma Bar Hotspot is one of three we run in Darwin; it was the first one we set up as a trial system, and we have another at Cullen Bay Marina, and another at Darwin International Airport. The Cullen Bay Marina Hotrspot is a user-pays system like the Roma Bar Hotspot, while the one at the Airport is free until May 2005 as part of a trial we’re running with Optus-SingTel, NEC, and the Airport. Hotspots are good; we hope to have more of them around Darwin in future.

Onward to Geekhood

Saturday, March 5th, 2005
blogpix/screenshot2

I got offered a geek job yesterday. I will be “Software Technician” with Controlability, a Darwin-based company that is developing home automation systems (among other things). Its a good job that’s come at the right time for me. I’ll be up to my ears in Open Source system admin and programming, I’ll be working with a good team of fellow geeks.

This job also confirms that I am now really a geek because other geeks recognise me (and want to hire me) as one. While I am sad to leave ICA Solution, I need to move on because of economic realities. Said goodbye to Felino Molina, my boss, yesterday and thanked him for the opportunities he’s given me. I’ll be available still, however, to do some work on ICA’s WiFi and other projects; I requested this of Controlability and they had no problem with that.

I was contemplating returning to the arts or multicultural affairs again as I was looking for work these past days. While I enjoy my current incarnation as geek, I feel that there is (so far, anyway) less purpose in what I’m doing than in working in community or multicultural arts (which I did before). Ideally I should be working to get communities to benefit from IT but there are no jobs like that here that I can find; maybe I’ll find one someday but for now I’m okay with doing commercial/technical stuff if only because of the intense training and experience this will bring. This sort of job also pays decently (better than in the arts anyway) so I’m lucky I can find work in this industry.

Well, onward to more geek things then.

P.S. It has been twelve weeks since I stopped smoking.