Toby's journal

Be hungover.

Ouch. Given that I was starting the first day of my new job this Monday, I had planned to have a healthy and quiet weekend. See some friends, have a couple of drinks, that sort of thing.
What actually happened was, I ended up going out drinking (reasonably excessively) for four nights in a row, Thursday to Sunday. This morning was *not* good. I was quite nauseus.
That was really stupid of me.

HOWEVER.. I did have a great time out last night at battlekitty's birthday drinks at the Mucky Pup, and was joined by Nick later in the evening.

The other good news is that my first day at work went well. I'm quite excited because although I knew roughly what stuff they already do, I've now been told about a new couple of projects, which are really nifty.. and they'll be my focus for a few months. It's some clever ideas, some neat tricks, and stuff that I honestly don't think has been done before. Hurrah :)

Plus, the office is nice to work in.. it's quiet, roomy, and has big windows. I'm still waiting for my dual 19" flat panels to arrive for my workstation though.


it's good to feel enthusiastic and motivated about work again.

So, yesterday I (just about) managed to get up around 5:30am, and stagger like a zombie to Kings Cross to get the Thameslink to Gatwick airport.
Predictably, the train was held up for about 15 mins between Blackfriars and London Bridge, but I arrived at the airport with enough time to check-in and look amazed at the cost of sandwiches for half an hour before boarding.

At Dublin airport I found the correct bus-stop (according to the directions I was given), and I asked the ticket guy if there were multiple routes, or if this "CityCoach" just had the one route. (ie. into town). He said there was only the one route, so I bought a ticket and got on... an hour later I asked the driver, and discovered that actually there were several routes, and this was the wrong one. Oh dear. Hopped off, caught a taxi, and eventually arrived at Google HQ, about 20 mins late. :(

The interview process after that was quite full-on. I just sat in the little interview room, and the interviewers came and went, swapping over tag-team style.. I didn't really get to do any "meet & great" or see the building much, apart from a 10 minute break to grab a sandwich and juice from the cafeteria.

The questions were all technical. Some were along the line of "write a C program to perform this algorithm" and others were more like "You need to diagnose a fault X, how would you go about it?". The latter were interesting, and a lot more fun than writing little programs on a whiteboard.
I think I did reasonably well at all these tasks, and did best at the problem solving/diagnostic sorts, and Perl/BaSH coding.
I think I enjoyed it overall - it was a demanding day and I felt a bit worn out by the end of four hours non-stop, but it was challenging.

The journey back to the airport took forever; I was sitting in a taxi for at least an hour in slow traffic, watching as the weather alternated between bright sunshine and snow flurries.
Dublin's airport has extremely expensive food! I ended up getting a slice of re-heated pizza for about €6, as that was about all I had left in cash.

Slept a bit on the flight home, then headed into Chinatown to meet Karl (friend from Adelaide), who was out drinking with some colleagues of his, down from Glasgow for a few days. Ended up in The Ship for a couple of drinks, then headed to Garlic & Shots for another couple, before we both called it a night.

I ended up home by about 1am, feeling rather the worse for wear. Slept.

Bother. So, this morning I went to start the Hornet, and found the battery was flat. It wasn't quite as flat as last Sunday, as at least the starter was *almost* going, as opposed to being totally dead. However it wasn't enough to start on. I tried push-starting it in the pouring rain, but didn't succeed.. the wheel just locked up when I released the clutch, thanks to the slippery ground. I didn't want to try too hard for fear of dropping it, too.

Damnit, I guess this means the battery is knackered and couldn't hold a charge*. I'll have to pick up another on the weekend. They're not cheap, and I don't want to be working on the bike in the rain :/

Meanwhile the job stuff looks promising.. I'm being invited back to meet the rest of the development team next Thursday, and meanwhile there are discussions going on with the CTO and CFO of the company to get them to extend the wage up to what I'm demanding. We'll see I guess, but the team leader seemed hopeful.

[*: I know that the bike itself is charging fine; and the battery was able to hold a charge for a few hours after being charged up. Maybe I should take it out and charge it overnight indoors on trickle and see if it helps it recover a bit.. although frankly I'd rather replace it than be worried it'll give up the ghost at a less convenient moment..]