Headers Already Sent

As I write this I’ve just got home from my final day at Sun. It’s hard to believe 13 months have gone by so fast and it’s safe to say I’m really going to miss all the people there over in Camberley. However, two things I won’t be missing are the £300 / month fuel bill and the 150 mile round commute 3 days a week! Hopefully in the not too distant future I’ll get to go back and see some of my friends again, possibly post graduation when I’m after a job.

It’s been a good day. We went out for a meal at lunchtime as a department to commemorate my departure, I got a few nice cards, played some pool and my boss gave me a £20 Amazon voucher which I’m probably going to pick up Animal Farm with.

I’ve now got an easier month ahead of me with university starting at the end of it. In between now and then I’m doing a little work with the webteam on the Canterbury campus and steadily increasing my alcohol intake so I’m fit for freshers week. I’ll probably try and swat up on some course material whilst I’m still enthusiastic. I’ve already started reading a book by David Butler, one of the Kent business lecturers, called “Enterprise planning and development” which is really interesting.

Onward and upward!

We had our departmental Christmas lunch yesterday afternoon which was really good fun. Not much to say other than my secret santa gift was this cool punch bottle opener thing. I tested it out last night and it works with varying degrees of success, depending on how hard you hit it, which in turn depends on how much you’ve had to drink.

Completely stoked!

For the past week I’ve been in London (Accenture Learning, Lime Street) on a training course for work, entitled “Developing Java Web Services” and it’s been very interesting. The only problem is the sheer amount of material it covers, which is hard to keep enthusiastic about after 5 days of the guy at the front of the room (literally) throwing knowledge your way.

If any one gets the chance to attend this course I really recommend it as it’ll make you an expert in XML/REST/SOAP/WDSL/SAAJ/UDDI/JAX-RPC/JAX-WS and any other acronym you can think of in no time at all.

Well I’ve done the first few days at Sun now and I’m pleased to report everything is going smoothly. Looking forward to this week because I’m hoping to start on something I can sink my teeth into.

Projects wise a few things are underway and a few more have been done (mainly Gentoo tweaking). I’ve got my router setup now running pfsense and I’ve used a spare Netgear ADSL2+ router as a wireless access point for my room. That brings our house total up to four wireless access points, three wired routers, three Netgear switches, six laptops, god knows how many desktops, about five servers and lots of random hardware. The power company certainly like us.

In other news I’ve been inspired to buy a SunRay 2 Thin Client since I learned that they have VPN support built into their firmware. The idea of coming home from work, popping my Sun Card into my Sun Ray and restoring my session is too cool for words. Shame they are

I start my internship with Sun Microsystems August 1st, so today I visited Sun HQ in Camberley and met the team.

The complex seems like a great place. The offices are lovely and everyone I met seems really cool, plus the atmosphere was nice and relaxed which is always good.

This is where the blog is going to take a turn for the geeky. Its primary focus is going to be informing people what I’m up to now I’m no longer at Uni. and it’ll also help me keep a log of what I do at Sun (mainly for my assessed report).

Therefore I have decided to stop importing my feeds into Facebook. This means my readership is going to drop to zero, but I’m sure people were getting sick of seeing new notes written by me, and no one is going to want to hear about the super-cool-omgleet-new-thing that I made Java do.

Sun, here I come!