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August 01, 2006
a new era
The company I've worked for over the past 11 and a half years, the company that brought me to Australia 9 years ago has, as of last night, ceased to exist. It's been acquired by a similar sized company and as of this very moment the merged entity is drawing it's first breaths. Myself and most of my colleagues are holding ours.
I don't typically blog about work, but this merger has been on the cards for a couple of months now and to be honest it's been on my mind rather seriously for the past couple of weeks. I'm fairly sure (better than 90%) that I have a job in the new company. But hey, you never really know do you? So I've been a little stressed - and that's culminated in me picking up a flu bug over the weekend (still with a rather sore throat.)
Unfortunately photography hasn't been an effective outlet. If you want to know what I've been up to, read on.
I've been spending most my spare time messing around with our TeFaux HTPC - putting in some quit fans from Arctic Cooling - I can't recommend the 'Silencer' series of VGA Coolers high enough. And the Freezer 8 Pro CPU Cooler keeps the Intel 630 CPU (a notoriously hot CPU) running 10 full degrees cooler when the PC is processing Digital TV. And it's fan is spinning around 450 RPM - can't hardly hear it. The next step is to replace the noisy Abit Northbridge heatsink/fan with a Zalman passive heatsink - that was on the cards for the weekend until the flu knocked me down.
Then there's ComSkip. Way cool little application that can strip commercials out of recorded TV. It's highly configurable and I must say it's taking a while to get it 'tuned' to Australian TV - if only all the channels here would run the commercial breaks the same - you know a nice long black pause with silence then the commercials. It would be so much easier. So I'm testing it, tweeking it, stripping commercials. Hmm, I think this is why Australian TV is against Home Theatre PCs... ha!
And I'm learning Chinese (Mandarin specifically) - on Monday nights. It's a really interesting language and is going to be hard to learn - it's so different from English. So far I'm about as far as 'hello, how are you?' and counting to 10. I haven't yet mastered 1-10. The interesting things: I'm finding myself remembering previously forgotten Spanish words - like I've woken up some sort of language part of my brain and the multiple vowel finals with 4 tonal variations may just help me finally master the Australian accent where 'beer' is a two syllable word and 'know' has like six.
Posted by yankinoz at August 1, 2006 06:32 PM
Comments
Rob, ni hao ma? Sorry to hear about the work thing. It's always the waiting that kills. Well hopefully you'll get the official word on the matter before too long. The kind of weight that stress can accumulate on one's health is nothing to be sneazed at.
Take care dude. Hope it all goes well for you.
Posted by: Wing at August 2, 2006 01:10 AM
wo hen hao. well, so far anyway. I should know more in the next 8 hours
Posted by: rob at August 2, 2006 07:23 AM
Keeping my fingers crossed for you and the job, Rob. Keep us posted!
Posted by: Will Z at August 2, 2006 08:56 AM
I just received confirmation of continued employment in the new company. more later.
Posted by: rob at August 2, 2006 01:13 PM
Rob, that's great news. I hate being inlimbo.
Good luck with the Mandarin!
Posted by: tracey at August 2, 2006 03:50 PM
A pity you're not studying Cantonese instead - we could have practiced together!
Nice to hear the job's still going.
Posted by: Andrew at August 2, 2006 10:06 PM
