2 days into work as part-time IT executive

It's been 2 days into the job. Well, let's talk about the location of the workplace. It's in an industrial park in the north and takes 1 hr 45 min to reach there from my place. I have to take a bus, take the train, change train, then walk abt the distance between 2 bus-stops to take a bus to get there.It's pretty inconvenient and the bus fare is is ard $5.40 per day, to and fro. It gets tiring quickly too, I spend ard 4 out of around 8-9 waking, non-working hours on travelling.

Let's do a quick calculation, assuming I work 20 days per month earning around $50 per day, spending ard $9 on transport and food, it comes to around $800+ per month. I guesss it's ok for a part-time job.

The main office itself is average, neither tidy nor messy. There are faint smudges on the walls. Some boxes and stuff lying in corners. It's not too bad, some of the government offices are worse, like those IT departments in the military which I've seen when I went for interviews. There are 2 clusters of cubicles, each cluster containing 4 cubicles arranged 2-by-2. Outside, there are more cubicles arranged linearly. A very typical SME office. I saw 2 cameras hanging in the opposite corners of the main office, and I thought "Wah lao".

The worst thing is the state of the PCs. When was the last time you've seen a PC with a 486 CPU with 128 Mb of EDO ram running Windows 95? The last time I've seen them was in 2002, in the army, and I heard they were going to be replaced by Pentium 3s that same year. It's interesting to see such things in 2005, but it's a pain working on them. Yes, they are functional, but you can wash the toilet-bowl with a toothbrush too. Debian is installed on them too, but Windows 95 seems to work better, for some reason there's too much disk thrashing when using Debian.

The actual work I'm doing is quite mundane, as the manager puts it, and I agree, but not necessarily simple. It's basically a bit of everything, end-user support, maintenance and backup, administration, web designing. Nice, vague descriptions. Basically it's doing some stuff like burning CDs/DVDs, fixing printing layout problems in OpenOffice and such stuff. Main problems are using software I'm not familiar with(don't know that you can only save up to 100Mb with the unregistered version of a certain software, how to convert ISO images to other formats) and unstable equipment (CD/DVD-drives that fail on you, display problems, slow PCs). And not being very knowledgeable in the Linux shell. These don't seem to be very tough problems, though it can hamper how fast I do the job as I need to troubleshoot additional problems or google intensively for info that is not readily available.

Sending out more job applications later, hope to land a real job soon.

Korean movie - Scent of Love

I caught this show on either Channel 8 or Channel U. It seems that the reviews are not very good. The main gripes are that the movie is devoid of new ideas and the inability of the director to develop the characters as the original novel on which it is based on comprises of 4 volumes. I agree with these points, however, I find that it is still a show worth watching on two accounts.

First, the acting. In particular, Jang Jin-Young, puts up a strong performance as she grows up from a feisty student, experiences the pain of love lost, and becomes a subdued woman scarred by her wounds. Park Hae-Il puts in a credible performance as he soothes her soul with his tenderness and thoughtfulness. At certain points in the movie, their performances are so convincing that I actually felt for them.

Second, the dialogue. The lines evoke much feelings but not in an overwhelming fashion, making the movie believeable. In particular, the conversation between Jin-Young and Hae-Il as that sat on the swing was particularly heart-wrenching.

Overall, I think it was a nice movie, the cinematography and music was fitting and added to the feeling of the movie. It wasn't overly melodramatic even though the story was a sad one so the director probably handled the emotions of the movie well.

More shows to watch out for!

Recommended for the wrong job

Continuing my job-hunt, I went down to a company in the north this morning. Unfortunately I was matched for the wrong job. I was told that my job scope was Unix administration or programming. However, I was tested on assembling a PC. After fumbling around, I told the interviewer I couldn't do it. I wasn't here for this. Somewhere along the communication line, there's been a mixed up, resulting in the agency sending me down for this job.

It could have ended on a sour note, but the manager was flexible and asked me what I could do. So I told him and since he was having a few tasks that needed to be settled, I demonstrated a bit on those. I felt he was satisfied. Basically it wasn't going to a permanent job, or maybe it won't even be a contractual one, but I guess it's better than doing nothing at this point in time.

Resetting a lost WordPress password

This blog has been lying vacant for a few months now, so I've clean forgotten the username and password. That means I cannot use the password retrieval feature too. Thankfully this post got me in again.

UPDATE wp_users SET user_pass=md5('new_password') WHERE user_login='admin';