Working Away!
For the x times, I was avoiding this trip to Jeddah and managed to escape (err boss.. don’t you think its too early , the infra not ready .. our project here is overwhelming bla bla..) but on last Saturday, I just knew that I will have to go — no more excuse! . “Book your ticket!” said my boss so I wrote an email for approval hours later the ticket + hotel reservation was ready. The flight was on Saturday night 10pm and I will be staying in Westin Hotel Jeddah -my very first remote assignment since I moved to Riyadh in 2006.
**Picture above was taken on my first encounter of a “jejantas” in KSA. The “Pepsi Jejantas” was located in Madinah Road , Jeddah
Last month, I was told to go for a meeting in Beirut — I managed to escape due to the short notice , later an assignment in Beirut — again I worked the magic — (I was busy with my commissioning work here in Riyadh) so it was postphoned. But once I told my boss the big task in Riyadh was completed – immediately he reminded me that I was booked for CG work in Jeddah and later integration task in Dubai. WoW!! My services are on popular demand!
Its not I’m running away from it (did I lie? ) it just that its been a while + I miss my family! — I used to enjoy it very much – staying in luxury hotel, see new places, meet new people , pulling cable, installing the hardware , watching the buggy UNIX scripts rolling down , tailing logs , sleepless night in data center — it was fun .. (of course I am referring to 7 years ago!)
But now, I think I have just to get use to it (again!)
Read MoreThe Standby
I have been customer service engineer for 9 years now and the hardest part of the day is always when your colleague walked on to you (you can feel it from a distance the sound of the footstep..boom! boom! – similar to the Jurassic Park dinasour is coming scene! ) and hand on to you the standby phone. Arghhhhh!! Why me??
It is an old Nokia model mobile maybe most of us last seen something like 5 years ago.
First thing what I did when I got it was, go to the "Call Divert" menu and change it to my number — turned it off and keep it inside my bag – thats why nobody cares to ask for a new phone -the functions used are so limited!
So there it goes, the scary part of job started. STANDBY time!
Why it is scary? I might be exaggerating but being on standby means that you’re responsible for any emergency case at any time of the hour, day and night , period.You can’t go outside town and have to be close to the phone at all time. Most important is to be mentally prepared if the customer call at 3am telling you the whole system is not working and found out later there was nothing wrong except his network cable was loose! #$%%%!!
What can be done? Other than tuning my mind into the "alert mode" I spent one extra hour, before leaving home to check our system. All processes are running , no alerting filesystem issue, oracle archive logs are not full, cluster is stable and many others. I just have to make sure everything is perfect (almost!) so that I can have a descent sleep tonight! God Help me! 
p/s Just a minute after completing this posting I have an emergency call and its 5.30am in the morning !
Read MoreThe Workshop
I was at a company workshop recently, organized for our team – such an event always anticipated for us to get away from work for the day . Anyway, I had “acid indigestion” just before lunch, lucky enough (and weird too) I have this ENO in my pocket which I bought (first time in many years) the day before so the supposed to be “good” food was rather so-so than enjoyable ( I never fanncy hotel food anyway!).
The topic for the workshop was “How to Delight Customers!”. (Yeah, sounds very much like a hot topic for Sales people). Everybody have their own ideas or definition of delighting customers – Project Managers , technical managers to engineers . The interesting part for me that day was at the end of the session- before leaving, everyone had to write their own version of plan(s) on want to do to delight the customers.
For me the best answer would be giving all what the customer wants but I am not writing that down! Need to have something better than that -not easy for me to come up with some bombastic words .. So, it took me a while to translate my ideas into words , something that (I have to admit) I was not very good at.
Finally, I wrote the following.
i) Listen more to the customers and try help them to achieve their needs (?).
ii) Help the customers to be more efficient – achieve more by doing less- by automating their work!
Skip point (i) which obviously something to start with (general ideas) and most importantly I always wanted to highlight issue (ii) to the upper management, I hope they are listening!
I will elaborate later about things that I have started doing since that day. Its quite a challenging task for me to implement these ideas on Windows environment compared to UNIX/Linux. And I found a good start later the week after, with this simple yet powerful mail tools called Blat – A Win32 Command Line SMTP Mailer
Soon lah!
Read MoreMaking Sense of Oracle
I was finally at the final day of the Oracle DBA Fundamental II class. Believe it or not, I spent 2 weeks in a class learning about database and I got this feeling that (at least a tiny part of my mind was somehow sorted in rows and columns now )
What so interesting about the 2nd week of training was, I met new friends , missed few hours of the class due to problem at site (never ever show your face at the office during your training week!) and as stated in the topic Oracle making more sense to me than before.
First, I met Vernon who was from South Africa but currently found a nice place to settle down with his pregnant wife , in Perth Australia. He’s a very experienced DBA, a UNIX guy (always had this small laugh everytime the trainer mentioned about Oracle on Windows! , hey! I did too ..) and surprisingly he used to live in Malaysia for a year in early 2000. He came here in Kuala Lumpur from Australia for the training as it was cheaper to travel from his place to KL than to Canberra or Melbourne.
And also met Kim who was later discovered that she actually working on the same building as me and also was my ex-colleague when I was in IBM- No wonder she looks very familliar!
Really glad that I eventually completed the course. Perhaps it was one of the best courses that I’ve been to for years the fact that Oracle was the subject that I feared most in my life as an NMS engineer. I had at least 3-5 criticals problem involving Oracle in this 3 years time and believe me each database failure will cause a system panic not only to the NMS system but also my internal body system!
So my plan now is to install Oracle on my Centos system, play around with it and perhaps later going for OCP.
Insyaallah!
Surviving Oracle
Approximately. 9 years ago I was in Helsinki attending a course on my Nokia NMS1000 Commissioning. It was tough for me the fact that I was a 2 months’ fresh graduate with minimum knowledge of UNIX (hey I know ls command!) , Oracle and the application itself.
At one stage of the installation (not easy everything was command line and source of installation was from a DAT tape!) , me and another British colleague were asked to clear some space in the filesystem and the suggestion from the trainer was to delete some “unwanted” logfiles. So what I did was running the “find / – name bla bla” command and walla! we found some log files.
I actually deleted all the redo logs from Oracle (wasn’t that genius??!) and then proudly showed it to the trainer. Her face turned red, she’s a blonde Scandinavian so it was very obvious – and that very moment I just knew that I was really screwed up . It took her perhaps half and hour to resolve the issue, made me felt very idiot that day but the cool part was somehow, after that I got more attention from her than anyone else in the class.
And now, years later I am here in Oracle Training Centre attending a course in Oracle (Fundamental DBA I & II for straight 2 weeks. What a vacation! ) . Most of the time, I will go .. Ohhh thats why in my work I have to do that bla bla command or My God! That was so easy I should have run this and that when I have this and that problem.
Hampeh kan? Come on man.. I am supposed to be a system+network engineer not a DBA!
But guess what, I already asked my superior to get me the exam voucher after the course so I can sit for the exam and become Oracle Certified Professional!
Thanks Saied
The picture was taken on the very last day Saied Ziaie working in Malaysia before leaving to Switzerland on 3rd June 2005. He was here for 6 months (that was half a year but yes it was too short!) and being such a good OSS mentor, a good friend to me I would miss him a lot I hope that we will meet again hopefully in Europe soon!
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The more I know, the less I understand
All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again..
