How are you today?

I'm fine, thank you.

A simple good question to ask when you meet someone be it in the office or on the go. The weather is getting hotter, and the haze seems to be back, although not as serious compared to years ago.

Few days back something bad happened in Bangkok, a disaster struck, some people were hurt. This is not good. Why would there people who wants to hurt other people? There are many questions that need to be answered. Life is short, we must learn to treasure it, especially if you have your own family with children. Nothing is more important than caring for your loved ones.

The sign

There seems to have some tell-tale signs that something is coming, the ministers are coming out talking, the opposition are talking. The MPs are getting busier. There are also new faces visiting the neighbourhoods. There's rumour saying the GE is coming on 12 or 19 Sept. I'm not sure about that, unless it's confirm by the ACE of SPADE.

Somewhere up north, things are not doing well for the top ACE, too many bad rumours and stories spreading around, are they true or not, no one dare to confirm. Hopefully one day, things will be clear.

Politics are complex, involved many people, no one can totally trust anyone, not even if he or she is close to you. In a work office, it's not uncommon to hear about people back stabbing each other. Everyone knows about office politics, but most are just playing along, no big deal. Keeping an open eye, be vigilant, remain focus with your job, that's the key to survive in the hectic and sometimes chaotic and cruel corporate world.

Try to bake something

Recently, I tried to bake some bread and cheesecake, well how difficult can it be? just follow the manuals and instructions, and then do it.

Ha ha...it's not easy, really. My first 2 tries on making baguette didn't work as expected, they look like one, but they are just too hard to be eaten. I also tried to make cheesecakes, just the normal ones, nothing fanciful. The first one tasted more like baked cheese, the second one, which I tried last night, look more like one, but it was flatten out, it didn't "rise" up like that kind of cheesecake you get from a bakery.

Something just seems to be not right, is it the flour that I'm using? The temperature? The Oven? I don't understand. I just hope that someone can enlighten me on this.

Expect heavier workload

Coming to the end of June, almost half year 2015 gone. This Sunday, there will be 2 major upgrade activities, one would be front by another of our senior Unix admin, and the other by me. Interestingly, the overall OIC is staying home, waiting for our updates, while we are working hard over the midnight and afternoon.

This month was also quite disappointing, while we got our bonus, but one thing I had expected didn't come, a promotion which would have uplifted my moral. Sadly, after so many years, it seems the bosses don't see me fit for one. It's ok, life moves on. Maybe if there's a better opportunity, I will grab it.

David Letterman's late night show

It has been quite sometime since I last watched the Late show with David Letterman. I remember many, many years ago, it was one of the rare late night American shows that I used to watch, so do my friends, when we were much younger. Sometimes, I may not understand American's humour well, but, it was still funny, you know? It finally ended, David will no longer appeared on his show anymore, he will be missed, definitely.

http://www.thewrap.com/david-letterman-last-show-social-media/

If time can roll-back

If ever time can roll-back, I wish I had got married earlier and live happily in a family with many kids. Most of my friends and peers were married younger than me, and their kids were already older.

Work had always been my priority when I started working. I was ambitious and don't care less about my other well-being, but not to the point of bulldozing my way out of any situations and hurt people. I have always been nice, I guess too nice, trying to help people when they come to me.

Time passes fast, I remember the time on 11/9/2001, I was in the office's pantry checking at the CNA TV news telecast on the Sep-11's WTC strike. Then it was in 26/12/2004, the Indian Ocean Earth quake and Tsunami that destroyed lives of many people. The SARS from 2003 to 2004. The global economy crisis of year 2008, pay freeze,...and may other things happened in the last 15 or so years.

Recently, a news article touched many people's heart, including me, it's about a young toddler becoming the youngest person to be cryogenically frozen - http://yourhealth.asiaone.com/content/thai-toddler-becomes-youngest-person-be-cryogenically-frozen

As human, we always try to look at the bright side of things, hearing nice things, eating good food  and wear pretty clothes, but we know the world is not perfect. Sometimes, there are sad and unhappy things that we have to live with. Remember this, if you are still alone now, go get yourself a partner fast, don't wait till you are old and rotten, lonely gets lonely, and when you start to regret, it may be too late.

Let's live life to the fullest!

Don't look back

The whole city was sadden by the loss of the founding Father. A week of mourning attracted millions of people here to pay their last respect to Him either at the Parliament House, where a queue could last 10 hours, or at the other tribute sites located around the neighbourhoods centres.

Rain or shine, hungry or thirsty, it doesn't matter, the important things in the mind of people was that everyone gathered as a united nation, you help me, I help you, that was the time when you truly see the spirits of the one people, one nation, one Singapore.

While the founding Father had left, there is no looking back, we will survive, so let's move on...

Growing up

Able to see the LO growing day by day is an experience someone who is not a parent would not go through. Watching the LO taking the first step, fall and come back up again, and continue to walk, the determination to do better every time can be felt.

Now, LO has so many things to do and to play, so busy walking and running around the house. LO is now able to slowly climb down from the bed, clap hands, fingers pointing and smile at people, these make my day! Especially, after a day of hectic, tiring work, priceless, nothing to compare!

The little one's first step

I wasn't home early yesterday, worked late as usual. Then I saw this video of the LO walking without any assist for the first time. Yes, I got very emotional and excited at the same time. By the time I got home, the LO had already gone to bed. I hardly slept for the night, and on the next morning, I went to LO's bed and gave hugs. This is the time in life where you will get so uplifted, I have waited long for this to happen. So happy...

My regret or is it?

At work, having been with the same company for more than 10 years, almost doing the same thing day by day, never really get to move on to other branches of the work field is one big regret. Some of my friends said that I'm crazy working for the same company for so many years.

All these years, I have seen fellow colleagues come and go, yes, I do feel a sense of sadness and loneliness. Some of them moved on to other companies and now they are doing better, advanced up! Some quitted to go back to their home town or even migrate out of this country. Right now, most of who I work with or met in the company are young, I just feel that it's kind-of hard to work close to them like I used to with my ex-colleagues, maybe their thinking is different or they are better trained to do the stuff, so they don't need someone like me to nag or teach them.

 Looking at the photo of my ID card which was taking more than 10 years ago, I know I'm no longer young, but I do believe that my attitude of endorsing changes and hardwork, I'm still relevant and can still do better, these should be my strong points.

Beginning of a new year 2015

Our team has finally migrated the 2 remaining systems. The best part is that we didn't delay or postpone any roll-out dates. I heard that we will get praised for the efforts our team put in in this exercise. This is good thing.


Up coming, there will be another huge migration exercise, much bigger that the 3 systems migrated earlier, and most probably, I will need to play a bigger role, although I will not be the main person fronting it.


Separately, I'm glad that, now, the playful little One is learning to walk with assist, hopefully, by the end of the month, the One will be able to walk and run without any help!

This is it! One down, two more to go

As promised, we managed to complete the migration of 2 big web systems from another service provider to our Data centre on the 30-Nov! It was on schedule, not later by even a day.

Come next Saturday, 13-Dec, there will be another 3 web systems to cut-over, then follow by 31-Dec, the last 3. Hopefully, we would be able to roll-out the rest of the systems on time.

The last ones were difficult, because the out-going vendor was not easy to work with, some of the information was not even given to us, lucky enough, we have a group of competent people, that's the reason how we managed to roll-out the systems on time.

Maybe will be delayed

The project to migrate systems from another site to our data centre seems to be doing fine at one look. Over the course of 3 weeks, our team can finally get the UAT environment ready to be handled over to the application team tomorrow for they web applications deployment, but for the production environment, things hit some obstacles.

Firstly, for production environment, we haven't got the budget approved to purchase a no. of software and hardware, resulting in having to share, e.g. firewalls and network switches. Secondly, even with the hardware delivered, there are just sitting in the staging room, not able to be deployed, due to the fact that because there wasn't a budget to engage the vendor for professional services, we had to source in-house, and you know what? The in-house people (not from our team!) are not familiar with implementing them, so, the project got delayed.

I don't mean to be crapehanger person, but it seems that things aren't progressing as expected, there are just similar too many show stoppers. It's so discouraging sometimes, even if you want to be a good engineer or PM, there are things that you can't control, nothing works perfect.

I will be going on leaves next week, there's not much time for me with so much work to do, and with a team that heavily rely on me to carry out the work, I'm really worried.

Shellshock Bash vulnerability

For the last one week, life wasn't good, with the announcement of the Bash's flaws, everybody was busying checking their equipment whether they are subjected to the weakness. For the Unix folks, CVE-2014-6271 was the very first that they were told to apply the fix, but after the weekends, it was another one, CVE-2014-7169.

More vulnerabilities were detected, and more CVEs were released, it was really bad. Some vendors didn't even have the patch to address the issue yet for this >20 year old Bash thing.

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/2240231709/Vendors-push-new-Bash-patches-as-more-flaws-emerge?track=NL-1820&ad=896324&asrc=EM_NLN_34719724&uid=976171&utm_medium=EM&utm_source=NLN&utm_campaign=20141001_Shellshock+alert%3A+Vendors+push+patches+as+more+Bash+flaws+emerge_mbacon

Project Win

Recently, the team just got another project. It's for a migration and new systems setup for a virtualised solution using MS Hyper-V. Servers will be windows 2012 Server R2. There will be a new network infrastructure, with F5 LTM2000S, MFE Firewall Ent S4016, Check Point SG4600 Appliance, IPS/IDS, etc.  It's going to be very interesting.

I reckon for the next 1 month, I will be busy with the project. Hopefully, I still can find time to attend some courses, to build up my knowledge. I wanted to sign-up for a network course, but it's kind of too expensive, so for now, not possible, maybe next time.

Outlook 2010 cache

I always have this slowness problem when opening my Outlook. So, a bit frustrated, I seek Mr Google for advice, the greatest "know-all" consultant immediate told me the answer.

What I did was to close Outlook, then delete the OST files from hard drive, C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook. This is for windows 7.

Re-launch Outlook, wow...not only it open fast after the one-time sync to local cache, it cleared away the space used by the old cache, thus, saved me disk space.

What's up?

I have signed up for two running events, one for a 16KM road run, and the other is a 12KM night trail run.

To prepare for both runs, I have actually embarked on a 12-week Marathon training program for beginners, www.medibank.com.au/bemagazine/post/marathon-12-week-beginner-running-guide . I have just completed the week 1 of the program, it has been tough, having clocked almost 25KM in all. Other than that, I have also bought a new pair of Solomon's XR Mission trail shoes and a pair of socks for trail run. I have only completed a 10.5KM trail run about 3 months back, it was raining on that day, the ground condition was muddy and bad, but it was a good experience.

Week 2 ahead, let's hope I can stick though the program and never give up!

Time to relax!

After the completion of the two projects, it's now time to relax a bit. But hey, wait, there's the audit! Although, for this time round I'm not the main OIC to follow up with things, it's still quite a tedious work for me, as I will still need to support the OIC to furnish information required by the auditor. There are plans for another system upgrade and one system migration project to do, but the dates are yet to be confirmed.

Meanwhile, I will plan for some short away from office trips. This Friday, I'm going to the Zoo, and end of the month, I'm planning for a staycation on a outer island. Cheers...

May Day!

It's May Day today, not May's Day, but 1st of May, aka  Labour Day.

People in this part of the world are worrying about their jobs and salaries, some say it's because of the local government's lenient immigration policy to allow inflow of foreign talents into the country, leading to locals not able to get jobs or even secure their jobs.

It was said that the recent years of higher than expected inflation and rising standard of living was due to the presence of many foreigners. Housing costs, necessities cost, cars prices increases, etc. are making locals becoming more pessimistic.

Are foreigners competing with locals on jobs and cause so much unhappiness? Or rather, will their presence make locals work harder and smarter, I don't know, really.

Time for break

Finally, both the newly upgraded systems have 'go-live'. But, its still not yet time to celebrate as there are issues pending to be resolved.

At least for now, there isn't need for us to stay over the night to watch over things. Now, to prepare documentations and take over stuffs.

We have done this many times, taking over the support of the systems from other teams, it would take at least 3 months. Meanwhile, time for me to relax after almost a year of high tension work, perhaps going on a short trip soon.