Stephen Witherden’s Website :: Work

I drive in to work at an unusually early time for me: it’s around 7:55am when I arrived at the front gate to the airbase. The security guard smiles his familiar round smile as he waves me through. His cheerfulness belies the fact that, were it not for the identification I present to him, I would go no further than his little box.

It’s cold and dark outside, the Auckland sun only just beginning to shine a few anaemic rays in my direction. I pull up to the car park. The car park straddles the red line which denotes the “operational” part of the airbase to the non-operational part. “Identification to be visible at all times” the sign says something like that. I clip my ID onto my belt and walk to the door to the building I’ve spent most of my waking hours in this past year or so. All of my personal belongings go into a secure lockup just in front of the secure doors. Nothing unauthorised is permitted here. I’ve taken to simply dumping all the contents of my pockets here, just in case.

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I’ve been particularly busy lately with a number of projects on the boil. It means I don’t have as much time as I’d like to devote to friends, family or my blog. That said, it also means I am being quite productive. Maybe it has something to do with the free freshly-ground coffee we now have access to at work *jitters*. I guess it’s quite telling that it’s 1am at the moment and I am still thinking of things I’d like to do before going to sleep. 

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I am sorry life’s been rather hectic lately and I haven’t had a chance to make any updates. I know that many of you are asking the question “when are you coming home?”

Well, I finally have my itinerary. I will be arriving in New Zealand at 7:30am on Friday 26th October. Don’t worry about picking me up at the airport, my empliyer will (had better) be arranging a rental car.

I look forward to seeing y’all all in the land of the long white cloud! The image on the right is a screenshot of my itinerary. Click it for flight numbers and times.

Firstly, I should mention that this post involves some boring, geeky mathematics. Geometry to be precise. In da Vinci’s day, Euclidean geometry was the pinnacle of intellectual pursuit and you will find a great many interesting geometric shapes coded into his artwork. Shapes that now have conspiracy theorists practically frothing in delight.

For most of the drawing in this post I will be using something called “Scalable Vector Graphics” (SVG). You will only be able to see the cool animated images here if your browser supports SVG or you have the Adobe SVG plugin. Firefox supports SVG natively.

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“Look, here’s bragging rights” Todd poked his nose into my cubicle, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses, just a little more than usual.
“Oh, sounds exciting, show me” I swiveled around and paid him my full attention.
“Look at this, I designed it.” Todd proudly proffered a print-out of a plane.
“See, there” he pointed at a part of the tail “I designed that”. He practically beamed.

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Ok, so after all that excitement, this is a boring work post. My company (Beca Applied Technologies) is looking to hire intermediate to senior software developers (that’s you, Doug). There is a CV submission thingy but the user interface is horrible.

Let me know if you are interested and I can write a recommendation for you, my recommendation will help a fair bit I am sure. I will also get a finders fee or something I think.

Ok, so now it’s time for a boring work post. I wish I could show pictures of where I work but no recording devices of any kind are allowed in the building. Security is reasonably tight. I can’t even get back from the toilet without a swipe card.

Yeah, Cecil guys & gals, I have been there before, but this time knocking on the door is not allowed. I once forgot my card when I went to the toilet. I had to get the security person (her name is Barbra) to ring into the office so that someone could walk out with my swipecard. No swipecard, no entry. Our swipecards have our pictures on them too.

Anyway, So I am writing code (no specifics). The design is finished and one of our key problems is interfacing with a particular API. This API is all done in unmanaged C++ libraries and we’re programming in C#. Non-programmers, continue reading at your peril… (more…)

I have finally received my passport with Visa attached!

It was quite an experience. The immigration consultant called me this morning to inform me that the DS2019 had arrived from Boston. I signed the form and she took it in to the consulate which meant I could have left today (Monday) instead of Wednesday as we previously had thought.

So, I scrambled to get a flight for today confirmed, but it became more and more apparent that it was near to impossible to make it from the consulate at 2:30pm (when they give back your passport) to the airport at 2:55pm (the required 3 hours prior to my booked flight).

So, I am now scheduled to leave at 5:55pm on Tuesday 18th July. This time, it looks like I will actually be leaving! For those of you who are really interested, a copy of my itinerary is below. I checked it very carefully this time because one of the previous versions had me ending up in Houston! (more…)

Well, after a great deal of toing and froing, my citizenship ceremony is scheduled for Thursday 15th June at 1pm. It will be at the Auckland Citizenship office at the AA Centre, level 6, 99 Albert Street.

The “Texas Counters” on the left hand side give you a good idea of the number of seconds remaining before my citizenship is confirmed.

After the ceremony, I can apply for a passport, that takes 3 days minimum if I pay them money. This means that, allowing for shipping and suchlike, that I can expect my passport by the 22nd of June.

Edit: You know, after showing these cool dynamically updating counters to my family, Arth says: “I’ll just print it out for your Mom”.

^^;;

I have been on training for the last 1.5 days. This is the first training I’ve had at Beca (I don’t count TechEd and Health & Safety training.. no, really, it doesn’t count). It’s the first time I have actually learnt something completely new in about 5 years (new programming languages don’t count, that’s just too easy). I am so excited I can’t contain myself, so many new concepts and moving parts that could go wrong, I love it! Most fun I’ve had in ages.

Link 16 is a tactical data link used in the military. It’s about 20 years old but it’s still considered state-of-the-art. I kind of like it, it’s cool. I would tell you about it but then I’d have to kill you :p

As for Texas…

There is even less certainty around whether or not I will be going to Texas. Katie from HR suggested I keep my South African citizenship so that they don’t have to re-submit my paperwork for visas etc.

-.-

Only, you see, the whole problem is: if I am a South African citizen (even if I have dual citizenship) I can’t have the technology exported to me. That’s kind of the whole point. Of course, Beca spent over 3 months checking my “security clearance” to see if I would be allowed to do the job in the first place. Um.. yeah, well, turns out that a a few weeks after they tell me to start packing, I am not allowed to.

So, my faith is rapidly waning. The window of opportunity apparently closes in the middle of next month. So either I am leaving by then or I am not. Although I do still hold out hope, what with the way things are going at the moment, I don’t think they’ll be able to get me much further than Sydney.

I feel most sorry for Sarah, but I will make sure she will be able to live where she is at least till the end of the year.

What will I do if I don’t go? Well, I guess I could do almost anything. I have always wanted to live in New York, just for a little while.

Well, doesn’t that just take the cake?

Thomas called me into his office today and informed me that there’s been a bit of a snag with getting me to work for L3 in Texas. Essentially, in order to be able to go to work for L3 either:
a) The US congress must pass a bill which allows L3 to “export” cool secret stuff to South Africa (that means me apparently), or
b) I need to become a New Zealand citizen

So, they are going to have to try and turn New Zealand’s 9 month citizenship process into a 1 month process. L3 have indicated that if it takes too long (2 or 3 months or so), they are probably no longer interested in having me, so we have to do it fast.

Now, I know what you’re going to say. Why didn’t they figure this out earlier? Well, to be honest, I haven’t the foggiest. It’s a mystery to me. I guess something didn’t happen when it was supposed to.

It’s a good thing I worked for the University for years. Working for the University gives you a deep appreciation for bureaucracy and a lot of tolerance for major screw-ups. I mean, they didn’t pay me for about 4 months when I got my new contract. I ended up having to verbally abuse the head of HR before I got my money.

It’s at times like these when you really have to sit back, take a broad perspective and laugh.

It’s a good thing I applied for New Zealand citizenship about 5 months ago. I didn’t receive confirmation of my application (as I had been promised) but apparently they are “very busy” and will “get back to me”. I don’t think I have even been assigned a case worker yet and I know they haven’t requested my paperwork yet. Technically, there’s only really 4 months to go before I should be able to officially consider myself a New Zealander, so greasing a few palms should prove effective.

Aaaaaaargh!
I just received an email from HR telling me I will be leaving on the 22nd of May!

It seems they expected me to check my horoscope to find out when the date would be because they “assumed I already knew”.

Now, I have been known to possess incredible powers of deduction but that is beyond even me…

*runs around in ever decreasing circles*

ohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapohcrap

I had an interesting run-in with a financial advisor these past few weeks that I would like to relate to you. It all started when I decided on the spur of the moment that I needed superannuation (super is best arranged on the spur of the moment, I am sure).

Now, I know that the University has a fantastic scheme where they pay more than dollar-for-dollar. What this means is: for every dollar you pay into the scheme, the University will pay a little over a dollar in as well. That’s frigging fantastic, let me tell you right now. (more…)

This month has been pretty lean. Not only is it the longest month of the year pay-wise (we got paid early in December) but Christmas was heavy on the pocket. So I have been thinking about money lately. I despise money, in general. That’s why I plan on gathering as much of it as I possibly can, so I can willfully ignore it.

I am afraid I am not so good at gathering money. This is the time when I reflect on old debtors and kicking myself for not enforcing contracts.

One such debtor is Bill. Sarah & I did a website for him nigh over a year ago. $2k (the website has some application stuff built in) but he was slow with the content. We got most of the content from him but he held off on the finishing touches. So, we waited, and once we’d waited enough we installed a content management system and told him that was that. Have a look for yourself. I have tried to contact him a number of times, but still no money, despite the fact that he called me once because his insert key was stuck *sigh*. Ok, I’ll give him a few more months and then his pretty website will turn into a page referring vaguely to failing to pay suppliers ^^

Another debtor, Jim, owes me $10k for some software development I did for him in early 2004. That’s been a year and a half overdue. He complains that the customer hasn’t paid him because of testing and bugs etc etc. He never asked me to fix said bugs and he was working on the same code as me. Grumble, grumble. I think I will eventually get some money out of him but I know people who have had to threaten litigation to get money out of this guy.

My goal with work is simply to earn money working 9-5. I tried changing the world at my last job and that was a miserable failure. So now I content myself with a stable job with no surprises.

Although I’d like to ask for more money from work, now is certainly NOT the time for me to be asking for a raise. The beginning of this year was quite a blow to my work ethic. I think it’s a combination of the post-Christmas blues and the *ahem* possibility of a love life (no, mom, I am still saying nothing, let it go) that have managed to distract me from my first love: work.

This has all been exacerbated by the fact that I am becoming increasingly involved in what could easily be considered the biggest hospital pass software project of all time.

I hope my work-mojo is back now.

On the plus side, Cecil offered me an exorbitant hourly rate to fix something for them today (Monday). Most lucrative 3 hours I have ever spent

So, I got to use one of my tools today (so wah)! I brought the laser measure into work to lend it to Dean and it turned out to be useful for something vaguely work-related as well.

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Ok, this is an old story but I haven’t actually posted it. This is for you, Mom: here’s what happened that night I only half told you about.

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