Thursday, August 10, 2006
Yeah, it's been a while
I know it's been a very, very long time since I wrote anything on this blog. I'd blame it on lack of anything interesting happening, but then I'd be lying. Many things have changed in the past 2 months or so. As you may have surmised from Tammy's blog, the following events have taken place:
Got a new boss, I am still at the same customer, however.
Got a car, a very nice Renault Clio.
Got a nice new-ish laptop: a Dell Latitude D810 with 128MB vid RAM, 1GB RAM, 60GB hdd, DVD RWR-R+/CDRW combo drive and a 1920x1200 screen.
It's great now that we have car. We can go anywhere we want, whenever we want. I can hear Tammy saying it: "I told you you'd like having a car". I can say this because she's actually used those exact words. A few times.
The transition between my old and new boss wasn't as smooth as I would've liked but that was mainly due to the customer not being too keen on loosing me and my old boss not wanting to release me from my non-competition clause. My new boss, the customer and my old boss fought for about 6-7 weeks or so. I've been working within Shell for more than 4.5 years now, in one project or another. It takes 3-4 months before someone has been fully "assimilated" into the organization, so finding a replacement for me, would have been a major pain in the butt for the customer. I love the work I get to do here. Some of it is pretty cutting edge and there's always new toys.
Over the next few years I intend to move away from pure Linux/Unix system engineering to a more architectural role. Ordina, my new company, is very happy to support me in that through courses and seminars. I'll actually be going to an advanced Dutch class to see if we can't improve my written Dutch a little. I never went to secondary school in the Netherlands (I was living in Ireland at the time), so my vocabulary and grammar are somewhat lacking. Now that I am working for a Dutch company, I should be able to produce reports and other types of documentation in Dutch. It'll be interesting to go back to school.
I am going to try to be better at keeping my blog up to date now. I can't promise anything, of course.
It's great now that we have car. We can go anywhere we want, whenever we want. I can hear Tammy saying it: "I told you you'd like having a car". I can say this because she's actually used those exact words. A few times.
The transition between my old and new boss wasn't as smooth as I would've liked but that was mainly due to the customer not being too keen on loosing me and my old boss not wanting to release me from my non-competition clause. My new boss, the customer and my old boss fought for about 6-7 weeks or so. I've been working within Shell for more than 4.5 years now, in one project or another. It takes 3-4 months before someone has been fully "assimilated" into the organization, so finding a replacement for me, would have been a major pain in the butt for the customer. I love the work I get to do here. Some of it is pretty cutting edge and there's always new toys.
Over the next few years I intend to move away from pure Linux/Unix system engineering to a more architectural role. Ordina, my new company, is very happy to support me in that through courses and seminars. I'll actually be going to an advanced Dutch class to see if we can't improve my written Dutch a little. I never went to secondary school in the Netherlands (I was living in Ireland at the time), so my vocabulary and grammar are somewhat lacking. Now that I am working for a Dutch company, I should be able to produce reports and other types of documentation in Dutch. It'll be interesting to go back to school.I am going to try to be better at keeping my blog up to date now. I can't promise anything, of course.
posted by Xander Soldaat at 07:13
