emsk

Location: fish and chip shop.

Players: Me; group of mid to late teen boys.

The boys are gathered around a dust bin, using the top as a table for their fish’n'chips and Coke bottles. While waiting for my dinner, various lads have wandered in several times requesting more food, as trawls of pockets and wallets have revealed previously unlocated small change.

I get my dinner, and wander back to the car.

“…. facebook… page … you should … facebook …. nah bro, didn’t you hear they’re shutting Bebo down?”

“Awww, bro, no way, nah, you’re fulla shit mate.”

“For real, bro, shutting it down, you gotta get you a Facebook man.”

“Nah nah, you’re all fulla shit.”

Me: “He’s right. AOL are either selling or shutting down Bebo – check up on Google, AOL are making the announcement next month.”

“Shit, really? Fuck, man, that sucks.”

I get into the car. I hear laughter, as said young man has apparently been “owwwwned, bro”.

“Fuuuck, man, how does some old lady know about Bebo anyway?”

I came home today to find a wealth of Good Things in my mailbox. Stockings (six pairs), my TSC tshirt (I’ve had my quota of stupid for today, please call someone else).

In fact, it’s generally been a good day. Half of work was absent (acts of drunkeness occuring – thanks St Paddy’s Day), so I got work done. Despite the stultifying boredom. Cyclenut contacted me during the day to ask for a website in a Hurry – Father needs something for school cycling – which is just fine as I still have the code leftover from my last attempt at creating a website for him. So, with a few hours work to incorporate some of the Useful Stuff I’ve learned over the last few months, that’ll be done this weekend. And, therefore, some extra money in the kitty.

Lunch was had with WebBoss on Thursday. This was also a Good Thing, as I am still lacking sufficient information about the state of my impending new job! Discussion covered: What I’ll be doing for a job, what I’ll get to help me do the job, and what I’ll be required to do.

So, from April, little Emma will be doing server administration. Basic “Stuff fallen over, fix it”. Create and start maintaining a backup schedule. (I know, I know – they need one already!) Create and maintain a Subversion/Trac box. (This is also a Very Good Thing, with programmers living all over the country. I know of five physical cities, and that doesn’t allow for the fact that we’re scattered around within those cities.) Learn about VMware – WebBoss has plans to be running all servers as VM servers in the long run, for redundancy and stuff.

They’ll give me hardware to be used at home (this is a Big Yay, as it means I’m not dependent on my home machine). Possibly more than one machine, depends what I’m doing at the time. (Note to self, acquire two desks instead of one.) I’ll be working 40 hours a week, but to be done as glide time – eg, if something takes a big poopy at 10pm and I can fix it, I am to do so, and take some time off later in the week, or save up hours and take a week off later. I’ll mostly be working from home, but also at co-location facility (10km away) occasionally. So will have keys to the co-lo, access to server racks, and so on and so forth.

No word on when I get the extra 2k, which is a tad sad, as moving will be tight – doable, but tight – but at least I know it is forthcoming.

I am a happy Emma.

Originally published at kiwi geek. You can comment here or there.