Just this afternoon my team leader popped by and told me and the colleage next to me to consider taking some time off. Previuosly we were able to charge the extra hours we worked to overtime and got paid for it. A few weeks ago, it can't be done anymore.

Orders from the management saying that paid overtime has to be preapproved 7 days before work. We all know system break down won't let you know 7 days before hand. Hence we had to work for free or not working at all.

A simple calculation from my timesheets indicated that I have accumulated about 2 and a half weeks worth of TOIL over that past 8 weeks. So I suggested to my colleage and see if we can make arrangement of working only 4 days in a week, until we have finished taken our time off.

The problem we can predict is, even in a 4 days week, we will end up working 5 days worth of hours anyway. Which translated to longer working hours per day. That also means more stress.

I guess we will just stick with working until we got sick and away from work for a few days like the past. :(

I came across this online magazine calls iMotor a few weeks ago. Nothing too fancy about it, its just another ezine. Since then I have subscripted to it and have been reading it every fortnightly when a new issue came out. The company that makes this happen is CerosMedia, there are other ezine available here.

Although the concept is nothing new, it sure did change some people's reading habit. A decade ago if you want to get the latest news about cars, electronics, and computer you have to go and buy some magazine. I still remember I have to get a local newspaper to get hold of a copy of Hong Kong based magazine call CompuAge for me.

Since Internet was getting popular, it is just too convenient that everyone will search for the info, googling for it. People like me will subscribes to RSS feeds, and save the hassles to visit multiple sites repeatedly to find out if there is anything new.

This day, where Netbook is the trend and more and more smart phones, MIDs, UMPC are out in the market, It even shows that people relies on the Internet so much. 5 years old will look for an answer from the Internet, no need to mention that IT professionals like me, who uses Google more then ever. Internet becomes the first stop for all of the information seeking. There are people looking for lost person in Facebook, tracking down the boyfriend via MySpace, and even have a website setup by a woman trying to find out who smashed her outside a casino.

Soon or later, company like Google and Microsoft will learn from your Internet habit and push the information to you. And when I said learn, I mean "spy". Think of it, Google Search saved your search histories, iGoogle records the news and RSS subscriptions, Google Streetview and Map records the places you are interested ( and don't tell me you never visited your home address in map or streetview) and now the latest Google Chrome web browser. One day, you might receive an email from Google advising you that the local market has fresh apple and the reason why it send you the advisory is because they thought you like apple and you haven't had apple for at least 6 months.

Technology, it can be very scary.

4 words. Do not get involved.

I am trying to visualize one of the existing Siteminder Policy server and experiencing all sort of problem. Well, not exactly my problem, somehow I got dragged in anyway.

One of my colleague build the virtual clone from scratch as a third node in the existing cluster. There is existing firewall rules for the existing 2 cluster nodes. They are all in DMZ zone and no DNS service is available, everyhing is configured using ip or host file.

We got a brilliant idea that if we swap the physical server with the newly build virtual server, keeping the same ip address everything should continue working.

Unfortunately after 2 ourtages (2 rollbacks) across 3 weeks, despite we had verified most of the applications were working, the mobile computing application just failed to authenticate from the radius server.

Everyone is big head and gave up leaving the so call fake acting senior engineer application (while the big boss is away for holiday) to look into it.

So I guess that will be my next big task, for the next few days, hopefully.