My last day at Zeacom

Today is my last day working for Zeacom, destined to move to my new position with ANZ National on Monday. It began as a day like any other day. I walked in the door, said good morning to Matt and Wayne, then the rest of the helpdesk as I went to my desk.

Wayne asked me to come into his office, so he could complete some of the formalities on a checklist he had. Wayne told me that a morning tea was organized for me at 10:30am this morning.

As 10:30am came around, everyone from support gathered around, and so did a moderate number of the rest of the staff. Due to the time of the year, unfortunately a lot of the team were still on holiday and out of the office. Nevertheless, there was a significant presence of people.

Wayne made a speech about me to everyone, and I followed shortly afterwards. I was given a card and the company gave me a $50 Westfield voucher as well. Zeacom has organised some morning tea goodies which I consumed with the rest of the staff.

Deepak Kulkarni has been away on leave for about 6 weeks at Zeacom and is due back on Monday. As part of a very elaborate joke on him, the support department has removed his entire desk and replaced it with a couch. His flight from Sydney has already been cancelled, so this will no doubt add to his stress levels on his return.

For lunch I went the Subway Grafton. The Manager there Ravi seems to recognize me. Undoubtedly because I eat there quite often.

At the end of the day, I had handed off my keys and mobile phone to Wayne, and emptied out my desk of various items and returned them to their originating departments. I gave most of my stationary to the new tier 1 agent Levi.

Earlier in the week I had sent an invitation to the Zeacom staff, and a couple of selected friends that I used to work with at Datacom for drinks after work at the Cardron Speight's Ale House in Mount Eden.

After work I pretty much met up there straight away with Matt, Dolly, and Harpreet. Alan Mason from Datacom arrived, as did Mark McIntee from ExpressData (Formally Datacom). Anisha was there with me of course as well. Jolene (Formally Datacom) also arrived later on in the night, with her dispatcher at Urgent Couriers Jamie.

I had a couple of drinks and generally a good time tonight. I am going to miss working at Zeacom, with the only reason for leaving is purely financial reasons. All departments in Zeacom has been fantastic to work with; Support, Sales, Development, Installation and Training, and Marketing. The Management team in support is second-to-none.

Additional Information: The goldmining town of Cardrona was formed in 1862 when a group of miners stumbled upon gold in the Cardrona Valley. The first settlement, the Upper Town, springing up where the historic Cardrona Hotel, built in 1863 still remains.

Zeacom Christmas Party

This evening was the Zeacom Christmas party. Cogent has their party on the same night, however they did not allow partners to attend, so Anisha and I went to the Zeacom one. The party was held at Pontoon on Westhaven Drive. Just under 100 people attended tonight.

I am not much of an alcohol drinker, but I did have a fair share or alcohol tonight. One of the key aspects of the evening was the speech by Martin Davis talking about the companies success, and then eventually awarding prizes to our most valued employees.

There were too winners of the Outstanding Contribution to Zeacom Success 2007 award. The winners were Lee-Ann Sterling and Grant Wright.

Lee-Ann also surprised me with her singing performance. Lee-Ann had been part of a band as a singer, and organised her old band to perform tonight.

After the party, we had a taxi take us thought the drive through at Macdonald's (after stopping some guy trying to pinch our taxi), where we ordered something to eat.

Useless Information: If the sound of a balloon popping startles you, you’re not alone. A bursting balloon actually creates a small sonic boom! Once a hole is made in an inflated balloon, the quick release of the balloon’s energy, or air, causes the hole to grow at almost the speed of sound in rubber. Since this speed is much higher than the speed of sound in air, the hole in the balloon actually breaks the sound barrier, creating a sonic boom.

Chicken and Rice

Today, Deepak shouted everyone the leftovers from the dinner party after his sons Holy Communion. I treated myself to some lovely Chicken and rice. There was also a selection of fruit, and other hotter elements which I decided to pass on.

The other thing which happened was a disastrous Telecom Internet outage. We lost connectivity to all international sites with only domestic traffic being available. This caused disruption at work when attempting to connect to international hosts. Fortunately, I was only working on domestic customers at the time.

I booked a lane for bowling at Xtreme entertainment for Thursday night.

Useless Information: More than 95 percent of inter-city trunk routes are fibre optic, and all customer lines are connected to digital exchanges. Broadband coverage now extends to 93 percent of New Zealand households.

Fuji Teppan-Yaki Restaurant & Cafe

Tonight after work, the support department went out to dinner at the Fuji Teppan-Yaku Restaurant in Ponsonby (the exact address being Unit 12 282 Ponsonby Rd). This was a Japanese restaurant where the food is cooked in front of you. It's a combination of a meal and a show really.

The night started off with some soup, which tasted just like chicken soup. This then progressed to a small salad. I was quite impressed with myself on how I handled the chopsticks provided. I seemed to get the knack straight away. I guess I have used them on rare occasions. Must be like riding a bike.

We we entertained as the cook tossed pieces of egg at us which we were expected to catch in our mouths. We were also given bowls which we were to catch slightly smaller bowls of rice in, when tossed at us by the cook. Harpreet was sitting to my right, and made a big mess when he missed and knocked my drink over the table.

For the main, I ordered the Grilled Chicken and Beef Zen. As with the above food, this was cooked in front of us. I chose medium for my beef.

For dessert, I ordered a Banana Tempura with Vanilla Ice Cream.

I also had my performance appraisal today with Wayne, and I also helped Vikas Bhalla jump-start his car.


Video: You have to catch your dinner in this place!

Useless Information: Japan is an island lying off the east coast of Asia. Japan has 4 main islands (Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu and Shikoku) and numerous smaller islands.

A little bit of Social Networking

This week has been it's usual busy self. Having recently being given the responsibility for administrating the Zeacom Support NZ sharepoint site I worked hard today on improving its usefulness and the types of information available to the support team.

One of my old school friends Ben Relf came into Zeacom on business today. He currently works for Connect NZ and is currently reselling our product on the Avaya platform. We plan to do drinks some time soon.

Jarrod Clayworth contacted me again today. I had worked with Jarrod when I contracted with Peace Software in Port Macquarie in Australia. He is applying for a job at one of Zeacom's customers, GE Money (Formally Pacific Retail Finance). I gave Jarrod some information about Zeacom software, as he was applying for a telephonist position there. I also added Jarrod as a Facebook friend.

I spoke with Wayne Anderson from CallPlus/Slingshot today, and he assures me that my iTalk phone number will be listed in the Online White Pages and in the Telecom phone book at its next printing.

And whats the deal with Microsoft's Live! Search? It's now looking like a complete mirror image of Google search! I recall people mentioning how the Live! search results mirrored the way that Google displayed image and video search results, but the main search page is virtually identical. Also, when will Windows Live! Search learn that I'm from New Zealand and not the United Kingdom! Must be a browser thing.

For now, enjoy this small clip of Carlos walking by himself which I took earlier this week.


Video: Carlos taking his first steps

Useless Information: Adolf Hitler was one of the people that was responsible in the creation of the Volkswagen Beetle. He came up with the idea of producing a car that was cheap enough for the average German working man to afford.

Marcelas last day at Zeacom

Today was Marcela Sierra's last day at Zeacom. We had a morning tea organised where the support team, and a significant proportion of the other departments attended. There was a significant turnout.

Morning tea was shouted by Zeacom and consisted of a number of different foods, ranging from pakoras to ginger slices. There was a large pile of donuts which did take a while to be consumed fully.

Unfortunately, Marcela requested that I did not publish her speech.

Useless Information: Consuming chocolate was once considered a sin during the 16th and 17th century. During that time it was provided in the form of a drink and since drinking wine during lent was a sin, so was drinking chocolate.

GeekGear.co.nz - Celebrating all things Geek

As part of his induction training, Robert Redgwell has had the opportunity to observe our fantastic support team in action.

Robert is the latest Software Engineer to join our development team. Robert has a number of other ventures outside of work, including a number of websites he has developed.

Robert maintains a blog on his server that he operates. It is located at http://maximum.servehttp.com/

Robert also runs http://www.geekgear.co.nz/ which is an online store specialising in geek clothing.

Robert is also heavily into recycling.

Useless Information: Castaways Travel, a Houston-area travel agency, offers an all-nude flight to Cancun Mexico. Once the plane reaches cruising altitude, you are allowed to take off all your clothes and roam about the cabin.

Sanjays Anniversary

Today was Sanjays one year anniversary of working for Zeacom.

My personal Nokia 6680 is continuing to drive me nuts. Ongoing errors such as "memory full" when trying to unlock the phone today are seriously making me consider smashing it on the nearest hard surface. Prior to the Nokia 6680 (my first Nokia smartphone), I had nothing but praise for the brand. Now my comments seem to echo the hundreds of thousands of comments from others all over the Internet.

After work, I had dinner with Anisha at her apartment and then watched Target and NCIS. Anisha served up some ice cream for desert. Anisha doesn't normally have dessert.

Useless Information: Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them.

An Auto Attendant gone bad

A few months back, one of our customers had complained that our software had been incorrectly disconnecting users in one of the Auto Attendants we had provided. Hanging-up in 95% of situations is a function of the PABX switch and we mealy interact with the switch to control call flow.

I was tasked with testing the system in an attempt to reproduce the fault. To facilitate this, I created a rather creative Auto Attendant, of which the customer had a DDI terminated on. I went through this Auto Attendant about a couple of hundred times, attempting to catch an abnormal disconnection. I was not able to find one.

The Auto Attendant I created was, well, very creative. It began with "Welcome to the Anisha Fan Club". Press 1 to Order a Pizza, Press 2 to speak to Harpreet Singh etc etc.

Now the real kicker is that today, the customer managed to reprogram their system to replace their normal Auto Attendant with my test Auto Attendant. God knows how long it was active for. The customer did call us in the end, as they recognised my voice on the test recording. Never underestimate your customer!

I also added labels to a large number of my posts. Thanks to Phillip Jackson for the idea! I also noticed when doing a search for my name [Ego-Surfing] that my blog has dropped from position number two which is quite disappointing.

Useless Information: Before the 1800's there were no separately designed shoes for right and left feet.

A Network-shared global clipboard?

Even with all the Big Brother monitoring on the corporate LAN these days, you would expect that an item such as your own computers Windows Clipboard would be safe.

This was far from the true today when a system irregularity was found. An irregularity, yes, but a feature that was working as designed. You may be surprised to find that our computers clipboards developed some type of network-aware sharedness. What this meant was that when a person placed something in the clipboard, it was being made available to other users on the LAN, and appearing when a paste function was used.

An example of this occurring, is when one user was using the copy and paste function, but ending up pasting an email from a colleagues PC into her Microsoft CRM case. We narrowed this down to the VMware virtual machine.

When a user has a VMware session open, and places an item on the clipboard on their local PC, a copy is made available to the local machine. Now, anyone subsequently using that same VM session may inject (for want of a better word) that clipboard content into their local PC by using the paste option. Obviously, timing is a major factor in whether the user gets clipboard contents intended for somebody else.

With the help of ISHelp (Outsource IT), we (Read Alan Murray) narrowed this down and Alan advised the team of an option to disable this 'feature'. My clipboard will never feel safe again.

Useless Information: During the American revolution, many brides used to wear the colour red instead of white as a symbol of rebellion.