InnerSanctum

That was a somewhat random title, Johnny has nothing to do with the post, but if you think back to the Hocus Pocus song of the same name, it always gets me a bit pumped up.

And today I am getting dressed for work in my SNOW GEAR! Not because I’m going to the snow, but because I’m going up, up, up in the world!

There was a crew of riggers in town working for Optus and they damaged a transmission dish on the main Optus tower in Mildura and we have the job to fix it, so my fellow Merbenien and Rigger collegue are heading up the tower to replace the mounting bracket on this bad boy, we aren’t really geared up for it properly yet, but this job gets us a HUGE foot in with the companies that will get us rigging jobs! Just by saying yes to this job, we have been given another job at Manangatang (east of Ouyen) for most of next week. Which is also really good, it will give us a chance to see how the guys do the jobs we will be doing once they are fully setup and have a bit ox experience.

So I will fill you all in on the exciting things, but right now, i gotta scoot!

Failure to run a course once you’ve paid the bastards $1300 already is a pain in the arse, so I’m home early and it might be a good thing thing.

We have been given 50 odd sites by the company doing the Vodafone 3G rollout and that means that I need to assemble 6 guys and 4 vehicles, about $60k worth of tools and eq and get them trained up and ready to roll out on the road for about 6 months, which is a pain in the arse considering I’m getting married in 3 months and will be away for 3 weeks.

Seeing that I’ve been given a leadership role in this project, I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to run my crews. I don’t think that having these guys up and onsite at 7:30 in the morning is too much to ask for, we are onsite around then when we do power work for christs sake! The earlier we get there the earlier we get done and the sooner we can move on to the next site, which means the sooner we get home!

I was given a car to go away in, VY Commodore Ute, nice ute, travels nicer than just about any other vehicle they have in the fleet, so i loaded up all my tools and the fridge and off I went, I was going away for 2 weeks. I get home to have someone tell me that someone else is going away in it on Monday (tommorow now) and that I needed to get my crap out of it. No problem, I don’t mind so much that I need to get out of it for someone, the part that shits me is that I am increasingly needing a vehicle to cart my shit around in and no one wants to bite the bullet and get me one of my own, do they think I’m leaving them or something? I’m in this one for the long haul, I enjoy what I’m doing way too much to throw the towel in on this one.

Anyway, I’ll keep you all posted about whats going on, hopefully I’ll be getting a NextG modem for the laptop they gave me and I’ll be able to keep you all updated while I’m away, will take some photos of me dangling 100M in the air as well!

Candy and I own the 2 cutest pets in the world, just so you know =P

I was supposed to go away today, but the guys I was going away with decided they wanted to go away early in the morning, so I’m going to meet them in Swan Hill at about 9am and then we will pick up the rest of the crap from there and then get the hell back on the road until we come across a little place somewhere near Echuca.

Well I dunno about you, but I’m actually a bit stuffed, all that paperwork and getting the car ready for my few weeks away was a big drain… That also might have been something to do with the fact that I gave Mick the storeman a bit of a hand to count the shit in his compound that we use.

Did that make a whole lot of sense? I don’t think it did, but you should get the drift.

I think it’s about time that the people in a descision making capacity at the place I work decide to give me a car to drive and to look after. My job would be soooooo much easier if I could get in the car at the start of the week and just go and do whatever jobs it is they want me to do.
I know what I’m doing when it comes to power work and I know what I’m doing when it comes to building transmission, and when it comes time to go out and do some optic fibre work, well I’m your man then too. When it comes to optic fibre work though, I would be taking the Fibre Van… Duh!!!

ahh well I think this is the biggest post of randomness I’ve posted here almost ever I think, so I’m going to go, I might even hit the sack considering I have to get an early start.

peace out =)

If you looked at the title to this post and wondered to yourself “what the fudge?” well you probably aren’t alone.
Kubuntu is a linux flavour that I have been playing with and have come to the conclusion that it’s not for me. So I’m going to check out Dreamlinux 3.0 for something different. It uses an awesome application launcher which is very similar to the one used in OSX on Macs with a few improvements. I’ve always liked the menus on Macs so I think this might be a nice change for me.

I’ll fill you in on how I go, you can read more about Dreamlinux by punching “Dreamlinux 3.0″ into google.com

As of Monday I am sinking my teeth into some CDMA recoveries, and then I’ll be heading to Melbourne for another Fibre Optic course, to make me even more awesome at my job.

Anyway…

Catch =P

Candy and I took to the road early yesterday morning for a weekend in Adelaide, we had a few things to do for the wedding but more so, we just wanted a weekend away.

We booked ourselves into a 4-star motel in the city on wotif.com and had a nice surprise waiting for us when we checked in. Our room had been double booked and because we had it booked first, our room was upgraded to an “Executive Spa Suite” on the top floor, which was very posh.

We did a bit of shopping and so we both have a decent pair of jeans to wear out now, instead of the pairs I’ve been wearing, with holes everywhere in them and the zips coming down because I’m a bit bigger now than I was this time last year. But that will all change when hopefully things turn around on the tower climbing front.

I’ll keep you posted!

The day has gone and we are home and hosed. And thank heck for that.

More over, we are home, the utes have been left down the river, bogged and waiting for a tractor to pull them out.
Scott’s ute is bogged in a drain and mine is sitting up on a patch of scrub waiting for the track ahead to dry out enough to get home, we’ll see how things progress this arvo, there isn’t any rain on the radar, but who trusts the weatherman?

Well today is the day, the big test, the day where we will find out if I’m a bushie from way back or a city slicker with a fancy tent.
We are heading out for a few nights of R & R and getting back to nature, 2 nights roughing it out in the sticks, well it’s actually not that far away from town, but it quiet and its peaceful.
And you could hardly call it roughing it, yes its rough compared to how we normally spend our time down the river (on the houseboat, cheers Dro!d) we have a surprising number of mod cons.
There is the gas BBQ that I built to go in the back of my ute, we have 2 fridges (for food, the drinks go on ice!) and with the extra battery capacity in my ute, we have plenty of light to go around thanks to a few old driving lights and magnetic bases I had lying around in the shed.

If you see me out, say g’day, otherwise I’ll catch you all when we get back!

Candy has a voucher for Harvey Norman that is going to expire soon and we thought we should go in for a look around to see if there is anything we need/want.

One thing we have been doing alot of lately is using Candy’s iPod to play music around the house, so we looked at a few docks with built in alarm clocks, you know the ones, they have the tiny speakers in them and just tend to sound like crap! We opted to leave without spending the voucher and continue using the old computer speakers I have left over from when I had a desktop computer.

Plus they don’t actually sound all that bad.

Anyway, I thought I would share with you all my morning, the afternoon has been pretty easy going. Going to get all my camping gear together tonight and tomorrow ready for next weekend.

Happy Weekend!

Damn thats fun, and it’s not particularly expensive. At $5 a pop, it’s pretty good value.

But jesus it’s hard work! running around in the dark with a vinyl vest on soon gets the sweat pouring out of the body.

Thats about all I have to say tonight, nothing much going on. work is still just… wellll work.

Ohh actually, if you came here from your bookmarks and they point directly to the blog, there is a new front page to one24chaffey.com. Just something to highlight a bit of web design work that I’m doing and have done. So please do stop by for a look next time you head round this way =P

Something happened today, something that lifted a huge weight off my sholders, even if it isn’t yet confirmed.

We got a phone call from one of the big wigs at Ericsson to say that there might be a bit of work coming up around our area for the Vodafone 3G network.
That along with news of a few other jobs coming up and my day got a hell of a lot better, finally we might be able to get back in the swing of things.

I’ll keep you posted.