Australia Entry #5 - May 13th - May 29th, 2024

The Last Few Weeks

I spent a lot of my time this week focused on work and trying to get in some good outdoor nature hikes and walks from the area. With Brian back in the office following his time in the US for XGM, Singapore has not calmed down with the amount of work that they require devoted to them. I find that there’s something extremely difficult with working on a customer that they themselves feel overwhelmed while also being generally new. Sometimes there’s a need to devote additional time to topics that make a good foundation of knowledge for their jobs, but then you realize you don’t have the time to be able to do it as you’re off solving another problem that pops up an hour later. I will say, that Singapore and I expect New South Wales will both keep me honest about whether I can actually explain the core concepts and how things in our Epic system interact with each other. Brian brings a lot of the technical knowledge that 10+ years of working has provided him, but I think I can help keep Brian and the ODBAs organized and aligned. I am a bit scared with how things will work once New South Wales work starts ramping up, but I am just hoping that we can get through some of the backlog that the RHEL8 migration brought with it.

The interesting thing about working with the customers out here in Australia, is there seem to be a lot of plans for expansion of the system, unless I just came at the time that a lot of our hardware configuration and parallel capacity assessment refreshes were happening. Each of the customers may be moving towards a future in the next two years where we need to buy new hardware. Specifically, Singapore and New South Wales are on a trajectory to being two of the biggest customers we have, and so I want to make myself a strong leader to my ODBAs and customer counterparts with making things feel like they are planned and completed in a smooth way, versus the more hectic approach that has been happening so far.

In a typical week so far, I have been averaging around 25 hours (consistently) devoted to working with Singapore.

Beyond work, I have been forcing myself to be more of a self-sustaining adult. I have been cooking and bringing my own lunch to work every day, and while it feels like a lot of my time has been just staying up with cooking and cleaning and laundry and writing these journals, I think that they are all good habits to build. I wrote in the last entry that I was looking to meet with the Melbourne Bushwalking group, but I never found the time in the last two weeks to go downtown after work and meet with them. Instead, I met a group that meets and hikes every weekend and I ended up doing a 24km day of hiking with them recently. I took a few pictures and videos I uploaded to youtube above from the experience. It was also the first time I talked with some locals and they had some good interesting stories. One of the guys I met works for a smaller company that deals with geospatial data and worked on the map that you can get from scanning the QR codes at the local zoo. He also recommended I watch The Castle, as it’s a comedy set in Melbourne. I’m planning to try to get a movie night set up with some coworkers to do so. I also walked to the nearby Yarra River and took a pit stop at an ikea to buy some small house stuff like a mat for the bathroom.

In the last two weeks I’ve also spent some time watching some new shows and movies as well as playing a few games on my computer. I finished watching Sugar and thought it was just alright. The Fallout show was also enjoyable, but didn’t catch my intrigue as much as it might have someone who had played the games. It was definitely fun, but wasn’t as thought provoking or different than a lot of the things put out. I did really enjoy two shows throughout this week though. Ripley, released on Apple TV+ was a very interesting noir old-school Italian atmosphere around someone who commits identity theft and I think visually and story wise it grasped my attention quite well. I’ve also been enjoying Dark Matter on Apple TV+ which has scratched my itch of the type of overthinking mind-bending shows that I always like to ponder. If you like Inception, Dark, or Interstellar, you’d probably like Dark Matter. Finally, I also watched the 2024 released movie Civil War, which was an interesting take on the subject. I didn’t expect the movie to follow a photographer through a make-believe rendition of a civil war, but it at least kept my attention while I cooked and cleaned one evening.

I had also found out these last two weeks that my favorite musical artist released an album that I missed while preparing for the trip to Australia and so I enjoyed listening to Finest on loop throughout this week.

This upcoming weekend I’m going to be going to Lerderdeng Gorge for a hike with someone that reached out on Facebook. On Sunday I’ll try to go to a museum as I haven’t been yet, and I’m also going to head to a coworkers place as I’ve agreed to cat sit for them over the long King’s weekend on June 8th. I’ll probably read a bit more of my book with some of that downtime of traveling. I have a few books on my backlog, including wanting to read the book that Dark Matter was based on as it seems very intriguing.

I’m also going to make some commitments for long term Australia plans here in writing so I can see whether I can stick to them.
I want to travel out to New Zealand for a few days. I want to meet one of my old coworkers when I interned there back in 2019 and then also go and do a few things I didn’t have a chance to do before due to money or time.
I want to get comfortable with overnight hiking and I want to plan to do one or two long term treks in Tasmania. I think I can have a great time by committing ~$2k for the equipment and then the plane ticket and accommodation.
I want to explore Singapore in October when I go out for a DR cutover event with my customers. I want to try to maybe tack on some vacation time afterwards to see some of Vietnam/Thailand/Indonesia, but I don’t know how plausible that is as I expect there will be issues following the event that we will be trying to solve the following week.
I want to get comfortable with renting out a car in Australia and doing some longer weekend drives. Sometimes I feel like I may enjoy just driving and seeing the countryside without having a specific destination in mind, but I can likely find some great destinations and make some fun road trips.