CSC assignment to Nigeria – now it feels more real (Week 1)…

Travel, Work, , ,

Yesterday we had our first kick-off call as a team of people who are going to Nigeria as part of IBM’s Corporate Service Corps (CSC). All of the team members were present as well as the operations and support team who will be helping us with the logistics. We are Nigeria Team 6, meaning we will be the 6th IBM team to do a project in Nigeria. We spent a good part of the call making some introductions to each other, but I suspect we will have a lot more opportunity to get to know each other. We spent the other part of the call getting an overview of the programme, what we will need to do, and some more initial information with the promise of more to come. We also got to ask questions. We asked about the logistics of travel, security, types of projects, etc. I left the call feeling satisfied that we are on our way – and in some way wanting to quicken the pace 🙂

I awoke this morning to find several administrative and logistical e-mails in my inbox, including forms for travel, pre-work assignments, and more overview information. It somehow now feels real. Like there is no turning back (like I would want to). It’s hard not to feel excited for what is about to happen: the opportunity to serve, a new adventure, a new experience. I can already tell that this will not be about “kissing babies and shaking hands.” We will get some real work done, and I am confident that we will have real results to show for it.

Bring it on 😀

#ibmcsc nigeria

So I installed Windows 8 Pro

technology, , ,

Yesterday evening I installed Windows 8 Pro on my private laptop.

I have to say so far so good. I can understand why people would complain that the experience is optimised for the touch screen market, but I really don’t get the complaints that it somehow so impossible to use that no one will ever understand it. If you want to understand the new Windows 8, just simply move your mouse to the edges of the screen as there is no start menu button. And there is a “desktop” mode which looks 99% like what you had in Windows 7.

Windows 8 in and of itself isn’t enough to make me buy a new laptop, but the new OS feels a bit more intuitive for those of us who spend our non-working hours on touch screen devices.

I give it a solid 8 / 10 based on my experience so far…I am looking forward to seeing the Surface tablet and maybe being able to ditch my iPad…

So Long, LiveJournal

general update

Well…the time has come to say goodbye to old my friend, LiveJournal (LJ). Well, maybe not goodbye, but it won’t be my primary blog anymore.

I have now moved all of my content to my own WordPress-powered app on my own website at blog.rodneycornelius.com/. There were a few reasons to do this. First, LJ seems to struggle to keep up with the times. They don’t offer the ability for automatic re-direction for mobile users, non-LJ users found it difficult to comment, and most importantly, I am paying a monthly charge for a website that I am not getting full capacity from. So I have decided that over time I will start to make greater use of my own website’s capabilities (including blog and photos) and stop paying other places to host content that I myself can host for free. In the worst case, this will give me a reason to keep my website updated.

I actually won’t delete LJ…there is some great communities there that I still find relevant today and will continue contact with. It is just my blog will automatically post to LJ but the posts are essentially read-only now. Shortly the same thing will be done for Tumblr.

I hope you still following along. And hopefully this move to a new blog makes it even easier to do 🙂

Nigeria Corporate Service Corp (CSC) assignment one step closer

Travel, Work,

So this week I got an e-mail from the CSC coordinator asking us to put together a cover letters and CV (aka resumé) so that our team could be matched to one or more projects. I worked on putting the material together over the weekend and send it in on Monday. I have to say that I spent a lot of time on my cover letter and CV (my CV was already done, but needed some touch ups), making sure both were simple enough to be understood by people who don’t have English as their first language.

nigeria_map

I am really excited to begin the pre-work and to find out more about what I am going to do. From the communications I have received so far, I know that I am going to be working with a pretty diverse international team and I think that those strengths are going to play to our advantage. Right now it is a little over 4½ months away and that feels like a long time. I know however how quickly time flies so I know that this adventure will begin soon.

I am already now beginning to blog about this CSC experience in Nigeria so that I get into the habit and then hopefully will also keep everyone updated on this latest and greatest adventure 🙂

#ibmcsc nigeria

 

Towards Vienna we go!

Travel, Work

On the way to Vienna for a company education event. I am pretty excited about it. I do really like Vienna as a city with it's imperial elegant architecture. The education events ends on Thursday afternoon but I will stay there some extra days to see home more of the city. It is my secpnd trip there in 4 months.

The education event is centered around the things we sell and how to sell more of it. Even though I am managing our delivery in the region, the session will also be valuable for me as well.

I could have done a better job of booking my flights, so I ended up having to take a flight with a connection. However, the flights are with lufthansa and that means that the flights are generally enjoyable. The flight from Stockholm to Dusseldorf was no different. And the connection to Vienna is no different. I do also have to confess that it was nice to be in the air again after several weeks on the ground.

Anyway…just a random update to get back into the habit of journaling. Write more later! For now, a picture from the air…you start to realise how small we are when you look at the ground below when you are screaming through the sky in a metal tube.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

Saturday Morning Update

Uncategorized

In hindsight, that handmade pasta and half bottle of wine weren’t the best idea to begin a night out. But it made for a cozy evening at home in front of the television. 🙂

It’s been a bit a long and strange work week. In some respects I am very glad that it is over. In other respects, some good news about work came to me and that has made me happy. September has not been a very good month overall. I am happy for it to move along.

In line with my Corporate Service Corps assignment, I will need to polish up my website, photo site, and journal websites and make it all work with Facebook and Twitter. This will be the motivation that I needed to keep everything updated and do a full refresh of my digital branding. I plan to make it all happen over the next 4 weeks.

I learned yesterday that I will have to delay my tattoo appointment again. It’s a bit disappointing so today I will go and find a new place to get my tattoo done. Or maybe I will go to the same tattoo place again today and ask for someone else to ink me. The person who normally does it has been sick a lot lately. So I wish them a speedy recovery in any event and hope it is not serious.

For those who haven’t seen it, this will be the new tattoo joining my Phoenix tattoo:

That’s all for right now. Now since I am up so incredibly early, I am off to a little farm stand to find some fresh fruit to make some homemade scones. Yes scones. And later bingo if I can my orthopedic shoes. Sigh…I live a life with too many contrasts.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

The lessons of online backup

Uncategorized,

So earlier this week (Wednesday) I got my HP laptop back from the repair shop. It turns out that the fan was broken which is why my laptop sounded like a lawn mower and you could hear it from the other room. I will give 8 of 10 stars to Info Care (who HP along with many others subcontract to) because they fixed the fan problem. They lose 2 stars for 2 reasons:

  • I had some problems with 2 files that were corrupted and rather than replacing those files they simply just reformatted my machine. Fair enough since they warn you that they might do this, but you get the feeling that reformatting is their first solution – not their last solution.
  • They installed a Swedish version of Windows onto my machine. I am near fluent in Windows but I still prefer that my OS be in English for the time being. So this required some additional e-mail and chat support to get right.

Anyhoo, so this weekend was spent bringing my laptop back to some semblance of the way it was. Luckily for me that basically my laptop is an expensive tablet in the sense that I don't keep a lot physically on the hard drive – for that I have my NAS. So looking over the 60 or so I had installed on my other machine, I used this opportunity to not install the 25 or so programmes I could live without or didn't know what they did anyway. I'll tell you right now, it pays to keep a list of everything you have installed so you don't have to guess. Simply just take screen shots of your programmes menu from the control panel every now and then and save it somewhere as a word document. That just left the restoring the 20 GB of data that Norton Online Backup had determined was important.

So I will come right out and say that this secure online backup concept is really cool and I like it. There is actually 20 GB of music, video, and photos that for various reasons I didn't keep on my NAS and this experience will give me an opportunity to correct that. The biggest drawback has been the amount of time. If I had kept the backup locally (say on a copy on my NAS for example, then I would have been done restoring within 1 hour. However, because it is online storage it has taken the better part of a weekend. Also, when I have looked at what I really have been backing up, I can now see that actually the true amount of stuff that has been useful is more like 11 GB and not 20 GB. And I have some other observations as well. So I have learned the following lessons:

1) I should have 2 backups – one which backups to my NAS and the other which backups to my online storage. The online storage can then be the "nuclear option" in case something really bad happens to my physical space.

2) I should be more specific about what to save. Selecting the defaults means that the backup programme errs on the side of caution, and probably backs up more than it needs to (and misses some things).

3) In some cases, you have to remember the order in which you have installed things. The biggest loss of this experience? I lost all of my user data for The Sims 2 – a game I have played on and off for like 6 years. When thinking about it is no catastrophic loss and it was just a mindless way to pass the time, but still, it killed my motivation to play as I have to start from scratch (and it is a reason to migrate to The Sims 3 instead,,,?)

4) I have a 2 TB NAS which holds everything everything with a mirrored disk (known for geeks as RAID1). Mirroring is not that same as backing up. So I trust that both disks will never fail at the same time and I trust that the physical location is secure, safe, protected enough such that it is unlike that I would lose access to them. This is the part that worries me. I am wondering if I should set up a NAS at a friend's place and have the data backup at their place. Anyone who has experience with this let me know 🙂

Anyway, overall, as I spent the midsummer solo it was a good time to tend to these things. And I will tell you all, if you aren't backing up your data on your computer regularly, you're taking a big risk. Storage these days is free or cheap so there is no real reason to lose all of those awesome pics, fun e-mails, important documents, and other things you have stored on your computer. But of course it is up to you 🙂