And another week has passed. Made a tough decision and started working, so far I don’t regret my decision.

Saturday I did nothing special. I just enjoyed the free day.

Sunday we went to Prahran and had a Yumcha with friends of my host parents. The yumcha was an extensive lunch at a chinese place. The table has a big rotating plate in the middle, the waitresses would offer lots of different foods in small bowls that were then placed onto the rotatable plate so everyone could easily access everything. I don’t recall what I have eaten, but it was all sorts of chinese food. Not the european version like at home but real chinese food.
And everybody used chopsticks! I have never eaten a full meal with chopsticks before, but I managed quite well. In the end my hand was hurting a little from the unfamiliar bearing, but I was full and did not starve 😀

Monday I wanted to finally decide which job to take on. I was waiting for the first one at www.webdynamic.com.au to get a more detailed description of my future tasks and for the second one at www.fdrive.com.au to get exact information about my future income. Around noon I had everything, I called the sysadmin at fdrive and asked if I could come in at the afternoon to get an idea about my potential future work place.

So I went to Kensington. It takes me an hour to get there, but that is quite normal for Melbourne. After having met the boss, been shown around the company and given some time to think about it I decided to take that job. It was basically a decision between working with Ubuntu at webdynamic and FreeBSD at fdrive. While Ubuntu is for people who don’t know how to use Debian properly which annoys me if I have to deal with it on servers, I had no experience with BSD systems and was interested in learning to use them while getting paid for it.

Being one of the 2 only experts running the IT for a company in the secondary sector I also assumend to be under less pressure, since nobody can really understand what magic I am working on the server side.

Tuesday I started working. It was a pretty relaxed start. My boss and all the coworkers I have met so far are really nice. I am working my way through FreeBSD and the IT systems to fully understand it. That will take a few days though. At the moment I find FreeBSD quite weird and left behind compared to sophisticated Linux distributions based on Debian or Fedora.

Wednesday I had another nice and relaxing day at work. I am really happy with my job 🙂 also this day I signed my contract.

Thursday I had my induction at work, meaning I got all the policies handed out. I enjoyed especially the computer+internet policy: blahblablah only with written permission of the IT department. Well – I AM the IT department 😀

On the way back my train to Ringwood could not go through the city loop because that was locked down for a police operation. Must have been quite big if they cut off half the city from major public transport. So instead of going through the city loop my train went back to Flinder Street station and then onto it’s normal route via Richmond.

Friday was no different to the other days at work, but in the morning it was really foggy outside. I liked that for a change, gave a little impression of winter 😀 it’s still too warm to get into winter feeling though, but that’s okay. In the evening we had Carole’s mum over for dinner. One thing was special though: my first train after work was REALLY OLD. Looked like a big tin can and the interiour seemed to be decades old. Vintage feeleing 😀

 

So, I have finished my first week at work. In the morning I get up at 6am and leave the house at 7am with Carole and Garry. We usually drop Carole at the school where she works then park at the Ringwood Railway Station and take the limited express train at 7.20 to the City. We leave at Southern Cross. While Gary’s work is right next to it I get on another train for 10 minutes to Kensington. It takes me a full hour from my work to Ringwood station. That’s quite a while, but it has its advantages: because I get onto the train quite early on its route I always get a seat 🙂 a few stops later the train is packed.

I finish work at 5pm and get to Ringwood at 6pm. Usually I am lucky and can get a lift home with Garry. If that doesn’t work I just take the bus which takes me about 20 minutes longer.

 

Some funny observations about public transport in Melbourne:

  • when people leave the bus they most often say “Thank you” to the bus driver
  • the ticket inspectors on the trains are called “Public Transport Authorised Officers”
  • they wear mighty looking uniforms
  • they comb through the trains in squads like special forces units
  • while 2 of them check everyone’s ticket (they’re actually quite friendly people) the other’s block the doors to each side so that nobody can run
  • together with the installed CCTV it gives the impression of a surveillance state
  • since PT works well for me I don’t bother 🙂 it’s a funny experience to me, with German PT not having CCTV and only single ticket inspectors that are not intimidating at all 😀