It’s weird. Normally, I’m a guy who has little trouble getting by on little sleep. However, lately I’ve had to coordinate a lot of my work with the company IT center in Germany and some guys on the US east coast. Also, there was a lot of documentation I’ve had to read.
What this all means, basically, is that I’ve been working in two different time zones while living in a third, and it’s been messing with my sleep a lot. I feel like I’m constantly exhausted and when I’m at the office I have to sit around hours on end without having much of anything to do but wait.

On a more positive note, there will be national holidays next week and I’m going to be able to sleep in most of the time. Also, Jan Schwarz is finally coming back to Suzhou as well as two new interns who are arriving next week, bringing our number back up to four. What this means is basically that I’m going to be able to concentrate more on my work and hand stuff off to other people – one intern is definitely not enough around here. Also it’ll give me more stuff do to on the evenings and weekends.

Sunday, I’m going to spend in Shanghai and I’m very much looking forward to seeing that city some more. Anyway, that’s pretty much it for now,

-Jan

I hate ‘em. Especially when they end around the time that I’m around. Even though I’m not really involved in the process of closing our books, it seems I get my fair share of BS considering I’m here to look after our IT.
At least there we’re making progress, even though some people waaay above me are starting to mess with the project.

You have a good weekend, I know I will spend mine trying to get my backlog of to-dos back under control.

-Jan

It seems to me that I haven’t posted in a while – a misdemeanor I think I have to rectify. It’s not as though I haven’t had anything to write about, rather I just haven’t found the time to do so lately.

So here’s what’s been happening with me the last week(end). I gotta admit that I have been dreadfully useless around the office the last week as I spent most of my time getting my machine back to it’s former working state, or something close to it. This involved downloading my personal files from my backup in Germany, searching and downloading the myriad of tools I use and finally putting that all back into some kind of order where I can find anything. The whole thing is not exactly being helped by my having to use my old infuriatingly slow hard drive while I have to wait for the replacement parts to be brought to me by Jan S. who is currently back in Germany preparing for the (hopefully) last university exam of his life.

In other things, the last week ended with a lot of “work” for me over the weekend. I’m using quotation marks as it didn’t really involve actual work but rather required me to show up to various fun things, starting with Kristof’s good-bye dinner on Friday, which I missed – because of real work. We were planning to finally finish migrating our network to the new gigabit ethernet backbone, which involved changes to our fibreoptic cables. Against my better warnings, the contractor wasn’t called in to do the changes to the fibreoptic cables and connectors at 4p.m. on Friday but rather showed up around 5p.m. – assuring me this would all go very, very fast. One and a half hours later, around the time we were supposed to show up at the dinner, he assured me it would take only another half hour at worst.
Three hours after that, they ran out of the fibreoptic cable they brought along to splice with our cable for the new patch panel they installed. By that time, the dinner had – of course – already finished and all I’d gotten was some KFC our IT guy fetched for us while we waited for the contractor to get his act together. Frustrated, but not surprised, I left them to do their bidding leaving instructions for them not to be let out of the building until the job was finished.
Unhappy about what I’d missed that evening, I lucked out and managed to hook up with the rest of the group which had by then moved on to a bar.

Saturday brought with it much-needed sleep and an invitation to the opening of the Kunshan International Beer Festival, the biggest beer festival in China. This being a sister-event to the Munich Oktoberfest, it was co-sponsored by a lot of German companies and we had VIP tickets to the German tent. Along with the VIP tickets came access to the plentiful lunch where I must have eaten more food than I had the 3 days before combined, as well as a nice and steady supply of German beer – all in all one could say I was happy.
It got better though – when our table was suddenly flooded with a group of very pretty Chinese girls who’s purpose of being there I have not yet quite understood (although the idea crossed my mind that they might be hookers…). They sure were a lot of fun, dancing to the Bavarian music that was being played by the band that had specifically been flown in from Bavaria to play at the festival. Maybe I’ll get some good pictures I can upload off Kristofs camera, but right now, all I have are memories.
However, Kristof and our boss, Mr. Zoeberlein, had other plans for the night. Seeing the event as what it was – an opportunity to make business acquaintances – they hit it off with the Mayor of Kunshan city. I don’t know exactly how much Schnapps they had but when we finally left for home, Kristof sure wasn’t looking all that great – I guess even the strongest drinker meets his match sooner or later.

Sunday was another day of blessfully long sleep, followed by my weekend assignment of showing our new company controller, who I just on a look-and-see trip to Suzhou before starting in earnest in about a month, around town. So we did some touristy stuff like taking a boat tour around one of the many canals this city is filled with, getting a massage and shopping for CDs and DVDs. Dinner was at the Thai restaurant I’m positively fond of and best of all, I was home around 10p.m. and therefore enough time to rest, if not exactly sleep.

So that was my last week, hope I’m not boring you with what I’m writing.

-Jan

So I’ve had the IBM service guy look at my laptop this afternoon. Turns out they could repair my notebook all right around here, just one teeny tiny problem: The parts.

I need a new base cover, handrest and some internal parts that got bent – which the IBM guys here think they can just bend back into shape – but that’s another matter. What’s surprising is the parts prices they have here: The base cover costs around 100€, the hand rest about 360€.

At that point, I was about ready to throw the guy out – which I did once I got through to the IBM replacement parts service in Germany. They told me the parts would cost me 15€ and 25€ respectively, without tax. So the decision is an easy one: I’m ordering all the parts I want in Germany (which are more as I don’t want anything bent back into shape…) and I’ll fix it myself – cheapest solution. Or, depending when all parts have arrived (some have a long waiting period) I’ll drive to Heppenheim and have it done by the IBM service guys in Germany.

Anyway, this finishes that issue for me.

-Jan

The ThinkPad T42p I’m writing this on is my second machine from the ThinkPad series. Although I’ve had to professionally deal with many many machines by multiple vendors such as Dell, Toshiba, HP and Acer among others, none have caught my confidence as the ThinkPad brand has.
Last Saturday’s experience of me dropping my hideously expensive Notebook off a server rack is another example of why my confiction stands: Aside from minimal physical damage to the titanium/plastic composite casing and the harddisk, the machine got through without any scratches. Not even the Display seems to be damaged which is almost unbelievable as the laptop came to a stop lying flat down on the ground.
Today I called the IBM service and I’m confident they will be able to send me replacements for the case within the next 48 hours along with a techie to take care of installing them – not that I actually need one but I’d rather keep the warranty.

I’m sure that with every other manufacturer I’d be in pretty big trouble if something like this had happened. I’m absolutely convinced the fall would have resulted in catastrophic failure, damaging them beyond repair. How do I know this? Because I’ve seen it happen and so far, the only ones that pulled through ok were the ThinkPads. I’m praying that Lenovo will not change anything about their build quality because if they did, I don’t know what I’d have to do – there just aren’t any machines out there comparable with what I got here.

-Jan