Letters that don't get published

Well I'm moving -- I realised that JRoller blog hosting is also available to me, it has categories and is seriously customisable.

This is where I'll be: http://jroller.com/page/mcbofh

Last time I was over here for a rotation, a mate took me to lunch at a place called "La Cabana" -- a very good mexican restaurant. The only thing I could remember about its whereabouts was that it was next to an adult book and movie emporium.

I found the place again yesterday:


And so I don't forget, it's on Sycamore near the intersection with Thornton.

So I'm in the SF Bay Area for work. I'm here for a month.

I departed Sydney's beautiful 30 degC and arrived at SFO where the temperature was about 11 degC. When the sun was out. If there wasn't any wind.

One of the things that I really really love about Australia is the weather. I love waking up and seeing the sun. In fact, I crave sunshine in the morning, otherwise I find it incredibly hard to wake up.

So for the past two weeks there's been sod-all (technical term) sun in the morning before about 0800. I'm still sleepy at lunchtime.

And for the past week there's been heavy drizzle every morning. Not rain as such, and not a brief drizzly shower-like thing here and there, but heavy drizzle.

Of course, I forgot to bring my raincoat or a pocket-sized umbrella so I'm sorta stuck. But that doesn't detract from the sheer annoyance of the rain. It's not minimal so you can't ignore it, it's just on the threshold of being heavy.

It's a good thing I'm not camping I guess.

One of the things I do in my job is trouble-shooting.

We make use of a methodology developed by Kepner-Tregoe called Analytical Trouble Shooting.

You can read about this methodology in a book by Charles "Chuck" Kepner and Ben Tregoe called The New Rational Manager.

It's not rocket science, it's common sense. But as we all know, common sense is unfortunately not very common.

Kepner-Tregoe run courses where they teach this (as Problem Solving and Decision aking) as well as a project management course (which I haven't done yet but will do some day). If you have anything to do with troubleshooting -- in manufacturing, engineering.... -- then you should do this course and put the principles into ractice.

Hands up all those of you who watched the movie Apollo 13? Remember the really stressful scenes where the guys on the ground were trying to work out what went wrong and how to fix the problem? NASA was using ATS. There you go -- ATS saves lives.

Right, I've finally joined the rest of the blog world. I've been feeling the pull
for months.

I work for a multinational computer vendor. I mostly do tier-4 technical support
-- that's bugfixes, patches and technical escalation management -- but I also do
a bit of tools and hardware driver development.

I live in Sydney, Australia. I sail an NS14 dinghy (more of a skiff, really) on
Sydney Harbour, and you can often find me via IRC on #humbug.