aidanwalsh.net

I do a lot of my shopping online these days. Like anyone I have spoken to who shops online regularly I have been hit now and then by occasional problems, delays and disasters that aren’t always unavoidable but usually annoying.

However this isn’t one of those stories. Today I want to tell you a good news story about someone I recently purchased from through the Amazon Marketplace.

Shortly after the passing of the late Arthur C. Clarke I decided that it was probably about time that I got around to reading some of his stuff. Going on the recommendation of someone whose word usually stands for something (IMO), I decided upon starting with Profiles of the Future. So about a week ago while on my local Amazon site, I searched for the name and, since Amazon were out of stock themselves, decided upon one of the Marketplace merchants by the name of Unbeatable Books. They had a pretty impressive rep, and the price was very reasonable. So I clicked and ordered.

Unfortunately, just last night two emails sat in my inbox, both through Amazon. The first was a refund receipt, the other an explanation.

Hi Aidan,

I am just processing your order for the above mentioned book.
Sadly,on close final inspection,i have found my last copy,to be faulty.
The pages have been misaligned during the guillotining process,resulting in the lower 6 or 7 lines of the last 30 pages being absent.
This has effectively rendered the book unreadable.
The condition is way below the standard we would be happy to dispatch or you receive no doubt.
I scoured my warehouse yesterday and have rung around my retail outlets this morning but unfortunately have been unable to locate a replacement copy.
In all likelihood,I will have the book back in stock next week,but I don’t wish to cause you any further delay.
I have therefore refunded your account fully some moments ago.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the inconvenience.
Best wishes,Darren.
Unbeatable Books.

Damn. By this time it was pretty late in the evening, so I decided against going back and finding another merchant to try to get it through. Still, I was pretty happy to see that Darren had appeared to go to some effort to find another copy, and the reasoning was sound.

Cut to late this morning, and another mail drops in the inbox from Amazon.

Hi Aidan,

Dont know if you have repurchased yet , but just to let you know , i have located another copy this morning and have listed on Amazon , if you still need it.

Thanks,Darren.

Now thats good service. With no guarantee of resale, or even any communication from me regarding the original transaction, here was a replacement copy up for sale and a tip off from the seller. And whats more, its even a little cheaper than the book was originally. Needless to say I went over and snapped it up while I could.

Thanks Darren. I’ll be keeping an eye out for Unbeatable Books whenever I’m in the Amazon Marketplace in future.

Long time no update, huh?

For one thing, there just hasn’t been much to write about. A couple of things came up from time to time, but I never really gave myself the time to write up my thoughts about it properly. I also want to avoid turning this into a “what I had for lunch today” type of thing which would be of no interest to anyone (myself included).

Well, here goes.

Since moving to Cork back in August, I’m still in the process of settling into the house. For the most part I’m relatively comfortable, though there are a few bits and pieces to sort out, holes to patch (damn coat hanger coming off the wall) and annoyances to resolve.

Also, I’m pretty happy that in my time there I have yet to lose a sock to the dryer!

I have been in the process of building myself a proper place to get some work done. After years of being restricted to a tiny desk barely big enough to hold the tower and the monitor, I am after paying out for a good, decent slab of work station real estate. I also invested in a proper, supportive chair. Once the desk gets delivered I can get up of the floor.

I bought an iMac. I was nearly put off the whole Apple scene for life a couple of years back, but I realise now that that was down to a really crumby OS 8 installation we had to use during a Multimedia section of my college course. Honestly, opening a video editor would bring that system down.

My trusty laptop has been given a new lease on life after getting rid of Windows and installing Ubuntu Desktop Edition. If you have read my blog before, you may know that for some time I ran Ubuntu Server on my personal file server, so the transition was pretty painless. The installation experience was also much nicer than the last time I tried as well, as the installer now correctly detected my graphics adapter and ran at a resolution higher than 800×600 – last time I tried to install Ubuntu this was all I could muster, and the installation options window didn’t (doesn’t?) function correctly at that low resolution.

While startup times are still kinda slow, performance while working is a multiple fold increase. It helps not having to run a couple of dozen extra real time applications watching every interaction to make sure that I’m staying clean and safe. There are still some things I have to sort out, like getting my Wifi card to get detected automatically rather than manually calling ndiswrapper into work whenever I need to get online, but that should all be a matter of reading and a couple of hours hackery.

Now I also need to build myself a nice Windows machine for gaming and work, and a proper Linux based server for storage, development and testing. Each of these will also being used for Folding@Home number crunching, as my current machines are.

Finally, I also have a project that I want to work on. More on that at a later date, but its based around a concept and a technology that has interested me for some time now, and its exciting to finally have an idea that I think could add some real value for people. It could be a while before I get anything out on it, as I have some protocol research and testing to do.

There are a couple of other ideas floating around in various stages of development, but as this one kinda fell into place quickly and seems to make a good dose of sense, its getting priority.

Well, that was pretty much what I wanted to avoid, wasn’t it? Well, now I am what I hate.

How quickly things can change.

Since I last wrote, I have gotten a job and moved home. It was all a bit of a whirlwind, really.

Shortly after I submitted my last piece, I got a call from a college friend telling me that he would like to refer me for a job. He had gone for an interview for first level support for a technology company a couple of weeks before and just been offered a place, but since he had already accepted a position in another organisation, he would have to decline. Asking me if I would like to take a chance at the place (offers to me had been few and far between), I accepted and an email was sent to the relevant HR people.

The following Monday I got the call. One quick telephone interview later, I was asked to travel to the company in Cork City. Two more interviews (HR and line managers) and an offer is made.

“The next training session starts next Thursday, do you think you can make it?” her in HR says to me.
“As in day after tomorrow Thursday?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”

Cue a phone call home to let them know whats going on, and by the time I have gotten off the bus back in Killarney the Cork local papers have been scavenged for “To Let” notices and notes made in blue ballpoint beside the promising looking ones. Calls were made, and reasonably priced accommodation was sourced in a pretty nice part of the city. Not bad for a few hours work.

So Wednesday is spent packing, moving and unpacking, before an early night for an early start the Thursday morning to partake in that great little tradition that it seems all American companies now ask you to enjoy – the medical.

Its not development, but its a step in the door. And its a good company to have on the CV at any rate. I’m not naming names as of yet just in case things don’t really work out, though I might revise that in time.

Also, now that I work for this company I have to legally throw aside one of my planned projects, as this probably would have found me in competition with them. Had it been successful, that is. Well, back to the drawing board…

Both project work and job hunting have been ground to a near halt in the last few days due to a problem with the computer. What looked like a hard drive failure has seemingly transpired to be a problem with the IDE controller (IMO, the box is currently in the shop for a second opinion).

I still have my laptop, but that thing struggles with Firefox open, let alone Visual Studio or Eclipse.

Hopefully, I will have it back to full steam in a couple of days time.

1) Read a recommendation for a new comic.
2) Spend said day reading the archives. All four years worth.

Possibly NSFW depending on your workplace, but still fairly funny stuff.

Thanks to Rob for guiding me to the comic and robbing me of another day I’ll never get back.

[tags]comic, leasticoulddo, Least I could Do[/tags]

Hi. I’m Aidan. I’m 23 years old and live in the small tourist orientated town of Killarney, Ireland.

I’m have recently completed the Computing and Software Development course at the local Institute of Technology. As such, I am currently “between jobs” as the saying goes. I program mainly in Java and C#, though I do try to dabble into a few other languages when I can get the chance.

I have had this space for some time now and have been meaning to do something with it. I used also maintain another blog (or Journal, as the hosting site preferred to call it) but since it didn’t really fit in with the focus on that site I have decided to move it here. If you want to take a look at that, you’ll have to bounce back through the archives, since its been a while since it was updated.

One thing you might learn about me there is that I do tend to have some ambitious ideas. I would hope to be able to share some of those here, even if I do not end up developing any of them myself. Others, I do hope to pick up some day, and this blog will in those cases serve as a journal of their development.

I also have something of an amateur interest in user experience in computing. For all the good that has happened in the last few years, there is still a long, long way to go. It doesn’t help that I can be easily frustrated – I prefer things to “just work”. But how often does that happen, eh?

I do hope that you will stick with me. I will need all the feedback that I can get while I try to push forward in these. There may occasionally be some more personalised entries like this one. I hope they won’t put you off too much

Onward and upward…