I got a JOB!!!!!!!!

Ok so I have been looking for a job for a while, since I got to Sweden, well not really that actively, was lazy enjoying my holiday for a while.

I mean we moved to Swedisn end of June, and I did not update my C.V. on monsterboard until  21st of August.

I applied for a couple of different jobs, and went for some interviews, but nothing went anywere, some i have not heard from again, and some I turned down.

Anyway so on the 12 of September I got a call from a recruiter for a Job.

She send me the Job description, and to be honest I almost turned it down right there, I was worried it was a call center like job.

But getting closer to my last day to BT, i decide i might just as well go, just in case nothing else comes up.

She calls again the next day, and I tell that I am interested.

And on the 15th I get a mail asking if I can go for an interview on the 17th, which I agree to.

So I go to the interview and the the position turns out to be much more interesting than my first impression.

I get interviewed by an in house recruiter, and I guess he found me to be an interesting candidate since already at the end of the interview he asked if I could come for a second interview on the 24th.

I then go for the second interview, this time with the Customer support manager, you wont believe this but well he is a dutch guy, hmm the dutch is haunting me.

Anyway we have a nice chat we decide to settle the interview language to English since my Dutch was as good/bad as his Swedish. .

After the interview I again have a better impression of the job.

We agree that I will come to meet the team leader the next day, I kind of have the feeling that I will get the job, but not sure yet, but by now I am really interested in this job.

And yesterday afternoon I went to meet with the Team leader, as well as another guy, who will be my collegue doing the same function.

We also talk a bit, mostly about what I did at BT, and after about 30 minutes we are done and they ask me to wait, since the manager (the dutch guy) wanted to speak with me.

So I sit and wait and after a while he comes in telling they like me and would like to hire me, and hands me an offer along with a contract.

I get very happy, but tell I would like to take it home to read through (Had to many bad experiences with rushing things.)

When I get home and read it through I find it is again better than my expectations, so today I went there to hand in the signed contract to HR.

And as of the 7th of October I will be working as a Technical Support Analyst for a company called Cognos.

Ok so almost done setting up our new life in Sweden, only thing missing is our own place.

And speaking of that, me and Marina have been looking at houses, and we actually found our dream house.(Link removed, House no longer for sale)

It has everything we wanted, not to far from Center, but still in a quiet area, a garage for my car, a garden for Marina, a big workshop for me, enough rooms to have a guest room and a computer room, as well as a room for me and Marina  and for the kid that is on it’s way, a nice layout on all of it. And for a resonable price, I mean this house is everything we want. A house that both me and Marina could agree on.

But unfortunatly it looks as we can’t afford it right now.

Now that I have a job I called a financing company to find out if we could afford it, and they told me no.

Since we only will have one income, and here is a rule in Sweden that your morgage payments can only cost 50% of your household income.

And this house would cost us about 60%.

The stupid thing is, that if I was single, I could buy it.

The calculation would then be based on only my income and my expences, but now it is based on supporting 2 persons on 1 sallary.

Although the amount she gave me that we need to have left was way more than we need to be able to live a normal life, with a kid , but rules are rules.

And since we don’t have enough savings to put in we have to borrow the full amount that is allowed (95%), and that makes it very difficult for us to get it at this moment.

Oh well hopefully something will come up later, so for now we are looking to get a rented apartment and then save up so we can get a house later.

So until next time, you now know what we want for christmas, I think i will be really good so santa will come.

Holly 20/08/1997 – 30/10/2008 »« Small update.

Small update.

ok small update.

The hospital called back with the results.

And they told that according to the test, there is 1 in 20.000 chance that the baby will have down syndrome.

I guess that is good. since we have no plans to have that many babies.

I got a JOB!!!!!!!! »« Baby on the way, first pictures available.

Baby on the way, first pictures available.

Hello everyone.

Just a quick update to let you know how it goes with the baby business.

Yesterday we had a meeting with the doctor, just to talk about different things.

One of the things, we were wondering was about a test that can be done to screen for Down syndrome, this includes a Blood test of the mother and an Ultrasound, so yesterday they took a blood test and today we went for Ultrasound.

The blood test had not yet been analyzed so we have no result, but well since Marina is only 28 the risk of Down Syndrome is only about 0.1%.

I will put an update when we get the result.

But for now you can go to the album to see the images from the Ultrasound.

We have another Ultrasound, the one they usually do, this one is on 24th of October. Will get some more images then, as well as a video, I found out that they can actually record the session on a DVD, so will get that for sure.   :smile:

Small update. »« Spam and Maintanance update.

Spam and Maintanance update.

Ok lately the amount of spam comments have increased a lot, you won’t see them since I have to aprove all comments.

But basically I was getting 5 comments per day that where spam, so I have installed a capatcha system to put a damper on it.

Basically it means if you want to comment you have to type what is in an image.

I found a different one, that actually also serves a purpose, everytime you translate what is in the image you help to digitize books.

You can read about it here:  http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

And Regarding the server, I ran into some issue when trying to set up a new server so I have rolled back, and are awaiting some answers on forums.

Until then I will leave site up.

Baby on the way, first pictures available. »« Some updates and Server Maintanance.

Some updates and Server Maintanance.

Hello everyone,

Quite a while since I made any updates here, so it’s about time.

So what has happened since last time?

Well me, Marina, Holly, Balder and Heimdal has moved to Hässelby in Sweden, it is in the Western part of Stockholm.

Here we share a large apartment with some friends, Aurelie (who also moved from Holland to Sweden.) and Göran(He moved up some months earlier.)
Move was a pain, we moved during the weekend of 27-30th of June, And well trust me driving Amsterdam-Stockholm-Amsterdam with way to little sleep in 3 days is no fun.

We have started to settle in, Marina is going to Swedish course, and I have started looking for work.

I had saved up Holidays from my previous employer, enabling me to be on Holiday from June to end of September, I have used this to get all the details arranged, including getting me some well needed rest.  :smile:

And I have some great news too, In end of July actually only 2 days before my Birthdate, we found out that Marina is pregnant. This was kind of unexpected news, but still very welcome news, since the plan was to move to Sweden to start a family, although the start a family part was supposed to be a bit later, but well nature wanted it differently.  :razz:

So after our calculations, expected delivery is on the 24th of March 2009.

Marina is going through some hard times, as many other pregnanat women, she is nausious, puking, difficulty eating many things, pain and general weak feeling. But luckily this should start to wear of, since she is entering 11th week now, and they say that most women start feeling better in 11-12th week.

I will kep you  updated on what happends on this of course.

So another update, this more boring than babies.  :roll:

With the move came a bonus, as I mentioned in the previous blogg, the server would be moved to a faster connection, well this was true, right now it is connected to a 100/100mbit Fiber connection.

Well not directly to fiber, but close, the Fiber converter is in the Fuse cabinet.

So you should notice a slight speed improvement loading images and such on the Album, or on your page if you are hosted with me.

Another update is that I decided to learn more about Server Virtualization, for those of you who don’t know what that is well, to be brief, I have a Computer that acts as a server, This server does a lot of things, most noticibly Hosting this blog, and the album, but it also does E-mail, file server, Database server and some other things. And right now it all runs as one server, all running in the same environement.

For a home server that is fine, but for businesses, it is not a good idea, since if for example the Mail server crashes or if a hacker found a security flaw in the web server, this could spread to all the other services, and take them all down.

Before this was solved by having one or more computers for each type of service, so one computer for Mail, one for Web, and another for Database, and so on.

But that is very inefficient and expensive, both in Energy and Money.

Because usually not all services need all the resources of the computer at the same time leaving many servers stanidng doing nothing a lot of the time.

So instead someone came up with the idea of Virtual servers.

Basically that means that on one computer runs several virtual servers, all Isolated from each other.

So even if one server get’s hacked or crashes, all the others will remain unaffected.

It also gives the advantage that you can run different type of Operating systems on the same computer at the same time, for example different flavours of Linux, Windows, and Solaris.

Well i wanted to try and learn more about this, so started investigating and I found a nice open source virtualization system called Xen, unfortuantly the hardware I have does not fully support virtualization, basically as you remember some time ago I upgraded the hardware in the Server, and bought new motherboard and CPU and so on, well the CPU I got was a Pentium D 805, and this does not have the Virtualization feature, so Today I bought a new CPU called Pentium D 930.

Unfortunatly my Motherboard is too old to support the new Core2Duo or Quad processors, so had to stick with the Pentium D generation.

I picked up the last one they had in the store.

I installed it and besides having the ability to do Virtualization, it also got a  bigger Level 2 Cache and it is a bit faster, 3.0Ghz, vs the old 2.6Ghz, this while still using slightly less electricity.

Now I need to collect some money to upgrade the memory also, this would give a good speed bump, since right now it is kind of struggeling with only 1GB.

I even tried to steal some memory from my old Dell PC, it has 1,5GB, so wanted to take the 1G, but it was too old. the Dell is using DDR 400, and server uses DDR2 667

So I have to go and get some new once.

Donations are as usually always welcome.  :mrgreen:

Well anyway, to be able to set up Virtual servers on my server, I need to reinstall everything, since I don’t have another server to take over while doing this it means I have to take down everything while doing that.

I plan to do it this comming weekend 5, 6 and 7th of September, if it does not work out I will make another attempt in the weekend after.

Well that was all for this time.

Brian.

Spam and Maintanance update. »« Moving to Sweden