Sunday, December 10, 2006

Weekend, going...going...gone! (plus some year end reflection)

Argh...there goes my weekend, all THREE days of it.

On Friday, I left work at exactly 5 pm. Heh, I was looking forward to the 3 day weekend and couldn't wait for it to start! I arrived at gym at about 7 pm and was happily jogging when I got a phone call from my manager.

"Amir, what are you doing tomorrow? We need you to attend a technical meeting with customer. It should be between 2 pm to 5 pm only. See if you can find out what's causing the problem."

2 pm to 5 pm? It didn't sound so bad. Even though it's a Saturday, the problem seems like an interesting challenge so why not? Did some preparation, played FM2007 to relax and had a good sleep. Next day afternoon, I went for the meeting. To keep a long story short (and also avoid giving confidential information!), meeting was from 2 pm all the way to 8.30 pm. So much for a short one. After all the discussion, we've arrived at an action-plan which involves me working from Monday night entering Tuesday morning. To make things more interesting, I then have a meeting (on a completely different issue) back in office at 10 am Tuesday. Heh, no rest for the wicked! Hmm...maybe I can claim emergency allowance...

So, Saturday technical meeting, Sunday emails and planning, Monday night work. Oh, and Tuesday morning meeting and Tueday afternoon more backbone fun! While I love my work (it's challenging and never boring!), it does get tiring. As soon as I'm done with my current project, I'm looking for a nice break next year. Maybe go to some beach or something and enjoy the seaside. Then again, if there's something interesting on, maybe I'll postpone my vacation and work some more. ;)

Hmm...looking back, I've been doing a lot of stuff this past year. I've done implementation and integration on SGSN, GGSN, Juniper routers, Extreme switches, Funk RADIUS servers, Bind DNS servers, Netscreen firewalls and SUN Solaris servers. I've also done backbone integration with VAS nodes such as SMS, MMS, WAP, Video Gateway and Video Mail. Beyond that I've done a large number of network trace analysis on Sigtran traffic for Video Gateway (H.323 and Megaco protocols mainly). All in all, I'd say it was a rather productive year. I'm looking forward to what next year will bring. :)

PS: Warning, bragging ahead! Did you know that I set up the first GGSN in the Ericsson world that handled HSDPA in a commercial network? I did that last year in Philippines. :D

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