Before I blog about Monster’s party, here’s a random set of things to do with my work that might be interesting to at least some of our vast readership.
We are finally moving to our new office – my section is one of the last to go, in early October. So we had a ‘goodbye to the old office’ party a few weeks ago and a ‘hello to the new office’ party last Friday. I think that the move date was due to be between the two, but slipped a lot and then they couldn’t move the party dates. The summer party was hijacked to be the hello party, and the goodbye party came out of move expenses 
. The hello party had the same stuff from previous years (a hog roast, bouncy castle, booze) plus a novelty for this year: an ice cream van whose contents were all free! Hurrah .
We got to look in through the windows of the new place – it’s still a building site so we couldn’t go in. It’s all very swanky, although probably won’t be quite as swanky as the office we already have across the car park from the new place as customers visit them their whereas we’re an ivory tower and *gasp* don’t wear suits.
The phone system is going to be VOIP, so may or may not work OK. (Talking to our colleagues in India is sometimes tricky because of technical problems with the VOIP they have – something to do with compression and bandwidth throttling we’ve been told.) The phone on our desks will plug into the data network (and not phone system, as they’ll be the same), and also draw power over the network lead. We’ll then plug our PC’s network lead into the phone, which will act as a mini router – seems weird but I expect we’ll get used to it.
There’s a toy that you can get for a bit of extra money – a USB headset and program for your computer. If you have these and then go to e.g. our office in Germany, when you connect to the network there the program grabs hold of your phone connection so that someone ringing my desk phone back at my office would magically ring my laptop in Germany! This would also work if you’re in a hotel and using the VPN to talk to the company network.
WARNING: Geek content alert! Feel free to stop reading here as this paragraph contains more geekiness than average. One of my colleagues wants to find out where all the data structure definitions are actually being used in a very large lump of C code – structures that contain pointers to other structures and so on. He thought for a bit and then realised that there’s already a program that understands all this stuff – the compiler. We use gcc among a few others, so he read through the source code, found the bit where it deals with dereferencing pointers and added in some code of his own. Not surprisingly (given how clever he is) it worked. Genius.
Are the phones Cisco 7960′s or similar? Beware of the network port in the base of the phone; they tend to flake out or drop packets, particularly under serious network load. If you get weird intermittent network problems with your PC – get a real network port!