Day 7

Skype with Nonno this morning. Can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying being able to speak with people back home – especially with video! Speaking of Skype, did you know the guy who invented Skype was Swedish? In truth, it was a Swede – Niklas Zennström – and a Dane but that’s not important.

They published the article about me on the company Intranet today. You can find a copy of it here. Not too shabby.

Went through adding a new domain to the AT&T Secure Email Gateway for Italy with Niklas. Getting a better understanding of how the whole email thing works – his ‘MX record’ lesson from the other day came in handy. Showed him our Helpbox setup and the tweaks we’d made (such as adding some ‘ITIL’ request types). Also had a look at our Project Application, the Change Register and our Asset Register. He’s putting together some documentation of the SSC EMEA ITIL processes and was interested to get some insight into how we do things in Oz.

Weekly phone ‘catch up’ with AT&T – Magnus Pierre (account manager) and Håkan Stegrud (service manager). About 12 items on the list including some AVTS activations, ANIRA/EVPN terminations, some sites missing in PIP and progress on some quotes they are waiting on.

Goulash with rice for lunch. I see a pattern developing – had something with rice for the last three lunches. I think I’m picking the least Swedish dishes… have to do better next week. Speaking of food, every Friday afternoon the IT department has what they call ‘Fika’ – coffee and cakes. I looked it up and turns out ‘Fika’ actually means ‘coffee’ so that kind of makes sense. Not too sure where the cakes come from (pastries is probably more accurate), but I think someone has to go out and buy them. I had hot chocolate, no coffee for me.

Got chatting with one of the younger guys, Johan. He’s a Landskrona local and has invited me out tonight and tomorrow. Tonight we’re going to a bar/pub to see some live music. He described it as ‘rock’ – I don’t think they’ll be playing ABBA. Tomorrow night, however, we’re going to another pub and watching the first of the Swedish Eurovision Song Contest heats. Apparently Dolph Lundgren (aka Captain Ivan Drago, the Russian in Rocky IV) is one of the hosts. Should be a laugh.

Tomato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches for dinner tonight. My excuse for not putting effort into cooking dinner is that we have a hearty lunch at work!