Lauren visited The Gabba today while some of us had to work. The Gabba is Brisbane's cricket ground and home to the Brisbane Lions AFL (Aussie Rules) team. We're into the school Winter Holidays now and as we're both working we've had to put Lauren into Vacation Care with her school. It costs money but they've got a really good schedule of activities on. It seems every day they're doing something different and fun.

I can't say I had much fun at work today. As per usual when I join a company, they haven't got my account set up on the network yet so I haven't got access to the systems to actually do anything. So I've spent all Friday and Monday reading through technical documentation. My head is buzzing! I was bored to tears today - it's not exactly like reading the DaVinci Code!

I've been promised it will improve tomorrow and I'll actually be able to get stuck into some work. I'm not holding my breath that my accounts will be ready but I should at least be able to take some tasks and get some meetings going with the client to move things forward.

The project I'm working on is a Secure External Access project. I've had plenty of experience with this type of thing before but it's a little more complicated this time as it involves 3 different companies sharing a common infrastructure. So I need to create and implement security policies so that 3 different companies can allow their users to access the network externally over the Internet into the shared infrastructure, but it needs to be completely segregated so users from company A cannot access systems at company B. What makes it complicated is that there's lots of different components involved and for each component the 3 companies have slightly different requirements and different security models.

What makes it even more complicated, for me, is that I'm not just helping design the solution and advising on security as I have done in the past, I also need to physically install and configure the different components, and understand how everything works in case there are any problems and I have to provide technical support.

It's 8:30pm now and I'm ready for bed if I'm honest. I'm not used to these early starts. This morning was the first morning when we had the hassle of Rach starting at 6:30 so we all had to be up at stupid o'clock. Oh how I miss being able to work from home.