As many of you know, I left Deloitte late last month and have moved onto a position within IT Audit at SMBC Nikko Securities. This new position puts me in the thick of a Japanese working environment, which is challenging on many levels – language being the least of which. I look forward to this career change since it pulls out of the rat race that Big Four job have turned into. Long gone are the days where Big Four managers could get regular work and charge exorbitant rates. The competition is stiff and the rates are falling through the floor, which makes it a good time to get out.

The new job, however, is a solid audit department with appropriate positioning independent from finance and reporting directly to the board of directors. While this new audit team has not had the recognition they deserved, now that we are a part of SMBC, the team’s visibility is elevated and most corporate politics aside. The last point is usually a big deal for auditors.

I spent the weekend moaning because I couldn’t go mountain climbing, but also put together a great dual monitor setup on Ubuntu 11.04, and am running (quite successfully) VirtualBox for a Win7 virtual machine. So far, I am impressed with this Ubuntu setup. Quite a contrast from Redhat that I was using back in 1999!
With Ubuntu I managed to get live streaming from a web cam running into justin.tv, so you can see me working at the console, or view an empty messy home office. If anything, take a peek after you hear about a Japan earthquake to see if the book shelf fell over and destroyed my desktop. http://justin.tv/workpapers