Technica Obscura

Strippers, lovers and why it's hard to be me.

2010-10-16T23:14:00.005+11:00

Dear Readers. Warning, the following blog is going to be written on the spot at 1:30am, no editing, no second readings, no proof reading. It's from the heart and going to be on the internet. And I've thought about it and I'm okay with it. (Which isn't entirely sensible since I'm slightly under the influence of alcohol).

Today I spent the majority of the day with some wonderful people from my work on Waiheke Island off Auckland and I had so much fun. According to karma, clearly it was a sign things were going to go wrong. Horribly wrong.

After I came back to Auckland from the island, I went out with two other people from work. These are two great guys who like a bit of fun and who care for me and none of the following is meant to be disparaging to them at all. We went drinking at a place called the Steamship and then later one of them says "We should go to Mermaids". Mermaids is a dodgy strip joint in Auckland. Last place in the world I wanted to go, but since I don't really want to spoil other people's fun, I consented to go. Seriously folks, naked people dancing sounds scandalous and titillating, but it's really terribly boring and degrading to watch (both for them and for you).

Things were just harmless for a while until my friends decided to buy me a lapdance with one of the girls. At about $80 for 10mins, this is what you'd call a generous gift and they were just trying to be nice to the single, friendly, geeky, loser on the floor. I was terribly uncomfortable with this and said so, but they insisted. I got half way and whilst the girl was attempting to clear the payment, I backed out, was very apologetic and went back. The girl was upset (at missing payment), but one of my friends 'volunteered' to go up instead. My other friend was very impressed and said so. He was like he had never met someone with such a moral compass, who was so friendly, etc, etc. With my ego boosted and in a moment of weakness, I told him about the girl I am dating back home and said "You know what, I'm a great person and if after 5 dates she doesn't want to kiss me, when I get back, its over".

If it ended here, this would be a great (lame) story and I'd be a hero.

It didn't.

About 15 minutes later, another girl comes over (being bought by my friends) and unfortunately my friends had picked the one I had mentioned was the prettiest, which weakened my resolve. She dragged me upstairs before I could protest and because I'm a non-confrontational person, I didn't want to make a fuss in the bar and followed. The next ten minutes were...awkward. I made the appropriate 'moves' to make her feel like she was doing her job and tried to be friendly and nice, asking questions about her life, hopes and dreams etc, but I was pretty far from aroused.

I came downstairs after wards later and my friend took one look at me and went "You're not too angry with me are you?" and of course diplomatically I answered "It's OK. You were just trying to do right by me". They got dragged into some other private show after and I used the opportunity to escape. I got in a cab, went straight home and after 4 years, I cried like a freaking girl.

Why?

Not only did my moral compass fail and I did something I didn't want to, but my original position stands. I'm a person who believes in loving someone before 'loving someone', but after my first (and only) girlfriend, everyone I meet ends up making me their friend. The current girl who I truly like, is almost certainly not attracted to me as a boyfriend and I'm going to have to dump them and return to being a no-hope loser. And no longer do I have the moral high ground, because I'm just a sleaze who ends up in strip joint. I can't blame women for not liking me, because at the end of the day, something isn't quite right with me if I just constantly turn women from potentials into a steady stream of (admittedly awesome) friends. I don't know what it is the problem, I don't want (or think I can) rewire myself to be something else and frankly as much as I said before, I don't want to die alone surrounded by my huge group of friends. I'd much rather die knowing someone had loved me and chosen me as the person they want to spend their life with.

That's all dear readers. I'm probably going to regret this post in the morning, but sometimes it has to be done. Regular thoughtful (and infrequent) blog postings will resume shortly.

Loving cloud nine, my head's in the sky, I'm ridin' solo

2010-09-02T20:43:00.002+10:00

Traveling solo has simultaneously provided some of the most depressing and most rewarding experiences I've had. There is much to be said for a journey where you control so many of the variables of traveling. The downside is a journey where you don't have that easy comfort of loved ones nearby.

I've been stationed overseas with only work colleagues for company a few times now, but I don't really classify this as solo travel. After all, your control is limited and you do have colleagues (Not exactly loved ones, but close). So holiday wise, I’ve only done a grand total of two, but here are some of my thoughts on the matter.

Meeting People:

The number one fear of traveling solo (Well at least my number one fear) is the fear of being alone for a long period of time. Some people are excellent at meeting others and then you have people like me. These are my tips for meeting people on holiday.

If you’re hot, just hang around, someone will chat to you. For the rest of us, you need to be an active hunter. If you see someone else who is by themselves, go and chat with them. This sometimes works out and sometimes doesn't. I don't actually remember all the people who turned out to be losers, incapable of speaking English, though I know there were plenty. There are two ways I like to meet people. If it’s a formal activity, the old ‘going up to someone and sticking your hand out with a smile’ trick works pretty well. If I’m just wandering around various attractions, I try making an observation whilst near someone I want to get to know and then see how they respond. Leave those who don’t respond and pursue those who do want to chat with you.

Avoid couples. Perhaps it’s my luck, but many couples are terribly self-involved people. It’s not that they don't like you, it’s more they are more interested in spending time together than meeting new people. Couples are also far less likely to ask you to join them for other activities later.

Pre-formed groups are tricky. That big rugby group could be a godsend with a bunch of fun people or a complete nightmare of bigots. Groups that are formed for an activity however are gold. Everyone is trying to have fun and often the organizers deliberately set you up to talk to new people.

The usual laws of meeting new people apply. Smile heaps; ask lots of questions about them, keep it light etc, etc. I find a mixture of discussing what you're doing and discussing about their lives keeps things from getting too superficial or too probing.

What to do:

What you do is entirely up to you. It’s your holiday after all. I like to get a mix of culture, outdoorsy and indoors attractions, but plenty of people I know see travel as an overseas pub crawl. Whatever floats your boat. Make sure you have a list of ideas, but not an itinerary when you travel.

I would suggest that you leave the scenery stuff till last. Try and select activities you know are likely to have lots of people. Little aside: ask ahead about the tour, sometimes you don’t want to be the only person doing it. I once went horse riding in NZ hoping to be part of a riding group and it ended up being just me and the (admittedly very cute) instructor.

Where to stay

This isn’t a competition. The best place to stay is hostels. I always go for the largest mixed dorm I can find. It’s not only damn cheap, but you have a better than even odd of meeting a good mix of girls and guys. The hostel-world website is totally brilliant with its ratings and easy bookings.

See if you can get the hostels which have included breakfast (even for a nominal amount). Firstly, it’s typically much cheaper than at a cafe, it’s typically open earlier than anywhere else and it’s (again) the best way to meet people in the mornings.

See if the hostel organizes any kind of tours.. Typically a good hostel has various activities, sometimes free or often it will provide a discount. Sometimes it’s in conjunction with other hostels in the area, so even if you made an error and picked a quiet hostel, you can meet folks from other hostels. In Paris, the hostel (St Christopher’s) that I stayed at, arranged a free and excellent walking tour around Paris.

Beware of:

This may be pointing out the obvious, but be wary of high danger activities. You don't have a friend to dig you out of trouble and even simple things like losing your hostel pass can ruin your holiday. Let me clarify. Jumping out of a plane isn't a high danger activity. (Think about it, you have two concrete outcomes, land safely, or die horribly). In this and most high adrenaline activities, you're with other people, typically a qualified instructor who has a duty of care over the group. No, by high danger, I mean situations where you are by yourself with no one to look after you. For example, I was driving from Auckland to Rotorua and I was both tired and slightly hungover. That’s a high danger activity because if I crashed, I wouldn't have friends or family to bail me out (of Auckland Jail if I survived too). To compensate for this, I made it a point to take regular pit stops at safe locations to just rest and get my fatigue under control.

This is all I've gleaned off my relatively small experience. Anyone else have ideas?

Growing up with games

2010-07-10T12:26:00.003+10:00

"Buying experiences, not possessions leads to greater happiness"

In my ongoing search to be happy, I've found this article which seems to justify my world view. (Admittedly, I'm sure I can find anything on the internet which will justify a world view that eating frogs whilst juggling knives is the key to happiness, but let's go with this).

Especially when I moved to the UK, I realized I have very few possessions of my own. Clothes, several books and my desktop are the main things. Everything else really belongs to my folks and I don't even use it that much. So most of my money sits in investments or has been burnt into experiences. Holidaying, parties, dinners, these are the things which has eaten most of my money.

There is one oddity in all this though. Games.

You see, games fall into that gap of being an possession (you own it forever) and an experience at the same time. I was wondering about the many, many hours I've sunk into gaming in my lifetime and considered if this was a mistake. After all, I know many people who have amazing stories of nights out on the town and with friends whilst I was younger. I can certainly believe that during uni, I would have burnt through as much as everyone else on drinking and met many wonderful people, who I'd subsequently throw up on as part of the uni drinking bonding ritual.

But no, I was playing games. And I can't really regret this. Gaming is an experience in itself. It is like that deeply emotional movie you love to see over and over, a nail biting competition of wits and fingers or merely a creative, piss-farting-about experience between friends.

Whilst demonized by the media for being a solitary medium played by anti-social introverts and psychopaths, I'd argue the vast majority of gamers are very sociable and gaming is a powerful relationship builder. I have memories of games of 8 player Warcraft3 in between working on the same assignment together in uni, being on the phone with my friend Jack for hours whilst we figured out Age of Empires strategy and of play testing Quake 1 maps with another friend during high school.

Some of the friendships I've developed over the years have stemmed from shared experiences in gaming. I became close to some of my friends at work because we would finish up work, go home and get on Teamspeak together to play games at night. I've met so many random people at LANs who have gone on to become friends who invite me into their homes and share their lives with me.

Ignoring the benefits of relationship building, I recollect many fond memories of the stories and gameplay of various games. I still remember the heartache that accompanied the ending of Dreamfall. I can remember various nights having the shit scared out of me by jumping Howlers in Clive Barker's Undying. And as sad as it is, I remember the romance of winning over the druid Jaheria in Baldur's Gate. Yes, these aren't real experiences. They aren't unique, there are millions of people worldwide who have experienced it. But they form fond memories for me, and that's still important.

So whilst these are "things" I possess, they create so many experiences that are were influential in the way I grew up. When my time comes and I think back on my life, will I think I spent too much time at work. Most likely. Will I think I spent too much time on games? Probably not.

The Silver Standard for Interview Preparation

2010-04-07T22:35:00.001+10:00

People often tell me that I over-prepare for things. There is a reason for this. I suffer from serious nerves (almost panic attacks) if I do not prepare which leaves me a wreck before and full of regret after (Oddly enough, during the event, even without prep I can falteringly get through, but it's never polished). And regardless of business climate, all the great jobs always require you to be reasonably polished to get the offer.

In fact, all this prep work isn't just about getting the offer. One thing which I never thought about until recently was how you interview doesn't just affect whether you get the offer, but it also affects where on the salary range for that position you are perceived. A colleague of mine interviewed at Thoughtworks and whilst he got the offer, he was offered the junior starting salary, despite several years of experience. And this is because he didn't prepare and outline all his real experience.

So I prepare. Some say over-prepare. Yes I did all the below before going into my interviews. It helped me feel better going into interviews and if I got an interview, I always got the follow ups.

I had two offers from the companies that interviewed me and good follow through for a number of others. It's overkill in some ways, but I feel it helped me, so feel free to take whatever you like from the below. If anything, if you do all the below, you'll come out being a better professional anyway.

So let's begin what is probably my longest post ever.

In general, my preparation could be broken into four main areas.

Behavioral Questions Prep.
Technical Questions Prep.
Company Prep.
Optional Extras Prep.

These are in order of importance as well. I'll explain more per section.

1. Behavioural Preparation

This is the most important area to prepare. Every company and almost every phase of the interview will ask questions around this area, so nothing here will go to waste.

I could go into detail about everything I did in this area, but I'll just tell you my secret weapon. I used the "Manager Tools Interviewing Series". For the uninitiated, Manager Tools is a regular podcasts given by a pair of management consultants. They have two regular podcasts, the 'Manager' series and a more generic 'Career' series. They also have the 'Interviewing' series specifically for those changing jobs. They like to call themselves the "Gold Standard" of interviewing.

These guys are massive gasbags; they manage to take a topic that you could summarise into 5-10 minutes and convert it into 50 minutes. Yet it's 50 minutes of GOLD. I used their advice at every job I applied for and I could tell it made a big difference in driving me through to the next stage. Look it's $150 USD, but when you see the pay differential when you snag your dream job, you won't care.

They will lead you through, how to prepare, what to wear, how to answer the 'big' questions like "Tell me about yourself" or "Tell me about A Significant Achievement" all the way to following up and salary negotiations. Augment what you hear with your own knowledge as there is a slight bent towards American corporate culture.

The only augmentation I have to the 'Interviewing Series' is to extend on their STAC (Skills, Traits, Attributes and Characteristics) cards system by creating Story Tag Clouds. This is a word page filled with individual stories demonstrating a particular S,T,A or C which you can easily search. It is best served with an example/template.

Bottom Line Up Front: I demonstrated ... to do ... which resulted in ...

Situation: The problem on our project was ...
Action: So naturally I had to do 1, 2 and 3.
Result: And because of how I did that, this resulted in us ...
Tags: Creativity, ..., Conflict Resolution

Once you've created your list of stories and memorized them, you can easily pull these out and then adjust emphasis to highlight what the question asked. The fact is your work career is filled with events where you need to use multiple skills to solve a situation anyway and being able to answer their question plus demonstrate your other skills edges you up on the list of candidates. After you've made your set of Story Clouds, try googling example behavioural interview questions and try answering them using the stories you just made. You'll find you'll be able to answer many questions with the stories you just created.

2. Technical Preparation
The next part will certainly receive some derision from my ultra-smart readers. But if you're not a super-talented-developer type and just an 'above average with other skills' developer type like myself, this is for you.

Software Development is HARD. It is too hard to develop anything useful in a one hour blocks which means often interviewers use standard questions that can be solved in 30-45min blocks. Hence I will point you towards books like "Programming Interviews Exposed" which give standard questions like 'How to reverse a string', techniques on how to solve them and general advice on the technical interview. I also got a book called the "J2EE/Java Interview Companion" to practice for Macquarie Bank's retarded online technical tests. I've never had to use it, but its been interesting reading regardless as it is a quick way to get an overview of the different parts of Java.

The last book I bought as study preparation never got used in an interview, but has been entertaining reading regardless. "How would you Move Mt Fuji" goes over a number of the brain-teaser/puzzle solving questions that hi-tech companies like Microsoft like to throw at candidates. I suspect the use of these might be more prevalent in strategy/analyst/non-developer type roles than what I interviewed for. Solving the puzzles in here does help jog creative problem solving neural pathways you might have abandoned in the last few years which is why I mention it here.

Finally, if you're going to apply for development jobs, it might help to do some actual programming. The better programmer site offers a set of excellent small programming questions you can whip up in under 20 minutes. There are some excellent development questions online such as famous Thoughtworks 'Mars Rover' or 'Sales Tax' questions which meatier and worth practising since they force you to effectively use design patterns as well (some companies are ga-ga for design patterns).

3. Company Preparation
Company preparation should be done only after you are comfortable with the above. At the end of the day, the hiring manager knows about his company quite well; it's you and your capabilities they don't know about. It is here so that you can separate yourself from your competitor candidates. There are two sides to company preparation. One being most companies now want to know why you want to work for them specifically and its a very common question. The second is you need to be able to ask questions which show you have an interest and you understand their business.

That said, please, please don't ask stupid questions about market share, stock price or macro-economic company questions. The hiring manager needs you to do a specific job, not run all corporate strategy. As Manager Tools would say, use the company research to formulate smarter questions for the hiring manager.

So I made a document for each company I interviewed with and it contained the following:
Recruiter details
Interviewer details: Linked-In is your friend. Yes it's mildly stalker-ish. Live with it
Job description
Brief SWOT of the company
Industry trends
Analysis of the main product: of the company, or say the division you are interviewing for
Questions for the company: Feeding off the above, more on 6. less on 4,5 unless you can tie it into your current role.
For example: "I noticed you mentioned that has been integrated with to offer more functionality. Can you tell me a little more about how that is done and if I’ll be involved in doing any of that integration development work in this role?"

It does help if you care about the answer. If you hate integration work for example, you might as well abandon ship now and not waste your time and that hiring manager's.

This will take a minimum of a day per company which does suck, but it will make you feel so much more confident walking into that interview. You will ask great questions during and at the end of the interview. You can drop comments about events pertinent to the industry. You actually feel like you're part of the company and the hiring manager will also feel it.

So all the above is for the first interview right? If you get past that and into the second interview, you got to up the ante because the other candidates will be doing so as well.
Who are this company's customers (easy) and what their problems? (harder)
(Bonus points) Problems of this company's customer's end customer.
What challenges is this manager currently facing?
If I don't get/take the offer, I still file all those things away because guess what, you never know when this information will become useful again!

If you need an example of the profile I did on the company I got an offer from, let me know.

4. Optional Extras

I feel odd calling this Optional Extras because I feel they are really helpful to getting you that job. I don't think they are all essential, but you know, every little bit helps.

Clothes
For what its worth, if you feel your old interviewing clothes aren't great, do invest the money and buy a decent suit or two. It won't make or break you, interviewers aren't that superficial (typically), but if it makes you feel better about yourself, you'll have more energy and that is what interviewers notice. I got two from the Discount Factory Outlet and they made me feel perkier!

Extracurricular activities.
No, I don't care about your football or hang-gliding skills. This is opportunity to demonstrate you are truly interested in this industry and not just month to month pay-check kind of person. I restarted this blog, I started playing with Git/SVN and other technologies again, I started programming for my Android phone, I started posting on technical forums. Admittedly I didn't get far with many of these ventures considering how quickly I got employed, but if I took longer, I could have pointed at these achievements in interviews. That said, considering the 'Fools In Love' section of this blog, I wouldn't give them the exact address of this blog!

Read like there is no tomorrow
I used my unemployment time to catch up on a lot of blogs, technical articles and read a few interesting books as well. And don't discount being on top of the news either. One of my interviewers threw this curve ball at me. "What do you think of President Obama's performance to date?". Regardless of political persuasion, being able to form and communicate a sensible opinion on this show you aren't a one-trick pony.

Anyway that's enough for now. I think I need a holiday from blogging after this one. Thank you for getting this far. Job hunting can miserable, but it can also be a fantastic learning opportunity. If you have any suggestions, war stories, questions, ideas you'd like to share, post in the comments below!

Salary negotiation aka Career Limiting Post #13

2010-03-26T18:09:00.006+11:00

Here is the hard truth boys and girls. If you don't ask for a raise, you won't get one or you won't get an appropriate one.

Asking for a raise is one of the hardest things you can do within an organization. Anything to do with salaries and money just becomes awkward (exception: any sales organization). And whilst I've been ripped off myself in the past, I won't pass judgement because for a manager, it is hard to give good raises.

In most organizations, this is how it works. A manager with direct staff will be proportioned $N of his budget to be allocated to merit increases and bonuses. That $N is often a tiny percentage of the total existing salary of the group. He has to then divide this up amongst everyone in a fair manner. That $N is fixed. So in order to give you a higher bonus/salary increase, he needs to give someone else a crappier bonus/salary increase. The excuse 'My team performed brilliantly, we deserve a bigger pool to distribute' doesn't typically work.

A manager's job is hard enough as it is. Knowing exactly why you deserve a bigger increase than 'Bob' can be very hard. Two things, particularly in software. Working more hours doesn't mean anything. Results are all that matter. Secondly, results are STILL hard to compare. If you have a project manager who met their results and a tester who met their results, who deserves more?

You deserve more.

That's the purpose of this post. I want to show you how. To prove to you I'm not making up random hypothetical nonsense, here's my story. I enjoyed my previous roles, but I felt underpaid and this was becoming a problem (Read about Herzberg Motivation Theory to understand why). My wonderful coach (separate concept to my manager) gave me the confidence to go make this right. I got a 25% change in my salary and I'll show you how in three easy(sort of) steps.

1. Market value.

At the end of the day, you need to get paid market value for your skills. If you love your job, market value is fine. The market value for the vast majority of jobs is really easy to find out.

1.1. Online salary information

Visit glassdoor.com, payscale.com or salary.com and fill in enough information to give you an approximation of what you're worth for a particular role, with X experience and in a particular location.

1.2. Ask a recruiter.

Recruiters can be scum, but some recruiters are honest, professional and clued into the market. Treasure and look after the good ones. Ask 3-4 recruiters what someone with your experience and skill set will collect in the open market with current conditions. Write down the dollar value, the recruiter's name, date contacted and their phone number. You'll need this for later. Have a one page document with the market information from online and the recruiter.

2. Achievements to date.

You're probably asking yourself why bother doing this? If you're under market rate, surely your boss will adjust you to market rate and if he doesn't you can just get a job elsewhere right?

Wrong!

Your best move isn't to leave. Leaving has significant costs outside of the job hunt which I won't go into here. Your best move is to remind your boss why you are important to this division.

In a single A4 page (no more, managers are busy), write down:

How you're going above and beyond your contract.
What are the significant accomplishments you have achieved.
What are the skills/knowledge only YOU have.
This one is often missed, but it is important. What are the key relationships you own? If you are the account manager for a key business or that developer who everyone on the team loves, you leaving can cause that account to move with you, or that team's morale to plummet.

If you are struggling to fill in the above, guess what? You actually don't deserve that pay adjustment to market rate. What the hell have you been doing all this time? You have been just doing your job, not kicking-ass in your role.

3. Talk to the functional manager in charge.

Not to HR, not to your PM if you're in a matrix organization, but your functional/line manager.

However, I will say this. If you have a good working relationship with the manager ABOVE your line manager AND you know your line manager isn't capable of improving your situation, you CAN attempt going to that senior manager/director. Yes thats what I did and yes there were consequences good and bad (let's not go into that here).

Book an meeting (at least two days away) with the two page document attached with a friendly "Hi John, I want to discuss my current renumeration with you, could you spare 15mins to go over this document?", or something to that effect. No hint of "I'm going to leave if I don't get my raise". It's unprofessional and no-one is impressed.
That said, you did include the recruiters' information right? This is your most subtle way of saying, "I'm taking this seriously and I hope you do as well."
Have the discussion. At this point you've done all you can. Hold firm, but play nice. You will get plenty of excuses. You just want them to say they'll try something for you. You won't get that increase in this meeting. Normally management has to wait till the next review cycle or if it's really urgent (you need to be a star), they'll put in an emergency request with their boss.

Hopefully you'll get an pleasant surprise within a few weeks. If you don't and you are below market rates and you have many accomplishments, you need to seriously consider if your current job is right for you. I hope this information has been useful to you.

Good luck!

Being a T1000 would make being soul-less more fun

2010-03-24T18:07:00.002+11:00

(Repost - to fix the odd formatting problems. I do hate blogger sometimes)

Blast from the past - This is another post which I wrote over 4 months ago and never got around to posting. Enjoy!

At a late night function with co-workers, I had a colleague bring along her friend who is a beautician for a local hair-dresser. She introduced herself and told us her profession and then asked what we did. My manager at the time mentioned that she worked in IT as a Program Manager. Our beautician friend was impressed and a brief glance could tell she was mildly intimidated by being a blue-collar worker amongst a sea of white-collar technologists.

So my manager started to put down the entire IT field as boring, cold and soul-less. And then started exalting the joys of being a beautician: how they get to be creative, how they get to work with new people every day and so on. My boss enjoys her job, and I greatly suspect her saying this was just a NLP technique to win the other person's approval over or perhaps to allay any feelings of inferiority.

Whilst I'm completely aware that being a beautician can be a rewarding career from a personal stand point, I don't see the need to degrade working in IT in the process. Being vaguely experienced in social interaction, something tells me that ragging on anything, particularly your own job is a form of whining and it has a great chance of backfiring on you.

The tech industries (pure software, Telco, IT support organizations) are at its core, engineering services. Wikipedia defines it as "discipline, art and profession of acquiring and applying technical, scientific and mathematical knowledge to design and implement materials, structures, machines, devices, systems, and processes that safely realize a desired objective or inventions."

Notice how it says both a discipline and an art. This is a reason why engineers get respect. You have to be both disciplined like a soldier and sometimes as creative as an painter in order to get the work done. The word itself is Latin for cleverness. What we do changes the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands of people for the better. Perhaps it is because I haven't been working for long enough to become jaded and broken, but I still believe in my profession and industry as outlets for something amazing.

So yes, I can totally believe your job is fantastic. I'm sure there is some aspect in your job that is significantly better than mine. And I'm sure something about my job rocks over yours. At the end of the day, let's celebrate our professions, our industry and our lives, not complain about it.

The girls give it up for the VMWare Playa

2010-03-09T15:59:00.006+11:00

After raging at Windows Virtual PC for not recognizing USB devices (and consequently halting my Android development), I threw away my Windows XP virtualized development environment and decided to start again completely anew.

I have Ubuntu 9.10 loaded into VMWare Player 3.0 and I've never been happier. Considering I migrated from MS Virtual PC, this might seem obvious, but this is actually nicer than Sun's Virtual Box as well.

Having only had a cursory glance at the VMWare architecture, I have no idea how the player runs so quickly for loading and operating VMs. The 'suspend VM' functionality is fast as well, which is particularly useful when you want to stop working so you can get in a round of Bad Company 2. In fact, after long periods of inactivity, the VM's real memory also seems to swap into virtual memory so efficiently that I've actually played rounds of Call of Duty (less disk intensive than BC2) and didn't even notice. In addition (and this was a REAL pet peeve of mine) VMWare player properly handles resizing of the window of the VM. VPC used to give me scrollbars within the desktop and that was infuriating.

Of course a lot has to do with the fact I've got a Ubuntu install in there instead of my old Windoze XP installation. Having only 2GB of memory on this aging machine, it is nice allocating the same amount of memory to the VM and getting significantly better performance.

One extremely cool feature exclusive to VMWare Player is Unity. You can run both the VM's application and the Host OS's applications side by side so it appears that they are in the same Window Manager Space. This removes some of the artificial "I'm working in windows now" transitions that happen and allow you to just use the applications more naturally. By activating the 'Shared Folders' option, you can save the files so that it can be shared between the host and the guest.

And I know what you're thinking. Why don't you just modify your existing OS to support the functions you need rather than having one OS and an OS stuck inside a hefty VM?

I like to keep my development environments inside VMs. This way, hardware upgrades, hard-disk explosions, my tendency to rage-format among other things don't force me to reinstall EVERYTHING again.
I hate Wine/emulators for running Windows apps in Linux and I dislike cygwin for getting a command shell inside Windows. Use the real deal man!

Some minor niggling points:

Oddly enough, I still get clock drift inside Ubuntu just like I did inside my XP installation. I've rectified this by installing NTP and configuring Ubuntu to connect to the CSIRO public NTP.
One unusual thing I cannot seem to fix is ubuntu seemingly either releasing the network connection or dropping CPU cycles down dramatically on a VM when you are out of focus from the VM. So for example, if I'm downloading a large file in firefox inside the VM, if I change focus away from the VM, it ends up slowing and terminating that download after a few seconds.

That said, these are minor quibbles and my Ubuntu box is often open. I'm guessing in future, it'll only get better again. Maybe my windows 7 and Ubuntu will run side by side in a hypervisor next. Who knows...

Episode 2: The Attack of the Social Media Tools

2010-03-05T16:21:00.003+11:00

You might recall me viciously putting down Facebook, Twitter and others in an earlier post. In a delicious twist of irony, I am using all of those services now on a fairly regular and beneficial basis. In fact, I'm on MORE social networks then I was 2 years ago. Let us approach these posts and see where I was right and where I was so wrong.

Myspace

I was right about this. Myspace is dying. Slowly but surely enough. They are trying to rebrand themselves as a music site and this might work out for them. A huge number of huge artists at the moment got their start in myspace.

Facebook

Facebook is an essential service to me. My entire friends circle is on Facebook and everything is done through here. There is no more 'calling someone up for a night out'. Someone sends out the invite, people accept and rock up. Photos don't have to be shared via USB or CDs, they just all go onto FB photos*. You are intimately aware of what is happening in some of your friends' lives and commenting is rife. Some of those comments deservedly end up on FailBooking. I mentioned before that Facebook is a 'friend grab' in that people friend everyone they meet to increase their numbers. Whilst this does still happen, I believe most people actually leverage Facebook to build deeper relationships with those people they run into once or twice. I know I've helped people who I've met once, but subsequently kept in regular contact with on FB.

I was spot on in terms of the privacy problems I mentioned, but in Facebook's defense, they've also introduced a number of measures to give people at least the illusion of privacy (though not before violating it a few times...Beacon anyone?).

Linked In

Linked-In's benefit is actually very real at least in the IT sphere. I've had quite a number of IT recruiters contact me through Linked-In and I've published most of my information using the hResume style profiles they have on LinkedIn. In fact I'm going to bet in the future, Word CVs will become a thing of the past and people will forward the link to their Linked-In public profile.I've yet to use much of the capabilities of Linked-In for doing such things as using relationships to get through to particular companies, but in the coming weeks, who knows!

Twitter

Twitter has very much morphed into something wonderful though, it really does depend on who you are 'Following'. There are amazing professionals who post intriguing articles to read, service professionals who tell you when services crash and come back up and those crazy friends who always end up partying and want you to come along. I think the advent of TwitPic, geotagging and the 3rd party APIs raised Twitter from Yet Another Social Media tool to being an integral part of the modern technorati and even normal citizens.

Now that is just the four I was slagging off previously. Hell, I'm now on Google Buzz, Google Reader, Youtube channels, Vimeo, Orkut, Bioware Social Network, the Steam Community in one fashion or another. There is more data being thrown at me then ever before and I think the key to survival is know what you want. There isn't enough time to look at everything in detail. There really is barely time to even give a cursory glance to everything.

I'll revise my previous message and say that Social Media is what you make of it. It can be a waste of time, a way to lose your privacy** and a way to ostracize yourself from the real world. Or it can be a way to learn from your trusted circle, a way to let people know how awesome you are and a chance to build meaningful relationships with those you might not be able to meet easily.

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* This does irk me since FB uses terrible compression and most photos look terrible. That said, most photos are myspace-style photos taken at parties which looked mediocre to begin with.

** Or it can be REALLY evil: Check the following two sites out which are plain privacy violation central!Geotagging when you just had sex: http://www.ijustmadelove.com/Knowing when a user is out of home: http://www.pleaserobme.com/

Smartphones: Making people dumber since 1992

2010-03-05T14:16:00.003+11:00

There are some great upsides to being back on the market. I've been consuming content non-stop for the last three weeks in an attempt to get reacquainted with the latest tech trends. When you're busy working, often 'sharpening the saw' has to take a backseat to the realities of work. Over the last two weeks I've started playing with new techs, started reading about different management theories, lots of other interesting articles (intermingled with a unhealthy dose of Dragon Age: Origins).

At some point you realize you want to give back to the internet community rather than just be a consumer and hence I've decided to start blogging again.

It has been a while since I've posted so lets start with something lightweight. Like my Android!

I decided to leave the stone age and join the portable computing age with an new smartphone. I purchased the HTC Magic from Vodafone. I won't give you reviews about all the specs, how fast or pretty the phone is, you can get these from Engadget or Giz or any number of other bloggers. No, I want to talk about a few other things.

The Work Stuff

What I found interesting is how most of my use cases for getting a laptop disappeared when I got this smartphone. Here are the primary use cases I had for getting an laptop:

Able to answer email anywhere: Answering email on the go using gmail is straightforward and fun.
Write documents: It turned out I never wanted to write 'documents' on the go, but the ability to capture ideas in bullet form. In a sense I can actually produce more content because I'm only concerned with ideas, not structure and presentation, which are activities much better suited to my large monitor.
Have access to various applications: Turned out most of those apps are available on a smartphone anyway. Train timetables, twitter, IM Clients, PasswordSafe and the list goes on.

The Fun Stuff

Being a well known gaming extraordinare, you were probably thinking, why isn't gaming on the go up there? Despite the giant portable games market, I never had any interest in this, so the somewhat sluggish HTC Magic's CPU never caused me a problem. That is not to say I have no interest in media at all.

Videos - the HTC only plays MP4, 3GP and Youtube. No support for flash like most smartphones which actually doesn't bother you as much as you think. The MP4 HAS to be downloaded at the correct resolution (320x480) for the phone otherwise it has to rescale and on the QualComm processor, this just results in slow, jerky video. But get something made for that resolution, like the TED Talks podcast and its just beautiful. Tip: Get a different video player from the Android Market than the inbuilt one though.
Music - Things that drive me crazy #133. Hearing a song, not knowing what it is and forgetting the lyrics for Googling later. Enter the well known app Shazam. Second problem, not knowing the words for singing along. Enter TuneWiki. Unfortunately they are different apps. If only they'd mate and produce a beautiful baby application. But otherwise this is perfect. If only the android had iTunes like integration for my songlists however. Oh well, can't win everything.

What I found fascinating are the behavioural changes.

I used to try to memorize prices when shopping and inevitably fail. Now I simply capture them using photos and look it up when I go home. I've recently got a Barcode Scanner/Google Shopper app which I've yet to try out.
Disregard for checking before leaving - Previously, if you have an engagement, I'd look up where, find it on Gmaps, confirm the time and so on. Now I just leave and figure it out as I go. There is always moments on the train or at red lights where you can check everything online.
There is no such thing as loneliness. The long 1 hour commute on the train after a night out is an furious IM texting session with people using GTalk or Ebuddy (for MSN/FB). I've also been practicing ignoring the notifications from the phone to overcome the urge to consume whatever email, facebook message or tweet. I can't believe there isn't an free app to disable notifications at night yet however. Hopefully with time...

Whilst I still hold true to what I said before in that you can survive on phone calls and text alone, this is like saying you can survive on dialup alone when you have broadband. You can, but you're just SO much less effective that moving back to that previous model is crippling.

(Yet) Another one that got away.

2009-10-11T03:42:00.005+11:00

Today I may have met my dream girl and in typical James fashion, completely screwed up the opportunity.

A girl with a passion for all things random, yet with a shy demeanour and a quirky, happy persona. She was cute with plump cheeks, long brown hair and a radiant smile which lit up whenever I said a completely stupid joke. Ah, a girl who meets my (often inane) criteria is hard to find so yes, I was completely delighted.

Yes I was making progress. Being at a party of friends, it is easy to make the approach and strike up a conversation and not be considered a serial killer. But I panicked when I ran out of conversation, confidence or just brain power and excused myself (on multiple occasions). There was ample opportunity, there was clearly a modicum of interest. Incompetance allowed the best man to win. The best man being my friend who, being not particularly much brighter, but significantly more charming and confident, did all the things that are necessary to win the girl over (and oh boy did he win her). In one of my weakest moments yet, I even tried to undermine the poor fellow. Not that undermining him is considered stupid. It's quite reasonable to undermine if you're planning on winning her favour yourself. But when you're undermining simply out of "If I can't get her, no one can", is just plain petty and beneath me.

I won't put the girl on a pedestal and say she got someone better for her. At the end of the day, it is a sale. Its not the best offer that wins. As any marketer knows, its the best presented offer that wins. Having the goods doesn't help if you can't sell it yourself.

Now is not a time for self-pity. There were clear lessons to take away from that party. Whilst this particular girl is lost, I hold no illusions there will be others and it is imperative that the next one will not contain any of the mistakes of the current. There are simple, practice-able measures which I will need to review in the morning when I'm far less tired (being 4am in the morning now).

Falling in love with Stakeholders

2009-08-11T20:05:00.004+10:00

This is hopefully part of a series of tongue in cheek posts where I attempt to correlate my love of software engineering with my love of..well Love. It'll be a bit Seth Godin like in that there is 10% truth and 90% preachy bulls**t.

In our current project, we have the problem of trying to get our stakeholders to come to the meetings and participate in the process of building the project they are paying us to make. They are happy to initially meet us and talk, but after they've given a rough idea of what they want, they are too busy to talk to the team.

This is sort of like when you talk to a girl and she is excited to be your friend and talk about what she likes in a boyfriend, but when you ask for more commitment, she cools off and wants to keep things at arms length. When you want to win her over, you don't spend your entire time sending her roses, begging under her window to take you in. You go off and live your life as awesomely as you can. You say now and then, "hey look how great things are going" and from time to time you can try again to convince her. After some time, she'll realize what a fool she is and she will dash into your arms. But remember to regularly talk to her, otherwise she'll fall for some other, less awesome fellow who happens to win her fancy.

Similarly, if your stakeholders aren't willing to come to the party and you've got SOME idea of what to do, why bother waiting around whinging that they won't read the product requirements document? Start building this cool product and make it something you can be proud of. Drop in with them now and then show them what you're making and at some point they'll realize either a) wow, this is really heading somewhere great and all it needs is a bit more guidance from me OR b) these numskulls are losing all MY money building the wrong thing, I've got to get involved or my bosses will kill me. And then they'll dash into your arms. But remember to demo and talk regularly to them, otherwise you might get canceled in the process for some other floozy project.

This is why I've started going to the gym. Do you have any idea how many stakeholders I'll have to carry in my arms for this project?

Optus is dead, long live Internode!

2009-06-27T23:42:00.006+10:00

After a painful 2nd month of being traffic Shaped and after a harder look at our budget due to the GFC, it was finally time for us to leave the nest that was Optus cable and look for something better.

I put in my order via Internode to get an ADSL connection done. No problem I think, after all, I'm near the exchange and I've got telephone lines already so this should be a piece of cake.
So began a comedy of errors to switch to ADSL.

First up, Internode informs us that for the first number we provided, they get a "Service Account Not Found". I was thinking this was due to us getting our phone line repaired recently, so I ask them to try again. No dice. They inferred due to my 2nd phone line being with Optus, that my phone line was being delivered via the Coaxial Cable network not via a twisted pair copper cable. Fair enough I thought.

So I asked Internode to put the ADSL service on my first phone line. After all that phone was with Telstra for a long time, so it MUST be on copper right? Hell this house came with copper before Optus was even around.

Turns out that when we switched that first phone line's bills to go via Optus a few months prior, they changed that phone line to run via the Coax cable network as well. Joy! And guess what? Optus has no copper line service anywhere (well at least certainly not my area).

So in order to get an ADSL connection, I have to go begging back to Telstra to take me back!
Luckily they were happy to have me back and switched me over for 'free'. Free as in 'costs', but as it turned out, not free in terms of 'effort'. As you might expect when working with Australia's crappiest ex-monopolist, everything was slow. I put in the order and they said, we'll be done in 3 weeks. So I ring up in 2 weeks to see progress and I find the entire order got canceled because they typed into the wrong customer account number for my current setup with Optus and conveniently forgot to inform me. They said I needed to put in another order. After some harsh words, I said I want it done in the SAME time-frame. Amazingly enough, this '3 week minimum' order got done in a week as a result. Once the Telstra tech got into the house, they were done in 10mins. Does it really take 3 weeks to schedule a technician for a 10minute operation?

As soon as Telstra activated my phone line, I rang up Internode and resubmitted my order and they did that quickly. Was I done? No. A week later, Internode asked me to ring up Telstra and collect the details for my own wholesale account number for that phone line. I don't know why I had to ask instead of Internode asking Telstra directly, but I'm guessing ISP's aren't fond of talking to each other. So after I get this number, I give it to Internode. They say thank you and say they will give it to Optus (because Optus is the wholesaler for ADSL2). So we've come 360 back to optus. Oh sweet irony.

Finally a week after all that, Internode has someone provision the exchange and also my modem arrives on the same day. Eager with anticipation, I wire everything up. I notice doing the 'speed tests' that my speeds weren't that different to Optus. In addition, the modem reports my connection as 384 up, 8,064 up. Huh? Where is the 24MB/s connection I thought I was getting. Unfortunately it appears the Optus ADSL box at my exchange isn't DSLAM equipped so I'm only getting ADSL2, not ADSL2+.

So finally after 2 months of futzing around, I finally get myself onto Internode. Ironically, this wasn't much of a change. Optus's grandfathered plans gave me 12GBpeak/24GBoffpeak @ 10Mb/s line speed. Internode gives me 25GB @ 8Mb/s line speed. However this is why I changed.

- Internode packages the phone line into the plan so I'm paying $89 a month. Optus Cable plus line rental cost us $120 a month. This was the number 1 reason for the switch.
- Whilst it looks like I have 36GB, in reality its all too easy to get screwed by the 12GB cap and end up at 64kb/s line speed for a month. 25GB flat is a lot easier to manage.

Internode has a number of unmetered services (I <3 free Steam), plus it doesn't count upload, but in reality it's the above two things that encouraged the change. Also I disliked Optus' treatment of long term, heavily committed (We had a number of services with optus) customers. A business should look after those loyal customers and providing an expensive and outdated product with no intention of providing discounts is NOT one of those.

Running and cutting with scissors.

2009-04-29T22:13:00.002+10:00

Welcome back to our normal blogging schedule. I don't honestly know where the last few months have gone, but the fact I haven't had time for reflection can either mean I've had way too much going on personally OR that I've been living in a cocoon like state waiting for a reason to live. The answer is actually a little bit of both, but you'll see a follow up post about that. For now I'm back and ready to blog!

Now a life well lived is a life full of firsts. Whilst there have been a number of titillating firsts which I've been meaning to blog about, I'll pick one in particular for today.

So I went to get my hair cut today. Yes this sounds very dull doesn't it? But today instead of going to my regular barber, I went to a hair salon! Okay this still sounds boring, but I did have a number of requests to explain why I would be mad enough to pay so much for a haircut that (to guys) looks roughly the same as before.

I went to the Luc Espace hair salon in Chatswood Chase. My friend Dan has a brother (Nathan) who works there (which has no real benefit outside of the fact it adds that extra personal touch to the entire story).

So unlike an normal hair dresser, the minute I walked into this place, I was treated very well. I was guided into my chair and greeted by Nathan as he was finishing up his previous client. In order to make the time go past faster, they politely offered herbal tea and men's magazines to read over. Being poorly prepared as usual, I hastily scoured the magazines looking for a style that would look good on me. Unfortunately it appeared 50% of the haircuts were for pretty/nancy boys and the other 50% were for distinguished gentlemen. There didn't seem to be something that screamed, "I'm a sexy software engineer, look, my great hair proves it!". I briefly looked at Patrick Dempsey's hair, but frankly, I think it only works on McDreamy and just looks ridiculous on anyone else.

Not long after I gave up looking in frustration, Nathan dropped by to talk about what I wanted to do with my hair. I described my previous hair cuts and how I didn't want anything like those, then gave a basic guideline to avoid cutting the hair in a style that would leave me showing a huge forehead by the end and then gave him free rein to do whatever you like after that! He showed me some designs to which I agreed (more out of ignorance than any real preference) and then we got ball rolling.

Nathan delegated the 'preparation of the client' to an apprentice called Susan. The first part involved Susan putting scented oil on her hands and wafting it up and down in front of my face before giving a gentle neck rub. This actually did relax me somewhat, perhaps not as effectively as chloroform, but close. After that I was led to the comfy reclining leather chairs and tilted back into the basin in order to get my hair washed. Normally I'm quiet around my hairdresser, but I've been working on my talking to (women) strangers skills so I actually managed to have a nice conversation with her. Working in IT gives you so few opportunities to practice so I welcomed this chance with open arms.

After this came the real work of actually getting a hair CUT. This entire process is always a blur to me, mostly because I have no glasses on and all I see is shapes moving around. If someone was going to stab me with scissors there would be no chance of me seeing that in time. The actual trimming and styling process took a significant amount of time, but I didn't really notice since I was having a lively chat with Nathan. I've met Nathan before and plus I've never really had any problems maintaining a good conversation with other guys.

After the hair cut, it was off to the hair wash basins again for another hair wash. In order to clean the hair on the face I received a mild facial with oils and a massage followed by a gentle towelling off. This is probably the finest treatment my face has ever received! This was followed up by the styling which in my case was as simple as some 'grooming cream' in my hair to style it forwards. Can't say I was blown away, but it didn't look too bad either. In the process of playing with it, he did spike up the hair, which I think might be an interesting look. I should try it in my own time!

In total the process took an hour. At $75, it was worth it for the experience, but certainly not a great idea for regular hair cuts for someone on a budget.

All that I learnt about Project management that I learned from Real-Time Strategy Games

2009-02-05T21:28:00.000+11:00

This actually an article that I wrote close to a year ago. I made it in draft in Blogger and then never got around to publishing it. There is a lot here which I think is simplistic, but it surprises me how much of it still holds true. So enjoy!
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So after a few weeks of crazy technical work as well as project management I've got a few titbits of information on how to run a project. And amusingly enough, a lot of what I learnt had a lot of overlap with gaming.

1. Business Case / Reconnaissance & Forward planning.
In all strategy games, sending in a forward scout to figure out what is going on in the enemy camp usually will give you a significant advantage. Why are you building Anti-Infantry units when he is going straight for vehicles? Shouldn't you figure out what he is trying to kill you with first so you can build the opposite? Sure you'll take a hit to your production since you're not using a unit for mining, but it'll be worth it when your build the right units for the job. In the same vein, shouldn't you understand what your customer wants exactly rather than rushing to build something that won't solve the right problem and will simply get your project axed?

2. Team composition / Combined arms
Who goes into battle with purely one type of unit? Idiots and spammers that's who. And in any realistic game you find this will get you killed. Similarly going into a project with gung-ho hackers will probably result in a cancelled/delayed project. A team need different types and I don't just mean roles. I mean you need the visionaries, the pragmatists, the pedantic types and of course the motherly types to look after this awkward lot.

3. Stub development/ Hit and Run
Just because the bulk of your army isn't ready yet, or your economy isn't in full gear isn't really an excuse to not do lots of harassment of the enemy. So just because you don't have all the information you need, doesn't mean you can't develop by skunk-working, or writing stubs for the bits you don't understand and then doing the rest later.

4. Self-Improvement / Building a Economy
I'd like to think I encourage people to keep improving their skills even if we're running close on the deadline. In a match, often it is tempting overstretch your economy and strike the opposition. It is a balancing act. Not focusing on skills/economy will result in you losing steam before long and being ineffective, whilst overdoing the skills/turtling in your base means you're not getting out there, solving the bigger problem at hand.

5. Force multipliers.
In most games there is a unit or building which doesn't do anything by itself, but confers benefits to those units around it. These are called force multipliers since their mere existence means your entire army is now more effective. This could be a 'supply truck' that improves the damage/hit points of every unit near it. Similarly in projects, you will find some people are force multipliers which aren't very effective by themselves, but multiply the powers of others. Managers of various forms typically fall into this role, but you'll find the overly helpful tester or help desk engineer can also maximise the strengths of your development team. Some tasks are force multipliers in that if you do those tasks early, you could allow a number of tasks to start in parallel, speeding up the entire process.

6. There is a place for heroes, but communication works better.
Say what you will, heroic efforts by a single developer in software development do exist and I'm willing to say all risky projects have needed it to succeed. It is just like the guy who somehow manages to destroy the enemies economy behind the lines, ignoring the fact his allies need him at the forefront. Communication is better, and I don't mean communicating the fact you're not coming back to help. Communication is core to winning in a game and even more so in project management. You need people to know what you're doing and make sure everyone is in alignment to win the task at hand. And if this means your team provides a distraction whilst you go and kill their worker drones, so be it. As long as you agreed to that as a team.

7. Your plan will typically be screwed very quickly.
What will be instantly familiar to both project managers and gamers is that the best laid plans of mice and men go astray. Going in with a set plan is a good idea since you have a reasonable starting point. And things don't always wrong. But nine times out of ten they will. A module will be harder to implement than estimated, an ally will have raptors 'killing their manz' before they know it.

Exceptions
Unlike games where is it often black and white, you have to be careful about defining your enemy. Other teams are not your enemy and treating them as such will get you in trouble quick smart.
Also most modern RTS games make you focus on looking after each unit individually and giving them directions. Unfortunately this doesn't work when you're dealing with intelligent people. Developers don't like being micro-ed generally and trying to do so simply makes both you and him/her less effective.

Road tripping to 2009

2009-01-03T23:04:00.003+11:00

Welcome to 2009! It has been a preposterously long time since my last post and I do apologize. I'm hoping in 2009 to improve on that and get back to a regular posting cycle.

I just came back from a seven day road trip today so I'm fairly tired and suffering from typical post-vacation depression, but I'm finding doing normal activities like blogging and reading help get me back in the mood for going back to work.

I went with pretty much the same crowd that I went to Thailand with, so it all felt comfortable and familiar. We had a good mix of boys and girls to keep the group dynamic from getting too girly or too blokey. The group operated like a well oiled machine where we all knew what had to be done and would be comfortable doing it. I think I appreciated this holiday more than previous ones because I felt needed. I could drive long distances, I could help cook, put up tents and just be useful whereas on previous holidays, I was more just a participant.

The driving was an highlight for me. Driving for most people is a necessary evil, but I enjoy a uninterrupted, interesting drive through the country. We had two cars, one being a latest generation Toyota Aurion and the other being an Holden Commodore Sports Edition. I loved driving the Commodore. Being a el-cheapo 98' Camry driver myself, it is great to be being the wheel of a powerful modern driving machine. I wasn't the only one however, since all the boys wanted first dibs on the Commodore.

In terms of activities and destinations, we didn't actually do all that much on this trip. In quick chronological summary:

Day 1 - Brisbane
Day 2- Noosa - Beach activities
Day 3 - Gold Coast - Beach activities.
Day 4 - Gold Coast - White water world theme park.
Day 5 - Gold Coast - Shopping and lazing about
Day 6 - Byron Bay & Coffs Harbour - Lazing around in an resort.
Day 7 - Port Macquarie & Barrington Tops - Camping
Day 8 - Back to Sydney. - Lots of driving back.

In all but Barrington Tops, we'd stay in serviced apartments so we did live in relative comfort. We evenly split cooking at home and going out. On the nights we cooked, we'd typically end up playing some sort of games such as the collection of Q's drinking games, Uno or Pot (a variant of Charades). I noticed our group is quite competitive where we try to make things a challenge to keep things interesting. Even on the drive home, we'd try and guess approximately when we'd arrive. It tends to feed my slightly competitive edge even though I did suck at a lot of those games, particularly the coordination based drinking games (as if it wasn't hard enough without the alcohol!).

It wasn't quite in the same league as our trip to Thailand, which felt a little bit more 'complete' and fulfilling, but it was still an enjoyable holiday away from the daily grind. After writing this post I feel a little more comfortable, but I still fear the first day back into work.

Match-maker, match-maker, make me a match!

2008-10-12T01:19:00.000+11:00

This blog post has been a long time coming. I couldn't write it due to a long running practical joke which finally came to a conclusion last week. A large segment of my friend base believed that I came back engaged after my trip back to Sri Lanka due to a story dreamed up by one of my best friends. Of course I decided to fan the flames of that story (all the while dropping hints) in order to see who would smell the rat and who would stay gullible.

The best lies are the ones which are half true and now dear reader, I can divulge what actually happened on my trip away in Sri Lanka.

Whilst overseas, my dad decided to take me to my uncle's home for a 'catch up' with the family and 'some close family friends'. I've known for a while that my folks have been searching for partners for me, but this was six days into the holiday and without any smell of a setup, I had gotten complacent. By the time dinner was done the 'family friends' had come over and with a daughter in tow, I knew it was a setup**. I was furious, but couldn't make a scene in front of two families so I put on a smiling face and greeted the family and the girl.

The unfortunate thing was, she was one hell of a catch. She was very forward, played sports, had an active social life, was a wonderful pianist (my dad requested her to play) and she was pretty. It was unfortunate because being the moron that I was, I decided to be somewhere between civil and friendly instead of going all out to make an positive impression. Whilst still annoyed at being in the dark about all this, I still kicked myself for botching it up. Especially since my family had gone to a lot of effort already, I decided to give this entire process a fair go and went ahead to the various setups my parents had filtered.

Girl 2: Worked in IT as a tester. I was utterly charming and she made for decent conversation. On paper it made for a reasonable match, but in reality, there was a significant lack of chemistry from my side. There simply wasn't the spark there was with the first girl.

Girl 3: Was in the middle of NOWHERE. It was a 3 hour drive through god-knows-where to get there. By the time I got there, my back was killing me from the driving and I was hardly in the mood to be charming. Luckily enough, she really wasn't my type. Way too timid for someone with an personality like mine and she just couldn't make conversation.

Girl 4: Utterly disillusioned by this point, I spent most of this one playing with my 6 year old cousin whilst my dad did the interrogation. She looked as disinterested in being there as I was, so luckily this ended quickly.

The idea is the next time I return that I have another look, but this is giving me good incentive to avoid going back for a while.

So the irony here is that I put some really high artificial barriers to entry when I'm interacting with the ladies in SL, but over here I'm knocked over by the first pretty face which is nice to me. It is an awful double standard. So, with not much happening here and no real wish to go back and continue the Sri Lankan match making process, I'm stuck.

In order to get out of my current rut, Cat told me to get myself on RSVP, which initially seems like an extreme measure until you strip away the emotional aspects. This is a classic Long Tail situation. Think about it this way. A lot of hookups and lot of incredibly good looking people appear in bars and pubs. But that said, your typical bar/pub only appeals to about 5-10% of the population you could date. Distribution is difficult because it usually requires a significant amount of courage to present yourself to another person. Filtering is impossible, because even if you could hear over the awful music, people don't tell you enough about them to make a informed decision (well unless you just want a shag, in which case the looks are enough data).

Enter the Internet.

Places like RSVP, Lava and the myriad other sites represent the long tail of the dating market.

There are thousands of people available on these sites, and whilst they don't currently represent everyone, they would probably cover another 40% of the potential market.

Distribution is easy, everyone places information about themselves onto the website, filling out what they are like. Anyone with access to a computer can do it, you don't need to argue with bouncers and its for the most part free!

Of course with this many people on the net, it makes it even more difficult to find someone you like. Luckily there are filtering mechanisms. Being able to filter out on age, race, pets, preferences towards Star Trek vs Star Wars, almost anything, gives unbelievable ability to find someone who you might be compatible with. The 'relative' anonymity of the process also improves chances of personalities being correctly portrayed rather than the usual mask people wear in public. Unfortunately you also miss 60% of the conversation due to the lack of body language.

It would be funny if there was a rating system for people as well, in the same vein as Amazon. "I dated James for two years, it was awesome. Highly recommended" - 5 Stars. It would highly flawed since the biggest problem is that breakups nearly always result in 1 star ratings of each other regardless of how '5 star' you were in the 'honeymoon' stage. But I digress.

So with this many great reasons to be listed, why am I not? I don't know, but I suspect its the same naive reason every other single person uses. We're all waiting for our Princess Charming to come along and whisk us away to somewhere beautiful.

** For those who are unaware of Sri Lankan custom, matchmaking is a fairly common occurrence even today. Both boy and girl have full control over the process and the family who does the match making simply act like a dating service, except with pre-approval from the parents already granted (since they helped set you up remember). After you find someone you like you conduct a normal courtship and if that fails, you start again. My cousin went through 89 girls before he found the right girl for him (and he's still happily married with several beautiful kids). In general the program has a incredibly high success rate.

Board games and you: A guide to a true nerd sport.

2008-10-05T22:55:00.005+11:00

My friends pointed out, moderately bitterly, that I have an affinity to economic board games. And looking back over the past, I've noticed a tendency to win significantly above average. Which is ironic considering my real-life financial situation, but I suspect board games reward the type of behaviour which would otherwise back-fire in real life. So I figured I'd share some of these thoughts as in the hope it will lead to some more intense games in the future, rather than a grimace of "Not again".

I originally wrote this blog with specific problems and examples from each board game, but I deliberately made it generic and applicable across multiple games, for as Drucker said in the Effective Executive, 'most problems are generic and can only be solved through a decision which establish a rule or principle'. This is also partly to help anyone outside of my work group who will not understand the specialized language of the games being discussed.

* Early investment. No.1 rule is anything that provides continuous and preferably exponential investment HAS to be done early. Example 1: In Peurto Rico, an early cheap investment in a 'Small market' accelerates your money making and allows you to get a 'Large market' quickly which accelerates your funding again. Example 2: In Acquire, Forcing an early merge allows you to get substantial cash infusion which you can invest into other hotels, allowing you to become majority share owner in them as well.

* Understand your resources by themselves and with respect to the environment. Each resource has different uses in each phase of the game and you need to understand how to best utilize them. For example: Puerto rico, there is only one good you can sell at a time, so generating a tonne of coffee or tobacco is generally useless. Having one coffee available at all times is plenty.

The second point is just as important. Each resource is has different value based on what people have done. Arms races will on the other hand will kill both players. Playing contranian often works in your favour. E.g. Settlers, if everyone shoots for brick and wood, there will a flood of these resources and you, the contrarian who owns the only sheep suddenly has a lot of power. Alhambra is a prime example. Those who do an arms race to own all the "valuable" 'Purple' buildings might end up having to share points, whilst he who notices this and moves into the "cheap" 'Blue' buildings might get to keep all of those points.

* Over-diversification is a bad idea. Just like real-life, over diversification hurts more then it helps. In nearly every game, you will end up highly overstretched. In Settlers, having access to every resource-type square probably means you have a lot of settlements and no cities to accelerate cash. In Acquire, having a stake in every hotel means you'll likely not get Majority OR Minority shareholder bonuses. In Puerto rico, having more than 2 types of production means you're wasting money on production plants which should have gone to support buildings.

* Strengthening your own hand is always preferable to damaging another's. Don't try to hurt a particular person, even if they seem to be in the lead, if by doing so you sacrifice a better play for yourself. The only exception to this is if you can screw everyone else at once. Example: In Puerto rico, 'Trading' to make more cash to buy that building you always wanted is generally the best move. However if by 'Captain'ing you can force everyone else to dump heavily goods whilst allowing you to have some minor benefit, then this may be a better choice.

* Communication on and outside of your round is vital. As a general rule, you want to steer people towards making a decision that benefits you. The only way to make that succeed honourably is to help them make a decision that benefits the both of you, but screws someone else. Staying quiet can help if someone else is propositioning a decision which fits into your plans.

* Medium-term planning is your friend. As a general rule, people will make decisions (or randomness will) which will make long term planning exceptionally difficult, if not outright impossible. Medium term prediction is reasonable and advised however. E.g. In Acquire, if you have two pieces which will make a hotel, but they are far away from any merging, holding them in reserve until there are hotels closer to that location is advised. E.g. In Puerto rico, you can think in terms of up to 3 rounds in advance since with the small number of 'roles' that can be played, the role you need played before it gets to your turn has a high chance of being played in each round.

One fantastic skill that I would also recommend is keeping a good idea of what resources others have got. It's one I'm generally utterly poor at with my short-term memory, but it makes decision making a lot easier.

That is all I've come up with so far. Hopefully it gives some insights into how I play.

Etiquette on the use of the 'L' word

2008-09-27T01:43:00.005+10:00

And no, I don't mean Lesbian, I mean the other 'L' word. The Love word. The great tactical nuke of words. The word that if packaged into a box would have both a 'FRAGILE' sign and a 'DANGER' sticker plastered on.

People use the 'L' word for lots of things. Drunk people use it quite regularly. Heck even I've done the "I love you man!" in big group hugs. As bizarre as it may seem, as a general rule I will be free to use the L word around guys, but not around girls. You can say almost anything from one guy to another guy when you are drunk because you know you're just being silly. But when you cross genders, you have to be careful, because you don't know when someone will take it wrong.

For some people, the 'L' word can be bandied about with not a care. Unfortunately there is a large group of people like myself who take that word seriously. It took me 5 months of dating to use the 'L' word seriously with my high-school ex , and I believe it took another month for her to do the same. It has so much weight behind it that its dangerous to use it lightly.

So do you want to know what happens when you use it wrong? You cause someone to blog at 2am in the morning about using it wrong!

I went out with some friends and whilst I was leaving, a drunken friend hugged me and then dropped the L word. This is fine. Unfortunately right afterwards she reaffirmed it and then explained why she did. And of course being stunned, I immediately just mumbled a thank you and sort of shuffled off. And subsequently I have been pondering whether this was normal drunken crap, or is this someone expressing their true feelings after alcohol removed the inhibitor circuit. So now these thoughts are just spinning around and around. Maybe I should clarify it another day in a sort of side conversation, but will that be too embarrassing to bring up? Do I ignore it? Do I ask her friends what she really thinks?

See the ample amount of damage done by simply not following etiquette? It is really simple:
1. Feel free to use the L word for anyone or anything, but unless you really mean it:
2. If its cross gender, never reaffirm that you do.
3. Never explain why you do.
4. If you HAVE screwed up, playfully and visually tell others around them, the same thing so the person in question realizes its just the alcohol talking.

Would certainly help me sleep better!

Don't pass the buck.

2008-07-23T20:44:00.005+10:00

Interesting chapter in the book I'm currently reading (By the way, great book - 1st Break all the rules). You should avoid saying the lines "I think this is a crazy idea, but the corporate insists". What you've just done there is demotivate everyone around you. I've done this plenty of times on my current project. I hear and see something reasonably mad and I report it back to the team and after a while you end up doing two things. One you foster a "Us vs Them" attitude which is never healthy. Secondly you give people excuses to be less than the best they can be and reduces the overall effectiveness of the organization.

So I'm thinking of doing the following:

1. If someone is doing something stupid that doesn't affect my team, just don't report it unless someone asks.
2. If someone asks something stupid of your team, make sure you have all the information and go to the team with it. If the team thinks its stupid, don't make promises of trying to change it.
3. If they insist on it, get the reasoning. It's very rare the reasoning is just plain mad, it is usually a compromise. Find a middle ground and justify the decision to your team as to why you accepted, rather than you didn't have a choice. People are generally mature enough to handle this. By passing the buck, you reduce the trust in the upper organization and you reduce the team's trust in you as a manager.

(This isn't the most well thought out blog post, but I've had a number of people complain I haven't updated in a while, so I figured why not ease myself back into it.)

WYD2008 Super Thursday

2008-07-17T21:25:00.004+10:00

Today was 'Super-Thursday' of World Youth Day (week) in Sydney and it was an amazing spectacle. The Sydney CBD was packed with thousands of people attired in the firey orange and yellow WYD 2008 signature outfits. Flags of numerous nations were proudly on display as people marched onto Barangaroo. Unfortunately, since I wasn't a registered pilgrim, I couldn't join them in the main area of Barangaroo. Luckily I did find a great vantage point from where I could observe all of Barangaroo. And boy were there a lot of them. The entire ex-shipping yard was covered with people, with estimates of around 130,000 pilgrims packed into that area.

Even though hordes of people were being herded like cattle, there was lots of singing and dancing in the crowd. The "Free Hugs" girls and guys in my photos really captured the feel of the event in my mind. The entire feeling of giving love for the sake of giving without caring about race, gender or age. The concept is not at all new, but it was lovely to see it at this event.

I was expecting to see some activists complaining about condom use, abortion or other controversial religious decisions. Yet I didn't see even one and I was all over the place from Barangaroo to the Domain. I was originally annoyed that these folk would try to ruin the event (though they do have the right to free speech), but after being there, I would feel sorry for any person who tried to push that kind of ideology against the crowd that was there tonight. They would have been politely ignored at best or ridiculed by the more militant religious ones. You'd have to be quite ballsy to try it.

Of course the Pope did arrive and that was pretty cool. He seems like a nice guy and maybe over time people will grow to respect him the same way we did JP2. The motorcade was funny since they drove past at around 40km/h so it is very quick. Despite one guy going, 'wow, was that it?', in general the crowd was elated and had that 'Wow, I saw the Pope!' excitment in their eyes.

Some come for the celebrity, some come for faith, some come to find meaning and others just to be part of the event. Organized religion may be dying, but its not dead yet.

Slipping task management.

2008-07-14T17:29:00.004+10:00

They say someone who is successful is someone who has screwed up a lot and learnt from it. So I'm hoping this project will help me to do that. There was a project manager at my work who was ruthless (in a good way) at tracking tasks that were slipping. Those who worked with her found it annoying in some sense, but everyone acknowledged she also provided perspective and butt protection. At some point, people stepped back and reassessed where they were with the task and re-planned. This is good for the developer, the project and the project manager.

So say you have a task that is slipping by a developer. You need to analyze the task and determine what kind of slippage it is. Is it slipping because its not clear what work it is. Maybe you need to break up the task into more manageable bits.

If it is dangerously slipping you might need to not deliver the entire thing. Understand what is the real dependency or feature that has to be delivered. Can you get away with perhaps releasing the interfaces even if there isn't an implementation. Can you deliver where the configuration is via a configuration file even if there isn't a GUI component requirement. It is a case of being creative and understanding your requirements.

If a person has missed a deadline several times, then you need to keep that in mind when dealing with them again. They could be bad at estimation, or their loading needs to be really low. Note you may have an opportunity for improvement with a person if their productivity is really low*.

When even that fails, you need to start micro-managing. This is where you break the task down with them, ask them daily how they are going with the task, and tracking very carefully. Its funny how quickly a task that is carefully scrutinized ends up being delivered.

Going back to my earlier point on idiosyncrasies of each team, it is really important to understand the motivations of each team member. I've heard people say 'everyone is out to do a good job and spend the right amount of time on it', and this is not always true. As a general rule, it is true, but you need to understand both extremes in the project too. There is the person who will work 12 hour days, rip through tasks, burn out and quit. You also have the 9-5 institutionalized person is waiting for their LSL to kick in and say things will be done 'when its done'. Whilst you can help, often those folk need to sort out their priorities in life outside of the project. You need to realize both are a risk to the project and the tasks and allocate accordingly.

*The funky thing about matrix organizations is that the closest person to the employee in question can't suggest those improvements. They need to tell the coach instead. Unnecessary layer of communication there.

Workhorses and Show Ponies

2008-07-08T20:06:00.005+10:00

It has been an painful week. There has been lots of dealing with people a lot more senior than I am over screw-ups that I had very little control over. In addition I got my first chewing out by a tech manager for letting the schedule slip, but ironically (or maybe not so ironically, for you learn more from your mistakes then from praises) it was the most beneficial coaching session I've had for a while.

The project has slipped for a number of reasons, but one of the main reasons is due to the way I allocated tasks to people. The difference between a good project manager and a great project manager is that a great PM can work with the idiosyncracies of their team. And within each team are what my tech manager called 'Show Ponies' and 'Workhorses'. And this is how he explained how they work.

Workhorses are easy enough to understand. They are the people who do the hard painful labour. They will sow the fields, write the big modules of your code, put up your walls. They rarely complain, they don't make excuses for being late and they are happy with just doing the work. They are the backbone of your team and losing too many of them will break the project.

Show ponies are the ones that prance from one activity to another. They like to know more stuff and strut their stuff to others. They are excellent for communicating with others, solving puzzles, creating designs but you wouldn't use them for heavy lifting, because its they don't roll like that. They are smart enough to do the work, but they aren't motivated enough by grunt labour to do it. Without them, you won't win any prizes and you probably won't innovate, but you should be able to get the project done regardless.

So when composing a group, you do need a good mix of the two if its possible, though it isn't very often that you get a choice about who you get to pick. Grads make for excellent workhorses, which is why any growing business needs a reasonable number of them. They need to be paired with good senior staff. This is because often senior staff don't believe in the organization, but they do believe in looking after their young proteges. Senior staff are more difficult to split into work horses and show ponies as they seem to eveningly split into both types and often show characteristics of both.

So what I did was allocate work the wrong way around and now I've screwed my schedule and made the other team member very annoyed. Ideally I should have allocated smaller tasks to the pony and made them more free for design/reviews and so on, and given the grunt work to the work horse which would mean it would be closer to being done on time.

It is kind of disconcerting seeing this kind of comparison of your peers to farm animals, being made by a manager, but it doesn't make it wrong, and this kind of simplification helps to guide future decision making.

Why Guild Wars is Technologically Awesome

2008-06-19T12:00:00.007+10:00

I like Guild wars. And not just because it combines the best bits of the OCD-driven grinding/levelling/item gathering tendencies of a MMO AND the 'what happens next' eagerness of a story-driven game. It is not even because it has a number of game play elements that make it easy to pick up, challenging to master and continually entertaining to play. It is because from a technical perspective it's one of the more impressive games I've seen for a while. Here is a washing list of the things I find fascinating from a technology perspective.

Online updates - Guild wars is at its heart an example of a Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) which companies have been touting for a while. Whilst you need to install the initial application, the rest of the game is purely updates. And its not small updates either, as new campaigns, new cut scenes, new enemies are all downloaded on the fly. This said, all it needs to download is graphical presentation and input layers only. The original install is apparently just a 90kb 'thin' client and most of the logic in the game is kept on the server. As it gets to a new area, it compares what it needs with what it has and downloads any additional content. This makes it easy for developers to add more content, fix exploits and respond to customer demands.

Instance Network reconnect - The single worst part of RTS games is typically playing a game for 30mins, and be at the climax of a good battle, and then have either the game crash on you OR you get a network disconnect. In Guild wars, each explorable area is a private instance that is just made for you and your party of friends. So if one of you got disconnected for any reason, it would ruin the game for everyone if it wasn't for Guild War's ability to detect disconnects and allow the user to reconnect straight back to the session, allowing the party to continue adventuring.

A Well-Made UI - A common mistake is to have an amazing back end infrastructure and to spend no money on the user interface technology. Guild wars doesn't fall into this trap by having a user experience that is both gorgeous (even after 5yrs, the architecture and scenery in GW is breath-taking) and completely functional (user widgets are adjustable, contains all the information you need, have appropriate short cuts etc). It helps add to the gaming experience instead of detracting as some gaming UIs tend to. To top it off, much of the UI is customizable. You can in fact skin the client, since it doesn't affect any other player. This includes changing some of the graphics or sounds or whatever. This does have some impact in PvP however since you can mod certain classes to be more visible (everyone loves to kill the healers).

I've heard some friends say there isn't anything technologically innovative about Guild wars and it is true. All the above have been done in games before. Guild wars happens to execute many of these things well and this really helps you appreciate the technology behind this game.

Further Resources about the technology behind Guild Wars:
- http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/534/534454p1.html
- http://www.monashreport.com/2007/06/09/technology-of-guild-wars/
- http://www.dbms2.com/2007/06/09/the-database-technology-of-guild-wars/
- http://www.dbms2.com/2007/06/12/thoughts-on-database-management-in-role-playing-games/

Birthday LAN '08

2008-06-10T21:08:00.006+10:00

Yet another year's Birthday LAN party is in the bag. And another record breaking year it was. Much of it was the same as last year. And of course, to follow PMI process, we can't close off the event without having a retrospective.

So what went well?
- Record attendance: 15 gamers and 15 non-gamers for a 30 person turn out and 7 girls for an amazing 1:4 ratio.
- New games were introduced which worked well. Call of Duty 4, World in Conflict and Aliens vs Predator 2 were added to the fray. Old classics like Dawn of War and Trackmania (Forever edition) also kept people entertained.
- The food was much better this year after we outsourced to a different provider (Flavour of Ceylon in Parramatta).
- The inclusion of a web-camera doing time lapsed photos was great as it gave a source of entertainment during the party as well as an riveting video after.
- The private bit torrent tracker BTNT was used for distributing games and this worked excellently to make for an efficient and quick distribution of games.
- The network and power allotment layout worked beautifully with almost no outages (the one outage being at 7am in the morning which appeared to be outside our control).

What didn't go so well?
- Fewer different types games were played. Previous years saw more variety.
- Player Participation per Game (PPG) was more erratic then previous years. Whilst some games like Trackmania and AvP had close to 90% participation, other games splintered with less than 50%.
- I pussyed out on the "No external access" rule which meant some people defaulted to playing Eve Online or WoW or Age of Conan at a LAN. Given a lack of consensus for the next game to play, this is a fairly normal default action for those who are addicted to MMOs.
- A record number of people stayed over (nearly all 15 gamers). This overloaded the sleeping accommodation which meant some people didn't sleep. This contributed to people leaving earlier (2:30pm) on the next day compared to previous years.
- Yet again forgot to FRAPs the battles during the games so I could have highlight reels from the individual games.

Otherwise interesting highlights included:
- Several people doing Tequila shots at 1am in the morning.
- People wracking their brains playing BridgeIt (A civil engineering bridge building simulator) till the whee hours of the morning.
- My set of non-gamer friends sat in our outdoors entertaining area for ages just chatting amongst ourselves despite the fact it was freezing.

Whilst it was a great and fun LAN, from my original set of goals, it was a mixed affair. Which is good, because it gives me something to perfect for next year's LAN. My general approach to these things are to let people run it and just help them with their objective of having fun (even if my brain is telling me to micromanage), My parents as usual brought up making this party the last LAN. And I can understand why. With the catering and electricity and hiring costs alone, it cost well in excess of $600 to run, ignoring the huge amount of time it consumes. I'm generally okay with it because each year it's fun to setup and run, I learn a few things and I get to show my friends a good time to show that I appreciate them. All those things balance the cost to my time and money. So here is to next year's more spectacular gaming event!

The Ghost who Walks, I mean Sings.

2008-06-01T20:25:00.003+10:00

So I decided to throw off the thongs and the beer stubbies and get myself an dose of culture by seeing the Phantom of the Opera at the Lyric Theatre on Saturday. Considering it cost me $90.00 to see it, I had fairly high expectations of an enjoyable experience. And yes, my requirements were fulfilled. I'm not a total uncultured buffoon as I've seen musicals before at London's West End when I was travelling, so it has to be reasonably good for me to appreciate it.

Not everyone can afford this kind of experience and I'd like to compare and contrast this with the Phantom of the Opera movie (which you can buy for far far less, or rent for almost nothing).

Whats great about both:
- The music: The Phantom has some AMAZING songs. Things like Angel of Music, and Music of the Night and of course who doesn't know the amazing starting of the title song. I don't think I can remember the words, but the music flows still through my head.
- The story: It is a moving, tragic story which you really only appreciate in Act 2. In Act 1 you kind of feel that the Phantom is, as Sunny might say, a bit of a douche bag. But in Act 2, you really do feel sorry for him. And Christine Daae is a beautiful character regardless of whether she is played by Julie Goodwin at the show or Emmy Rossum in the movie.

Why the movie over the theatre:
- cost: self explanatory. $90 vs free.
- convenience: both in getting and watching the film. No crowds or parking to deal with.
- more-absorbing: This may slightly contradict a later point, but a movie is a continuous piece of fiction, whilst a play has intermissions and set pieces and people stopping to clap which totally ruins your ability to disconnect from this world and go to that world.

Why the theatre over the movie:
- There is so much passion and depth in real life sound that digital conversion just robs. The theatre is also built for acoustics so that when you hear it at the theatre, it moves you on emotional level.
- Visually its a trade off. Some scenes (like the Phantom throwing fireballs) are kind of stupid looking in the theatre because you don't have access to CGI/special effects. But you cannot deny that seeing things in 3D makes you feel like you are a fly in the wall watching the story unfold. Well up to the point where it changes scene anyway (as mentioned above)
- Theatrics: Okay this maybe just me, but I enjoy seeing the various things they do on a stage. Being treated to certain 'special effects' without CGI such as the Phantom taking Christine on 'the boat' on stage is pretty darn neat.

In short, if you know its going to be a quality production, its worth considering seeing the theatre version of a story, but unlike a movie, the cost of guessing wrong is way more expensive than just the time wasted. In the Phantom's case, its Quality with a Q, so go with my blessing.

My Media Center... It lives, It lives!

2008-05-18T16:01:00.006+10:00

So I finally got out of my work-induced state of apathy and did something that I've been meaning to do for ages. I made a media center for our living room so that the folks can have access to all the videos I watch and so we have readily available music for parties.

My plan was to spend absolutely nothing on this PC and outside of a $20 hard drive I succeeded by scavenging two dead PCs to make one workable PC. The following components are sufficient for a media center PC (faster is always better, but below is quite workable).
My Media Center PC consists of:

Athlon 0.9GHz (yes <1GHz)
256MB ram
Geforce4 MX with TV-Out
350W ye-olde Power supply (I need to replace this since its SO old)
Network card
80GB HDD (probably a bit small, but got it for cheap!)

I love Ubuntu, but I need something as lightweight as possible so I chose Xubuntu so that I start off with the minimal set and Xfce lightweight desktop. I actually ended up installing Xubuntu twice because I can't read the difference between 8.04 and 6.06 (it was late, give me a break). I did notice that 6.06 was quite smooth compared to 8.04 which I'm assuming is the usual effect of feature bloat, but I can still live comfortably with it.

I got my TV-Out to work using the following work instructions: ... Sort of
I still had to run to do some fairly confused apt-get and /etc/X11/xorg.conf editing black magic, but in the end it all works. I'd write what I did, but it seemed to be various runs of sudo nvidia-settings, xorg.conf editing and sudo nvidia-xconfig.

The biggest decision was which Media Center application to use. My original choice was Elisa, but there is actually a number of other solutions that are available. I went in the end with the XBox Media Center or XBMC. This is a direct to linux port of the media centre application that is on the XBox. It did all I wanted and the interface was sufficiently slick and intuitive that I was okay with using it. It does music, video, photos and for no really apparent reason, the Weather. After all, I want to know how much sun and blue skys I'm missing out on by being indoors watching movies... Anyway I will definitely revisit Elisa in the next few months as it does look like its growing at a faster rate than XBMC.

Installation of XBMC was trivial once you realized that there is a Ubuntu package and you don't need to build it from source. Building from source reminds me why I used to hate Linux as its a needlessly painful procedure which made me nearly give up on XBMC. This site helped me a lot with setting up XBMC, though make sure you use the latest XBMC for Hardy Heron. You also don't need to do much of it outside of updating the sources.list and doing the apt-get. Once installed and launched, if you notice that you get a lot of mouse slowdown, this means your Nvidia drivers are probably out of date.

Video is well handled in XBMC in terms of how the overlay of GUI elements work with the running movie. It is hard to describe without showing it so have a look at this youtube video. Music is somewhat confusing to use, but it is possibly because I haven't enabled 'Library mode' properly yet so I reserve judgement. Photos is fairly awful however due to slow rendering speeds and an slideshow that doesn't appear to allow controls. But I'm pretty much only here for music, movies and that kick-ass style so it has got most of what I need.

I have a few problems that I still have to solve:

I need to somehow reduce the noise output of this machine. Currently I buried it behind the amplifier and then covered all but the fan output with a sheet to muffle as much sound as possible. I can still hear it clearly enough. I suspect a new CPU fan and PSU fan are required.

I have no network access in the living room and running cables on the ground everywhere is not an acceptable solution. It means most likely that I need a wireless card which I can then link to my WAP/Router. Whilst more painful, it certainly gives me a chance to learn about wireless in Linux which is a new area for me.

Frets on Fire server on Ubuntu

2008-05-04T18:32:00.004+10:00

I've been having a blast lately playing Frets on Fire, the el-cheapo PC Guitar Hero clone. My ex pointed out that it has a Frets on Fire server as well which allows us to upload our top scores so we can verse each other to see who plays better over time. The Frets on Fire server has all these following pre-requisites:

Python 2.4 or newer
Django 0.96 or newer
MySQL Server 4.0 or newer
Apache web server (or any other web server)
Apache mod_python
Python Imaging
Python MySQLdb

So I put aside most of saturday afternoon & evening to install all this on my computer and get the server running. Remembering the 'fun' I had installing the LAMP stack on my old Fedora box back two years ago, I knew this would easily take a long time.

Two hours later I had finally managed to get 5 stars on Kaiser chief's Ruby and blew away my old score. Hang on, what happened to installing the FoF server? Yeah, I did that already. That took me less than 30mins. Yes you heard me right, I installed that entire stack and the FoF server in 30mins and most of that was the download and waiting for install.

In fact, its as simple as this:

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache-mod-python
sudo apt-get install mysql-server python-mysqldb
sudo apt-get install python-imaging
sudo apt-get install python-django
Follow some very basic commands in the FoF server read-me such as copying and filling in the blanks in files.

It was so easy, it was so simple to get the application to do what I wanted to achieve, rather than just fiddle with install and configuring. It was so quick and easy that it didn't feel like I was working in Linux at all. It was so easy it could have been Windows for all I knew.

What happened to Linux? What happened to the days of mind-bogglingly painful installs? Of rpm-dependency hell. Of dredging web forums trying to understand what a particular error code meant? Of the little victories as you get each component to recognize the other component.

Of course, this was one small app, theres still plenty of other horrifying applications we can try installing, but even that is getting easier by the day. Its clear that Open Source programmers are realizing that making things easier for noobies is the best way to convert us over. We like to spend more time working with the application, rather than knowing all the intricate configurations.

Anyway, I need to get back to some Killing In the Name of...

The Plus One Club

2008-04-20T20:50:00.006+10:00

I had my first +1 club experience this Saturday. What's +1 club you say? That's exactly what I asked (OK fine, I actually mistook it for something D&D and asked if the club was Vorpal).

The +1 club is a term coined by my friend Julian and it refers to bringing an random friend along to a party as extra. The only rule of being in the club for a guy is that you don't make an ass of the primary invitee. It is an excellent concept because it benefits both the random along with the primary invitee. The primary invitee gets to inject some new blood into conversations and also gets shortlisted to be added as a +1 in other parties whilst the random gets a chance to meet some new friends.

The party was an birthday party for an ex-worker, Dylan, who I never met before. The party was at the Dome club within Crown Hotel in Surry Hills. Considering how very ordinary and pub-like the downstairs is, the upstairs "Dome" component is very trendy. It has a reasonably sized bar area, the crowd is mostly middle aged so there were a lot fewer posers and the surroundings felt sophisticated.

I've never really noticed Julian's abilities at parties before and after Saturday night he is my new hero. He has this remarkable ability to just converse with people and engage them with funny stories or quirky questions. There were many fantastic looking guys and ladies (I'd be interested if I was 30 anyway), who Julian easily chatted to with no pretension or ulterior motive (well that I know about) and I was thinking, I want to be that confident one day! Being able to be witty on demand, to engage multiple people and keep thinking on one's feet is a fantastic skill which I'd love to master one day.

Well it's either all the above, or it could be due to the fact he managed smuggle out some tasty birthday cake from the sealed 'superheroes' 30th party which happened to be running in a function room at the bar.

Enough with the Julian worship; on a side note it is amazing how small a world it is in some ways. I met two other people who used to work for us, AND who also worked with Mr R. And I met someone who worked with someone else whose boss was Cat from work's ex-husband whilst they were in Guildford. Then we met someone who used to work with Jane before she came to work with us. Then again, the Australian IT community is small enough that the degrees of separation are likely to be small.

One habit that I have formed of late is to keep in my personal wiki, a list of people I meet and a few notes about each of them for future reference. When I went to write up those who I met Saturday night I realized by accident I had been a +1 at over 4 different parties in the last two months. I wouldn't have believed it without counting it, but I've been introduced to over 40 new people! Considering how boring my social life is, this is kind of amazing. I envy those who are regularly meeting lots of new people, sort of like Julian. Ahh I think I'm going to stop blogging before this becomes a Julian fan site.

What Dead or Alive can teach us about Talent Management Time

2008-04-09T22:19:00.007+10:00

I watched the much derided game to movie adaptation Dead or Alive today. And guess what? I really enjoyed it! No, this isn't because I'm a masochist and it's not because I have extremely low standards in my movies. It's not even because I had such low expectations for this movie that I would enjoy 80 minutes of static. It is because I set my expectations of what to expect from this movie accordingly before I watched it. I was told the movie would contain fantastic action sequences, beautiful locales and incredibly sexy women and it delivered on all those accounts.

It is mid-year review at my workplace and everyone has to take some time during their fortnight to document what they did in the last 6 months and how they are in relation to their objectives. This is commonly known as "doing PMP crap", by the majority of people. Note in this post, I will refer to it as talent management, not the "Performance Management Platform" since being of project management persuasion, associating the PM Professional qualification with PMP is just too confusing. It may be obvious why it is called 'PMP crap', but lets elaborate for those not at my work.
Software engineers are a difficult lot to measure and for the most part it is impossible to create any discrete scale of performance. There are those who have done something 'really good' and those who are 'really bad' and there is the bulk of us which make up the 70% who make the business work, but not necessarily make it much better. Regardless of what we write up, it is usually clear which bucket we fall into from the start and hence promotions and salary are generally considered somewhat disconnected from Talent Management system.

And here is the problem. I think people have an expectation that the Talent Management System is about writing up why you deserve more money. This is like saying you watch DoA for a storyline. Yes, there is a storyline, but it won't satisfy you and if you expect it to, then you'll be disappointed. This was my problem for a while. I expected pay rises to get me in line with my graduating peers. Whilst I got great pay rises compared to my colleagues, I'm still significantly below my graduating peers and this was "disappointing"(read infuriating) until I came to epiphany about what the game was about. What you get paid extra in bonus or salary merit is reasonably random, regardless of the tripe they give about 'calibrating' your rank with what is in your talent management write ups.

So what should you be expecting out of Talent Management Time (TMT) about in my opinion? My expectations are for it to be an opportunity to do a personal retrospective and to conduct a marketing exercise.

Imagine if you were told you had company-allotted time every 6 months to spend time thinking about how you went? During this time, your peers and supervisors will also give you feedback on how you went, and how you can become better! Wow! Time flies really quickly when you are working and it's easy to lose track of what you have done unless you sit down and document it. The key to getting better is feedback via introspection and from those around you. Use this time to figure out what you did well, how you provided value to the company and most importantly how you are tracking against your own personal goals (you DO have these right?..right?). So I should EXPECT to get good feedback and I should EXPECT to have time to think about this properly.

The second part of talent management is a marketing exercise from both an internal and external perspective. Internally you are trying to sell yourself for better roles, more recognition and of course, better pay. What people fail to see is that there is an external marketing opportunity here. Every 6 months is a perfect time to update your CV. It is a good time to examine the market to see if recruiters are looking for the talents which you have been using. Using this information, you need to practise selling yourself, even if it is to a mirror. The only person who can market you is... you! And what you are selling is your RIGHT to that sexy new project, that interesting new role or hell maybe even a pay rise (This assumes your company has money...).

So remember to treat talent management accordingly and you will not be disappointed. When end of year comes around, you may be disappointed if the reward doesn't match your efforts, but you've already set expectations, right about TMT? And because you've been updating your CV and examining the market, you're in an excellent position to conduct your exit strategy* if you feel it's appropriate.

So on that note, please excuse me dear friends as I must leave you to go do some Talent Management write ups.

* Quick side note: Exiting is a GOOD thing if you ever feel like you are going nowhere, but you don't necessarily have to exit your current workplace. For example, each time I was on the verge of activating my company exit strategy, I've been offered new interesting roles and I got 'suckered' into yet another year of growth. Remember, new role, new place or new company are all exit strategies and the order of preference is an personal thing.

My Blog! Now with less categories per serving. Guaranteed!

2008-04-06T01:26:00.004+11:00

For those using various news-feed readers might have noticed that a lot of older posts have got reanimated. Relax, its not a zombie-post Armageddon, but rather me going through my entire post collection (admittedly not that large) and creating new tag categories. I wanted to narrow my list of tags to something slightly more manageable. So the new short list at the moment should be on the right hand side and on further study, its reflects a lot about who I am as a person with its focus on love, friends, work and technology.

The main categories are:

The.Wonder.Of.Life - Mostly the wonder of MY life that doesn't fit into the below categories
Fools.In.Love - My various ill-fated yet occasionally successful attempts with the opposite sex.
With.Friends.Like.This - for all the fun things I get up to with friends.
Office.Space - related to my office, the work I do and friends I have with the office.
Techa.licio.us - Related to technology in some way.
Self-Enlightenment - Usually related to random bits of insight.
The-Colour-Of-Game - Anything related to my other passion, gaming.

There are some other minor categories which for the most part I wanted to merge into the above categories, but I can see their use currently. I'll either be expanding them or killing them later.

James ShortHoof of Hobbits Alley.

2008-04-06T00:00:00.006+11:00

My friends dislike the way I play pre-3rd Edition D&D due to the way I focus my attribute statistics on the class that I'm playing rather than 'role playing' and putting my stats the way I would be as a character. There is a reason for that. Its because I'd be utterly CRAP at EVERYTHING as a D&D character. I like to consider myself a well-rounded person, which could also be interpreted as I'm very average at a lot of things.

My friend Chris linked a site where you fill out 129 questions and it tells you what type of D&D character you are. . Yes this isn't the first, nor the last site that has done this quiz, but I suspect it'll be the same regardless of where I do it. So without further ado, let me introduce you to our friendly neighbourhood mage James ShortHoof of Hobbits Alley.

I Am A: Neutral Good Halfling Wizard/Sorcerer (2nd/1st Level)

Ability Scores:
* Strength-12
* Dexterity-13
* Constitution-14
* Intelligence-14
* Wisdom-13
* Charisma-14

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Halflings are clever, capable and resourceful survivors. They are notoriously curious and show a daring that many larger people can't match. They can be lured by wealth but tend to spend rather than hoard. They prefer practical clothing and would rather wear a comfortable shirt than jewelry. Halflings stand about 3 feet tall and commonly live to see 150.

Primary Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Secondary Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Need Hot Sexy Singles? Facebook will show you how!

2008-04-05T15:30:00.003+11:00

So apparently Facebook reckons I'm a desperate single loser. Why else would it be consistently showing me ads that say "Find hot singles now!" or "Do you want a relationship? Find people at blah" or "Meet Aussie Babes" around the clock whenever I login. Clearly having my relationship status as 'Single' was a big mistake. Now I cannot get rid of these ads!

Maybe I should start a relationship just to get rid of these ads. But who knows what ELSE it might start promoting. Maybe it'll start selecting places to buy expensive diamond rings, and worse yet maybe tell my partner "Get your partner to buy this gold necklace from Tiffanys for only $5k". Is there no end to what Facebook can get upto?

Anyway I did remove the relationship information in my facebook profile and consequently had 10 people ask me, 'oooo how come you're not listed as single anymore?'. It was somewhat depressing telling them that I had simply just removed it to try and rid of ads (which didn't work by the way).

You never love study... until its gone.

2008-04-04T22:46:00.004+11:00

I'm back! Yes dear readers I've been away for a long time, but I have an good excuse! A new project at work took a large chunk of my time and that's another blog post for this week, but the other thing which took my time was studying for the CAPM exam, which I successfully completed on Monday.

So what is the CAPM all about then? The Certified Associate In Project Management is the light-weight version of the Project Management Professional(PMP) certification. It is designed for those people (like myself) who are keen to get into project management, but don't have the necessary hours to get the real PMP accredition.

The exam was criminally easy and made me slightly annoyed considering the many hours I sunk into self-study for this test. The time spent in understanding the project management processes is not a waste, but the waste is memorising PMI specific things, which aren't reflective of real life.
This has got to partly explain why there has been a lot of criticism about the PMI and how they are milking the certification process for all its worth. The amount of money you have to pay for what they give you is silly and the industry that's spawned around helping you pass the PMP test is easily making millions from this. All of this is true, but the fundamental core of what the course teaches you is still incredibly valuable information for project managers. Like any other certification, the PMP shows two things. One is you have the perseverance to go and get accredited and secondly that you have a solid understanding of the fundamentals. This won't make you a great project manager, but the chances of you being truly AWFUL are minimized and from a manager's point of view, this is tops.

I'm hoping that over time I can start using this information in projects I'm already on and hopefully I can use this certification as leverage into a real project management role either within or outside of Avaya in the next year.

That said, now that I've finished studying, I'm a little lost as to what to do with all this spare time. Anyone got any ideas of what I could do next?

Welcome to 2008!!

2008-01-02T19:19:00.001+11:00

Happy New Year to everyone who reads this blog!

I know the last post was somewhat ominous, especially followed up with a long period of silence during all of December. This was mainly because December was very much action packed with little time for blogging. Nearly half the month went to travelling in both exotic Thailand and rustic outback Mudgee. I've got blog articles to write on both of these things, but I've been holding off from doing that whilst I concentrated on other things.

Whilst 2006 was a shambles due to so many personal, professional and financial disasters, 2007 represented clawing myself out of the pit I fell into and 2008 will be hopefully be the year it all turns around. New years resolutions never work without planning and this year I've actually got organized plans.

Firstly, I'm looking after my health. Its an easy one to forget, it requires constant attention, but if you neglect it, the consequences are worse than financial or professional ruin. Previously I've attempted to improve health but always gave it up within a few days due to no planning, tracking or controlling. In the weeks leading up to this year, I bought myself a pedometer and drew up an exercise goals list and I've actually kept to it for two weeks so far! My steps per day went from an average 5k to around 8k. Still haven't managed the 10k average that you are meant to do, but its getting there! By planning what I wanted to do and daily tracking it in Excel, it motivates me to keep trying.

Secondly, I'm trying to improve my finances and start building a real asset base. I've been reading "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki, and whilst there is a lot of obvious fluff in there, it does raise some good points that we easily forget. As my previous tech-lead used to say, its important to start investing young, keep your expenses & liabilities down and have a strong asset base. The ASX website has this great section on learning to invest that is well worth reading through. A visit to a reputable non-bank financial advisor is probably worth your while too. For my younger readers, its worth taking your parents along since their money is essentially your money so devising an combined plan is in your best interest. Of course remember, typically financial advisors get commission based on what they sell you, so make sure you have a clear idea of what you want from them and don't necessarily take what they are offering. So it will take time (and a lot of it), but do your own research. Thats what I'm trying to do and I'm certainly eager to get advice from those in the game.

If you're thinking this is a lot of extra time, you're right. Most likely I'll be scaling back my gaming time and my out-of-office work hours to fit this in. The real problem is that during work, often you are so tired after work that there is little drive to exercise, or study. I've got 4 days to figure out how to solve this problem before I fall into that rut again! If anyone has any suggestions on how they manage work and their personal goals, I'd be glad to hear it.

Tick-tock Tick-Tock Tick..silence..taptap Tock

2007-12-04T19:31:00.001+11:00

I had a minor scare in the last few days. I kept getting sharp pains in the middle of my chest and feeling a little out of breath for about the last three days. That and the occasional sharp tingles in my arms and jaw, plus the long history of heart disease in the family made me slowly and uneasily start thinking "Dear lord, am I about to have a heart attack?".

In typical (idiot) guy style I originally decided to rough it out until the pains went away. At the frantic urgings of my ex however, I relented to getting it checked out. A visit to the doctor quelled those fears as a blood pressure and pulse rate check, along with a few listens to the old ticker indicated everything was fine and it was more likely to be a muscular problem. I did notice the pain tends to be during certain movements and breathing thing happens mainly because I often stop breathing during panic attacks anyway. But of course when you start worrying about your own mortality, logic doesn't come into play until after you calm down. In any case, the doctor recommended coming back for a full blood work test after my holiday and I'm booking that right into GCal.

It comes down to the conclusion that we're getting older and can't afford to dick around with our health anymore as we could when we were invincible teenagers. The original reason I did any exercise was to lose the giant beer gut, but its becoming more evident that this exercise isn't just a vanity based endeavour, but imperative to continued survival. After all, I'm not ready to die yet! I have several years of good deeds to do in order to bribe St Peter at the gates.

Arghh! Zombies!

2007-11-29T00:02:00.001+11:00

Why won't some things stay down!?

Bringing projects and programs back from the dead is nothing new in the software industry. Which is one of the biggest annoyances compared to some other engineering disciplines. You don't see anyone decide to resurrect a bridge project and go, lets make this bridge longer!

From a business point of view, there is really nothing wrong with extending existing software. For minimal additional expensive, you can get either more revenue, or extend the longevity of it. Nearly all projects have continued development after their initial release. Currently I'm working on a project that had no work done on it. The problems occur when you have a project that was meant to be dead and buried and is now coming back to life. And not in the good Jesus-resurrects-Lazurus sort of way, I'm talking more about a necromancer bringing back a project that is currently brainless and lurching around until someone figures out what to do with it. And our resident necromancer manager has sent it lurching towards me!

This is why I'm complaining. I was 'volunteered' to lead an existing project that was meant to be off shored to the US after its birth and development in Sydney. Unfortunately the person who was meant to take it over resigned. Clearly he saw what was coming and decided to take the window instead of the fire.

As Jeff Atwood would say, in programming, one is the loneliest number. Being the only person in Sydney assigned on this project would suck more than I can describe. Having someone to talk with, and bounce ideas off in real-time is invaluable. There are others who've been on the project before, but pressing on them when they aren't officially assigned to the task would make me feel guilty.

Now where's my shotty?

Redun-dancies

2007-11-12T22:05:00.001+11:00

It was a sad day today at work. We had a number of redundancies take place, in the typical sudden one day's notice sort of scenario. To make it worse, all the people who were made redundant were people I work with every day and one of them was my boss, mentor and friend for two of my four years at Avaya. As much as I tried to ignore it and get on with work, it was a hard and painful day and its probably going to difficult for a while.

Redundancy isn't always a bad thing, especially if you've been there for a while. The payout is typically quite substantial and if your timing is accurate, you can potentially move jobs and effectively get paid a bonus to quit. The people that were leaving are top performers who wanted to move on and they volunteered to leave so good on them! I'm sure they did the redun-dance when they found out they were approved to leave.

If you think about it from a economic stand point, having more voluntary redundancies made available to be negotiated is a great thing. All companies have staff who want to be somewhere else, but stick around for the money. Typically people become bored and want to move on because their skill set isn't effectively utilized by the firm. Its in their best interest to move on to another role/firm, and its in the company's best interest to give them a good reason to leave so that they can use that person's headcount to hire people who are more suitable for the strategy in play. And even if its not a skill set problem, just being at the same place for too long can kill your drive and this is bad for you and the firm.

From a personal standpoint, its a bit of a 50/50 affair. Whilst you do lose that person as a comrade-in-arms in the company, what you are actually gaining is potential contacts for new job placement. Peers within the firm are typically useless for ensuring promotion, but if they leave they can have (depending on their eventual role) a great potential impact in your ability to find jobs 'on the outside'. Whilst in the near future this isn't a relevant point for me, I'm sure it'll come in handy at some point.

Vaccines. Preventative maintanence

2007-10-28T00:58:00.001+10:00

If I told you that I paid someone 100$ to stab me in the arm with a needle and fill my body with fatal diseases, you'd think either I was having a deathwish or I was trying to impress a girl. But thats exactly what I did today.

I need to get my vaccines for my Thailand trip and I figured lets get them done early since I'm not innoculated against them yet. And vaccines are NOT cheap. The Vivaxim booster shot (the vaccine against Typhoid and Hepatitis A) came in at $105 and the cholera tablets are another 110$. Luckily the booster will last nearly 10 years, so come 2017, I'll have to get another shot. I still need to verify I have the Hep B vaccine active.
Of course this cost is a mere pittance compared to the costs of not taking them and catching any of those diseases.

So all of these drugs should leave me covered for the common illnesses from this region. I'm sure going to only the most touristy areas should also minimize exposure to the illnesses, along with avoiding certain...indiscretions... which is the other main way one gets a number of these illnesses.

The Lurrv Boat

2007-10-20T22:40:00.001+10:00

I was about to begin singing the lyrics to The Love Boat, but alas my taste hasn't gone THAT downhill. The reason for my nostalgic singing is I went to a masquerade party on board a cruise boat which was being hosted by the Nepean University Medical Society (or something like that). So yes, a cruise filled with young doctors and yes gentlemen, they all look better than the cast of Grey's anatomy (except Katherine Heigl..sigh )

I can tell you now that it was fortunate that for a masquerade ball, masks weren't required all night. Whilst I'm quite capable of seeing people and large objects, its the subtle things like, I dunno, STAIRS or ledges of any kind which cause me grief. On the walk down to boat, I had to hold Cherryl's hand to prevent myself from making an ass of myself. Once onboard, I could just take it off.

Two things made the night fantastic. One was, I've come to the realization that I really don't give a toss anymore about trying to pick up, which meant I took a risk and actually talked to randoms. Secondly everyone on the boat had a one to two degree of separation from their friends so you could be 'pre-approved' to be onboard. This combination meant I met many new people, guys and girls and had an absolute ball. The girls I met were the type I would have been interested in. Smart, funny and pretty without being slutty. Normally I'm so lame that I fall for any new girl who is nice to me, but this effect was diluted because EVERY girl was really friendly. They'd talk with you, they'd dance with you and you never get the impression you're a retard.

At the end of the night, I was tempted to go onto the after party at Pontoon, but my friends had a separate party planned at a friends house. So several good-bye pecks on the cheek to my new acquaintances later (!!!), I went (via a circuitous route to Artarmon to pick up my car) to North Strathfield.

And so my friends and I stayed up together, discussing life, love, careers, personal insight, moral decisions and all sorts of other things into the weee hours of the morning. And this is what you come to realize. New people give you a rush of happiness, of excitement. However it is your old friends are the ones who'll really make you content and safe. When given the choice between finishing the night with hot randoms and finishing with old friends, you can't go wrong with friends.

Rolling, Rolling, Rolling

2007-10-14T15:32:00.001+10:00

At the beginning of today I was so tired of driving. I racked up over 500km over a period of 26 hours. Friday night was taking people in and out of the city for to celebrate Doug's birthday. (100km). Saturday racked up 340km as I had to drive my folks back and forth to some church halfway to Canberra, and during the night I had a house warming in Erskinville (another 100km).

You'd think thats enough driving for one weekend. Except it turned out that Sunday was when my AAMI Skilled Drivers test took place. And that restored my love of driving.
The course took place in Nirimba TAFE up near quakers Hill. Half the day was theory and half the day was practical. The theory was so-so, stuff you already know, but things which you kind of know. One exercise really resonated with me however, which was when we drew a scale of all the things that annoy us on the roads, like tail-gaters, Taxis, speed cameras and so on. And then we compare it with the consequences of messing up just a little and crashing. I know on friday night my mate was telling how she deliberately goes at top speed past a speed camera since it only works in one direction, just 'to stick it to the cops'. Yeah sure, but all it takes is on little mishap and suddenly all that bravado means jackshit.

Anyway moving onto the fun stuff, after work we did a series of practical exercises. There were four exercises, being the Slalom, the hairpin, emergency lane change and emergency lane change stop. The Slalom(ducking between flags/cones) was by far the most fun and hair-raising since you have to keep your vehicle speed constant AND keep weaving through the cones. We did it at only 45km/h and it was incredibly difficult. Then we dropped 5-10km/h off that speed and it was an easy task. All four tasks involved doing it at 45 and then dropping to 35 and seeing how much difference it makes.

The hairpin turn is just going around a tight corner again at a constant 45km/s. In real life its not so hard because you flutter the brake, but without the brake, its so easy to lose control of the car. The emergency lane change and lane change stop involves going straight down 3 lanes and at the last second the instructor yells stop, stop left or stop right and you have to follow what he says. Its only cones that you might run into, but its a heart pounding exercise.

What I found great was the Camry really did hold its own against some of the other cars. Sure there were some bombs, but there some MX-6s, Integras and other nice cars. Out of the 'hot' cars, only the Integra held nicely to the road. The camry's size and weight work against it, but its 'hard, non-ABS' brakes and reasonably solid handling allowed me to have a very minimal witches hat-kill-rate. Having a few years experience on top of the other drivers helped, but still its sobering to realize how easy it is to crash a car.

But still, whilst its just witches hats, its a heck of alot of fun! The AAMI course is completely free for AAMI comprehensive insurance owners and their kids, or its 165$ if you're not with AAMI. Its probably not that great if you had to pay for it, but for holders of an AAMI policy, you'd be mad not to give it a go.

EDIT: Thanks to Julian for pointing out that the word is Slalom, not Shalom...

The most expensive music in the world.

2007-10-09T00:59:00.001+10:00

This falls into two main categories; Things that don't make sense and Only in America.

In the first US trial to challenge the illegal downloading of music on the Internet, a single mother from Minnesota was ordered Thursday to pay 220,000 dollars for sharing 24 songs online.

This is absurd.

Don't get me wrong, she committed a crime by pirating this music and the reason she got busted whilst others won their cases is because she was clearly not naive since she swapped harddrives on the machine. The REAL issue here is the ridiculous $220,000 USD fine she was charged. She earns $40,000 is a single mother and has NO real chance of paying it. Let me put the size of this fine in perspective with other crimes and their penalties.

Drink driving - the third and subsequent time you're caught drink driving a 1 tonne killing machine, you will get charged upto 5050$.

Vehicular Manslaughter - A 15,000$ USD fine is the highest amount you can get charged for this typically.

3rd degree assault - $10,000

Kidnapping - Maximum penalty is $50,000.

Outright Piracy - Hell, a man who sold pirated physical cds and profited from it got 1 yrs jail and a 1000$ fine.

That said, those were criminal cases, while I believe this woman's case is a civil case which should really be relabelled 'capitalist bastard cases'. Considering this is about the same as stealing two CDs, this lady should have really got arrested for theft and she would have got some community service and a slap on the wrist fine. Everyone knows this was less about justice and more about making a point to the community at large that file-sharing is not going to be tolerated in a court of law. You'd think they'd fine someone who could afford it, but then again if she could afford it, she would have got better lawyers.

What a f&*$$d up society.

To Melbourne with Love.

2007-10-08T00:08:00.002+10:00

Ah Melbourne, the city of love and excitement. Of nature and concrete. Of art and goddamn pretty ladies.
I went down to Melbourne over a extended weekend with my friends from university for a typical boys weekend away.

The first day was all about the compulsory touristy things. We rode the trams, we went to Federation Square, saw the sights of which when it comes to it, aren't really that many. Whilst entertaining and a worthwhile experience, its nothing to write home about. Melbourne is like any other city in the world with a plaza full of buildings designed to attract tourists. It is a very tidy city however and the trams really are quite helpful in moving passengers. Lunch was at St Kilda beach and dinner was at the wonderful Man Mo restaurant at Docklands. As usual SOMEONE had to have their baggage lost by Qantas, so we spent a portion of the day playing console games at the apartment whilst they delivered the bag to us.

At night we decided it was time to go out and appreciate the Melbourne party scene. We were lucky that it was drizzling so that the crowds were down from a typical Friday night. Otherwise there is no chance 5 non-white guys without girls could get into as many clubs as we did. Our night started off at GPO, the Trader Bar, the Long Room and finished at the Gin Palace. Hersh's place was in the center of the city and bars are so close by that barhopping is an easy exercise. Out of all of them, the Long room was easily the most amazing. I'd compliment the easy to reach bar, the good music, the refined decor, but when it comes down to it, its because of the amazing number of stunning women. Even in Sydney bars, I've never seen that many gorgeous women (though the female of the night has to go to the foxy librarian stunner at the Trader Bar.). By the Gin Palace we were exhausted from the long day and the alcohol, so we politely declined a friends offer to visit the Spearmint Rhino and went back home at 4am. Considering the early morning flight, that was 24 hours straight of being awake.

Saturday was our 'random activity' day so we decided, lets make it a fishing day.
We went to a trout farm in the ridiculously flat Victorian countryside (so about only an hour out of central Melbourne). Admittedly fishing in a trout farm is like shooting a barn with a shotgun point blank. You can't really miss. They must be starving the poor fish, since they go to bite on the lure within minutes.
Catching the fish was only half of the fun. The second part is cooking them! The entire gang got together and cooked up a storm and had a meal fit for kings, or at the least Barons in a wealthy duchy. There was no way we could finish all of it, though Kieran gave it a good try to finish an entire trout by himself to score a bed for the night. Sadly the fish got the better of him.

Even though we finish dinner and cleaning up at around midnight, we were determined to visit Crown Casino at least once before we left. It was a easy 10min walk from the apartment. I'll tell you now, it is not much better than Starcity. There is a mild stench of corruption in the air as in all casinos and all my friends lost out in their betting, which is probably a good lesson. There were a few good lookers, but most were young and somewhat skanky. Realistically, a night back in the apartment playing Settlers of Catan would have been far more entertaining.

And to fill in the 'nature' component of a holiday, the gang decided to take a drive along the Great Ocean Road. Melbourne's sprawl is nothing compared to Sydney's. Just like the day before, it wasn't long before we were out in what was basically country. Even Geelong felt more like a large town than a city.

After you hit Tourquay, the drive is breathtaking and we only covered some 10% of the entire Great ocean road. Cliff faces tower over endless stretches of sandy beaches. Halfway to Lorne, there is a quaint lighthouse which has a panoramic view of the area around it. Unfortunately we had planes to catch so had to go home, but not before we cut across the picturesque rainforest/bush on the mountain side back up to the Prince's Highway.

So all in all, I had a ball. Melbourne isn't somewhere where I'd clamber for an opportunity to line in, but I certainly wouldn't complain about being dropping in now and then.

Why software is like Love...

2007-10-03T23:52:00.001+10:00

Our director today made an great call when he was defending why we had redone the process of secure service delivery over six times.

"Software is a lot like love".
Snide comment from our Division lead. "Oh this should be good..."
"The best software isn't about knowing what it is, but you know its right when you feel it."

Someone else made the call, "And sometimes you think you've found the right one and then have to break up with it and try again and again and again."

I scoured the interweb to see if there were other references to why software is like love and found none. So here are a few more examples.

Finding off the shelf software is like the dating scene. There isn't a Mr Right, or even a Mr sort of good enough. Its mostly a Mr-This-will-do-for-now.
Software is a lot like love. Simple in concept, but far far more complex under the hood.
Relationships with women are like debugging. Sometimes when you think you have it worked out, suddenly you loose it and you have no fucken idea what is going on. - Thanks Dan.
Fooling around with naughty software can give you itchy bugs.
Software is like relationships. You think the majority of the cost is at the beginning when you have to do the courting. You'll find that's hardly the case.
Software is like love because at the beginning there is a lot of excitement, hope and pampering, but by the end, its mostly decided to break down and divorce itself from you after years of neglect.
If you think software is expensive to maintain, try being married for years on end.
Software is like sex: it's better when it's free. - Thanks Linus

And finally software is like love because despite all the suffering it causes us, when it comes down to it, you're willing to live with the problems for all the joy it gives you in the end.

Additions are welcome in the comments section.

This ain't a scene, its a god damned Fall Out boy Concert.

2007-09-27T00:09:00.001+10:00

Pete Wentz: Who do you love Sydney?
Sydney: F.O.B!
Pete Wentz: I didn't hear you, who do you love Sydney?
Sydney: F.Ohhh.Beee!!!!

I'm still pumped and as Mr R would point out, I'm blogging at midnight after another awesome night out. Fall out boy, the American punk rock band came to Sydney and rocked the Acer Arena tonight. This was the best concert I've ever been to. Its also the only concert I've been to, but if I had been to others, this would STILL be the best concert ever. I used to doubt that live music would be as good as music recorded in a controlled studio scenario. How terribly terribly wrong I was. Call me a convert to the church of Live music KICKS ASS!

The only thing that was poor about tonight was Acer Arena itself. The parking situation is dismal, in that it took me about 20 mins to get out of the car park. The way they prevented people from getting in and out of different sections of the floor was just annoying and the food was disgusting and overpriced. Those are about the only bad things. Seriously.

The rest of the night was great. We started off with a complete surprise in the form of the support band "Jack's Mannequin". I'd like to say it is a pop punk/rock with piano band. The lead singer plays the piano beautifully and it adds the soothing underlying sound to the riffs of the guitars. The song "I'm ready" is amazing and this made me really hooked into this band.
The second support act was Gyroscope. They were in my opinion slightly average and this might be due to my general distaste of Australian rock bands. There is something about them that makes me annoyed, at the very least stemming from some bands thinking its OK to use 'fuck' as a normal part of the lyrics. Dudes, its good for emphasis, but overusing it is lame.

And of course. There was Fall Out Boy. F.O.B. Patrick, Andy, Joe and the ever annoying Pete Wentz. These guys made the crowd sing the roof off Acer Arena. Their act was so full of energy that the 'mosh pit' extended from the front of the floor, pretty much to the back. I head banged and moshed with the energy of an 18 year old (which pretty much was the general demographic. Man I feel old.) They played nearly non-stop for nearly an hour and a half, with occasional breaks for Pete to talk crap. Patrick, the lead singer has got the most amazing singing voice, but hes so shy that he never speaks in anything unless he can help it. It doesn't matter, as long as he keeps the words flowing and the bass jamming, I'm willing to listen to emo kid Pete.

Hard to say which was the best song. The roar of approval that came with the classic "Sugar we're goin' down" was matched with the excited surprise of "A Little less sixteen candles". The song 'Thnks Fr Th Mmrs' went down well, and Pete even got the correct code of football that the song was used for in advertising. They even did covers of Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and the "Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News. A well rounded show where one could not stop singing. I kid you not, I nearly passed out from singing and dancing for so long without taking a breath. The encroaching blackness reminded me, oh wait, yes breathing for air consumption, that thing you do outside of just using it to sing.

I'm sore, I've got this ringing in my ear that won't go away and my voice is pretty much gone. And I'm incredibly happy.

Thnks Fr Th Mmrs Fall Out Boy.

The CIA and Google are in cahoots!

2007-09-09T23:28:00.001+10:00

Its true, the CIA has a black operations program and they use Google products. I mean come on, I saw it on the Bourne Ultimatum, so it MUST be true. Jason Bourne used Google search to find out the location of a secret spy operation in Madrid. The CIA agents who are out to kill him used Google maps in their cars as GPS tracking systems. Maybe that is why they couldn't catch him in the movie. They were using map data from 2 years ago! Seriously I have no idea if Google paid to be in this movie, but I thought it was pretty appropriate to use their technology for spy operations. Just like the rest of the movie, it really didn't make that much sense.

The movie was predictable, but enjoyable enough. It did cap off a totally awesome, if completely unproductive weekend. Thanks to the world leaders and the APEC long weekend, I spent way more than I normally budget for fortnight in 3 days and got no study or work done. At least in order to repent for my excesses and indulgences over the last three days I can impart some knowledge to my loyal readers.

Thursday night for Jeff's farewell we went to Starcity. Dinner was consumed at the Garden Buffet restaurant, which appears to be an all-you-can-eat piggery for $30. I wisely had dinner at home, so I cannot comment about the quality of the cuisine. Our next stop, the Astral Bar, is on level 17 of starcity offers a fairly chic (read expensive) environment with picturesque views of the city. Despite my friend working there for 6 years and being well liked, only the usual small core team came along. The lesson here is to remember to differentiate between work friends and real friends and set your expectations accordingly.

Friday was a public holiday and public holidays equals ridiculous surcharges in restaurants. I had lunch with a pack of university friends at Toscani's Italian restaurant in Parramatta. Whilst the food and service was quite appetizing, the bill at 32$ a head for LUNCH was not. Pancakes on the Rocks (at Northmead puzzlingly enough), was a expensive place for dessert. That said, the Devil's delight (two delicious chocolate pancakes with chocolate topping, cream and chocolate icecream) was delectable. Toscani's was a 20% surcharge, whilst pancake's on the rocks was 10%.

On Saturday was a day out at Doug's and here more lessons were to be had. Never play risk and advance wars together. Actually, just never play either game. Perhaps it was a combination of bad rules, and bad maps, but both games were dissatisfying and protracted. In contrast, Mario Party for the Wii is excellent and well worth purchasing (based on the brief two hours we played it).

And finally, my lesson for Sunday is, if a close lady friend asks you out last minute to a movie and she is by herself, then shes probably into you and is just shy to ask you out proper. If she asks you to a movie and invites a bunch of other guys and girls with her whom SHE barely knows, she is probably not into you. And also, remember. The CIA uses Google. There is nowhere you can run - unless it hasn't been indexed.

The Argyle Night out.

2007-08-25T21:46:00.001+10:00

There is a tacit agreement that personal things that happen outside the office, stays outside the office. Unfortunately this makes for poor blogging since you cannot share the hilarious bits if any of your readership are co-workers. So as a compromise, I'll try to avoid naming names, but keep the events as they were.

Our destination on Friday night was the Argyle in the city. The Argyle in the Rocks is a fantastic venue and one I would clearly recommend for the more refined crowd. It is very much a bar, not a pub and caters for a different crowd. Note I said refined, not a yuppie bar like Bar333. People here are well dressed and out for a good time, not just showing off their corporate credentials. It is a very different vibe. There is adequate seating and large areas for standing around or dancing, there is food and the drinks are reasonably enough priced. The music is quite loud, but its still possible to hold a conversation and its the kind of club dance music I like anyway.

The surroundings are very 'old-Sydney' like. Rustic wood and cobblestones feature prominently. The toilets are the exception to this style and they are truly amazing. Completely impractical, but amazing. The women's and the men's toilets are kept together and the men's urinals are one man troughs behind these pillars. No one has any idea whether someone is behind the pillar. And since the women and men both share the toilet, the line is equally long for guys as girls, instead of the typical guy line being almost instant. It was a great relief to find the second *normal* toilet, which almost no one else was using. (I'll keep the location a secret so that its equally accessible next time I go).

The queues are a bit random. When we arrived at 7:50, there almost no queue. Then around 9, my guy mates couldn't get in because of the queue. Then around 10, my good friend Chez drops in to hang with me and gets in with no effort. This could be partly cos the line was smaller, but I suspect this is due to the 'hot chicks get in with no effort' policy that most bars/clubs have.

It was a great night. In the middle of it all, most of the crowd was non-compos-mentis, to the point where the security guards were threatening to throw us out. As as the night wore on, everyone sobered up quite agreeably. As expected those who spoke great things about their drinking abilities were the worst off, whilst the quiet ones were the ones who drank as much as the others and didn't skip a beat. Of course some people did some really daft things like mixing drink types so its to be expected that they were sick before long!

The highlight of my night has to be our resident 'hot chick' approaching a woman whose (rather large) breasts were falling out of incredibly revealing dress and basically mocking her in front of the sleazebags who were hanging with her. I dared her to do it and I cracked up laughing after she did it.

We left around 12:30 which may seem early, but we needed to catch the last train and more significantly, the important people in this group were just too drunk and tired and it seemed prudent to take them home. All in all, it was a great night and one which should be repeated.

Lady I wasn't born yesterday...

2007-08-17T23:27:00.001+10:00

So I went to Bar333 at Wynyward for Marty's farewell party. It was great to catch up with friends and to see Marty before he left forever to HK, but I had this particularly off putting moment during the night.

I went to buy a drink at the bar, and I started looking at the cocktail menu. This very pretty chick asks me for it next. I was fairly certain what I wanted, so I give it to her and just strike up a conversation with her while we waited for service. All seemed to go ok until she turns around to chat to her friend. At this very instant, I get served and then she turns back and goes, damn could you add my drink onto your order...she didn't have cash in her hand, so its an obvious, buy me a drink scenario.

I'm thinking "Lady I wasn't born yesterday.." and I lied saying "Sorry I'm short, but I can get the bartender to serve you next and you can handle it." Just as I suspected she started to ignore me after that. I was not at all surprised, and frankly would have loved to have seen the look on her face when I didn't pay for it (cos we had a bar tab for Marty's group) . Realistically I would have bought her something if she kept talking, but she was clearly just a bar fly thinking I'm an easy guy to fake. Maybe theres a protocol for this, but realistically I'm not interested in cheapskates, regardless of how good looking they are.

It was definitely as annoying a moment as finding out the new girl downstairs Kirsty (or Kristy?) had a boyfriend and is also an young-un. Seriously where can a guy find a nice girl these days? No don't say RSVP...that's not happening..EVER!

That song ISN'T sung by the Dixie Chicks,

2007-07-20T23:33:00.001+10:00

Its actually Alecia Moore, or far more famously known as Pink, who is singing the song 'Hey Mr President'. This song takes the angle of a person asking tough moral questions to the Bush. The song is so touching, yet so filled with disdain for George Bush that I automatically thought it would be the Dixie Chicks. And who said Pop music was just fluff material. One of my favourite sections of this song is:

"Let me tell you bout hard work
Minimum wage with a baby on the way
Let me tell you bout hard work
Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away
Let me tell you bout hard work
Building a bed out of a cardboard box
Hard work
You don't know nothing bout hard work"

Its such obvious things, but at the same time its inspirational. Speaking of inspirational things, I would highly recommend you take a little while out to watch "Shut up and Sing", the documentary of the Dixie Chicks in the wake of their criticism of Bush during the start of the second Iraq war. The review from SMH pretty much sums it up quite well, so I won't repeat it here. I find movies like this restore my flagging faith in society and humanity in general. They may be celebrities but they are people too.

Its all good and well for Pink to stick it Bush when the rest of the US finally has realized he done more damage to the world than good, but the Dixie Chicks showed that the majority doesn't make it right.

Transformers the Movie

2007-07-07T17:34:00.001+10:00

You know how bulletproof vests are associated with Kevlar, the nonstick material is associated with Teflon?
Best Movie of 2007 should really be associated with Transformers.

I saw it today with mates and I loved it, and I'm questioning why I did. Mates from work bagged it out and I could not understand why. Yes there was product placement, but it was hilarious in your face placement as opposed to less-than-subtle annoying placement. For example, they transform a Nokia phone into a evil Decepticon and the annoying soldier guy says "sophisticated technology, these Nokia phones, you have to love Japanese technology". The Australian chick goes "But Nokia is Finnish?". One thing that product placement does is make it seem more real, its not some future time or world, its here and now.

The transformers were amazing works of CGI and looked absolutely awesome whether standing still or beating each other to a pulp. There wasn't as much involvement of the Transformers as say the cartoon and it really was about the humans for a change and I think it was for the better.
I watched Transformers the original series, some of the later series, the movie and even Beast wars and some of the dialogue can be extricating bad but in this movie they kept it to a minimum. There were some hilarious bits in the movie such as when all the Autobots are trying to hide from the main character's parents. The Decepticons were awesome to watch as they are (as per the cartoon) loaded with weaponry and its fireworks spectacular. I would have liked to see more of Starscream but I suspect he'll come into his own in the sequel (and while it does wrap up nicely, it does leave enough avenues open for a sequel).

And finally, the lead actress Megan Fox is one of the hottest new talent I've seen. Ok not so much about the talent bit but definitely the hot bit. I don't think I've seen anyone as gorgeous in a sultry way on screen for a long time.

This movie is definitely worth your 15$ even if you never got into Transformers.

This Week in WallStrip Tumbling along...

2007-06-28T21:29:00.001+10:00

On TwiT (This Week in Tech) recently I heard of site called tumblr. Tumblr is basically a scrapbook blogging system where as you traverse the internet you write about what sites you visted. Its the lazy man's way of blogging, but I can see the attraction. After all writing a blog takes a lot of effort. Each entry can take around an hour to write depending on how much work you want to put into it. With tumblr its mostly a short entry about what you visited and then about it. Which got me thinking, hey laziness is good. Means time for MORE stuff. Which is the model I'm taking today.

TwiT referred me to an absolutely awesome site and consequently I've found someone new to drool over. Shes about even with Jade Raymond. Shes a hot skinny brunette, shes funky, shes funny and shes financy...(ok that was a struggle to fit that last 'f'). Shes Lindsay Campbell, the presenter of WallStrip. As they like to say, wallstrip is stock culture meets pop culture. Its about the culture at wall street, about different businesses and why investors love them and when it comes down to it, its really about having fun. Lindsay and her mate seem to really get a kick out of doing the show and it is full of energy and humour. And come on, isnt that every guys dream? A chick who knows money, who does comedy for a job and whos very hot? (Not to mention she would have got the lions share of the $5,000,000 USD that CBS paid to buy wallstrip.com.).

GPS Navigation aka In 100m U-Turn and smash into the next car.

2007-06-23T16:59:00.001+10:00

As some of you know, my folks invested in a GPS navigational unit. Its a TomTom One XL for $540 and we've been playing with it for the last few weeks on 'trial' basis. This means we pay upfront but if we're not happy with it, we can give it back and get a full refund.

The TomTom One XL is like any other GPS, in that you program where you want to go, and it'll guide you there with voice prompts and map information. Around our local area the instructions are quite accurate and easy to understand. Programming where you want to go is intuitive and the user interface is excellent. You can tell that the TomTom product management got real mums and dads in to test this as opposed to programmers. They even offer multiple voices to customize who you get to yell at when the directions are crazy. I selected the British Jane voice because come on British women sound so sexy!

We went on a more 'rural' trip to Mulgoa and Warragamba Dam and the One XL found roads which were faster than what we knew, found petrol stations at the touch of a button (ok a few buttons, but easy enough) and got us home safely.
Of course rural areas are easy due to the long stretches of road, and lack of confusing streets. For a real test we took it to the city.

There are some sequences which are difficult for it to process. For example if I'm going to north sydney, I can't easily tell it to avoid the Lane cove tunnel, BUT to allow taking the M2 motorway. To do that I'd need to give it two waypoints which can be difficult if you don't know anything about the area.

It is going to the city with its crazy road implementation that I realized I cannot rely on the voice navigation. You do really need to look at the graphical display to get an idea of which road to turn into, when to turn in and so on. The clear, large car-centered GPS map with arrows really does make up for some questionable driving instructions. For example, when coming back on Longeuville road trying to get onto the M2, it decided to give this wildly mad suggestion of doing an suicidal U-Turn in a major traffic junction that on a hill. No thanks.
Luckily if you do override what it says and just drive on, it'll throw away the old course and recalculate it for you and usually it'll get it right this time.

There are a few things that its missing that I wish it had. It doesn't show traffic lights, speed cameras and doesn't really get the speed limits on all roads. That said, I'm fairly happy with the TomTom One XL, and won't be returning it. Its not perfect, but it seems to do the job well enough to justify its expense. That said, a GPS Navigator is not a substitute for past knowledge of the route and being aware of whats going on. It is an aid, and a fallback when you have nothing else.

The cable modem is dead, long live the Cable Modem!

2007-06-17T23:27:00.001+10:00

Lets take a few microts (seconds in FarScape-speak) to mourn the loss of my Nortel Networks 100 series cable modem. It has served faithfully from early 2005 on the second day that Optus@Home was rolled out to greedy bandwidth junkies everywhere. It has survived storms, stupid misconfigurations at home, and terabytes worth of.. 'bittorrent linux isos' downloads.

But like all good things, it has to come to an end. When I first got cable, I was getting 1.2Mbyte/sec downloads. Two years ago I got 600-700kb/s and I figured it was just because there were more users on the network. More recently I realized I was actually maxing out at 250Kbytes/sec and THAT was unacceptable. First reaction was to move over to this new sexy ADSL2+ technology that everyone raves about. It was all good until I realized how expensive it was! Even internode, one of the cheaper vendors was 2.5$/Gig whilst optus is about 1.94$/Gig. With the number of TV shows I watch, this is terrible. Besides this, ADSL hasn't had a stellar record for reliability. I regularly hear of ADSL outages whilst with my 7 years of optus cable I've could probably count the optus@fault outages in mere hours.

So I rang up optusnet support, lied about my download speed (Optusnet do not help you unless you're below 200kb/s) and got them to finally look into my case. Their suggestion based on their tests indicated it was time to replace the modem. So the optus tech came over and replaced it on saturday with a new Motorola SB5 series modem. I think the results speak for themselves.

Old Modem
Line speed = 1.89Mbps
download speed is 257kb/s

New Modem
Line speed = 10.59Mbps
download speed = 1.27MB/s

Long live Cable!

Samurai Pizza Kats (minus the Pizza)

2007-06-03T19:51:00.001+10:00

A bunch of firsts on this weekend. I took a trip to Balmain to have a birthday dinner with my friends from work. Our place of culinary conquest was the Samurai Japanese Cafe, a tiny little restaurant right opposite the Cat'n'Fiddle hotel.
I was stoked by how great the place was. It was a proper restaurant experience but with a ridiculous amount of food. In fact it was slightly too much. I had the Dinner box deluxe, which was effectively 5 courses of food. It was so much that even an hour after we left, it was still sitting in my stomach! In addition the service was great and when Jen mentioned to the waiter that it was Sunny and mine's birthday, they even got us dessert and individual special gifts!! I love gifts so they instantly went into my best restaurants EVAR (sic) category.

I actually did something I rarely do the following day, which is to login to the webpage that recommended the restaurant (eatability.com) and posted a review. If you ever used someone on a site's recommendation to make a choice, it makes sense to repay the favour and add your own recommendation. After all you're helping someone else in making a decision.

Our next stop was the Cat'n'Fiddle hotel where Katherine's band Kinetic was playing. The Cat isn't a bad place, but I wish SOMEONE would enforce the no-smoking policy. As I may have ranted before, smokers need to have their cigarettes blow up in their faces. But anyhoo.
Kat's band was pretty decent, though it didn't exactly blow me away. They were definitely a lot better then the band before and after them at least. Kat looked and (mostly) sounded amazing, but she clearly got tired halfway through the performance as she sounded like she was on helium for one of the songs. The funny part was she was wearing these arm warmers which were clearly for the entire sex appeal/fashion thing, yet I was going, man thats such an awesome idea! Now I can wear short sleeves and not be cold, where can get me some of that! I suspect it would look a bit gay on guys however so alas.

All in all, a good night.

LAN07 (Contd)

2007-05-31T00:21:00.001+10:00

Finally I have uploaded the photos onto Flickr (which is an awesome site, but thats for another blog). The pictures are located in my filespace in the LAN 07 Set.

From those photos I remembered a number of other memorable events during the day.

* At the height of everyone arriving and plugging in, we started up a game of dawn of war, the GPUs/CPUs started going full bore and suddenly....Poof! Out goes the power. We tripped the fuse from the amount of power drain of 14 machines on one circuit. So I had cables running all over the place to make sure we connected machines to as many different circuits as we could.

* We went to bed around 5:00AM Sunday and I made everyone else's bed before I turned in. Of course Doug completely misses the pillows/quilt on the recliner and sleeps on the desk...only after he stays up till 6:30 making trackmania maps.

* Watching 5 guys surrounding a 22" inch screen playing NHL2007 was hilarious. The game itself looked average, but Ryan and the boys went mad playing it and their enthusiasm was infectious. Before long entering the backroom was impossible as there was an entire crowd of girls and guys watching these five mad hatters play Ice Hockey.

* People at LANs bring their own idea of what to play and often these can be a surprise hit. Case in point the ridiculously simple Toblo, which is a free fast-paced CTF style game. Or Bid for Power, the DragonBall Z quake 3 mod. It only takes one Evangelist to make everyone play an ancient game like Starcraft1 again (thanks Dilan).

There were a few other interesting things I learnt from a technical perspective:
Using Bittorrent as a way of sending the files around didn't quite work. The main problem was BT is great if I had all the necessary files first so I could convert them into torrents and could start seeding. But the time required to turn something into a torrent and then host it and get people to download it was greater than someone hitting a share and downloading it.

Fraps slows your machine down to buggery. The only time I found FRAPs would work and not be an hindrance was on my dual-core machine, where I'm assuming one core is Frapsing and the other is going to the game.

Running multiple games also will slow your machine and I think it always will regardless of hardware. I had SupremeCommander and Trackmania running. Now trackmania isn't a GPU heavy game, but once running beside SupCom, it was 5fps all the way. Truely quite poor.

Broadcasting people using VLC and a webcam is extremely easy to setup and can be completely useless to do at a LAN unless we're talking a large enough crowd to act as an audience. If we could have people playing and then you could go, I want to look at Jacks screen and it did a Picture in picture of his game interface, THEN we're talking something interesting. Also significantly more difficult to implement.

And finally, I relearned the skills of putting together a video using captured content and Adobe Premiere & Virtualdub. But thats for another blog on another day.

Birthday LAN '07

2007-05-27T22:20:00.002+10:00

So ends another successful world-famous James Birthday LAN. This one was probably the biggest yet, with a turnout of nearly 14 computers and 22-23 people, of which 4 were girls! (breaking previous guy/chick ratios for this LAN). As usual we had gamers and non-gamers and this year for a change we kept all the gamers upstairs and the non-gamers downstairs. This worked out really well as it meant people always had stuff to do. The non-gamers could talk or play the Wii, watch videos, whilst the gamers were kept together so there was steady flow of gaming done. I'm SOOO happy my coach let me have the projector, otherwise that would have caused problems in terms of entertainment for my non-gamer crowd.

The gaming was fantastic and by having a semi-well ordered list of games to play ensured we got a whole pile of different games in. I think in the end we all had big sessions of:

C&C Renegade
Bid for Power (Q3A mod)
Prey
Warcraft 3
Starcraft (LOL..such an oldie)
NHL Hockey
Toblo
Dark Crusade
Supreme Commander
But the game of the LAN has to be awarded to Trackmania Nations, which had Doug up till 6:30am, making tracks to play on. The amount people played that game was absolutely insane, but it was quick and enjoyable and thats what really counts at LANs.

The dinner was deemed excellent by all except for poor Sunny. After all, when the mains are beef, veal and chicken, there really isn't much in the way of choice for a vegetarian. Luckily there was plenty of mudcake and pavlova to fill in the gaps afterwards.

I went to bed around 5am on the Saturday night/Sunday morning so I'm absolutely KNACKERED at the moment. We woke up around 10 and then went straight back into it, and finished at 4pm. After dropping people at the station and then cleaning up the house I think it was about 6 or 7pm. So thats effectively me going hard from 8pm on Friday night till 7pm Sunday for this entire party!

I have many photos and videos and I plan on fixing them up with PSP/VirtualDub and then posting them on Flickr or something most likely tomorrow. I'm FAR too tired to do that now. So I'm going to bed tired, but very happy.

Driving under the Influence

2007-05-13T01:22:00.001+10:00

Tonight wasn't the first time, and probably won't be the last time I've been driving under the influence of drugs. And before you recoil in shock, its only Dimetapp (popular cold medication). Of course I was down to my last few tablets which of course were the 'night time' tablets. Yes with the antihestimine to help you sleep. The dilemma of course was, which is worse, driving with really runny and itchy nose, or half asleep. So clearly I popped the blue pill.

Needless to say, doing 1.5 hrs of driving both ways whilst on drugs was not great by any means. My passengers were not helping. On the outward journey my navigator was sipping sake, and not entirely with it, for the you know..NAVIGATING. It did make for entertaining driving however. The classic moment for the night is after several missed turns, we're looking for Melbourne St. So I see a road coming up that says 'Melbourne St' and Damo goes, nah thats not it, go straight. So we drive past it and he goes, "you do know I was being sarcastic right?"...

One U-Turn later and we finally get at Stephs

Then we're driving back towards the cumberland highway... and I ask Steph, do you know how to get to the M5 and shes like, is that a freeway or motorway or something. And I go motorway and she goes, sure turn left. Since I clearly had to make a choice, I turned left despite me feeling, this isn't right. So I ask, this feels like we're going to the M4 and she says "That goes towards city right?".

One U-Turn later and we're finally on the M5.

Finally after we turn off the M5 onto princes highway, I need Damo to look up the side street to turn into. Of course Steph chooses this oppurtunity to ask Damo about gothic subcultures relentlessly. Here I'm trying to get Damo to do something important before we crash/overshoot and she doesn't shutup. Sarah (in the backseat) later said, she was just WAITING for me to snap. But being the gentleman (who was half drugged out) that I am, I left it be.

The way home was just as hilarious as we got quite lost. A few dozen side streets and no through roads later we finally find our way back. Its midnight, the drugs still have the drowsiness effect, and more annoyingly my nose is starting to go again. And of course Steph is in the front seat and she doesn't have a clue how to navigate and is incessently talking about Japanese porn and furries and all sorts of fantastic wacky stuff. Stephs a great girl, but after we finally dropped her home, there was a collective "Thank f**king god" as we appreciated the joys and splendor of silence.

One U-Turn later and (30mins of dropping Damo and Sarah off) and I'm finally home.

Spiderman 3: The Soap Opera

2007-05-05T01:08:00.001+10:00

*WARNING - spoilers likely *
Still not sure what surprised me more. How truly bad this movie was, or the fact that it got 8.2 last time I looked on IMDB. Granted its only released today and its the fanboys hit IMDB way before the rest of the world does.

Spiderman 3 isn't a terrible movie. Its not in the same class as say "Crossroads", but its not a fitting movie to finish off the Spiderman franchise. It doesn't try to suck and tries a lot of new things. The problem is it just doesn't work.

The spiderman series have definitely involved a human element to the action, which helps a lot. This movie takes this idea far, far too far. There is probably 15mins of action in this 2.5 hr extravaganza. The action is really quite good. The CGI work on sandman is practically good, but Goblin and Venom look also fantastic.

The problem is everything outside of this action is boring, corny/hammy/cheesy or just plain nonsensical. Theres the entire boring "I'm suck, I miss MJ" scenes, theres the truly stupid hordes of crowds staring and pointing at this giant sand monster thing, instead of screaming away in terror as they well should be, or the truly random laws of physics in regards to pretty much anything. Monster hole punched multiple times and large bits ripped of = perfectly alright. Shoot two small rockets at it and wow it goes down in a flash. Crane is out of control destroying buildings, and Spidy just saves ONE chick and proceeds to chat her up whilst all this carnage occurs nearby.

The romance scenes between Peter and Mary-Jane are sometimes touching. Its a shame that the other 99% of this relationship is so full of corny lines and hammy acting. Speaking of cheese, this movie was GROSSLY full of it. From the people cheering spiderman in random locations, to the well over the top shot of Spiderman arriving to save the scene, landing next to a waving American flag, posing and only THEN attacking.

Theres just so many other bad things about this movie, but its late and I want sleep. Please don't go see this movie, as it'll only justify a fourth crappier one. In the cliched words of the random person in the movie "Even one person can make a difference".

Why is my Documents hijacked?

2007-04-29T14:50:00.002+10:00

Remember that scene in Red Alert 1 where Albert Einstein goes back in time to kill Hitler? Remember how satisfied he must have felt to prevent untold suffering in the future. Its the same feeling I'd have if I could go back in time to kill the guy who started the trend to put application specific files in My Documents. (Lets ignore the fact that in C&C:RA1 that Albert's actions led to the soviets invading..).

My 'My Documents' had 3 folders which I created and maintained, and 15 that were created by other applications. I have Work, Home, Archives. Other applications have made C&C3, My Shapes, Visual Studio 2005, Battlefield 2...the list goes on. My Documents are files which are meant for viewing and editing by user. Often these applications are putting things there which are neither. It is usually save games, configuration files and templates, all of which are edited VIA THE application, not directly by the user.

Unless the files are meant for regular edits by the user, I don't see why the application developers can't do any of the following over putting its junk in my space.

1) Put all user specific files in the "home" directory, i.e. C:/Documents & Settings/, rather than //My Documents.
2) Make it an option either at startup or reconfigurable as to where to put the specific files and hence the application will move these files around.
3) In combination with the above, maybe developers can agree to a standard way of storing. For instead of your typical egotistical Adobe/photoshop/saves directory, maybe they can do /graphics/adobe.photoshop/saves. They can even use shortcuts if they think that'll help, for example /image-viewing/adobe.photoshop symlinks back to the above graphics folder.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of having user specific data in the user space rather than the application space, but there are better ways to do it then blindly clutter "My Documents". Let me reclaim my space!

Episode 1: The social networking Menace.

2007-04-28T22:54:00.001+10:00

Its funny how much modern society has become more closed off in some ways, and yet so open in others. The average person probably barely knows their neighbour, has minimal contact with their relations outside of their immediate family, yet opens up all sorts of details about themselves elsewhere. And where is that elsewhere? You guessed it, the Internet.

Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In*, the list goes on. All of these sprung up from nowhere and just exploded in popularity. BUT WHY? I've signed up for a few of them and I still don't fully understand the attraction. I'll go through them in turn.

Myspace is a social networking site catered for the teen, early twenties level. It just shows a profile, a blog and a place for people to leave comments for that person's friends. A homepage with a guestbook from 1998 with a template is effectively what it is.

Facebook is similar, but it focuses even more on the relationships between people. It wants to know who you know, how you know them, when you knew them and so on. Again you fill out your profile and theres a place for people to leave comments. It is funny how quickly people find you on Facebook. Within 2 days, I had 8 friends add me without me telling anyone about it. I remember in the old days of ICQ that everyone wanted to be on each others lists so you could say you had the biggest set of friends. Facebook is similar in that it keeps a tally of how many friends you have and it feels like everyone is trying to increase that number.

LinkedIn is effectively the "business" version of Facebook. It tracks who you worked for, and who also worked for that company and its meant to help "career networking". I say all this in inverted commas, for as important to your career as Linked In propents to be, in reality, its the social equivalent of a chain letter. This article by Jeff Atwood from codinghorror.com sums up my feelings about how useful LinkedIn is. I encourage you to read it.

Twitter is...quite possibly one of the dumbest fads I've seen on the Interweb. Its bite sized snippets of what people are doing. I stared in naked fascination at the idea of people posting what they are getting up to... For about two minutes before I realised that people who 'twit' to a internet site are essentially boring.

prozach Cleaning the house, less than 10 seconds from web
hawaii5 Sleepy. less than 10 seconds ago from txt

I cannot entirely understand the Twit phenomenon, but I'll endeavor to analyze. I believe we all like the idea that others are interested in us. Its that small narcissistic side that must be satisfied by the possibility that someone is interested in what we are doing.

We Bloggers aren't immune from this trend either. After all, we all blog to be read, to be heard and loved for our 'insight'. But I hope to think that most bloggers attempt to at least impart something back to the community who reads them, more than "oh man, I got so wasted last night but I scored with that spunk Ray. Anyways gtg sleep, xoxoxo".

What frightens me is how invasive these sites are. Wake up and smell the roses people. You're freely depriving yourself of your privacy! Wouldn't it scare you if a random person came upto you and they knew everything about you from your interests, to who your friends are, to where you work. This is an advertiser's paradise. Each time you sign up for one of these sites, who are you really benefiting?

I know there are meant to be benefits to social networking. Maintaining friendships, meeting new people and so on. But think, for each person who finds love on Facebook, there are hundreds of thousands of lonely hearts without any hits, and probably a few thousand nutbag stalkers reading your profile. I'm going for the vast majority of all the encounters you'll have on LinkedIn will go nowhere useful for you.

People are social beings and we thrive off feeling loved and important. Hell this might explain why I still have a Facebook account. But this isn't the way to do it. Real relationships are those in real life and they are hard, and require more effort than hitting "Confirm this person as my friend". For each moment you spend in updating your Facebook profile, maybe spend a few minutes ringing a old friend. It'll take you a lot longer, but you'll feel better about life guaranteed**.

*Its not accidental I didn't link ANY of these sites. They ain't getting any page rank from this site.
** disclaimer: guarantees not guaranteed on this website.

Command and Conquer 3 - The good, the hot and the meh.

2007-04-15T00:01:00.001+10:00

You know what they say about riding a bicycle? It completely applies to C&C3 in so many ways. Here is a game which clearly knows its limitations, and doesn't care.

Firstly the good. Its C&C. I know that sounds lame, but C&C is like quake. There is a certain charm to it that cannot be disputed. The campaign is probably the single best part about it. Its got the same over the top acting, but this time its got some well known actors such as Lando Calrissian, the guy from Starship Troopers, the guy from Lost who always has his shirt off and most importantly a host of hot girls from Battlestar Galactica and Farscape including the delectable Grace Park. Its campy, its predictable and its damn awesome.

The meh is the gameplay. For a game which has a raft of different units, it becomes a megaunit crunch in most larger games. The concept of combined arms doesn't apply in this game, especially for the GDI and their cheap and totally unbalanced Mammoth tanks. Tactics aren't as important as getting more resource gatherers out to fund your megaunit army. For me, C&C games always becomes rather old rather quickly. At least in Generals, combined arms was reasonably important, so that lasted somewhat longer.

So why do you ask do I bother playing this game? Simple, because my mates are playing it. Any game automatically doubles in its playability when you have friends to play with. Its not the type of game I'd ever play online with strangers simply because its far too boring.

Fear the Emperor's boxes

2007-04-08T23:05:00.001+10:00

In the search to get Dawn of War going again on my machine I made this lovely error occur.
Note to self, stop replacing the main engine library.

Synergy for Dual Monitors/Dual PCs

2007-04-07T04:09:00.001+10:00

You know what is cool? Synergy!

No not the team/department/company relationship crap that has been flouted by marketers and execs for more years than it deserves. I'm talking about the application Synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net). For a while now I've been running a windows and Ubuntu setup at home where I have both machines and operating systems running side by side.
Unfortunately they were also in all practicality in isolation. There was no way to copy paste things between the screens, no way to even move the keyboard or cursor. I've been doing the two level keyboard and mouse combo.

I've heard of using an application called Multiplicity by Stardock for such problems, but alas its only for Windows and also costs $30*. So I was stuck with a pretty lame deal.

No longer! Synergy runs a TCP connection between the two systems and it seamlessly allows control between the two systems to proceed. Its so beautiful I could cry.
If you run a dual monitor/dual box setup, you GOT to use this. Its easy to setup, its fast and offers all the features you want and most importantly.....its free!

* That said, Stardock is a pretty cool company so I'd check out some of their other products. The only reason I endorse them is because they had the BALLS to release Galactic Civilizations, one of the finest space 4X games I've played, with no cd-keys and no copy protection or any of the other rubbish that companies make us do these days. Any company that puts the consumer first should be exalted!

Dawn Of War in Programming languages

2007-04-01T18:46:00.001+10:00

DoW and Programming, together at last! The next logical step when all one does is program and play DoW. How DoW fits into the world of programming. Some of these comparisons are a long shot, but hey its all for fun.

The imperial guard is Java: Theres hordes of imperial guardsmen just like there are hordes of Java programmers. Its bulky, rarely elegant but effective enough to get the job done. I like to think of consulting companies like Accenture to be the Emperor. Who cares how many tired programmers we cut down to make these apps, theres plenty to fill the void. Like the Imperium's tanks, the many prebuilt libraries come in very handy and will work well with the guardsmen to put down any programming foe. Your baneblade equivalent is something like Weblogic or any other application container which does everything in one, like serving apps, providing security, logging, annihilating all the Ork hordes etc.

PERL/TCL/Bash Scripting is Chaos. Powerful in its own right, but so filled with insanities that you'll sell your soul to the dark gods to understand whats going on. The Warp in this case has to be the OS which provides Chaos all its applications for bash. And just as the Warp is fickle, so tends to be the OS. I find PERL's regex statements to be like possessed space marines. Fast, effective, but hideously ugly and something you hope you never have to really touch.

FORTRAN is the Necrons of programming world. Older than most languages, rather monolithic and very obscure. If you know what you're doing, you can solve basic problems like KILL EVERYTHING, but don't try and do anything more complex with it. It'll probably not be worth it.

C++ are easily the Eldar. If you know what you're doing, you're solving problems in a brutally efficient hail of coding fire. Its very flexible, to the point where you can by accident shoot yourself in the foot. And if you don't know what you're doing, you're basically Fleet of Foot running around in circles dying horribly, before everything comes crashing down on your head. Attacking something head on in C++ is unwise. Just like the Eldar, attack, destroy one part of the problem, then run away. Trying to take it all on at once will get you killed. And just like the Eldar are a dying race, C++ is becoming a shadow of the power it once was.

Just like Tau are the new kids on the block in the WH40k universe, Ruby comes new to the programmers stable of languages. Just like Vespids and the Tau commander makes Tau incredibly quick off at harassing, programming in Ruby results in quick code which gets the job done. Unfortunately just like their vehicle support is generally pretty woeful, Ruby's development support is also pretty hopeless. Just like much of their history is undocumented, much of Ruby outside of the core is also undocumented.

Orks is definitely C#. Just like Java and C# have a lot in common, the IG and Orks have a lot in common. Both rely on sheer size and both languages have plenty of boiler plate to go. I like to believe the Squiggoth is like Windows. Its huge, its kinda ugly, but no ones going to mess with it and its mostly stuck in its own base due to its size.

Space Marines...has no real equivalent. We're talking about a race that is dedicated, flexible yet has hard hitting prowess, and is strong all the way from the beginning to the end. I don't I know any programming language which is that good.

2007 NSW Careers fair

2007-03-26T20:31:00.001+10:00

Today was the careers fair at UNSW and was truly a most excellent day! It was that awesome, that it was one of those days that made me wonder about my choice of career! There was so much energy and vibrancies to the fair, which I don't get on a day to day basis. Being around new people makes me terribly nervous BEFORE the actual event, but on the spot, it’s like another person runs me and I'm on this great ride and I love it! It could have been partly the novelty of it, and it’s true, if I did it regularly I'd probably be bored, but at least this once, I truly loved being 'at work', even more than the Big Day Out (annual company team building day).

The day started off at 9am at Avaya. There I had to pick up a bunch of gear with the assistance of the lovely Miss Karen, all of which combined to be worth more than the car I drive! After which point I drove down to Randwick. By sheer coincidence, the lane cove tunnel was open and free and this sped up the visit dramatically. Of course being me, I managed to screw up the turn offs at least twice during the day (note to self, stop thinking about DoW whilst driving) which negated any benefits of the tunnel.

We had a fairly large stall which was comfy and allowed us to put plenty of gear down, and also gave us some space for chatting to people. I ran on the laptop a whole bunch of Avaya ads I found on Youtube Sunday night! (Darn you Jess for ringing me at 8:30) (Kinda funny too btw, you should have a look). However, realistically you wanted to be in the MAIN building. That place was SOOOO packed with people and the atmosphere was fantastic. Well for extrovert like me it was anyway. I suspect others might have been overwhelmed at the crush, the noise and the horde of orks/university students. That said, we had many people visit the Avaya stall and we got a chance to give them on the speel. I met people from India, Brazil, British Columbia, SE Asia (a ridiculous number from there) and yes, would you believe it, even an white Australian or two. Honestly there were SOOO few white people that I felt like putting up a sign that said 'Equal Opportunity Employer. We hire whites too!'. I was surprised to find people who knew what we did, happy when they had the skills we needed, and overjoyed when they actually were interested in joining AND had the right skill set. After all, that’s what we're here for right?

I realized that the people who wrote 'Peopleware' are spot on. Everyone LOVES a little bit of chaos in their lives. It gives us purpose by stamping it out and replacing it with order. Constructively putting a little bit of chaos here is a great way of making life enjoyable again (well only if the chaos not your FAULT, which just sucks). When we first got there and set our booth up, I noticed our stall was a bit bare compared to others. So I rang Kylie, who passed me onto Fiona in Marketing and I did a wild dash back to the office to grab things to make our stall look professional. I know Jess was apologetic for not having grabbed those posters from Fiona and making me have to drive all the way back, but I need to thank her for an opportunity to meet someone new in Lvl2, a chance to visit Kylie for the day (^_^) and a chance to stamp out chaos FOR THE EMPEROR!.

As always, being the enterprising fellow that I am, I took the opportunity to get as much free stuff during the day as I could. Oracle backpacks, E&Y pens, Thale balls, ABS yoyo's you name it. More importantly, I got to chat to a lot of industry people. I think I've matured a tiny bit when I could at least partially filter the BS artists from those who were giving me the real deal (the real deal people provide examples, don't use as many clichés like 'there’s always opportunities to move up the ladder' etc). I even chatted to the CISCO guys, who were a really friendly lot (for being the enemy…). There was a heap of companies I chatted to actually; CISCO, Hayes, Thale, Credit Suisse, Oracle, E&Y, ABS and the list goes on. I loved the ones where the staff were technies, on the floor staff etc, not just the PR guys as they don't come across as fake as the rest. After all that, I reckon I'm taking a pretty good deal at work, but there are probably better opportunities out there for growth. I'll just see how things go, and hopefully things will get more interesting. I'm sure our wise management team will realise you need to care for your younger employees else they WILL desert you in a heartbeat. The new generation is not as tied down as the old and is likely to move around to whatever works for them.

I digress, so enough of that. The other major thing was... I got to chat up lots of pretty ladies. Thank God! Do you know how rare that is for me working in the IT industry? A lot of them were grads like myself so we had plenty in common and they were all friendly. Being both professionals working for their firms, we could chat normally instead of the usual CRAP that you go through when you meet someone new in a bar. I still don't know the trick is for asking someone their number, as there quite a few who I had great conversations with and who I effectively did the 'nice meeting you' and left. Karen B had this huge grin on her face each time I came back from these 'mini-excursions', but was polite enough to not say anything. Hey it’s not being unproductive, its about making new contacts and learning public relation skills and improving employee morale! *cough*.

All in all, I can't wait for next years!

Workaholism.

2007-03-15T00:26:00.001+11:00

My name is James and I'm a workaholic.
I've been sober (not doing work) for 2hrs whilst I've been doing DoW.

There used to be a point where I used to be proud to say I was a workaholic. A few extra hours won't hurt, hell I'm sure it'll result in possible benefits in the future. But you know when that what was originally a fling with the dark side has turned to something worse. This is when you start lying to people about how much extra work you're doing, and when something that just was an hour or two on the weekend becomes effectively an 80 hr work week.
You start cutting yourself off from things you used to enjoy on the excuse, 'you're no good at it anyway, why waste valuable effort on it'. Important things like trying to find love gets shelved because "you're too busy to have time for a girlfriend and besides you trying will just result in embarrassment". Stupid little excuses for the real truth which is you simply value work over everything else. After all, you work harder, you get rewarded. You try to find a date and its just rejection one after the other.

Then eventually this tower comes crashing down when you realise, that when it comes down to it. Work does NOT value you as much as you value it. And that's also when you realise that you've lost time on something that actually has no value, and you'll never EVER get it back.
//falls sobbing into the arms of the fat female moderator.
----
Wow I'm particularly proud of that. I could even believe that was me.
You don't have to look very deep to realise, there is grains of truth, hell entire cereal packets of truth in what I just said and what is my life.

Workaholism is an illness. Its just that simple. People make excuses about pushing your career, but really its a form of OCD. The sad thing is, that person at least in the short term IS more productive and supervisors, management will encourage and potentially reward such behaviour. Management is often myopic and won't realise this behaviour will backfire. And backfire it will. Maybe it'll be a year, maybe it'll be five years, but one day the employee will get the sickening realization that, "I've been wasting my life".

Worse yet, of all the addictions in the world, Workaholism is a socially 'respected' addiction. Hell there have been studies touting that there are 'positive forms' of workaholism. Behaviouralists say 'if people are working hard at what they enjoy, it can't be bad for them'. People think highly of someone who puts in the hard yards at their employment. But really, how is it any different to the other great 'holism', alcoholism. Both are really forms of escapism right? The employee is good at work, and maybe not so good as a father, or husband. So you do what you do best instead. Proven surveys show correlation between martial breakdown, dysfunctional parental relationships, and health deterioration. From a corporate view, it leads to this burst of productivity early on, which is more than completely negated by increased sick days, reduced motivation and turnover.

Yet WHY is it companies don't do anything about this? I know no one ever monitors how much EXCESS work I do or anyone else for that matter. Sure if I slack off for a little while I might get someone commenting, but other than my work friends, not a single manager has ever told that I should perhaps cut back. My mate at the ARL works till 3am to get things right. Do you think any of his bosses say to cut back? Nope, its at best 'thanks for your hard work', or more likely 'we've still got all these fires to put out'

Its a no-brainer to say work more, but it takes courage and insight into really understanding your employees to say 'Hey James, your task today is to go ask that nice receptionist out to a movie and dinner and give a report in the morning'.

If only the workplace was THAT straightforward.

Die Elitist Dating Scum!

2007-02-24T00:50:00.001+11:00

"Excuse me miss, but have you built a car?"

What is a bigger achievement, a chick who has a university education, or a chick who has built a car?

This comment has its roots buried in a conversation we had today. To set the scene, it a work lunch in busy cafe in an arcade at Eastwood. Cafe Centro. The serving girl in charge of our table was incredibly cute. And also incredibly underage (potentially). After she dropped out of earshot, I mentioned out loud, 'man, if she was a few years older and had a university degree...' ( I never finished it off, since realistically even if that was the case, I'd probably stay quiet. Rejection is always a bitch).

But of course, Sunny as usual completely disagreed with my philosophy with saying an girl who has done university is not at all necessarily better than one who hasn't and that I simply had elitist views.

My belief is a lady who is educated and dedicated enough to finish a university degree is a real catch. Does this make me an elitist? I certainly don't think so. I just like to think I'd prefer my women stable and brainy rather than flighty and boring. Generalization true, but I'm not sure how far that is from the truth.

Of course Sunny's more impressed by someone who has built a car rather than who has higher education. This is because of the complexity of building a vehicle outweighs someone who simply went to uni and cruised through it. Realistically that is a different form of elitism. Its the same principle of favouring your specialized desired attribute over the basic things like attractiveness, conversability and so on. Though that said, using "have you built a car" makes for a far better pickup line than "are you educated". I must try both out one day and judge the success rates.

Does that mean that if a hot girl with no education asked me out that I'd say no? Not at all, (desperation means anyones fair game). Does it mean when it comes time to commitment that I might back away? Probably not then either. But if I had a choice between a hottie without a education, and someone average who was educated, I think its evident who I'd pick, but hey thats just me.

Am I alone in this or are other people just as picky about this?

Valentines day 2007

2007-02-14T01:13:00.001+11:00

This summarises the accumulation of much despair and loathing over Valentines day. This is me and my mate at 12:30am Feb 14 2007. Note > means from me to someone, and < means from them to me.

(00:46:33) > i feel like sending flowers to myself
(00:46:40) < i reckon you should
(00:46:43) < thats so cool
(00:46:46) < and not sad at all
(00:47:01) > i nearly believed you thought it was a good idea
(00:47:46) < hehe sending flowers to yourself a good idea?
(00:47:49) < really james
(00:47:52) < think about it
(00:48:14) > well if you tell the florist to randomise the times and flowers
(00:48:33) > and send say anywhere between 1-3 to yourself
(00:48:48) > you could almost believe that some of those flowers are from someone else
(00:48:58) > I've really thought about this in too much detail to be healthy
(00:49:08) < Thats an understatement.

The Ups and Downs of Downsizing

2007-01-17T22:51:00.001+11:00

My mate today asked me how they can overcome the fear of being downsized. It was pretty easy for me to counsel them because its downsizing that anyone who works in IT faces every budget time. Its a monster that we know is there, but which we hope we can roll a 5-6 and run away from each time.

So I asked them, what are what do they want, advice on overcoming the fear or ways to avoid downsizing and they of course wanted both. And since I always want blog topics, I figured this would be a great opportunity to share my thoughts on the matter.

To avoid getting downsized, its less about how good you are and more about how much people think you are vital to the firm. When it comes down it, most of us are average to good at our job, but some people always survive and flourish whilst others flounder and sink.

It's all about profile building and getting involved. Be known as the person to go to for help whenever ADVICE is needed. If you become known as the guy to go to when something needs fixing, you'll just be buried under more work then you can really deal with.

Also whilst many ISO/CMM processes rely on projects being survivable with the loss of a member, this isn't really in your interests. Hoarding information is bad and will bite you one way or another, but if you can prove yourself more accessible and valuable then a bunch of documents, do so.

Suggest new ideas for improving productivity, processes and what not, and take ownership of those. All people need to know is you're independently looking at a problem of your own accord, and they'll be impressed. Doesn't matter if you're actually doing anything!**

So they go, I should really start fixing my CV up again. Attitude wise, I reckon the attitude of I'm going to get fired so I should get ready for it is often self fulfilling. If you like, prepare, but drop the attitude.

Ideally you should be like, this year, I'm going to find ways of being more useful
And really as far as kicking the fear goes, think of it as a win win scenario...
If you survive the downsizing, you're competing with less people. Also typically in order to stop the massive morale hit that is downsizing, companies award more money for remaining employees. If I remember correctly, they year after we sacked several thousand people had the biggest pay rises and bonuses.

Downsizing also results in more work amongst fewer people, so you get more responsibility and more interesting work.
And if you get 'unlucky' and get downsized, its fairly awesome too. You get paid out (typically) redundancy pay, you get paid out any remaining vacation leave, you get a good reference (extra good reference cos its a 'Sorry for kicking you out' reference) and now you are free to move onto any firm you like.

The money really is quite good. Each time my dad got retrenched, he paid off an entire car from the redundancy payment. Each company and each person is different, but typically you get 3-4 months worth of money to live on till your next job.

So as you can see, its not really that scary***. Live on and be happy.

** In some organizations like mine however, running an idea and not doing anything will get you cruxified however, so beware.
*** unless you're looking after a family and have specialist obsolete skills which will make you impossible to rehire.

Audacious Audacity

2007-01-14T22:21:00.001+11:00

Audacity Rocks! This is a completely free/open source music editor that can be very handy for everyone who is really into their music editing (but who can't afford the heavy duty mainstream gear), or those like myself who just want to do something simple like cut 5 seconds of garbage of the end of a track.

Audacity comes in Windows, Unix and even OSX flavours, and the windows installer is easy and convenient. The interface is pretty easy to use, though one surprise is you need to install the LAME Mp3 Encoder Library separately. Don't try and get LAME from sourceforge since it requires compilation. Instead use (http://lame.bakerweb.biz/) to get the lame_enc.dll and just stick it somewhere where you can point Audacity to it. Usually audacity will ask you where to find the dll, but in case you miss the screen, just go to Edit -> Preferences, File Formats and then Find Library.

I might fall follow up with some audacious creations and even more audacious quotes about Audacity.

Hunter valley expedition

2007-01-14T18:08:00.001+11:00

Recipe for awesomeness: Take 14 pumped up guys and girls and a cabin in the woods for the weekend in the Hunter. Add copious amounts of alcohol and stir until heavily toasted.

Whilst last years trip to Shoal Bay was a fun, relaxing trip, this was great in a completely different light. The CSN FC team was organised into a lean-mean wine-drinking force by the wonderful Mr Derek and shipped via a mini-van (and two cars) to the beautiful Hunter Valley. Whilst I and Richard took the faster, yet sedate drive up, the van arrived at the quaint, yet well equipped Belford Country Cabins with most of the regular drunks already tanked up. The night quickly progressed into more drinking and hence more hilarity.

Amazingly enough, everyone woke up the next day mostly fresh and ready for a day of drinking. And that we did. From 11am to 5pm, it was wines, wines, more wines, beer, schnapps, wines and cheeses. We visited The Boutique Wine company, Polbolkin Estate, Ivanhoe Wines, Harrigan's Irish Pub, some random Schnapps place (which had AWESOME chilli schnapps) and another winery with a name which we might never know. Apparently we each drank 47 different wines, which probably doesn't include the schnapps.

We also tried lots of cheeses, and I can tell you this now. Avoid aged goats cheese. Its mostly just ewww. But there were plenty of other tasty cheeses to offset that taste.

Our troop arrived back to the cabins around 6pm, and we then ran a bbq. The rest of the night was mostly a blur. A few notable exceptions included Ryan walking around STARK naked, and a lot of stacks-on people. Immature you say? Maybe, but you'd sure be laughing if you were in our position.

The next day was mostly quiet. People were tired (aka hungover) and mostly broke from the prior day. So after visiting a few more cheese and chocolate shops, we headed back to Sydney. A brief stop in Cessnock reminded us why we want to avoid backwater towns (the place feels like time hasn't caught up with them), but otherwise an uneventful trip home.

Kudos to my friend Richard for coming along with a bunch of people he never met before and for integrating so well. Even if he did get confused for Harry Potter.

For incriminating photos.

Yet Another Busy Saturday YABS

2007-01-07T21:24:00.001+11:00

Saturday was a full day of unproductive activity. Well I'd like to think it was unproductive, but realistically I was putting effort into the other important things in life, which are my relationships. I caught up with Richard, Sunny and Doug after two weeks to again play games together.

The old favourite Settlers of Catan got a play (special cheers go to Richard who won his first legitimate Settlers win in ages), but it was mostly full of new things which was awesome. We had 4 Nintendo DSs linked together to play Super Monkey Ball together. Doug's Nintendo Wii once again got a lot of action with 'Rayman's Raving Rabbids' being the star attraction there. Richard also bought a new card game called Munchkin. As a quick summary, this could be thought of as parodied D&D in card form. It makes for a fun, easy to learn but quick experience.

After that I had a choice between sitting at home and buming around playing NWN2... or going to Jeffs place. Whilst the first option was incredibly tempting, I figured going to Jeff's was the better option since I don't see Jeff that often and its good to maintain that relationship with the Eng guys/girls. Surprisingly enough, there was yet ANOTHER Wii there and hence, MORE Wii action. At least we broke it up with some Poker and Pool action. Jeffs house is good in that way, for there is always plenty of entertainment.

Of course now I feel quite guilty that I did nothing productive from 10:30am till 2:30pm, but I've logged it on paper as to what I was up to at least. Friday is still 18 hrs of what the hell did I do there. I really should hurry up and get my C++ activity summariser application up and running so I can start doing some real analysis of my life activity.

Beware the IDEs of March!

2007-01-02T22:14:00.001+11:00

My next upcoming project is an C++ project. Yes whilst this does fill me with horror, its also a nice chance to learn something new.

The first task is the most tedious in some ways, which is to find the best IDE for it. I'm not a purist (and I'm keen on getting some work done) so I'll be avoiding text editors wherever I can. A part of using an IDE is learning how to use it, and a part is fighting the IDE when it wants to do one thing, and you want it to do another. But even after taking away the time that absorbs, I suspect the amount of time saved using an IDE far outweighs using simply an text editor.

So far I have two candidates for the job. In the left corner is Microsoft Visual Studio and in the right corner is Eclipse with the C++ Development Tools.

After a week or so of playing around with it, I must say for pure coding, Visual C++ falls really short of the conveniences of Eclipse. Theres not even a call hierarchy until you get to VS.Net 2005. Theres no quick way to get to a particular file, like Eclipse's Cntl-Shift-R/T. However, it does allow for building relatively easily, debugging is far less painful then in Eclipse and its also the only development environment thats got built in support for MFC (funny that..).

This combination of things is enough to convince me to stay with Visual Studio. Even if it is going to make me dumber :).
Heck its a lot better than vi/gvim!

P.S. For those who didn't get the reference of this title and went 'but its January -> Click here.
P.S.S. xoxoxoxo
P.S.S.S. I can't help myself when I get a P.S. The hugs and kisses must go on.

IDEs are making you dumb.

2007-01-01T21:01:00.001+11:00

Ever felt the more you programmed, the crappier a programmer you were becoming? It could just be your editor of choice. I read this thought provoking and mostly amusing article from a guy who is bagging out Microsoft's MS Visual Studio.

Some good quotes from the article.

On Intellisense: "Human beings have never been inclined to refrain from pursuing certain technologies because they may have unfortunate repercussions."

On interactive design tools: Eventually, the interactive design stuff found its way into development with C++ and the Microsoft Foundation Classes, and there, I truly believe, code generation was used to hide a lot of really hairy MFC support that nobody wanted to talk about.

On visual studio: Almost twenty years after the first Dialog Editor, Visual Studio is now the culprit that generates ugly code and warns you not to mess with it.
and
But Visual Studio is not interested in having you write good code. It wants you to write code fast.

Whilst the majority of the article is MS specific, it applies to every IDE. So don't you snicker at the evils of MS all your open-sourced Eclipse fanboys because it still applies here.
Overall a good read.

Shoal Bay: The 5th Generation

2006-12-17T19:48:00.001+11:00

Eleven friends for a weekend of sun, surf, fun and sheer abject terror.

The tag line for a new hollywood slasher flick? No, its my weekend holiday experience.

My engineer friends and I went to a lovely quiet coastal town called Shoal Bay. Its within the Port Stephans area. This long weekend started hilariously with the car trip up. Five guys stuck in traffic and the rain on what became a 4 hour journey. Boredom quickly strikes when you are stuck in a car, but my particular group is funny to travel with.
So whilst we are driving along, we start hiring this regular thump. At first we ignored it, but then it became more insistent. It turned out that the windscreen wiper rubber blade was slowly but surely slipping off and striking the car as we kept driving along. So here we are going at 110km/h in pouring rain without a windscreen wiper. Its all good, we can SORTA see the car in front...

We made multiple stops and made attempts to fix it. We stuck a woodchip inside to block the blade. About 30seconds into the drive, it flew off. We had more success with a tiny stone, which as far as I know is still holding that blade.

We arrived in Shoal Bay around 7pm and then hung out with Nish, Dennis and Neha. For entertainment we hired Batman Begins/Coach Carter & The family man which we watched over the next few days. We waited for Sonia and co. to arrive at 1am. Of course instead of doing the smart thing as soon they came and sleeping, we played poker until 4:30am. This appears to be a common theme on all our holidays.

Day 2
So its overcast, and grey, but its NOT raining. Good enough for us, we decided to go and get some beach on! The good thing is, not many people were on the beach so we had all of it to ourselves. So us girls and guys got some beach cricket, beach volleyball and swimming in on a day where most people would have stayed inside and grumbled. I was tremendously of our group.
We even hired some kayaks and did crazy things in the bay. I've still got a cramp in my knee from holding three kayaks together with my thighs alone for the ultimate dragonboat AS well as operating rudder.

We had lunch at good old Aussie Bobs (a tradition after 5 trips). Speaking of tradition, I dropped by the old Golding house where Rosy and the remains of the Fishery were having their annual holiday as well. It was nice to see them and there was no animosity amongst us, which was great considering they didn't invite me. Bastards! :P

So you ask, James where is this sheer terror you speak of. It is coming.
We had a bbq for dinner. Whilst the idea of us cooking is scary, its not really that which is the problem. After we watched Coach Carter, we congregated in Nish's room and just had a chat whilst people were trying to sleep. For some unknown reason, we decided to talk about a movie. Wolf Creek.
I shall not elaborate here, but this movie was described in a disturbing manner by Jessie, who didn't waste time on the gore factor, but on the psychologically disturbing feel of this film. Needless to say the entire room was silent and disturbed after this and retired to bed soon after.

Around 3:20 AM, I woke to the sound of the most terrifying scream I've ever heard. I was shocked awake, then I heard cries for help, then someone yelling, "the lights are cut!". With no street lamps in the area, it was PITCH black in the room. With a combination of all these, and the unfamilarity of the room, I was effectively paralyzed until someone managed to get a light activated which bought some sense back to me. After a desperate scrabble to find my glasses, I ran out of the room to find the others also coming down in a state of terror. Jessie and Louis both claimed to hear footsteps just before the scream and we all heard the scream. Louis was the one yelling for help after the initial scream until someone switched the light on. We ran into the main living room and huddled together in this unfamilar house which had massive windows with few curtains, which lead us feeling exposed. We had no idea what happened and to this day still do not really know. Did someone have a really bad nightmare and scream out in their dreams? Was it inside the house, or was it outside. We called the cops, who never came, but eventually around 5am, from sheer exhaustion and fright we all crashed into bed. Most of us were petrified, so we bunked closer together instead of separate rooms where we could.

So it wasn't really the best way to spend the night, but outside of that, it was a enjoyable weekend.

The Receptionist Followup

2006-12-13T01:01:00.001+11:00

So someone suggested doing a follow-up article to The Receptionist which I posted several months back, and I went, that's a great idea!

This is mainly because things have changed so much in that time. So for everyone who didn't catch the first part of the story, read the above link. This article is partly self-reflection, but its also to clear up a few misconceptions people have.

In order to keep things anonymous and so I don't need to keep typing The Receptionist lets name our receptionist Rachel.
Now despite my utter fear during the time of the first article, I managed the day after that article, to say hello and introduce myself, thus starting a long and odd friendship.

Rachel is a lovely girl, very bubbly, easy to get along with and surprisingly easy to hold a conversation with for someone who has no knowledge/interest in IT. She's attractive, but she doesn't flaunt it which is a huge plus point. (Okay that said, she could be flaunting and I might be just ignorant of it). Shes actually quite young at 20, so really a baby compared to the age of most of the people at our work. Shes got a boyfriend whose moved in with her. Hes a nice bloke, but my opinion of him took a massive nose dive when I realised he was a smoker and a real estate agent. (Bad experiences have made me realize Real estate agents are the scum of the universe.)

Shes on the way to the coke machine so I often get to talk to her. Its a silently (or in Mr R's case, not silently) accepted fact that the coke run is really a 'Chat with Kylie' run. I don't think anyone minds.

Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not really that attracted to her in that way. I like to make other people think I do, and sometimes I even try and convince myself I do like her in that way. But she simply just doesn't measure up to my ex, who despite her severe parental issues is still the most awesome girl in the world for me. That said, I really enjoy hanging around Rachel regularly because shes just got that awesome friendly vibe. She doesn't expect you to be witty, or intelligent, you can just be yourself. There is also something else... I think Sam de Brito's article's article on how to avoid a Princess said it best when he said

"Deep down, I think men are actually quite flattered when a princess chooses them because ... doesn't that make you a prince?"

So being friends with a Princess doesn't make you a prince, but hell at least you're a courtier or someone the Princess hangs with. Outside of the normal commoners. Shes also the only chick besides Katherine who I can talk non-work related issues with, so that's a big bonus. Shock! I do actually like talking femme things on occasion, as terribly gay as that sounds.

Rachel is a slight pain in the ass to get a lunch date with however, and I'm not entirely sure why. She often says for example, lets do Thursday and then shes like fully busy on that day. This could well be because shes busy, as shes often the only one holding down the fort. I'm also likely to believe its because she doesn't want to lead me on and give off the wrong signals. Which is admirable, because one should always be faithful to their partner. But its also hard to tell a chick that you're not interested in them without them bringing it up, since its effectively saying that you ARE interested in them, which leads me to quite a quandary.

Why do I keep asking if I keep getting turned down? Well a) shes not saying no, and b) well I'm annoyingly persistent. You know the saying about a dog with a bone...

Burning Out

2006-12-12T23:50:00.001+11:00

I'll be speaking today about something thats close to my heart at the moment.
And before any of you smartasses say anything, no its not our resident darling receptionist.

Its about career burnout.

Its been my first year of work, and I think we've all felt it to some extent regardless of how long we've been working. Its that feeling you get when you just don't get anything out of going to work anymore. You can still feel ok at work and maybe even fine about going to work in the morning.
Doesn't mean you're not burnt out.

Okay just answer this honestly.
Have you felt in the last few months that your work is underappreciated and underpaid, that you're not getting to where you want to be, you question if you're better off somewhere else or that you just don't feel satisfied that you're getting what you want out of work anymore.

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you're probably burning out.
And this is ok. Really it is. We're all prone to it, I don't think anyone is 'weak' because they are burning out. Its a byproduct of our society that we're all more likely then ever to burn out. We've got such high expectations of ourselves and our families/friends reckon we're able to do more then what we really can do.

I've read this fascinating article on burnout, and I'll summarize it a bit. There are so many misconceptions about burning out that its worth clearing them out. First and foremost, burnout is less about overwork and more about Expectation to Reward. If you have high expectations (like most high achievers out of university), you're almost guaranteed to burnout. Sometimes you get lucky and do something that rewards you, with promotions, money or gratitude, but most of the time you'll work your butt into the ground and at the end of it you'll go... thats it? Thats all I get?

And I think you need this shock to the system. Everyone of us do. For its at this point that the crucial decision happens. You do one of three things, 1) quit, 2) keep going unhappy or 3) re-prioritize your life. As obvious as it looks, no.3 is the way to go.

Corporations are really quite daft in a way. They like the idea of people who are committed to the job and where their work is the most important thing in their life. What they don't realise is, this is one the primary reason they either lose said individuals when they burn out, or get suddenly a far less effective worker. By working too hard, you can actually get poorer quality workers.

One of the other misconceptions is you can love your job and still burnout in the process. So never think, I'm in the wrong place because you don't like what you do anymore. Think about WHY you don't don't like your job anymore.
Most likely its because you're not feeling appreciated anymore, or the work has become too much of the same. You need to chat with your boss/coach and let them know whats going on with you. If you do and they don't do anything, you're probably in a company who doesn't care about you. This is a good time to start looking elsewhere. Not only are you getting out of dodge, but its a chance to find new challenges.

The Bloc

2006-10-08T13:40:00.003+10:00

I've been getting back into the dating/search game of late and darn isn't it hard to find someone these days. I've been out of it for a long while and considering the unusual circumstances that led to me and my ex getting together, I could honestly say I have -NO- experience in the field at all.

I went the bloc last night with my mate Ellie. I was rather apprehensive, since clubs usually are just a waste of money. And spend money I did. 15$ cover fee, and probably 40$ in drinks (mostly for other people too!). So rather expensive night in that regards, but the music was good, the place was bopping so it was money well spent.

So anyway, one of Ellie's friends joins us and she brings along a girl who is really kind of cute in a 'Willow from buffy' way. Her name was Cathy and I got this definite flirting vibe from her. Of course I make this often incorrect assumption that if someone laughs at my stupid jokes and talks to me that they're vaguely interested.

One of the funnier moments was when I asked Ellie to find out with Cathy was single and she said when she did, she'll give a big thumbs up, else a big down.
So then 15mins later, we're all dancing away together and she starts doing this big thumbs up, and I've completely forgotten what she said and I'm like ' thats an interestin dance' and then she start nodding her head and making the thumbs up even more obvious and I'm like 'what??' and she just rolls her eyes and drags me off and goes 'shes single you dumbass!'.

So I play it cool and just start talking to her more. Then after it became really late, I offered a lift and she and her friend accepted. Here I'm thinking, 'w00t OMG I might get a phone number'. Of course I could feel it in the air that this wasn't going to work out in reality. I'm just not that lucky.

And of course I was right. I dropped Claire (her friend) at her place and then Cathy got off as well instead of getting a lift all the way home. As we drove off, Elle went 'I meant to explain earlier, but she doesn't think you're her type and she wants to be on the market'. Oh well, so close but no cigar.

I was pissed off on the night, but I got over it quickly. Cos it was a fun night and it was a good chance to practise. I don't think I've really found anyone whose fit my requirements at all yet. Its hard when my ex set such high standards to begin with.

Buffy. Bad for your hormones

2006-10-08T13:40:00.002+10:00

So I watched Buffy Season 3, 3rd last episode, 'The Prom' and I got all teary. And slightly mad. Then I thought to myself, why the hell am I getting mad. I thought it must be due to the fact I never had a highschool prom (ok formal in Aussie terms) date. All these gorgeous girls with their handsome guys having dates and little old me without one.

30 seconds of anger later, I remembered, 'Wait up, I had a date'. Anger vanishes. Okay sure it wasn't a proper date, it was just a friend I went out with, and sure she ended up making out with some other yr 10 guy at the end of it, but hey I wasn't by myself either.

Yes I have the maturity of an highschool student still. Or maybe its just the excessive amounts of buffy in a short period of time. I blame that! The good thing about gaming and work is that it suppresses your hormones whilst still offering a good mix of ambition and relief. With Buffy thrown into the mix, its like an external activiation of a whole bunch of useless hormones.

Roadkill

2006-09-27T22:08:00.001+10:00

Today's topic is rather sad, so avert ye eyes if you are of the feeble type, for it deals with mans greatest enemy. Death!

I've never really had to deal with death directly before, or even suffering that much. Most of the time, i have a fairly detached way of looking at it. On tuesday I had a front seat view.

When I was driving home from music I encountered some strange traffic where everyone was driving around some obstacle. This obstacle was a gorgeous husky dog which came off second best against two vehicles. It was bleeding from the mouth and its back legs were quite evidently broken. Being in so much pain and utterly frightened, it snapped at anyone near it, so me and this other young fellow got a tarpaulin under the dog and lifted him off the road so he didn't waddle into more traffic.

After we sent off a bystander to run upto the nearby vet, it was a death vigil. The dog was alert and active at the beginning and was even trying the hero, 'I'll be right and be on my way' angle till its legs just collapsed on it.
It was after it came out of shock it realised how screwed it was, and began howling and braying.

We did the best we could to try and keep it calm and alive. The pet ambulance finally came after some 40mins. Slow bastards, but I suppose they came from fairly far away. The veterinarian injected the husky with a calming drug which kicked in about 5mins later. Then the cops finally turn up as well, but by this stage there were just too many cooks in the broth, and after the dog left, I bid my farewells to those around me and left myself.

I didn't feel so bad about it at the time, but after I got home and talked with my ex, thats when I really felt bad about it and how that poor dog is probably in the heavens now.

The Receptionist.

2006-08-30T23:02:00.001+10:00

its been ages since I last wrote in my blog and I figured its now a good time to write in it. The last few days have been sort of funny, yet 'deep' in some ways so I figured its worthy writing about.

So the last few days we've been having training on object oriented design and analysis. Good course, but totally boring blogging material. The day before the training started, I fantasised that the instructor would be some totally hot girl from the states who I could take out to lunch, and maybe show around Sydney, you know as a good host does. Of course knowing fate the way it is, it turned out to be a dude. If I was female, I might have actually gone for him, cos hes the smart Owen Wilson type. Charming yet intelligent.

However, my prophecies did not go completely unfulfilled. The training is held on the ground floor (which I usually miss since I'm coming from the basement). The ground floor receptionist is...for the lack of a better term... a complete smoking hottie. We're talking the COMPLETE (physical) package. Black/brown hair, beautiful eyes, about 5-11, slim toned and of course, well proportioned in the upper body. (ah hem).

Everytime I walk past from Level 3 to training and back again, I got more and more smitten, but of course, had ZERO balls to talk to her. That didn't of course prevent me from spending ages thinking of various scenarios asking her out for a lunch date. So she got a stalker, woopdie do.

So I started asking people upstairs if they knew her name. Since I'm terrible at description, I usually go 'shes the one with black hair' and EVERY single guy I asked said (whilst doing the appropriate hand movements), 'is she the booby one?'. To tell you the ABSOLUTE truth, I had no idea what she looked like in that area until everyone else said that.
Of course my Irish mate goes 'Good to see you're getting back in the game and starting from the top whilst you're at it. Pity shes got a boyfriend though'.

Then my old boss goes 'Yeap, but good try. You know what you say, you start from the top and work your way down'. We all had a good laugh (most at my expense) but I know they mean well. They've known me for 3 years which is a long time really.

Oh noes... hopes crushed. But still ..maybe they broke up of late or are in some bad water and shes just waiting for an excuse to bail... Every stalkers fantasy right? Of course before long it spread through the test team (to some extent I aided it, cos its just plain funny because shes Grade A material and I'm me, so its a pair made in Opposite world). I even spent ages waiting for someone to ask me a difficult decisionjust so I could say 'This is one of those difficult decisions, like choosing between a lunch date with (the receptionist) or going to see the Veronicas at a lunchtime gig at the macq center.". Someone went, "you've been saving that for ages haven't you".

My good friend Katherine at work of course gets annoyed and goes "of course receptionists look good considering they spend ages doing make up and they always dress like they're going for a interview or nightclub. Most of them (or all) are uneducated as well!" (She doesn't think too highly of them as you can tell). Everyone of course had a laugh at that.

But it did get me thinking. What the hell was I thinking.
This is the complete opposite of what I want. Shes most likely
a) poorly educated - I like my women with a brain thank you.
b) high maintenance - girls who are pretty and know they are, will ALWAYS demand more (and I'm a stingy bastard).
c) hard to keep a hold of: Cos every other guy wants her and really she can move on with no bother.

The problem here was, I normally like stable commited relationships. That is until I got into and broke up from one and I realised, I really don't want one anymore. I just want someone to share time with and to have fun. I don't want to worry about getting their parents approval, I don't want to discuss life time committment or any of that other crap.

So I fell for someone who is completely the opposite figuring that'll meet my requirements. WRONG WRONG WRONG.
My requirements are DIFFERENT, not completely opposite to what I had before.

That said, I've got two more days of training and thats two more days of eye candy. Who knows maybe i'll dig up some courage and just say Hi.

After all, whats the worst that can happen......

The horrors of installing Gruff

2006-07-23T20:57:00.001+10:00

Whilst most of my ruby experiences have been very pleasant surprises, getting the graphing subsystem of the project to work has been truly truly unpleasant.
The main ruby/rails graphing library that gets bandied about mostly is Gruff graphs. Admittedly once it started working, its been reasonably good (ignoring a few irritating things with bad documentation and lack of features). Its the getting it to work part that was truly horrible.

There is a LOT of stuff on the web about this, so I'll make it less painful by starting from scratch (as far as I remember anyway).

There are 3 critical ingredients to get gruff to work. These are

ImageMagick
RMagick
Gruff

At the heart of all your problems will inevitably be ImageMagick, so this is where you really need to be careful. I've become a little wary of automatic installers such as 'apt-get install imagemagick' or 'gem install RMagick' for just because an application install doesn't mean its functional. On my home system I had almost no problem, but on the development machine at work, it was a painful mess. Some of the problems I had were.

uninitialized constant Gruff
uninitialized constant Enum
No decode delegate for image format JPEG
Can't measure text. Are the fonts installed?
Can't find libMagick or one of the dependent libraries.
Unknown format: PNG

And nearly all of them can be traced back to a bad ImageMagick/RMagick install. This page helps a lot to debug these issues, but doesn't really give you everything to get it working.

ImageMagick's main saving grace is ./configure gives a nice summary of what it thinks it has and doesn't have. In my case, it picked up bad paths for the fonts, and the debian install didn't have libjpeg or libpng installed, both of which caused issues with installing. So I installed libpng (apt-get install libpng12-dev), and it got picked up no sweat. libjpeg was a little more annoying however. I had to download libjpeg from the website, untar, make, make install and of all things, copy into /usr/local/jpeg-6b.

After that I had to run configure in a bizarre manner

CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/jpeg-6b LDFLAGS='-L/usr/local/jpeg-6b' ./configure --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts/

The gs-font-dir is to kill my 'can't measure text' problem by making sure it used the correct fonts path for the machine, rather than the default. A make;make install later, I had a installed ImageMagick with correct support for fonts/png/jpeg.

The next thing I did was to install Rmagick (again from source).
Previously when I tried to install RMagick from the gem, it installed successfully (until you tried to use it, at which point it went poof), so source I go...

Once the RMagick installed (with no errors from the make), I installed gruff from the gem, which went smoothly. And voila, everything worked! Thank goodness. Undoubtably the most unnecessarily painful thing. That said, its not that bad once you know what you're doing.

Career Development Part 1

2006-07-13T22:50:00.001+10:00

The entire performance based culture is tough, its not like a normal company where you can be guaranteed to go up a bit just by 'being'. If you don't raise the bar for yourself everytime, you'll never get promotions and you'll never get raises.
Its good and bad at the same time. Improving yourself is always something to be happy about, but lifting that bar will get harder each time.

I know personally I have a few issues that I have to work out. The first and most important one is to use my coach better. I've got this great resource thats sitting there and I've never used it beyond the basics. I've been classified as a DPH person for coaching purposes after I tried out a assessment form. That is directed, programmatic and holistic. Before you think this makes no sense and sounds like psychobabble, let me clear it up. A directed coach will teach you thinks by telling you how things are done, what you can do to improve yourself, give you feedback externally. By programmatic, it means you should meet regularly in order to discuss how you are going and how to improve yourself. Finally holistic means that I'm not interested on learning about just day to day skills from my coach, but more about the overall career development. So I'm going to have to have to raise this next time and get it organized. Its my responsibility after all.

Also at work I'm a 'yes' person and it means I'll say yes to something that I cannot promise without working like a dog, which of course leads me wanting to cause mayhem and chaos. So really I need to learn to say no. I can say no plenty of times at home, but at work, I'll do it if someone says to do something.

I was shown a nice diagram which I'll remember pretty well. It was three concentric circles. The center most one is your comfort zone, the middle ring is FEAR and the outer ring is growth. I'm one of those people who have a comfort zone and a thick ring of fear around it. But I'm slowly getting better at breaking through the fear barrier of late to get something done. But its hard, but thats what personal development is about right?

How to get things done Part1

2006-06-24T16:12:00.001+10:00

Something bizarre happened today. I asked something to be done, and it actually got done quickly! Now you are probably asking why is this bizarre?

In big firms, there is a lot of bureaucracy to get something done. The change I wanted was small, but it could have other ramifications. Most of the people I spoke to said I'd have pretty small chance of getting it done soon.
I put down the quick response to a few things, which I'll share with you. It seems obvious, yet you can easily forget any of these.

1. Find the exact person to talk to: In most firms, there is some highly complex 'ticketing' system when you request a change. If you don't fill in the fields correctly, your service ticket will bounce between people, all of whom don't really want to look after your problem. Often your co-workers will know who was the person who looked after similar problems before. So the best thing to do is email that person and then state your problem and ask if you need to raise a ticket. The ticketing system is still good, since it means you can priotise work, and the person answering it gets recognition, but by asking someone directly, it means you can write the ticket to go to the correct person first go.

2. State your request clearly. If I don't see something numbered and easy to do, chances are I won't do it. So don't say things in a roundbout way, but just say, I want A, B, C done by preferably Y at the latest. This basically means it'll be done by 5mins to Y, but better than two weeks after Y.

3. Allay any fears: People are scared that when they do something for you, that they'll be creating more problems for themselves later. Make it obvious that its a simple one off thing. You're not lying, you're just being optimistic...

5. Follow-up. Everyone loves recognition for doing a job well, but people are lazy giving recognition out. In bars, we tip, partly to recognise and appreciate their work, but more realistically its because we want to given just as good service next time.
In firms we can't do that, so we do the next best thing. Tell that person's supervisor that your needs were helped by their help.

Why SQL Performance Tuning is 'teh suck'.

2006-06-18T00:30:00.001+10:00

At work of late I've been doing performance tuning in SQL. In postgresql to be precise. A friend of mine said that its great and you learn a lot. I'd say the second part is true, but the first is wrong. SQL Performance tuning, especially in postgresql is truly an abysmal process!

Part of the problem is that you have to work with a poor mans toolkit. In postgresql, your best friend for tuning your queries is explain. And thats it.
There is a visual version, but for the really complex queries (which are usually the ones that NEED the tuning in the first place), this visual version will choke and die as it requires just too much power to generate an visual display of these often frightening queries.

Explain basically tells you what the database 'planner' is probably going to do to answer your query. I.e, what tables it will hit, what merging, connecting, sorting etc it will do to answer your demands. This planner is quite intelligent in most cases, except with complex databases like the one I'm working on. This is where you have to dabble in the black arts. Eye of newt, and key of foreign table style.

Things that help the planner

One thing that really helps the planner is making your foreign keys explict in joins. So sometimes if a table has a foreign key back and forth, just mention them both and it can often improve things dramatically.

Beware of joining views which have unions defined in them. Unions seem to create temporary tables which means bye bye indexing. Which leads me to the next point. When it comes to searching, indexes are king. It can vastly improve the speed of your joins if you use indexes, so never sacrifice (or forget indexes). Sequential scans are very costly, but index scans can be much faster. But do be aware, that when the table is too small, indexes won't be used (seq scans are faster), and when the table is too large, sometimes it won't use indexes either!

Avoid using tables which you know are going to be huge, but which you can avoid. Postgresql is particularly relevant here. Since it allows using inheritance, your smaller specialised 'sub tables' could be more useful for the join than the big table since it can be scanned faster. It also be fine to scan each of those sub tables separately and union them at the end before joining (because you'd have got smaller filtered sets to work with).

Relative sizes also matter. Say if you are joining Table A to Table B to Table C, and you know A and B are generally smaller than C. Its a lot faster to join A and B first, and then join the results of this to C. Rather than joining all at the same time.

I'm working in Postgresql 7.3 and granted this is getting a bit old. 8.0+ has apparently made a lot of improvements and hence half the work I've done is probably no longer necessary. Which begs the question, why aren't we using pgsql 8.0. Well dear reader, thats a question for another day :)

2006-06-11T14:17:00.000+10:00

You know what blogger really needs? Categories!
This blog was called Technica obscura and I don't think there is anything technical in it at the moment. And I'd like to put some techy stuff for some readers who are into learning new things and also as a way of storing things I've learnt. But of course I also got to look after my regulars who like to find out about the wonderful dreary mess that is my life.

So I shall start hunting down how to put these things into categories!

Eating your co-workers. I mean with.

2006-05-28T20:04:00.001+10:00

On saturday night, I went out to dinner and drinks with a few work friends. Nothing major, just about 15 of us having a bit of fun outside of work. We went to this great little place called Thai Foon in Darling Harbour. I can highly recommend it if you ever do dinner in the city.
The food was good and well priced, the service was great, even for our large crowd (we had our food out in 10mins!) and there was nice views of Darling Harbour.

One of these work friends commented that it was weird seeing work people outside of work. A few years ago I would have thought so, but lately I'm not fond of this notion. When you spend 8 hours a day, 5 days a week with these people, then theres no reason why you can't be friends outside of work. Generally, you'd think this would lead to better productivity as you know what your co-workers are like, and also mean you got someone to turn to when you're in difficulty.

I think it helps if they are reasonably in the same age group though. After you go about 10 years one way or another, its not that straightforward. There is definitely a massive generational gap every decade and you can't always relate. There's some overlap but not as much. Anyway I should do some work. As they say, TTFN. Ta Ta for now!

Why software engineering is the hardest profession.

2006-05-21T18:32:00.001+10:00

This is a highly debatably topic, but I think its quite valid and besides I enjoy a bit of shit stirring!

Firstly lets go with a definition of 'hardest' to put this into context. By hardest, I mean to include the stress, the hours, the bang for buck factor and the respect factor.

Your typical software engineer often does not get the level of respect they deserve. Often they are thought of as mere 'IT workers' or 'programmers'. If this was true, they no way would this be classified as hard. IT support is just like normal janitorial work, albeit of a technical nature. Something goes wrong and they clean it up ready to use again. Programmers just code what designs they are given. Software engineers have to take an problem, and convert it into a solution. This was never easy for even normal engineers, but for SEs its just even worse. This is due to the ignorance of people who think that adding a bit of functionality is easy. Sure its easy to tack on a feature, but software is like metal work... You really need to MOULD everything to make sure things don't start falling off.

So No.1 - software is finicky. Its actually worse then people in someway.
People don't do what you tell them to do. Software does EXACTLY what you tell it to do, not what you WANT it to do. So if it stuffs up, its actually YOUR fault.

No.2. The technology field accelerates far faster than any other field. Medicine has only evolved so far in thousands of years, but the IT field has gone in leaps and bounds in only a few decades. To avoid becoming redundant as a SE, you need to be always on top of your game and this means knowing all the latest techs and practises.

No.3. You are Quality's bitch. Since more and more important tasks are handled by computers, what you do will affect thousands, maybe millions of people. So everything has to be as close to perfect as you can make it. Otherwise you will feel the burn from those same thousands of people who'll strap you onto a burning pyre.

No.4. You are boring. Well you're not really, but society is cruel. Doctors are sexy (especially Addison Shepherd from Grey's Anatomy...hubba hubba), lawyers are sexy (even if they are pure scum), but when was the last time a software engineer interesting from a media perspective. I know a SE who says hes a grape grower (or anything other than an SE) when someone asks what he does.

Anyway theres more I could say, but I'll reserve that for another day.

To rent or not to rent...

2006-05-04T22:17:00.001+10:00

Today's blog will star someone from my own work! To be precise they aren't actually starring, but they will be mentioned. So like Schindler's List, this blog is more based on a true story. It may not involve Jewish propaganda, but someone will get gassed at the end.

So we've got an annex behind our home which we built brand new. And did absolutely nothing with! I have no idea what my parents were thinking when they decided to build it, but its been sitting idle for little over a year. Sure its been handy for LANs and when visitors come, but otherwise its a completely idle resource. Theoretically I could move into it and have all this living space to myself, but realistically, WHY? At home all the living space I require is my bed and the 2 meter radius around my computer. Sure its annoying to have the folks come in and out, but I actually enjoy the company now and then.
Shock horror! A twenty-something enjoying their parents company...whatever will they think of next.

Anyway, a mate from work is moving out of home and I suggested this back place for him. Its a bit under the covers, but basically its about $4,000 more for me (hello Mazda3) and about $6,000 cheaper for him in rents. Also we get to car pool and share costs there. The legal is a bit shaky, but in general I shouldn't see a problem. The real issue is the fact I work with the guy!

There is definitely such a thing as too much friend time.
I remember my trip to Europe... 1 month in close proximity to my best friend drove me to consider murder. Actually it only took about 5 days before that. Well in retrospect I think everyone has been driven to consider murdering Jeff at some point regardless, but I digress from the topic at hand.

I think as humans we all need a balance, and that balance cannot be achieved if you don't have get some personal space. Denis Leary said it best when put his long lasting marriage down to "love, honour, respect and keeping the FUCK away from each other as much as possible... just come out, eat, talk, fuck and go back into separate bedrooms if possible".

The same applies here, except obviously not the marriage part, cos that would be scary and to be frank a little gay to even discuss. I'll keep you gentle reader informed as events unfold but for now, as promised, this shall end in someone getting gassed.

// farts
// exits in coughing fit.

I need to take a Wii

2006-04-30T18:28:00.001+10:00

This is definitely behind the times, but for all those people who like me have been living under a rock, check out the new Nintendo Wii. Its so cool that it redefines cool! If you know me, you'd know that I hate normal controllers, as I'm just completely unco at them. However this thing appears to be far more easier to use and understand.
And you can use it as a sword and beat people with it! (At least in the game). This is what I was thinking. And theres a little add on which you connect to the controller and it turns it into basically a numchuck... awesome!

But seriously, what bright apple in marketing thought of using a name like Wii for the console. Like I know Revolution doesn't have a snappy 3 letter acronym like the PS3 or 360, but surely you can do better than that. Maybe the GC2 :D

Excel or How crunch the numbers to suit your needs

2006-04-27T00:31:00.001+10:00

I've been playing a lot with Excel lately. And by a lot I mean, it seems suck about 2 hours of my day every day for 3 days. And its nothing really constructive or impressive. I'm number crunching how I'm going to survive the next year or two given my questionable cash flow problems.

I do this via what I like to call a monthly cost schedule. On the vertical, I place the months-years. The first column after that is the events (for example build house, get renter, get salary increase. The next few are opening bank balance, salary, rental, tax, repayments and expenses. Finishes with net income and the closing cash balance. Sounds reasonable right? Seems to cover what I need to know...right?

The problem is I don't necessarily know whats correct or not, and whats reasonable and whats not. The great thing is Excel can tell me exactly what I want to believe based on the information I give it. The house will be built EXACTLY in six months like they say. Sure lets bring the rental and tax relief forward a few months. The car will cause 150$ in tax relief, sure lets cut tax by that much. I love it! I WANT to believe I can afford this, and this plan won't leave me scraping for the remaining out of a can of spam spam spammity spam spam

SHUTUP!

Diversion aside, the reality is this seriously a pile of crock. The reality of things is never that straight forward. When one is living on the bread-line as it maybe, its a dangerous game. I could be always solvent and on several grand by Oct 08, or be on -13,000$ by Oct 08, all depending on what happens. The latter isn't really that impossible to envisage. All you need is shitty tax relief and a bad renter and you've got an situation where there isn't really an easy way out.

However... using sensitivity analysis which I ALSO did in Excel, I should be perfectly right due to the relative spread of probabilities. After all, excel doesn't lie...

The beginning of another beginning...

2006-04-26T00:49:00.001+10:00

"The blog was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of the InterWeb. But it was a beginning"

You can tell a lot about anything from just first impressions. Judging by the cheap Robert Jordan WoT rip off there, you can tell this site will start well, then start to pad out to thousands of pages of tripe where you will want to kill everyone on this site. All in the sake of profit!

In theory this site is designed specificially for the purpose of pushing me to reflect on my progress on a personal and a technical level. And as with all blogs, it will be filled with enough rants and angst to fit several episodes of Daria . But come gentle reader as we hopefully start what will be a beautiful lasting relationship, or at the least a passioniate crazed romp in the backseat of the Internet.