This week in news
A few bits and bobs for my odd readers. Not odd as in weird but.. ah, you get the point.
I'm growing increasingly pissed at tabloid "news". I might go as far as calling their bullshit-spinning an art form. Over a million people read tabloid news every day. That's over a fifth of the population. Now does that fall on the age old adage of keeping the stupid unwashed hordes pleased? Maybe. And sometimes looking outside, i'm inclined to believe just that. There's even a thread on MuroBBS dealing with the stupidity that the tabloids churn out each day. I mean, most of this is either purposefully crafted lies, or sheer malice, because i can't believe they are this stupid...
I ordered "Market Forces" by Richard Morgan, which was the only book of his i did not already own. It's starting out pretty well, but of course i'll read it through before passing final judgement. It's this whole future (though this time near-future), corporations run shit deal. I picked up the book used, since i was feeling like getting a hardcover. This was shipped over from the UK, from the "East Riding of Yorkshire Library", and used to actually be a library copy. It's wrapped in tough plastic film, but you do see signs of wear and tear. Perfectly readable though, but the seller posted it as "very good condition", which is a bit iffy. But for the 3.50 euro (including postage) that i paid, i'm as happy as a pigeon with a french fry. Bought if off play.com, through their playtrade-thingy.
On the Android-side of life, i switched from GingerReal, to the Cyanogen Mod, while also upgrading to the 2.3.5 kernel. I'm running on the nightly version of the 7.0 for Samsung Galaxy S. It's a version obviously built each night, but the codebase seems to be fairly stable, so so far i've had no large issues with it. Some things change wildly over night, such as the lockscreen, or the camera, but it's mostly for the better. The customizability is unparalleled, and though the synthetic benchmark scores are lower (1600 vs. 2100 for GingerReal), but the system still seems responsive (enough), and above all else, more stable. GingerReal does have more tweaks for the kernel, the processor and the filesystem so that explains most of the weirdness, and the crazy-high performance.
At work, i've spent the last few weeks setting up a Sun M4000 box with Solaris 10 U10, and then installing some new UPS's. The M4000 was otherwise rather uneventful, but a notable detail was that the XSCF console port still only handshakes with fucking 100mbit. Which means, that some of our more high-end Cisco-gear don't really want to talk to it. Which means, just for this purpose, we have to hook it up to a switch that also talks 100mbit. I wonder how much more it could honestly cost, considering it's a several-ten-thousand-euro machine. Twenty cents? Bring it Oracle, our budget can take it!
Did i mention the price of coffee is rising something crazy here in Finland? Well if not, then i'll say it now. The price of coffee is rising something crazy here in Finland. Honestly. The brand of espresso i buy, from Paulig, has gone up nearly a euro. For a five euro bag to now cost six-ish euros, is pretty steep. For 250 grams of pre-ground coffee, that is. And since i have my DeLonghi espresso-machine, i can't really not use it, being the caffeine-addict that i am. I still mostly drink instant coffee, which will probably be frowned upon by most people. But seriously, try it out. Forget the preconceptions. The coffee i drink mostly is Nescafés' Classic (used to be Red Cup). The price of that has also gone up, but.. It's kind of like gasoline. We said "we refuse to drive if gasoline costs over 1.50 euros" (which it now does), but yet, the traffic jams each morning are as bad as they ever were. I wonder if 2 euros will be the limit? Probably not. So keep on raising those prices Oil and Gasoline-guys, we can still take it further up the ass!
On the OpenBSD-front, i did some upgrading of my 4.9 box, to bring it up to -current. It was a fun and educational experience. Waiting for 5.0, even though it won't be anything revolutionary, as the OpenBSD schedule advances .1 every 6 months. Round numbers mean nothing. Except maybe symbolically. I did not manage to get the kernel to build, and Google wasn't being too helpful. I'll have to look at that some other time.
My pet peeve privacy is probably going to take a big hit thanks to our glorious Minister of the Interior, Päivi Räsänen (of the beloved Christian Democratic party). She's now come out and said that she would support releasing fingerprint data collected for new biometric passports since 2009 for use in criminal investigations of "serious crime". Now take a seat and close your eyes. The other one too. And go way back to 2009. We were told that this new biometric data being added to the passports was due to international pressure, and would not be used for anything else except travel related identification. You can open your eyes now, and fast forward to 2011. What are they saying? They want to give the data to cops who are investigating "serious crimes"? Gee-whiz! I never saw this coming! Slide something in, convince people it's not what they think, and then fuck them over once they've forgotten about what you said. Also, who the hell decides what a serious crime is? But yeah, i guess that was the previous administration who made all those promises, so in our grand democratic system, those things are all forgotten and buried. But rest assured, i have not forgotten. And lucky me! I'm up for a passport renewal (since they cut the maximum validity of a passport from 10 to 5 years...), so i'll have to get a passport with the fingerprint if i want to go to the US next year for Hope number..9? Is it really number nine already? I guess.
Enough ranting for this post.
Kabuki
Yesterday i had a delightful meal at Kabuki in Helsinki. It's probably the best Japanese restaurant in Helsinki (or so i'm told). I don't have anything to compare to, but i did like the food.
Let me describe the place. It's a pretty inconspicuous-looking place at the corner of Lapinlahdenkatu and Työmiehenkatu. Walking in, you're greeted by someone from the staff, who asks you to remove your shoes, as the restaurant is shoe-free except for the vestibule. There are eight tables, two of which are .. i guess Japanese-styled, where you sit on the "floor". That area is actually raised from the floor, but anyway. The restaurant opens at 17:00, and we had one of the low floor-seat tables booked. The place was booked for the entire evening, and people kept walking in asking for tables without reservations. I'm not sure how much in advance you have to do your reservation, but it's not a place you just walk in to. And this was on a Tuesday!
Sitting down was not an easy task for some of our entourage, but we all eventually found our places. I'm a small chap, so i found it rather comfortable to sit cross-legged at that low table. They had, as i mentioned, 6 regular tables, but we wanted the Japanese experience, whatever that may mean.
We ordered assorted drinks first, including some "Japanese" beer, called Asahi. Which was actually made in the Czech republic, which was printed with the smallest possible font at the bottom of the label. But none the less.
The menu can be confusing at first, because you kind of have to flip back and forward if you don't read Japanese. On the first two pages, you have the kanji (?) and the english versions of the dishes, but then when you get to the other dishes, which are combinations of different things, you just get the japanese name of the dish, but with a number, that corresponds to the first two pages. Confused? Good. Anyway, we managed to get some appetizers ordered, including Ebi Furai (deep fried scampi, flounder, and octopus), Yakitori (chicken skewers), and some dish with fresh tuna that i missed the name of, possibly the Sashimi Moriawase.
The main courses were ordered next, along with a beaker of warm Okunomatsu Junmai Ginjo sake. This was our waitresses recomendation, out of the three standard sake varieties. It was a warm, very sweet liquid, which wasn't overwhelmingly strong, but not something i'd drink on it's own. With the food it was alright. They had an 81 euro premium sake, but we decided not to order that, even though we were on the company dime.
I had the Sukiyaki, which was one of the two "table-made" dishes (the other being Yakiniku). Basically, they bring out a cast-iron pan, and turn on a gas-stove which is at the center of your table. When the pan has heated, the waitress brings out a tray of different items. She started out by taking a small dollop of fat, to see that the pan was properly heated. After that, she started piling on the different components: very thin slices of beef, leeks, chinese cabbage, bamboo, shitake mushrooms and noodles, adding the Sukiyaki sauce as she went. The sauce consists simply of sake (or mirin, which is not as alcoholic?), sugar and soy-sauce. With everything simmering away in front of us, she brings a cup with a raw egg inside, which she informs me, is for dipping. She tells us to wait a few minutes, and then enjoy. Totally awesome!
The beef was absolutely succulent. Marbled to perfection, and cut so thin you almost couldn't see the slices (Seinfeld reference, never mind). The sauce made everything soft and sweet, and you then started picking up pieces with your chopsticks, dipping them in the raw egg, and then eating it. An absolutely delightful dish for 18 euros.
Dessert consisted of green-tea ice cream, which was rather odd-tasting, but not altogether bad. Two from our group had red-bean ice cream, which was equally odd, but not repulsive either.
All in all a great place to eat, if you remember to book in advance, with fair prices and good service. The only thing that was kind of weird was the decor, which consisted of hockey-jerseys, clubs and skateboards filled with signatures. How does this fit in with the theme, i have no idea. But it's not stifling or bothering, so i guess.. rock on.
Check out their website at http://www.kabuki.fi/
I feel like titling every post ‘Random’
Yeah I'm bad at figuring out titles for my posts, so they will be..what they are. For now.
I've been back at work for about 7 days now, and I'm already pretty stressed out. Nothing I can't handle, but still. A decent reminder that yes, i have a job that i do well, but that is not easy to do well without feeling the effects.
My home garden is still alive, and looking better than ever. The balcony-project has been growing lettuce for many many weeks and providing tasty goodies for many a salad. The basil is looking good as well, and right in the middle, you can see some slow-growing parsley.Inside i have another similar box which has some Chives, and some Rucola growing in it. They are not yet in representable condition, so pics will have to wait.
Home-growing (not that, hippies), I've found, is quite satisfying, even on this small scale. But in an urban environment (such as in our bustling megacity of a capital, Helsinki), small is where the game is at. Word.
I had the weirdest dream last night. Perhaps one of the weirdest ever, and all without any mind blowing, groovy, 60's drugs. Basically it was me, my father and my paternal grandfather (who just turned 90, props) on the yard of one of their previous homes. For some reason, which was not explained by anything else by twisted dream-logic, he had.. a cake. Growing out of his left temple. It had apparently started out as just a.. splotch, and dismissed as something old people just "get". But then it started growing, and turned out to be a cake. And it kept growing and growing. I found a screw on the top side of this cake (at this point he was unable to move because of the size of the cake), and i for some reason, reasoned that this screw is what holds the entire thing in place. So we started turning the screw, which eventually released the cake.
Now if this isn't fubar, get a load of this. On the side of the cake was.. a door. Opening the door revealed a bakery or a coffee shop. A coffee shop inside a giant cake, growing out of a mans head. And there were people, employees, inside this giant cake/bakery .. thing! So i promptly told them to get the fuck out of the giant cake, and to leave my grandfather alone. The shift-manager, was this weird.. Stepford-Wife kind of person who just had this creepy smile on her face, and without commenting on the weirdness of the situation, calpped her hands merrily, and asked the other employees to leave. I think her happy (creepy happy) face and demeanor was the last thing i saw in this dream.
I would wager i had some late-night fever or something, because never, in my nearly 30 years, have i had a dream that was this fucking convoluted. I've been fighting some viral infection for a few days, so it might explain things.
This is so fucked up, you have to realize i could not possibly make this shit up.
So what else. Finished the patio/whatever at the cottage, and it now kicks ass:
Kick. Ass.
Still don't reaaaally have a well-behaving Ubuntu 11.04 with kernel 3.0 rc[n]. It does boot, but i get bogged down with a bunch of issues. I've been posting some bug reports, but most of it has already been posted. So there's not much i can add. But i try to do my share.
I love how Linus Torvalds has taken up using Google+ to announce new kernels and other misc stuffs. Not sure i like google+ though. It's turning into facebook for me, which i left nearly 2 years ago. The only thing I'm liking more, is the way it handles links and media, for some reason. Facebook might be just as good nowadays. Who knows. The games addition is (not yet at least) as bad as Facebook, since you can actually choose to opt in to seeing game-related content. So i don't have to follow your progress on fucking Mafia wars or some other inane piece of productivity-waste.
I started reading Devil's Eye, by Jack McDevitt. So far it's basically a "far-in-the-future", as in millennia from now, detective story. So far. The sole reason i picked it up, out of the blue, was that i was reading an article on Hypernovas (as opposed to Supernovas), and the article mentioned that this book features a hypernova. That sounded interesting,so i placed my order.
Ok enough rambling. I'll update with some stuff on my HTPC at a later date.
Assembly 2011 – My notes
Assembly 2011 came and went as it always does, the first weekend of August. Pretty much a standard deal, nothing revolutionary on any front really. We only got some attendee tickets this year, as our usual gang kind of fell apart. We've usually had 7-10 computer-seats for our crew. Having just the 40 euro attendee ticket wasn't bad. You always had a place to sit. The WLAN mostly worked (thanks probably go to the netcrew placing more AP's in the arena, and Cisco...), and you were more free to come and go as you wished. We live 10 minutes away from Hartwal Arena where the venue is held, so it wasn't a big thing to go home, grab a bite to eat, watch a movie or something. We were mostly on the Arena for the compos.
There were not really any mind blowing entries this year, except for perhaps the particle-laden "Spin" by Andromeda Software Development. It had some pretty awesome stuff in it! Also, the real wild compo had two entries that I really got a kick out of. One was built around an Arduino-platform with an LCD screen, and the other was a freestanding, rotating led-thingamajig that displayed text and images. Absolutely kick-ass!
The attendees are still mostly young and getting fatter by the year. Top three games are, as last year, Counter Strike, Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft. Not too hard to see. Kids still have a hard time realizing that this is a demo event, and not a huge lan party. When the compo starts. we get the KAAL, or the Kill All Audio and Lights. This is a sign to stop playing, shut down your fucking Rihanna or whatever crap you're listening to, and look at the big screen. And ever year it fails, because our darling 13-year-old rebels will wait until 3000 people are screaming at them until they shut everything down. Or they start playing music when the call for KAAL (see what i did there?) comes. I get it, it's very rebellious, and you get to go back to your school and tell everyone what a tough guy you are. Also i get that when you get home, you cant:
- Have that nude chick as your wallpaper because your mom will take offense
- Play loud music
- Play games 72 hours straight
Being at home feels like being castrated. And there, in the bosom of Hartwall Arena, you get to be king for four days. It's probably a great thrill.
But next year, if i decide to go, and i see a fucker pull this shit... I'll just buy a bag of cheap wrenches from Clas Ohlsson and start throwing them around. I'll go medieval.
Booth bitches and other promo-whores are getting ever more popular, which is really boring. They go around in their microshorts and talk to gamers and ask stupid questions and act like they know something. Then they hand out a fucking 10 cent lanyard or some other piece of shit. I remember one year, they came to our area and i think asked one of us why he or she had two screens. "Does that mean you're really pro?". No, it means go away you dumb shit. They are just doing their job, but what do we really get out of all this except a throbbing headache. Maybe the kids get something else. I don't know. I find them annoying.
No 64K intro compo this year, because there was only one entry. Loads of 4k entries. None among them legendary. The 64k intro was put into the demo category, and came in second, which was deserved. Fairlight & alcatraz did a good job there.
Rovio was prominent with their own booth, and their own KAAL which was fucking awesome. Rovio, according to the organisers, actually got their start at Assembly 2003, i think. Which is cool!
Concerts on the main stage instead of every-night raves? Not so cool. We had Machinae Supremacy, who don't play too well i think. And we had Press Play on Tape, who were good, but a bit too loud. Get off my lawn. And next year? Can we have the bloody raves back...
Ok that's about it. A different experience for me this year, and next year... Well who knows. Maybe i'll go, maybe i won't. Like i say every year.
Check out the Results from all the compos here.
To download any of the entries, go to scene.org
My non-edited, non-framed, non-hipsterized photos from Assembly 2011 can be seen here.
Vacation-man posts again
So i'm on week two of my four-week summer vacation. Still reading Broken Angels. I'm at the part with the scary nano tech. Thing.
I tried kernel 3.0 from the kernel ppa for ubuntu, but that didn't work out too well. I guess fglrx is to blame, because i received errors about it during kernel installation. It booted fine, but graphics were.. well there were no graphics. I decided to wait for a while with 3.0. I've been practicing a bit of perl during my off hours; just basic scripts and stuff. It's funny that i actually started out with perl during elementary school. We had this computer club that was i think once a week, and we had a guy from TKK come and teach us. He taught us perl at the tender age of.. what eight? Anyway. I remember it fairly well and it's fun to do perl again. Back then it was simple stuff, but a good foundation, now that i look back at it.
Google+ is.. well it's there. It's not like i'm using it or anything. It's just there. Many of my friends have moved a lot of their stuff (or so i surmise) to Google+ but for me it's just another platform to voice thoughts and place comments. I do like the integration of media, and how easy it is to upload photos or other stuff. I haven't tried the Hangout-thing yet, i don't have a webcam, except in my work-Thinkpad. I spend maybe 30 minutes a week on Google+ i'd say. I'm not sure i'll stay.
It's still unbearably hot in here. It's Finland for fucks sake. I didn't sign up for this. All my hardware has been running admirably, though, which is a bonus. I haven't spent as much time at the summerhouse as i'd like to, but that's due to other circumstances that i will not go into here. There's still a lot to do there, and i hope i can go next week.
Been playing a lot of (for me anyway) Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I have clocked a total of.. 88.5 hours of BC2. And it's still one of the best multiplayer FPS's if you ask me!
My little mini-garden on the balcony is bearing "fruit". I've got a bunch of salad, and the basil is coming along nicely. As it is still very hot and nice, i'm considering other stuff as well. Here's a pic!
Isn't it fucking great?
I found out that the apartment does have a 10/10mbit connection that is part of the rent. Provided by Elisa. Latencies were fuck-all, so it's probably very close to fiber. I do also have fiber up to the apartment, but no card with an SC connector to try it out with. Care to sponsor one for me? Heh, thought so. Not sure it's even hooked up. It probably needs to be ordered separately. Anyway.
Have a nice day.
Random Friday Ubuntu Tip
I was trying to customize Ubuntu just a bit, in regards to the "special folders", that is, ~/Public, ~/Videos etc. These are special, in that they are recreated and/or renamed every time you log in, back to their defaults. Where are these defaults you ask? So did i, and the answer is pretty simple, and easy to fix.
The main reason, not that anyone gives two shits, is that i wanted the directories to be lowercase only, because i hate hitting shift all the time to refer to the directories. Also, i don't like directories that i can't rename, remove or do whatever i like to. Kills the linux ethos in my humble opinion. Anyways, to the fix:
To rename the folders:
Edit a file in your home directory called .config/user-dirs.dirs. Syntax should be obvious.
To remove one or more folders and stop them from being recreated:
Edit a file called /etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf. Change the enabled=True, to enabled=False
Any renames or removes of the directories will keep after this.
Note that you have to atleast log out and then back in for the settings to be applied.
Thanks for this tip goes to http://superuser.com
Marvelous miscellania
Amazon delivered my copy of "Just for Fun" by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond. It's going to be a good read, i can feel it! In parallel i am still reading "Broken Angels" by Richard Morgan. Still recommend the latter.
I am also still on Ubuntu 11.04, but without Unity. I can't do it. I can't deal with unity, i can't seem to configure it so that i can use it sensibly. I can't deal with the side-menu thing popping in and out. I can't deal with not seeing the toolbars at all times, i can't deal with having the max,min and close buttons be on the left side if i maximize the window, when I've specified in gconf that i want them on the right side. I realize that i can configure these things somewhere. What i don't realize is why make things like this by default? Unless you've never used Ubuntu before, you're going to shit a brick. Me. No. Understandy.
Something i also realized was that something that changed in the propietary ATI driver, or Compiz, or some other relating concept messed up h.264 playback in Ubuntu. VLC would act as if something was wrong with the overlay.. The video was either entirely black, but with audio playing perfectly. Or, i'd get the video, but it was the top most level of everything. Try to open a menu like File in VLC, and the video would overlap that menu, so you wouldn't see it. Very annoying, and made watching video nearly impossible. The fix, or workaround for now, was to disable compiz entirely. Another annoying feature of Ubuntu 11.04 - The System - > Preferences - > Appearance tab that controlled compiz is gone. No way to disable it that way. You even have to download the compiz configuration manager separately if you want to configure it! So i did the metacity --replace trick to kill compiz and replace it with metacity, that does away with the overlay-problem.
A big sigh. But at least it works now.
It's also time to head out of the city and into the untamed wilderness known as our summer cottage. I started my four-week vacation, and i intend to spend a lot of the time out there. If i can. My allergies are acting up, and if they get bad enough, i can't stay there. Which blows.There's lots to do there. Some trees to cut down and chainsaw into pieces, a new balcony-thing to build. Some electrical work at the Sauna.
There's a shortage of podcasts to listen to in Summertime. Somehow. Or then there is too much time vs. the amount of podcasts, which is static.
I should try the 3.0 RC kernel. I have a colleague who's tried it under VMware Workstation, and says that it works well. There was some issue with it, but it was patched by someone (tm). I also read an interesting article that B pasted to me on the end of the AltQ in OpenBSD. You can read that here. PF has been serving me well since version 3.7 or 3.8, in a modest box sitting beneath my desk here, diligently filtering through all of my Internet traffic. It rarely breaks. And when it does, it's due to some syntax error in my configuration, or failing hardware. In any case, it's a great product.
A few minutes before writing this post, the Space Shuttle Atlantis separated from the International Space Station for the last time in Space Shuttle history. A sad moment. The end of an era. In all, the space shuttles spent over 300 days docked to the ISS. Sad to see it just floating away, the thrusters firing somberly to adjust slightly. I get a slight scifi kick from it all. Seeing the planet drift by below at blistering speeds. To see an orbital sunrise live from my own PC. A final victory lap around the station, and she is gone. Starting de-orbiting procedures. After this, the US has no way to get people into orbit, without help from the Russians. Next up, perhaps a commercial alternative. The Atlas V? Some rocket-based system in any case. Waiting for the Chinese to do their thing. Seeing the Russians put people up like they have for 50 years.No more space planes for a while. Not in the governmental sector anyway. Private spaceflight is the way to go for the next decades, mark my word.
Ok time to end this blabber and prepare for a departure of my own, to the summer house.
Distrohopping like a Motherfucker
Like the topic sez. I've been trying out different distros over the past weeks, and landed right back where i started. Basically. I've gone through Arch, Archbang, Xubuntu, Debian 6, and finally Ubuntu. This is sad to admit, but in all other distros, i had some deal breaker problems that i was unable to solve in a decent amount of time, and ended up valuing the fact that most things work pretty much out of the box on Ubuntu. I can't believe that i'm actually giving Unity a try as well! It's probably going out of the window pretty soon, because i just can't get a hang of how to use this most effectively. Things are sliding in and out of view.. i can't see what i'm running, i can't see the menu bar until i hover over it, and.. oh god. It's just not Gnome 2, y'know?
Arch i like. I like pacman, it feels right. It feels like 10 years ago, in a good way. But i ran into some stupid audio problems. And automounting usb sticks and the likes didn't work as well as i hoped it would. Now, I'm not saying the issues are unsolvable, they are not. But i gave them a reasonable amount of effort, and if it didn't work, then it was out of the game. For instance, Archbang, which is a bleeding edge rolling distro, like Arch, had massive problems with audio. Alsa lost my cards, or some mixer element, and i'm talking lost the entire /dev devices that were supposed to be there. The excellent Alsa Troubleshooting page was not able to save me, at least not as far as i could deduce. I was going to download Alsa and compile from source, but i said fuck that noise.
So here I am, typing away on Ubuntu 11.04, with Unity (shrug), and waiting for something to break so i can say "Aha! Told you so!". Deep down i know it won't break, not that badly anyway. Sure it's not a rolling distro. Sure it's for "noobs" but whatever. I mean i like to have a tool that gets the job done. Ubuntu has done a bad thing by taking in Unity, at least that's what i feel now. I guess I'm just getting too old. But it is *still* a pretty good out-of-the-box experience. No matter how you turn it. You can still do the Gnome Classic thing, and run with what you're used to. Xubuntu worked quite well too, but there were some issues there too. XFCE4 is pretty damn brilliant. KDE is just something i haven't touched for so many years.. It hurt me back then. Left me creepy voicemails. I'm not taking her back.
I've also been giving Google+ a whirl, mainly because it is not Facebook. I hopped off that wagon over a year ago, and i haven't looked back. Look, i don't care how many fucking melons your Farmville farm grows. I don't. Twitter is opt-in which i like, and you can easily grasp the concept, and with a short glance, see what people are saying. That's the main reason for using Twitter. Brevity. Now, Google+ is a new thing from Google. So naturally i had to try it. I got an invite from an old boss of mine, and soon i was typing away at something that is kind of like.. Facebook way back. Or an unbloated Facebook. But also not. It has some novel concepts, like the Circles, as a way to limit the distribution of whatever it is you are sharing. It's much more multimedia oriented, which i like. It has the whole Hangout thing. It has no Farmville.
But still I'm not sure what it gives me over using Twitter. It's status messages. It's people's doings and goings. It's Google. I dunno. I probably won't stick around, but I'll give it a run for it's money, that's for sure.
At home, we're still putting the finishing touches on the place. We're having some people over tomorrow, god knows what that'll be like. Tomorrow also marks the day i start my summer vacation. It could be in more relaxed circumstances, as I've been dealing with some nightmarish problems at work this past week. Somehow, even though i know i shouldn't bring my work home, i end up doing that anyway. Because i feel that it's somehow my duty. I want to do a good job, even if it means long hours. I want to make sure things are running smoothly. But i also know i desperately need a vacation. And the following four weeks are just what the doctor ordered.
Some Android bits and bobs: I've been running GingerReal 7.1.3 for the better part of a week now, and fucking hell it is a good ROM! My Galaxy S has longer battery life than ever, and the UI is snappy as hell. I'll probably do a proper writeup once I've played around with it some more. I've now had my Galaxy S for a year, and the only complaint i really have is the lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard. My next phone will have that, for sure, but I might go with the Galaxy S for as long as it goes. It's a solid phone, with a great community around it.
Weekend Activities
This week i have been mostly reading...NOTHING
Poor reference to some British comedy of the not-so-recent past. Anyway, what i want to say is I am currently re-reading the sequel (Broken Angels) to the excellent book by Richard Morgan, "Altered Carbon". If you like high-flying Sci-Fi, you'll like Richard Morgan's books. The paperbacks cost next to nothing on for instance play.com, so order up. Meanwhile, back at the point, i'm looking for something to read. The last "new" book i read was "Burning Chrome", by William Gibson, which was brilliant. The one before that was Zero Day, by Mark Russinovich which was a load of bollocks. The one before that was Kingpin by Kevin Poulsen, which was again a winner.
Any recommendations are welcome. And nothing that will bore me or insult me.
This weekend I've spent with my son. Later today, H will come back from a road trip to the untamed wilds of north-eastern Finland. Or somewhere. Before that i intend to clean the place, and do some re-wiring because the current wiring looks like un-diluted ass. A great inspiration to this was that Stefan Didak, workstation-GOD, has been posting a few things about his... 7th iteration of his famous home office. Check out his new posts here. If i had a billion googolplex of money, i'd do the same thing, but i'm stuck with my same old, same old. My next buy's will probably be an SSD drive for the operating system, as I've grown very fond of the Thinkpad T410s i have at work. Boot times are fast, well, it's a Thinkpad on top of that. Godlike. I willingly gave up my 17" pimped out Macbook Pro to get that Thinkpad. Many will say i am crazy, but I've found I'm much more a Thinkpad-guy than an Apple-guy. Other areas are really not an issue at the moment. RAM is enough at 4GB, and the graphics card, though old, (a Radeon 4850), is more than enough for the games i play. The past year i've played mostly Bad Company 2, and Civilization 5. Both of which run brilliantly on this card. Sure it's not 9001 FPS, but enough for me. CPU is quad-core and more than enough also. I would like a second screen, and that Ergotron arm that i originally set my sights on from a Stefan Didak post on his v. 6.0 home office.
I could also pick up on a new TV show. True Blood has continued, but no in Finland of course, so officially one cannot get any episodes yet. Same with Game of Thrones which was recently recommended to me by some younger geeks.
That was an adventure all on it's own, let me tell you. I was at this birthday party of a friend of H's. People.. 5-7 years younger than me, and apologizing in advance for being so geeky. I laughed and said i bet i'm more geeky than any of them. But i found that the term geek has now changed. I fiddled around with computers before these people were born! And they are seriously trying to over-geek me. But the thing is, geekdom is different. I was considered odd for not watching Anime. Or not having seen Game of Thrones (no time to watch that...yet), and so on. I did know nyan cat, but that's just because i hang around 4chan way too much. But basically i got comments like "How can you call yourself a geek!". I was stumped. I can install Gentoo! I can compile a kernel, while remotely installing a Solaris 10 server on the other side of the world. But.. i guess being a geek isn't just what it used to be. I really didn't fit into that crowd. "Have you watched Naruto?" -"Uh..what's a Naruto?". And then I'm faced with some apparently funny "music video" from some anime called Naruto. And inside, i was crying.
Passion for hardware
No, not this kind of passion you perverted fucks:
I'm talking about the thing that drives us to do this work. As a sysadmin, we're mostly invisible, and then extremely visible when things go wrong. It's a thankless job, but someone has to do it. So I've been thinking about what drives me to do it.
It's the passion.
Ever since I was young, I mean.. 5-years-young, I've been taking things apart and learning about how they work. It's been a rocky road of trial and error, but somehow, even from an early age, I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. And I'm doing it right now. What drove me to learn new things (and fix many old things), is still the driving force. The thing that gets me out of bed every morning to face new challenges at the office. Sure, the level has changed. The stakes are higher. Back in the day I might mess up and break a 1000 euro computer. Now it's a 40 000 euro computer, or a 100 000 euro piece of SAN equipment. But it's still just the same. The toys have just gotten a lot bigger.
Today at work, I took delivery of a new Sun (frack it, Oracle) blade server which I then assembled, updated and set up. After that, I did the same to a brand new IBM xSeries server. And I'm happy as a clam. Most people don't understand this. They think it'd get boring after a while. And it might. But it is not this day (had to slip that Aragorn quote in there, sorry). As long as I have a yearning to learn more, and a passion for the hardware and the things I work with, my job will never be dull. And most of all, it helps you go through those shitty days when the fecal-matter has hit that spinning thing.
Ok, so this was a really short post, and mostly just an excuse to post that picture. But it was something I devoted some thought to today, and this is why I had to type it up somewhere.