Month: June 2000

30 Jun 2000 »

I was talked into going skiing this weekend. Then I worked out what I have to do to get to the conference next week (the SAGE-Au conf on the Gold Coast) and the doco I’ve promised work, and skiing became too difficult.

Don’t mind the cold white stuff, as I have quite ample heat shielding (coming off at the rate of ~ 1 kg a week). But given a choice of skiing and apres ski, apres ski wins big time. I actually prefer doing winery tours and staying in bed and breakfasts – preferably run by people like my Mum. Skiing in Australia is winter surfing for the tennis crowd. Expensive. New Zealand has much better skiing, but right now Perisher had a huge dump of new fresh snow, so I’m sure my friends will have a hoot.

hackery

Still no sign of the Suse contract papers. Oh well. They’ll come.

Had fun with an EMC SAN store. Tried to get them to let me create a 4 TB reiserfs volume from my laptop, but testing schedule is tight, and connecting a laptop via a fibrechannel is not possible right now. Might try again when we get the Alteon fibre card working under Linux for the SOE we are preparing. That’d be nifty to do a df on.

Talking to a new group that I wasn’t aware of who are working on XDSM. Hopefully, I can help them get HSM into reiserfs natively, so the last vestiges of “not enterprise ready” go away.

furniture

Eskil, Ikea is good as long as you like screwing stuff together, but when it comes to couches, have a look around. I looked at a Ikea couch, and it was okay and a little flat and hard. I then went to a local manufacturer (you may be able to get them) called “Moran” who hail from Melbourne Australia. They make the most beautiful furniture for surprisingly small amounts. I priced a three seater recliner couch and two massively overstuffed recliner arm chairs for $4500 AUD (Australian peso’s 🙂 with leather. Ikea could sell me that hard self assembled couch for $1100. Chuck in two nearby arm chairs, and the price went to about $2300. But the Moran stuff was sooooo much better. 10 year guarantee and they make it for you in any covering that they offer in the style of chair/lounge you go for.

Even if you don’t go for a Moran, all I’m suggesting is that Ikea are not that cheap when it comes to the big things, and couches and arm chairs are with you for 10+ years. Make a wise choice now – go visit a speciality store.

21 Jun 2000 »

depression
There’s so much macho crap about being your average beer swilling Aussie male that it’s really hard to grasp the concept of being on a drug for more than a course of anti- biotics (about 2 weeks). I might be depressed from time to time, thinking about my family’s tragic past, or upon my own failures as a human (slackness (sigh), singleness (sigh), being a big fat bastard (I’m on Jenny Craig, 9 kg gone), bills (which I can afford, but hate nonetheless), the usual crop of angst), but then I cheer up, usually by getting on the phone to some of my mates or just spending some quality time with my two cats. Total Annilihation also works.

I have a friend who would truly benefit from such a constant supply of something that would smooth out the troughs and peaks. I dread these calls, but being a Chinese- Taiwanese-Australian, the taboo of taking legal mind altering drugs and seeing a shrink is too much for her and what she claims is her culture (which is basically Australian from age 4, with Taiwanese parents, obviously). I just hope she can get over this thing before she does what I think she will, so she will have a chance of seeing her 30th birthday.

Of course, I have other friends and acquantainces who say “ditch the bitch”, but I think they do not understand.

work

Cool – I am at a single client for the rest of my stay at my current employer, and the new contract is in the mail. I’m happy for both reasons! 🙂

hackery

Sad to see Suse go from the laptop, as I was just getting it to be useful, but it’s basically a tool for me to do my primary work, which is doco (and lots of it), e-mail and interoperability with clients. One day, Suse’ll do me, but not yet.

I’ll have to get the FM801 card under alsa working and get the IO-APIC SMP stuff sorted before Suse freeze 7.0 on me.

18 Jun 2000 »

laptops and Suse
I’ve had a horror week, not least caused by Partition Magic ripping the guts out of my laptop when I moved and resized my Win2K partition to make room for a fullish install of Suse 6.4. Luckily I don’t trust PM or any partitioner, and so I had a backup.

Suse took a long time to install, and after which I didn’t have any PC Card (pcmcia to the sticklers who haven’t been to pcmcia.org in about five years) stuff because I have a Toshiba and Suse ship an unbelieably ancient pcmcia-cs, and my USB mouse didn’t work because they had failed to test it with the kernel they boot by default (usbdevfs or something like that didn’t mount, so no USB). I love my USB mouse, and I compiled my way into submission. I finally managed to get a network connection some four days after installing Suse as my only OS. I must point out that I’ve been very busy working for my current client, and it’s not me being very slack or crap at Linux. It only took about 30 minutes to locate and download the relevant bits (a newer pcmcia-cs and alsa for sound, didn’t manage that) and recompile a couple of times. But in real time, it took four days due to the incredibly hectic schedule I kept whilst in Melbourne.

It’s interesting to note that I was able to work for a week with just Linux, doing word processing (on StarOffice, which feels like a bad Word 6) et al, but now that I have over 900 messages streaming into Outlook, I am so happy I was able to recover all my messages. I can’t live without e- mail, and until there’s an Outlook 2000 class e-mail package for Linux, I can’t make the final switch. Don’t give me any of the ” is better than Outlook” or “urgh, how can you use MS crap?” type of things, because I firmly believe that Outlook is living proof of the maxim that if you let MS improve something until it’s right, they’ll eventually do so. MS don’t manage perfection with all their products (Win3.x & Win9x are perfect examples of crap at work), but Outlook is e-mail ambrosia. It’s fast, clever, functional, deals with the 190 MB of mail I have on there at the moment with aplomb, and can handle POP3 and IMAP servers like nothing else. In short, I’d sleep with it if I could.

Work

just returned from a week in Melbourne when I had just returned from a week in Brisbane. I have documentation due from the project I sort of completed in Sydney the week before that. In addition, I have my SAGE-Au paper to finish (due two weeks ago), and finally, a 16-20 page edition of SAGE Advice, the SAGE-Au journal. busy. I need the 36 hour day.

Home & Work situation

Went house hunting and mortgage enquiring on the weekend whilst I was in Melbourne (my original & preferred home town – I live in Sydney at the moment, and it’s awful). The problem is that the banks and mortgage brokers will not talk to you if you don’t have like four months worth of savings, even though I earn more than most two income families. And if I become self-employed, as I do want to (to work for Suse, see previous entries), I’ll need two *years* worth of company tax returns before I can borrow a maximum of 75% of the total cost of the house. If I hold off moving jobs, I can do the four month thing, and get a loan and then transfer to my own company, but that’s giving me the total willies in case cash flow becomes a problem. I want my own place, dammit I can afford my own place. Every time I use a home loan calculator, I can easily afford nearly all the townhouses, houses and occasionally even small mansions in the suburbs I want to live in. With the cats, apartment/units are out.