Ok, a few things have changed. I now have a work laptop with remote VPN access to work, and a work mobile phone (with full email capability via GPRS). This is a bad sign, but it’s the first time it’s happened to me, so the old fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me proverb (of Chinese origin) applies. It won’t be happening again, my curiosity won’t stray that far again. Plus I only recently got a new desktop PC at work, and it’s sweet. For the time being I’m trying to keep both, but really it’s the laptop I don’t really need (except when traveling). The thing is I don’t want to be doing after hours support, and I don’t intend to. Thus far each call has eaten a bit more of my soul and the bottom of the barrel is within sight. There will be changes.

Your stuff owns you as much as you own it. (from here) I’ve come to really believe in this, yet I still buy stuff. I’ve recently acquired a digital camera and because of this I was able to put some pictures up (but read on and look at them afterwards). I also bought the laptop I’ve been wanting for so long. I guess money can bring happiness to a certain extent, but it can’t buy everything. The laptop is definitely a good move in the general scheme of things.

My file server upgrade is nearly complete. After selling 5 WD1200JB’s off (2 left) I replaced my 6 disk Raid5 setup (1 hot spare) with 4 WD2500JD’s again in Raid5 (no spares). The final step will be migrating from a boot hard drive to a compact flash boot, but I haven’t quite perfected the image yet. Currently I’m toying with CFLinux, uClibc’s buildroot and Mandrake. I must say I’m quite impressed with Mandrake 10’s minimal install, it is very small compared to other full distributions (except debian which is smaller). The Mandrake install I’m using is around 220meg total installed size, including raidtools, LVM2, 2.6 kernel, samba 3 which is all I’m after anyway.

I managed to escape to have a round of golf with Russ again, I enjoy golf.

Found this site which has cooking suggestions written for those with analytical minds. Cooking For Engineers. I also rediscovered Mysterious Cities Of Gold, and downloaded the 9gig of Mpegs available via Bit Torrent here.

I discovered how good vector drawing is. Sodipodi is a fairly easy to use tool that generates SVG’s. But a few useful tutorials are needed to truely get up and going with it, icons and Melbourne.

Some of the photos I took are here, well these are the geeky ones first.

Others things that is new is my web host; White Llama Networks. Sign up now and benefit from some free months. Yep, splat.cx is no longer coming to you from my second bedroom.

My offshore trip got postponed due to more software bugs. Sigh, how panda! Now I have to wait till mid October. Damn my former employer to hell !

Why make things difficult, when it is possible to make them cryptic and totally illogical, with just a little bit more effort?

Home Alone 3 is better than Home Alone 4 by several factors of cool. But it still fails to make great status. It was better than 4 because for one, the kid (not Kevin McCallister) does set some traps, though many a kid would not be capable of doing. Still he does get a kick ass radio controlled 4×4 with a video camera strapped onto it running round the neighborhood. Honestly the film is entertaining, but I wouldn’t be slapping down money to buy it.