Sickie weekend

I've been feeling kinda sick this weekend, it must have been all those late nights and long days while travelling up to Brissy. Saturday was good enough to head out for a late 1pm breakfast at the South Melb markets with Steph and Simon.
I somehow made it to the gym for a good workout later in the afternoon before it started going downhill Saturday night and now I'm nursing a sore throat and body aches. =(

No matter, best way to get over any sickness is to distract yourself doing something else: So I spent all Sunday tinkering around on my PC.

Remember a couple of weeks back I was writing about experimenting with non-window$ based operating systems?
I finally did get down to giving Ubuntu a shot and almost drove myself to the edge of madness in the process.
Long story short: It is working now, and yes it was really fucking difficult to set up my wireless Internet connection on this damm thing (because yours truly had to use the top of the line WPA2 encryption). Not to mention sound, video and everything else.
I could almost pick up drinking again because of the stress involved in this.

.... but that's all sorted out now.... thankfully!

Here's some screenshots of how it looks. For normal web surfing, listening to music, chatting on messenger and stuff, it runs sweet and is stable as a rock. Not to mention it has a pretty slick interface.


Pretty much the default theme with a cool wallpaper in the background. Everything that I could do in WindowsXP, I can do here too now.



I'm running a music player called Amarok here, you can see the house channel from Digitally Imported running in the background and it even remembers and keeps a list of track titles and the times they were streamed.

So it was an acronym after all

A brilliant thing happened this morning; I got to the office building only to find everyone locked out from our floors. Apparently there was a burst water pipe on the 32nd floor and water was seeping into the floors below which posed an electrical hazard.

I waited around the lobby and talked shit with some colleagues while building management allowed small groups of us to use the goods lift under supervision of a safety warden to go to our floors to collect any valuables. The 27th floor where I worked looked fine except for the desks near the windows where water was raining down from the ceiling boards. Too bad I didn't bring my camera today to take some snaps.

I retrieved my laptop and am now working remotely from a couch facing the window with an awesome view from the Accenture offices below. Its amazing what you can do with wireless networking and remote access passes. =)

Remember back in this post I was bitching about the stupid names that IT people give their systems? Apparently FROG did stand for something: Feedback Register for Organisational Growth. Yep, of course it sounds perfectly logical......
The funny thing was that nobody on our project knew what it stood for the last 7 months.

Tech. Consulting Workshop

Monday was a bit of a struggle getting out of bed, after all the shenanigans over the big weekend.

Thank god I had a 2 day workshop at the Hilton to break up the monotony.

This was a networking event for all the Technology Consulting practitioners in Accenture's SEAAK (SE Asia, Australia, Korea) region. A huge part of the costs are borne by companies like HP, Sun, IBM and the other big boys of the software/hardware industry as it was opportunity for vendors to showcase the latest and greatest in what they can do for today's businesses. Essentially we are the people that will be using these products to fuel our client engagements and improve the way businesses are run.

Did I say networking? Yes, the integral part of all business events cannot be complete without business cards being tossed around like bits of colourful confetti and names exchanged as fast as they are forgotten. Ahhh..... its like going to a computer fair, except a million times better because instead of getting nothing but shitty pamphlets you actually get cool freebies thrown at you and the vendors shout you lunch/dinner/endless drinks.

An example of cool technology being developed were: The Next Generation Data Centers for companies, that strive to be as close to carbon neutral as possible. (Data Centers require massive amounts of air conditioning; these new ones run faster, smarter, with less power and less air conditioning)

I got home that night at 2am, very drunk, carrying a brand new Dell926 All-In-One printer in a box and a massive bag full of promotional materials.

These are perks of the job I REALLY like ! =)

FreeBSD vs Ubuntu

I have had it with the Windows operating system! Microsoft's overpriced OS with its slow and chunky interface, choppy response time and instability can kiss itself goodbye from my desktop very soon!

When Windows2000 came out, I thought it was great (compared to how shit Win95, Win98 and WinME was). Finally a 32bit (almost) operating system which was much more stable than its predecessors. Then Windows XP came along which was essentially Windows2000 with a few modifications under the hood. It ran great too, but not quite. Programs get installed and crap gets left all over your registry and hard drive.

Therefore: I'm going to trial out 2 different operating systems to run my PC on this weekend.



FreeBSD, which is a Unix like system descended from AT&T Unix.




Ubuntu, a Linux like system based on the Debian GNU/Linux but with a stronger focus on usability.


Considering that 99% of the time, I use my PC for basic stuff like surfing the net, downloading stuff and watching movies, its reliability, up time and robustness that is of the paramount importance to me. I can't be bothered doing all that fluffy stuff like customizing screen savers, wallpapers and all that nonsense. I am a pragmatic PC user, I need it to work fast and efficient, period!