| quick update |
[Jul. 20th, 2007|10:20 am] |
drive by personal update:
* got bumped a level (now apparently lead designer for the company's flagship product range),
* found an attractive, intelligent, kooky woman that I actually want to hang on to, appear to be capable of doing so, and who is showing every sign of reciprocating,
* have this horrible head cold that's taking weeks to shake off,
* got a little bit fatter (too much good wine and food and not cycling in winter),
* buggered up my taxes (not horribly badly, just annoying),
* learned to control my spending,
* killed another Kentia palm through neglect,
* became a facebook victim,
* and regained my taste for JG Ballard. |
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| Utility grids |
[Jul. 11th, 2007|02:34 am] |
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Amazon S3/EC2 compute grid. Anyone using it, in anger or otherwise? Yay or nay? |
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| daemons |
[Jul. 10th, 2007|09:48 pm] |
So for a few months now I've been admiring what Solaris has become in the Nevada releases aka OpenSolaris aka Solaris Express. But just looking over the list of stuff in the Q2/2007 FreeBSD Status Reports I have a feeling that FreeBSD 7-RELEASE will kick everyone's arses in the virtualisation arena. With ZFS, gvirstor, full network virtualisation inside Jails, Xen dom0 support, and HVM support via lkvm/qemu it covers the whole shebang from filesystem cloning, thin storage provisioning, kernel virtualisation, interface virtualisation, paravirtualisation and hardware virtualisation. A more resilient install/upgrade toolset and front-end is just candy. Decent support for 10gigE is coming along; pNFS would be nice; the lack of a iSNS/iSCSI/FC target stack in the base is a glaring omission. But no Unix has a good FC target yet; if Solaris or FreeBSD get one, sell your NetApp shares.
In the meantime, Linux once again thinks it's cool to futz with the kernel allocator in the middle of a so-called stable release series. And if that isn't flamebait I don't know what is. |
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| bang bang |
[Jun. 18th, 2007|12:52 pm] |
No my dear friends, I was not one of those shot. Although, yes, I was only metres away at the time. And much love to the many who sms'd/called/mailed to check. No, they didn't catch him yet, he's still running around. And they closed the surrounding streets. As I.D. said, "I can't come to work because of the gunman loose outside" has to be in the top 10 best excuses.
(although there are people who read this blog for whom it's a daily hazard) |
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| playlouder |
[May. 23rd, 2007|10:21 am] |
A London friend of mine is building the Playlouder MSP and is offering beta DSL accounts with legal unlimited music sharing (contracts and content from both majors and independents) for UKP18/month.
They're a bunch of music and tech nerds. If you're interested I'll put you touch. |
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| Die Schöpfung |
[May. 17th, 2007|03:08 pm] |
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Haydn's The Creation, Royal Melbourne Philharmonic at the Town Hall, May 26. Who's in? (a colleague is one of lead tenors; can score cheaper tickets). (flyer) |
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| Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing |
[May. 15th, 2007|01:16 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  jubilant | ] |
The RSC is here in August, and they're bringing Ian McKellen with them, and pitching us both King Lear and The Seagull. Lear is the play, as far as I'm concerned. The first time I realised the theatre could be not merely bearable, but magnificent: Robert Stephens's splendid and sadly (for him) fatal Lear at Stratford in 1993. I've already been spoiled by Pharoah Sanders and McCoy Tyner this year. I feel like a parched man in the desert, on whom it is suddenly lightly and sweetly raining. Only e.g. a season of Philip Glass conducted by Philip Glass could top it. |
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| too long, edit this entry, you're waffling you idiot |
[May. 2nd, 2007|07:18 pm] |
So I'm in the gym. And I have this particular circuit, once a week, 100 reps of this, 50 reps of that on one arm, fifty on the other and so on, it's an endurance workout, and we time each set and the whole elapsed time, and so on. And we record the times, of course, because my endurance is supposed to improve, and I'm sure it is, and we're talking about it and I mention to my PT that the aggregate time is down from 40 minutes to 36. And she says not to worry about that, that I shouldn't add up the numbers - it's a column of twelve time measurements - it's something I shouldn't be thinking about, that I think too much and so on. She's a good trainer - excellent actually, and I've chewed through a few, so I should know, you know - but she doesn't realise that in fact I look at the numbers, and I can't help adding them up. It's like looking at a frog, and knowing it's a frog - to not know that the frog is a frog would require brain damage, or a philosophy degree, or a very arid upbringing. The numbers add themselves up. She can't understand this, and that's fine, she's trained in sports psychology not cognitive science. And I'm reminded how different people can be. |
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| towel fluff |
[May. 2nd, 2007|07:15 pm] |
I seem to have one of those faces that towel fluff sticks to. Every morning I dry off with the nice big fluffy towels, and every morning I have to rinse and dry my face again with one of the rough, threadbare towels, because of all the lint on my chin. I'm left wondering if it's Just Me or whether Everybody Does This.
This utterly trivial myspace-grade blog entry brought to to you by: Musashi chocbanana protein bars. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 16th, 2007|12:30 am] |
There is a lot uninspiring (and horrifically overpriced) about the Melbourne Jazz Festival 2007, but one gig leaps out.
No, not Herbie Hancock, although he will be interesting.
The gig of the series has to be the Pharaoh Sanders / McCoy Tyner double bill on May 12. Which is approximately as close as you can get now to a night with John Coltrane. If you want to come with, contact me very soon, because I'm buying the (eye-gougingly priced) tickets this week. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 10th, 2007|11:56 pm] |
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Sometimes I simply feel terribly and unaccountably happy. I'm not describing lunatic moodswings, never fear. On occasion it feels as though due to someone thinking about me, and that includes this evening. So whoever was thinking of me tonight, hello, and I love you too. |
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| Ruthless Day |
[Apr. 9th, 2007|07:39 pm] |
Once every couple of years I take a stern look at my arrangements. I am rarely pleased.
The usual finding is that my finances are in disarray, my clothes need replacing, my cutlery is missing, my friends aren't talking to me, my health is worrysome and everything needs cleaning.
And that I have Too Much Stuff and it's all become unmanageable.
My usual response is to throw things away. Inwardly I name it "Ruthless Day", where I go through everything that has piled up and dispose of anything I really couldn't care less about holding onto.
This year has been Ruthless Weekend and has coincided with Easter. So far, eight twelve sacks of junk have headed to the garbage or the recycling bins. Piles of old magazines. Torn and worthless clothes. That free three months of The Age. Boxes full of smaller boxes. Electronic junk ranging from unidentifiable cables to an old mac. A heap of dried-out herbal teas. Empty bottles. An entire set of shelves. &c.
It's liberating. Ideally I would own very little - just the minimum to cook, live, sleep, be entertained, be creative, be fit. In particularly the inner geektoy hoarder needed to get over itself. And over it, it has got.
This is all kinda a prelude to moving, of course. I've mentally outgrown this apartment, and moved on from the guy I was in my 20s.
And the other things? My cashflow is stable, my clothes fit nicely, I'm short on spoons and long on chopsticks, my blender died, I'm keeping properly in touch with most of my friends, my health and fitness has never been better in all my 31 years, and there's far less dust than I was expecting. And I'm enjoying work again. 2007 should be a terrific year; I've not been this happy and content in ages. The only thing really missing is someone to share it with, right here and right now. But it turns out that this is a small sadness. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 8th, 2007|12:37 pm] |
I need a tailor. A really good gentleman's tailor. One who can bring in a couple of suits of mine, copy a favourite jacket, and maybe make me a couple of new suits. Will need references. In melbourne, preferably CBD or inner suburbs.
(My mental picture is a small leathery man who's done nothing else forever, smells slightly dusty, only ever uses the finest italian suit wool, and operates out of a small warehouse space above Collins Street where he's been for 40 years, telling stories about making clothes for princes in monaco and portly industrialists in covent garden, and knows your dimensions within 10 seconds of meeting you without resorting to a tape measure) |
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| where next |
[Apr. 8th, 2007|12:43 am] |
Decided to move to North Melbourne.
Already identified my ideal place: the old Tramhouse at 201 Abbotsford. It pushes my three buttons for newhome: * Old brick * Wooden floors * High angled ceilings. The numbers don't add up for me right now, but they should by the end of the quarter. I won't lift a finger to sort this out yet, though it'll make me very happy when I do. |
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| Storage rant |
[Mar. 23rd, 2007|08:19 pm] |
This is a rant, and is one for the geeks.
My least favourite commercial grouping in the whole of our benighted sector is surely storage vendors. What a bunch of halfwits they are, pushing new slightly varying technologies year after year, never properly implementing protocols to the level of transparent interoperability, instead preferring to come out with "interoperability matrices" for every product, which IF and ONLY IF you are damn lucky will they overlap in any reasonably sophisticated environment. And we continue to bite on the teat, because the applications we're running need ever more disk to churn through their constantly bloating data formats, log files, journals, backups, snapshots, clones and mirrors. Today's gripe? I'm trying to buy a disk shelf. Not a hard ask, you might think. Just a disk enclosure that I can hang off a Solaris box. JBOD. But I don't want U320, I want a SAS or SATA2 shelf, with the extra phat bandwidth. Amazingly, Sun don't have one. HP have one, but they only "qualify" it with their controller (not supported under OpenSolaris, only Sol10). IBM have one - but only qualify it with their controller (not under OpenSolaris). Dell have one - but only qualify it with their controller, which I don't trust (also it's from the same line as IBM's). Adaptec have a controller I can use, and on paper it's fine! It's SAS! It's Mini-SAS SFF8088, exactly the connector I need! Solaris doesn't just have the driver, it has the PCI IDs! Why isn't it qualified? Why should it be? Why do I have to fuck around with vendors trying to lock me in to their "solution"? This is many terabytes I'm after, and it ain't chump change! Must be too many product designers corrupted by the notion of pushing a solution, with the usual consulting bullshit that surrounds it, rather than concentrating on good products. Don't they realise I'll just walk away and find an alternate product, one that doesn't try to force me down their path? Maybe enough suckers capitulate that it doesn't matter.
But it drives me batshit. |
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| AC/DC |
[Feb. 24th, 2007|02:39 am] |
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Wore my schoolboy outfit for Kat's birthday party. Lots of "HI ANGUS" and "THUNDER" shouted out as I strolled home at 2am ;) |
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| vehicles |
[Feb. 4th, 2007|08:31 am] |
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after years of abstinence, I have decided to buy a car. I'm hooked on driving again, after a glorious weekend of cruising around the (rain)forests and mountains with the soft-top down. It's got to be convertible; the question is - Astra twintop, Peugeot 306CC, Mazda MX5, or what? Don't want to spend over $50k, not this time. |
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| battle gear |
[Jan. 26th, 2007|08:44 am] |
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At the risk of turning this into a Melbourne-business-I-endorse column, I'm going to recommend another shop. BackpackingLight have a new store in Somerset Place (off little bourke, near the other outdoor shops). They sell much the same stuff as the others, but the staff do that little bit extra - open to shaving dollars off already good pricing, friendly, laid-back and helpful without being pushy, and they let me keep the hangars. Good muzak too. |
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| Coffee Snobbery, part 4 |
[Jan. 25th, 2007|04:47 pm] |
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Another adequate coffee outlet has emerged! The Illy(of course)-based Elizabeth Street Coffee Shop, a tiny cupboard near the foot of Elizabeth St - smoothly textured, complex, delicious, creamy coffee. Accompanied by mango and raspberry muffins. |
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koshua's journal