An addendum to my previous post on the same issue, I’ve thought further about my energy levels and what seems to affect them.

Today, instead of sitting at my desk and reading Slashdot for my lunch break, I took my lunch outside, sat in the sun and read my book. It was a lot better. I got to have my half hour (and a bit more — oops!) eating and reading something totally unrelated to work, and I did so while sitting in the sun and soaking up a very limited amount of vitamin D.

Anyway, the other thing that happened today that has seemed to bolster my energy levels is two-fold: I had something to do in the morning, something specific and requiring research, something that I was able to accomplish, eventually. That was, disabling removable media via group policy. I got it all implemented, and it works. The second thing was, from the afternoon’s meeting, I had a task list which I set myself, and made some allowances for times to perform those tasks, and roughly an order, too. So, some structure will see me making better use of my time, consequently I’ll be less worried about just how my time is being spent.

I’m happy at the moment. I don’t even mind so much that it still takes me an exorbitant amount of time to get to and from work (on the order of a couple of hours, nearly), because I can tuck into a book and just relax. I’m good at ignoring the world around me when I have something interesting to distract myself with; a computer, book, game, whatever. It makes no difference. The hustle and bustle of the city and public transport fades away, and I can just enjoy my book.

Still, it’d be nice to have a choice about what I spent my time doing, instead of just using it for travelling. Suppose I ought to seek out employment closer to home.

A further addendum: these are all lessons I’ve learnt during my time of study, why have I been so silly? I guess, it’s more about taking those past lessons and applying them to new circumstances. I think that’s what I’m still coming to terms with.

It seems as though it doesn’t matter what time I go to bed, I invariably wake up tired. Whether it’s to do with the current cold weather or some other environmental factor, or due to my current state of health, or due to some other influence on my life, I’m not entirely sure.

I find that going to bed at 10pm and getting up at 6am or 5.45am, whichever is necessary, results in me being quite tired by the time 2pm rolls around. I eat breakfast, typically toast (wheat, carbohydrates, fibre) and a cold milo (energy, fats) or milo cereal (all of the above). I have fruit for morning tea: an apple, orange, kiwi fruit or passionfruit and some yoghurt. For lunch, two sandwhiches (four slices of wholegrain/multitrain/high-fibre bread) with ham (filler and flavour - probably no nutritional value), cheese (calcium, fats), spinach (iron), and tomato (good stuff?).

I don’t usually have afternoon tea, but that’s because there’s no time for it. Dinner sees me eating steak or chicken, pasta or baked vegetables.

I rarely snack. I never buy soft drinks, chocolates or other food tidbits. I have my three meals per day, and that’s all I eat. Yet I find my sleeping patterns unsatisfactory, and my levels of energy low. As I was saying, I can go to bed at 10pm or 11pm or 12pm, and the only difference it makes to my day is just how hard it is to wake up in the morning. The earlier I go to bed, the easier it is to wake — but only ever so slightly. I’m always still tired in the afternoon.

I do have a theory however. I believe it’s stress related. Days where nothing much happens at work see me not expending much energy, but I still feel drained. I’m stressed about having nothing to do. Days where I’m full on and doing stuff all day see me drained, but for similar reasons: I’m stressed about not having done enough. I can’t seem to find a happy medium where I am satisfied with myself, for the sake of myself and my employer. I thought that my new job was going to save me somewhat from this, but I was wrong. Today, I didn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve, and I came home tired and stressed.

I get to the point where, after I’ve driven all the way home, I park my car in my driveway, turn it off, turn off the headlights, and sit in silence. I sigh a big, drawn-out sigh, and I think about all the things I still have to get done, and how it all seems so never-ending. I’ve only just started my working life, and I’m already tired of it. Apparently.

I think I’m just whinging, but I know I have a point. It’s not the amount of work I have to do that’s large or particularly stressful, I think it’s simply the fact that I don’t have any adequate mechanisms for dealing with such stress. The parallel I draw between this and my last post is that the burden of choice is huge. I no longer have hard-set deadlines like I did in university with assignments, but now that my task completion is more open-ended and up to my determination and responsibility, I find myself extremely lacking. I expect more of myself; perhaps too much. My employers seem pleased, so why can’t I be too?

I just don’t know. I think I’m worried I’m not “good enough” at all the things I’ve been studying these last few years. I think maybe I’m worried about having wasted too much time, and I think maybe I’m worried about having fallen behind all the other examples of students of my age. I think this is partly why I used to (and once again are) occupy my spare time with so many personal projects.

Matter of fact, remove all the uncertainty from the previous paragraph, and you have the exact reason I’m under so much (self-imposed) stress.

Well, this post helped me figure that out. This is what my blog is for, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned that before, but perhaps not so blatantly.

For a while there, I’d lost my groove. I’ve always been seriously interested in constantly learning new things about computers, and learning new things in general. For a while there, my interest was waning somewhat. I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it was, although I know many people will tell me it was my other half. Haha, yeah, that works.

Anyway, the point I’m making is that for the last 12 months or so I’ve been wallowing a little in my own self-pity. There was an interesting story on Triple J’s hack programme Friday, about how kids — well, young adults — these days are stressed out to the max when it comes to making life decisions. Australia’s quite a well-off nation, and our high-school graduates are faced with so many choices because of this. Straight into work, tertiary education, travelling the world, dole bludging even. The comparison is made to the era of our parents whose career choices were extremely limited. A good example would be my own mother who finished school at the end of year ten, whose only marketable skills at the time saw her placed into any of the following roles: secretary, typist, or administrative assistant. Yeah, you see what I’m getting at?

These days, we have so much freedom in terms of choosing our career paths … it’s quite stressful. The point is made on the programme that it sounds spoilt, but the burden of choice is extremely taxing on our young minds, and it’s not an easy decision at all.

Anyway, the point I’m getting to is that I’ve never really know what I wanted to do. Parents and teachers always asked during high-school, and even before, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” — which I think stemmed from their own upbringing, and the mindset that you were destined for some arbitrary role in society of your limited choosing. They asked a question which wasn’t relevant to the children whom they were asking. In my case especially, as I’ve never really had any life goals.

I want to own a sports car, and I want to own a house one day. The time frames are pretty undetermined. Though these days I’m thinking more about those two goals, if you’d asked me about those things three years ago, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you. These things do take time.

So for the last twelve months or so I’ve been doing not much with my life. Just studying and working when I have to, and in my personal time, chillaxing. Which is fine, but I think I neglected my self-learning a little. I dropped out of the loop for a while. In hindsight, I can see that it was a good thing for me to have done. I was getting bored with it all, and I needed a change of pace. So I spent time with my girlfriend a lot, and more recently started wasting time playing World of Warcraft.

I don’t mean to say that I’m going to neglect my personal time now that I’ve re-energized myself. I’m going to devote more thought to my personal time so that the time I do spend on myself, and on others, is more worthwhile.

Work has picked up, though. Not my main job, that’s still pretty bland. I don’t care about finance so much. It’s remotely interesting, and I’ll pick up tidbits as I go along, but I won’t actively teach myself about it. My other job however has started off excellently. I’m my own business and I’m doing some research for a guy who does full IT system implementations for small businesses. The twist is that he does it using all open-source software. You know how much I love open-source.

So last Wednesday, my first time working for him, I spent some of the day researching ways to do unattended installations with Ubuntu Linux, and then I spent the rest of the day starting to implement our first revision of system we’re putting in place. I spent the entire day working on my laptop (Arch Linux), logged into his server (Ubuntu), using awesome open-source tools (Firefox, Tomboy Notes, vi, etc). It wasn’t restricting (licences). I didn’t have to learn to speak another language (Microsofteese). I wasn’t constantly worried about lack of documentation (third-parties).

So now even though I’m about to spend my Sunday fixing not one but two Windows PCs for friends and family, I’m not in that poor a mood. I’m going to fix one by installing Ubuntu on it and having all the Windows-only apps run in a virtual machine courtesy VirtualBox, and the other I’m charging for. So that balances out for me!

Anyway, the Ubuntu ISO has finished downloading, so I better get to it.

Well, yesterday, it happened. My graduation ceremony. Initially I was reluctant to go. I only went to my high-school graduation ceremony grudgingly. Some people may say I’m an idiot. Indeed, many people would’ve thought I at least looked like one. While everyone else was dressed in suits and ties for the formal, I showed up in khaki pants and a hawaiian shirt because I wasn’t going to the formal. I didn’t really like anyone in highschool outside my own group of friends, none of whom were themselves going to the formal. So, I didn’t care about it.

Anyway, I was having similar feelings towards my uni graduation ceremony. Not only did I have to wear a crazy square hat (called a mortarboard I found out) and some robes, I would have to pay $55 for the privilege! Well, I was outraged. A little. Not really, I just didn’t feel like paying that much for something I didn’t really need to be at anyway. Though thankfully, friends and family convinced me otherwise. I went, and I’m glad I did.

Wearing the robe and mortarboard was a good feeling. The ceremony was held at QPAC in South Bank, and after robing up before the ceremony I met with my mum at the art gallery. This meant walking around in public in my academic dress, and that made me feel good. Aside from the other graduates I saw (there were 390 that day; the largest ceremony ever apparently), I noticed that nobody else was wearing robes. And although statistically speaking it’s probably unsafe to assume the people I saw didn’t have degrees, the fact was that I was graduating that day and they weren’t.

The ceremony itself was pretty long; as mentioned, there were almost four-hundred graduands to be handed their certificates. This length wasn’t helped at all by the various guest speakers chattering on. Most of them were welcome, but there was an MP there, Mike Kelly, who seemed to make a rather round-about point on how important our degrees were. His speech was the longest and most awkward. He was a private practice lawyer before working for the ADF for 20 years and then turning to politics. His language was interesting as it he used some typical legalese, but combined with the bluntness of language only 20 years of ADF service can create, it came out a little strangely. Anyway, I digress.

I sat with my fellow graduands for about two hours total, with the preceding speeches and ceremonial back-and-forth providing some interesting introduction to the entire affair. After all, I haven’t graduated from uni before yesterday, so it was interesting to see just what went on. The process of handing out the certificates was straightforward, and nobody messed up their order. Unlike the ceremony on the day before where someone placed in position 44 accidentally sat in position 244 and missed out on their special moment.

One thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that the ceremony itself was held in the Concert Hall at QPAC. All of the graduands were seated on-stage, which was interesting, because it was the same hall where I’ve seen a few acts previously, most notably Ross Noble. It was weird to see things from the performers’ side of the stage lights. They’re very bright by the way.

What I found super-awesome though is that while friends and families from outside were being seated, the music team were playing some songs on the huge pipe organ. One of the songs they played was the Star Wars theme song which I had a giggle at. It was epic to hear it played on the huge organ though.

So now I’m going to get my certificate framed and put it somewhere people can see it I think. I also think that I might go on to do my masters, or maybe another degree entirely. I can’t see myself settling into a work-only lifestyle, unless the work’s particularly challenging.

My life’s not working out at the moment as I had planned it to be working out right now. Most of it is coming along nicely, however, there are a few aspects of it that I thought would’ve been different.

My job, primarily, is what I’m talking about. To put it bluntly: I’m not enjoying it. Or even more bluntly: it kind of sucks. It’s a glorified tech. support role. It was sold to me as something else. I was told it would be tech. support and development work. I wasn’t really sure at the time what that meant: I suppose my naivety was to blame. Yeah, sure, there’s development. There’s plenty of opportunity for me to brush up on my Microsoft Access skills supporting five-year-old database applications. There’s plenty of opportunity for me to write annoying little VBA snippets that semi-automate behemoth Excel spreadsheets.

Initially I took the challenge as it was: a challenging learning experience. While I haven’t learnt all there is to know about Excel, Access or the whole awesome Microsoft Office experience, I certainly know enough now to be handy in writing solutions based on Microsoft’s Office suite of applications. Hell, I wrote a fucking share portfolio snapshot graph application in VBA on top of Excel. I think that’s something, don’t you?

The problem with that last project wasn’t so much the difficulty of the algorithms as it was the difficulty in understanding exactly what the fuck I was meant to be writing, who it was for, how the output was intended to be presented, and so on. My boss is a nice guy, but he’s the only boss I have. He runs the whole show, and he’s shit as an IT manager. He comes up with ideas with no concept of what it takes to implement them, but expects them all to be done yesterday. So, you can imagine what kind of awesome fun I had with this guy while trying to develop software for him.

But, you know, I rolled with it. I learnt something there about how to deal with adults who want things they can’t have and don’t understand why. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s stressful and at times downright intimidating to have that kind of thing hanging over your head. You never knew when he was going to have another flash of inspiration and decide to triple the complexity of your application.

Not that I was writing anything super-complex. I haven’t even graduated uni yet, though. While I am capable of researching things and solving problems all of my own accord, I don’t yet understand how I’m meant to determine what’s appropriate in the eyes of my employer in terms of the problem solving process and the various metrics associated with it. Time, complexity, depth, breadth; you name a metric, I don’t know it. This is why big business run graduate programs. I should be doing one I suppose.

Though, that’s another thing I don’t know if I can really get into. Big business. I hate the corporate scum-sucking that goes on. Everyone runs around in pretentious outfits wearing ridiculous strangulating ties, black long slacks in the middle of summer with long-sleeve shirts, and uncomfortable non-breathing leather shoes. They sit at a desk in an office, push paper, answer phones, and generally do … what? I don’t know. I hate the image, and I hate looking at myself in the mirror when what I see is myself becoming some corporate bitch. Though it makes my parents proud to see me all grown up and shit, but I suppose that’s the era they’re from.

You know what, I have a theory. I reckon people work better when they’re comfortable. I’m talking about all aspects of comfort: environment, clothing, seating, computer, whatever. When people are in a good mood they do good work. Stuffing everyone into the corporate mould and spitting out oddly-shaped people stuffed inside uniforms of drab pale shirts and standard-issue black or grey pants is not a way to raise the spirit of the people.

I think people should have a sense of self-importance about themselves simply for the sake of maintaining their own self-esteem. On top of that, people should respect themselves and dress appropriately. I do not think that everyone should be limited to dressing in the same 70-year-old combination of slacks, button-up collared shirt, overcoat and tie. Hey, chicks can wear what they like. Why can’t guys?

If you’ve read this far, good on you: seriously. There’s a lot of angst in this post, and I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.

The other night I got totally trashed on Jim Beam Small Batch - though I asked for it. Didn’t eat all day, chugged it down like it was water, and expected an hour or so later to be sweet for a night out in the Valley. Turns out I actually spent an hour or so lying on the floor of a bathroom in my own vomit, alternately crying and yelling about how much I was sorry for ruining my friends night and laughing my brains out about how funny everything was. I was in another world. I’m not eager to do that again but jesus that Small Batch is good shit. I had mine with Coke but you could easily drink it straight from the bottle its that smooth.

Anyway, that wasn’t really the good bit. Did I trick you? Haha. The good bit is I will soon be under the employ of the man behind Dependable Technologies; (let’s hope he doesn’t get any hits from my blog and reads the above paragraph) which is a one or two-man outfit that specialises in, well… you can read it all for yourself on the single page website. This is exciting because as you may or may not know, I am all about that kind of thing. Doing intelligent support work for clients who have real problems, not replacing batteries in wireless mice for people who are too lazy to do it themselves (because “that’s what IT is for”).

I think I’ve said enough now. Oh wait, no. I’m trying to do my tax using the Governments’ super e-tax programme, and it wants to connect to the internet and download my Medicare info, but consistently fails with the helpful message “Unknown exception, please contact the IT helpdesk on… ” At least this year the website is compatible with Firefox. I couldn’t believe that this time last year their website had the audacity to tell me that my browser was out of date because its ident/signature didn’t match exactly that of Internet Explorer. Oh wait, yeah, no, it’s the government. Of course I can believe that. At least things are better this year ’round. Still no Linux e-tax application though.

Sorry, enough ranting. Carry on with your lives. I mean that sincerely.

I love Windows and Microsoft and all their awesome wonderful software beauty. This is what happens when I install Windws on one of the machines at work and try to activate it.

1. It activates “fine” but doesn’t allow me to login. Why? Well, I login, it says “you must activate Windows to continue” I click OK, and it says “Windows is already activated” and then logs me out. When I log in again, the same thing happens. Infinite loop. Sweet.
2. It doesn’t activate at all. When it goes through the steps, and attempts to generate an installation ID that I can pass onto Microsoft, the space where the installation ID is supposed to display is blank. Yes, blank.

These are both fucking catastrophic failures. Infinite loops and no user feedback? Hey, infinite loops and no user feedback during Windows installation causing installation to fail?! From the worlds largest software development company?! What the fuck is wrong at Microsoft?

So, I have been scouring the internet for a day and a half now trying to figure this out, and while there are reports of both problems occurring elsewhere before, none of the available solutions seem to work. I have formatted and re-formatted the machine probably eight or nine times now. Always the same problem. At the moment, I’ve got the blank installation ID issue. It’s been that problem for the last three or four formats.

Things I have tried:

• manually editing the registry to set the timer for activation to some far-distant future time
• copying the files used by the activation process (wpa.dbl and wpa.bak) from the installation CD into the %windir%\System32 directory manually after installation
• installing the drivers for all of the hardware in safe mode so the activation process can reliably generate an installation ID (it’s based on the product key and hashes of your hardware info) (did I mention this requires further registry hacks to enable software installation in Safe Mode?)
• tried various cracks and hacks from the ‘net to disable activation without any success
• been on the phone to Microsoft tech support for an hour without any success

Oh and I’ve done all this using three different Windows CDs, two with SP1 pre-packaged and one with SP2 pre-packaged.

HOW SWEET IS THAT?!?! LIKE SRSLY MCRSFT I <3 U SOOOOOOO MUCH RITE NOW!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi everyone,

A headsup for some of you: there are a bunch of sweet gigs on over the coming months, and I’m inviting you to attend them with me.

First up is Birds of Tokyo, whom I don’t know much about, other than their frontman is the very same who leads the very entertaining and very awesome Karnivool. Although I haven’t seen either live, the latter’s full-length release, Themata, is a favourite in my collection. Anyway, check out The Birds’ MySpace for more on them. Date is September 5th, cost is $27.75., venue is The Arena.

Next up is heavy-metal favourites, and awkwardly-pronounced, Meshuggah. While I’m not particularly fanatic about their style of music, I can appreciate it in small doses. Let’s hope their performance on October 12th at The Arena isn’t too large a dose! (at a cost of $53.50 + booking fee)

Next up in the metal section (although arguably with less throat-destroying lyrical talent) we have Disturbed. I’ve listened to a lot of their stuff over and over and over, with their album 10,000 Fists taking a special place in my collection. They’re touring with old favourites P.O.D., the up-and-coming Behind Crimson Eyes, and Alterbridge. We can catch them at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on the 2nd of September at a cost of $89.65.

Changing genre completely, let’s think about Dukes of Windsor. They scored well with their hit The Others showing up in a remix on a recent Ministry of Sound album. You’ve heard it, and you liked it. Trust me. Anyway, they’re touring with the awesome Sneaky Sound System, and I reckon we’d be stupid not to miss their show at The Tivoli, on the August 16th, especially for a cost $53.50 (plus booking fee).

Keeping the electro/dance theme, though moving down in the popularity ranks, we’ve got a relatively unknown group by the name of Grafton Primary. They reached realtively huge popularity on TripleJ last year with the slightly nerdy but ultimately funny (and fun!) Relativity; and they’ve also created many awesome remixes of other popular artists, including remixing the tired and overplayed This Heart Attack by none other than Faker, which in my opinion is as good as the original, if not better. They’re supported by The E.L.F, who are busy doing lots of wierd things on their MySpace, and the first group I ever saw play live: Christopher Robin, whom are not the same you will find on MySpace. They’re a small two-piece electro pair who seem to occupy themselves more with drinking than playing music, but they’re oh so good at it! For a cost of $12 and a trip to the Valley, what more can you ask for? (at Rosie’s)

Second last on this by-no-means-ordered list, we have Canadian crackpots, haters of vowels and all-round funky dudes, MSTRKRFT. They’ve a few releases and a lot of remixes, and they’re all hella-sweet. Accompanied by Ajax and a few other DJs I’ve never heard of, we can catch them at The Arena on the 2nd of August for a cost of $35-$45 (plus booking fee).

Finally, we have two bands actually: PNAU and Operator Please; both huge on the Australian charts, with the former being a veteran of the dance scene and the latter barely out of highschool, you’ve no doubt heard tracks from both, with PNAU’s “Baby” featured on recent advertisements for milk, and Operator Please having many of their songs played on mainstream radio. We can indulge in their alternately funky and rocking sounds (quite a contrast) for only $44 (plus booking fee) at The Tivoli on the 7th of August.

So, if you’re interested in seeing any of these gigs with me, please let me know. Some of them have been on sale a while, and are due to sell out soon, so we need to get in quick! A comment, SMS, e-mail, phone call or face-to-face conversation are all good ways of engaging my attention.

If you want to find out more information about any of the gigs, you can check out the bands’ respective MySpace/websites, or you can visit the awesome Triple J gig guide, which helped me to compile this post.

Yeah yeah, you know it. The World of Warcraft servers are down for scheduled maintenance which means I haven’t much to do. Sad really, isn’t it? Still, I’m not addicted. I don’t think about WoW while I’m supposed to be doing other things. I don’t talk about WoW all the time to people. I certainly don’t dream about WoW.

Yeah, I post a lot about WoW, but that’s only because I know you expect me to, and I couldn’t go letting down my avid readers now, could I?

The next post is going to be about something interesting. As soon as I figure out what that is, I’ll let you know.

This post isn’t about WoW.

My life basically consists of playing WoW, going to work, and hanging out on weekends. Except, on weekends where I don’t see much of Carly due to her own commitments, I tend to also do a lot of WoW playing on those occasions.

Seriously, I do play a lot of WoW, and I think I would say that I am highly interested in WoW, but not quite to the point of addiction. I play it mainly because I’ve finished all my exams, forever, and now I’m just being rebellious and doing ‘irresponsible’ things in my spare time for a change of pace from the work-study-work-study-work … et cetera rigmorole that has been my life for the last three or four years.

So last night I stayed up until about 4AM playing WoW; though that’s because I was helping others. You see, in WoW, unlike other online games, there is more of a real sense of community and so much more “niceness” between players. Unlike other, more openly competitive games, where the mixture of high-speed violence and young teens makes for a complete lack of intelligent conversation at any point during the game. At best, it’s people trashtalking. At worst, it’s people trashtalking with added racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and grossly inappropriate sexual content.

In WoW, players help each other because that’s what the game environment encourages people to do. Through the length of the game experience, the co-operative nature of many of the quests, raids and dungeons, and the fact that, like real life, players of different skill-sets rely on each other in order to get ahead, the community behind WoW is generally a lot more friendly than the highly-strung, trigger-finger aggro children that hang out playing shooters.

That’s not to say that all shooter-players are morons (I still play occassionaly, and I’m definitely not :D) or that all WoW players are saints (sometimes high-level characters will draw high-level enemies onto low-level characters just for laughs), but generally speaking the communities are vastly in contrast to one another in terms of their attitudes towards others playing the same game.

So if you’re sick of being called a fucking dickhead bitch slut hacker poof in CS over the microphone by a 13-year-old boy whose voice hasn’t dropped and can count the number of pubes he has on one hand, and would like to see some nice things coming from the players you game with, then give WoW a try, and see if I’m wrong.

Today Carly and I, being flooded in, decided to muck around a bit more with the GIMP. Though this time we took some random photos specifically for the purpose (well, kind of).

As you can see, my level of skill hasn’t increased at all. I’m still using the same elements I learnt yesterday, but I’ve combined them into some photographs to make… something. I’ll let you be the judge.

Carly’s photos:

My photos: