Mickblog

I was browsing through realestate.com.au last week, and look what I found.

I checked the place out. They were putting in a few new light fittings and new blinds, and that’s about it

So I went through the tortue of moving out so they could do some minor renovations and charge and extra $35 a week.

ARRRRGGGGHHH MUST KILL TO STOP THE BURNING

I’ll give everyone a quick rundown of my life since, uh, 9 months ago.

Goddamn, has it been that long.

On August lst year I left utbox.net, after having been rewarded for turning the business profitable by being demoted. I took on a contract job at ThreatMetrix and worked there until Feb when I had enough money to live on until late May. This was going to be the break to make up for 3 years solid on-call duty.

So I spent a month doing nothing essentially. I was supposed to relax and get to work on a couple of projects but repeated harassment from the insurance company about the car crash more than a year ago didn’t help. I spent most of April visiting my sis in the US for the first time since she left for there about 3 years ago, and visiting my 2 neices for the first time ever, so that was good. But I also received notice, one week before the flight out, to get out of the place I was renting by end of May. I decided to visit the US anyway, leaving a month to move out. This turned out to be insufficient thanks to the state of the rental property market at the moment (I’m competing with 10-20 applications!), so now, after spending the last 4 weeks of my holiday plus another week packing and trying to find a place in vain, all my stuff is in storage and I’m staying with my mum in Penrith. Now I am living off my credit cards and still have to find some more work, then find a new home (somehow) whlie working full time in the city from Penrith. The move has/will cost a month of holiday and about $3500. Oh, and during all this I’m hopelessly in love with a girl that doesn’t want me.

After all that, I don’t feel like I’ve taken a break.

Goddammit everything better fall into place or I swear am going to go postal.

At least I got to see my nieces.

So while I’ve been looking for work I’ve also been dabbling in all sorts of things. Let’s see:

- I modded my x-box, which you already know about

- I have bought a PS2 and plan to mod it as well :) I sure hope this is a moddable version - I haven’t found a web site yet that identifies its version from its model number.

- Been having a play with gEDA and a, um, *cough* evaluation version of Altium DXP (the new name for the Protel electronics design suite, that costs a house). geda is pretty complete in the sense that it’s got the functionality for designing very complex boards, but its interface is awful at the moment. But I’ve only so far tried the version that is in dapper’s universe, which is a year old now. I’m thinking of either helping out with it, or starting a similar project (not on my own of course)

- I’ve bought 2 big fat text books, one on engineering mathematics and one on linear circuit analysis. These two books, along with The Art of Electronics , I plan to go through slowly and thoroughly. We’ll see if I persevere.

- For a while there I thought I could get a contract doing some embedded development. I narrowly missed a job doing some kernel coding which I would have loved, so I kept looking for a similar kind of job. Looks like that was as lucky as I’ll get. Anyway in the meantime I spent a bit reading up on kernel programming.

- Been playing with povray again. I finally found the scene files for the povray scene that got me into raytracing so long ago. It’s improved a lot since then. It’s got media, radiosity,photons (what they’re for I don’t know) and isosurfaces, which can essentially render almost any aribtrarily complex mathematical function, with a bit of guidance. Turns out the rendering algorithm isn’t impossible to understand. Regardless, it’s cool. If you can figure out how to play with the math you can make all sorts of interesting shapes

- Been collecting a list of places where I can get cheap surface mount components, so when I am ready I can
start making prototypes with them. I reckon using SMD will making the process less painful, since it will at least mean I don’t have to drill at least 2 holes for every component on the board.

- Searching for an FPGA development board. FPGAs are essentially huge reprogrammable logic circuits - you can turn one into a CPU, and more. I’m hanging out to design my own processor :) I learned the basics of processor design in a subject about it at uni many years ago. Never had the chance to apply it.

This guy makes a living decorating the interor of people’s homes to look like the intererior of the Enterprise. And I don’t mean the navy ship.

There is a trade magazine centered around the elevator industry. Wow, what an exciting industry that must be. The opportunities to rise up in your career must be staggeringly high.

BWAHAHAHAHA.

Mick.

As of yesterday I now own two Nintendo DS’s, one standard and one of the new
DS Lites.

It’s been out here for, what, 3 days now? I got it because I will anyway, and also because I have a few multi-player DS games which I’d like to try.

Funnily enough it seems to have been released in Australia before the US or Europe. Weird. Here’s a short review for those that care.

It’s not a huge improvement on the size of the original, but it looks nice. GBA cartridges jut out a bit, compared to the original where they fit entirely into the unit. There was no thumbstrap thingy in the box, but it had the hook for one so you can grab one from an original DS or whatever and use that. The sound from the speakers is a little more tinny. The screens have different ideal viewing angles so they can sometimes look a bit washed out compared to the original, depending on how you use it. On the plus side the screen brightness can be increased from the startup menu to something like 4 times that of the original. The start and select buttons feel a bit mushy and hard to press. The battery is the same, but (once again) the charger has its own special plug specially for the DS Lite (different even from the GB micro).

I sure have enough to complain about don’t I? :) All in all it’s fine, but don’t get one unless (1) size and weight is a big deal to you, (2) looks are a big deal to you, or (3) you are a consumer whore like me, and must have every console Nintendo ever produce.

In other news, My internet connection is shaped, so sorry to those who are finding it unresponsive. I’m working on getting it fixed (by replacing the ISP) but apparently it’s going to be a bit of a ride - I am with iiNet and although I could churn to them ~3 years ago, they have sinced moved me over to their own DSLAM and I can’t churn back out. So I have to apply for a new connection as usual.

Lastly, I am considering making posts that attempt to give quick overviews of what I have learned about various aspects of starting/running/growing a business. To help me decide, if you are interested in reading this sort of thing, or especially uninterested, post a comment. I may, at least, post to my blog but withhold it from planet SLUG.

Okay, so to complement that last post I’ll let everyone know where the hell I’ve been the past few months.

Mostly I’ve been buried in my work, in an effort to make it both lucrative and enjoyable. So far I’m not doing too well on either account, but things are going to change very soon. Check out ASX announcements for BLE. Whatever happens, I am going to make sure I come out of the mayhem with some measure of personal freedom. I’m sick of living like this.

In Jan I got a car. ONE MONTH LATER I was involved in a crash that was not at all my fault. Nothing serious, but I didn’t have insurance. The other car had comprehensive but the insurance company seems set on trying to get the money out of me, or at least not having to pay me anything. Luckily there was a witness who was willing to help out, but the insurance company is still trying to bluff its way out. I would pursue it but I just don’t have the time. I can fit the bill for my car, it won’t kill me. I have bigger issues. The car is repaired now and looks like new.

A few weeks ago binks, my beloved server of everything but the kitchen sink, started misbehaving. One of the hard drives decided to freeze up. I checked it out and both its drives were VERY hot. Silly me disconnected the fans in the mobile HDD racks because the were making noise (”they’ll be alright, they passed the 1 hour test!”). So I got fancy new aluminium HDD enclosures with DOUBLE BALL BEARING FANS, and also purchased a new drive to replace the one that was misbehaving, just to be safe. So after shutting down the machine about 5 times in total in the process of getting the new stuff in, the OTHER drive, the one that showed no signs of being near death, suddenly and completely died.

Thank $deity for raid1. Well, I didn’t have the ENTIRE drives mirrored, but all the important stuff was.

Oh yes, and I’m an uncle, again. Kimberley Brandt, born 6:00 on 02/06/06. I gotta get to the US, soon.

I’ll try and get into the habit of making slightly more regular posts so everyone remembers I exist.

For those who occasionally check up on my blog (both of you) you might have noticed that it was gone for a while.

The server holding my blog self-destructed. Which was kind of annoying, since the same server also received my mail, mail for about 5 other people, contained 2 CVS repositories, a dozen web sites, and gigs of precious pr0n and warez.

How did this all happen? I’m not sure but I think it can be blamed on XFS. Silly me, not heeding the warnings.

It’s mostly all still there but there were some casualties. Files got scattered all over the place in lost+found, and some disappeared altogether. The CVS repositories were both damaged, and lots of system files were too. Essentially it meant rebuilding the server from scratch.

This all happened while my dad was over for a few days whlie he helped me look for a car. So I had to coordinate that with making sure nobody lost their mail. And it all started while I was on 1 hour of sleep. Great fun.

I’ve recovered everything cept for a bit of CVS history and a couple of other bits and pieces. There’s still some stuff to go though. If you see something missing or broken let me know.