Personal

People talking on their mobile phones in the restrooms whilst sitting on the toilet seat. Not cool guys. Not cool.

I think the most important is a phone conversation recorder, and I don’t know why it isn’t automatically built into the phone systems that corporate engineering companies (well, this one at least) use. When I’m having a technical discussion over the phone with my tech lead or something (and sometimes these conversations can go for over an hour, especially when a group discussion is going on) I always miss stacks of points. There are a couple of ways I know of to record what was said during the conversation: make notes while you’re listening, or listen very hard and try to understand so no notes need be taken. If I’m doing the former I’ll miss key points without realising it because I’m concentrating on getting down on paper the information in a form I’ll understand later. If I’m doing the latter I’ll just forget stuff. Why don’t they give us a “record” button on the phone so I can play back the conversation later to see if I missed anything? Maybe there is stuff out there that can do this, but they don’t supply it to us by default. ...

*Finally* I went for a night out in South Beach. Only one word describes that night out: awesome. When you’re kicking on to breakfast at 6:30am in the morning and making sure that a friend is ok as they’ve been getting sick in the toilet, you know you’ve had a good night. I *think* we ended up in a place called “Pearl”. The name of the place was “Rumi”. Check out the pictures of this place! They played some bloody good music but only towards the latter part of the night. It seems that the music has to be dumbed down a lot earlier on in the night to please the fickle part of the crowd (err, rethink that. It’s South Beach. The fickle part of the crowd is the crowd) and they only play the non-commercial, actually good-to-listen-to stuff later. ...

Err, thought it would be time to update my blog. Well, I’ve started up tennis again. Yah! I haven’t played a game since I got over here and now I plan to make it a weekly thing. I was missing it so, so much. The only sport I’ve been doing is the odd swim and I don’t do it often enough to get anything out of it. Anyway, it’s been good to get away from the computer for a while. I sit all day in front of one (which I hate doing… well, all day at least). I hate, hate, hate that part of my job. ...

Heh, happy Australia Day by the way. Geez, I nearly forgot. I don’t know how I could have, it was on the news constantly over here.

I was setting up my new computer on the weekend, and I nearly lost all my pictures that I’ve taken so far. Yeah, most of them are on the web but they’re not the full resolution pics. Not all of them are backed up yet either. I couldn’t find the pics after I did a re-install and I swear to God I was nearly in tears once I realised what I had done. So tonight, the first thing I’m doing is uploading all of the pictures I have to the web and doing massive amounts of backing up *and* creating an automatic backup plan. Geez, I don’t want to ever feel like that again. ...

I was in my third project meeting on Monday, having been on my new project for two weeks. Things weren’t going so well. My computer was set up completely wrong for the sort of work I was required to do so I was working with the systems support group to get those problems resolved. Plus, as with any new project, there is a thing call ramp up time. Or, time taken trying to understand what the hell you’re supposed to be doing. That takes a while. So, combine computer not working properly with ramp up and you’ve got a bad start. ...

Well, here is the first one. The northern gate of my apartment block got taken out last night by someone trying to get out of the complex. This happened between midnight last night and 8 am this morning. Likelihood that it was someone from the party on the floor below me last night? Pretty high! But this is even worse than what happened above. I’ve run out of milo. ...

Yeah, you can already tell this post is going to be full of all things nerdy. Well, I gotta say it, but hats off to the folks at NASA/ESA/Uni Arizona for getting a space probe to land on Titan. That’s just freaking amazing when you consider what must be done to accomplish something like that. I had to laugh though when they only got half the pictures they wanted because someone missed a command. Hehe. ...

Right, it’s nearly 2:15 am and I’m pissed off. There is something in the exhaust duct of my clothes dryer that keeps on making a tap-thud sound. I heard this sound a few weeks ago but then it stopped. I thought it was the wind at the time and there was some sort of valve that was loose or something but it can’t be that tonight because it’s as calm as a Hindu cow… and don’t get me started on Indians! There are a bunch of them having a party on the floor below me and they’ve got their freaking balcony door open. I think they work at my company, I’m not sure. It’s bloody 2 am in the morning. Shouldn’t they be programming or something!?! Bloody hell, I’m trying to get some sleep so I can do good work so I don’t become a victim of outsourcing. Jesus! ...