yaleman.org

I decided that it’s time for me to grow up and learn a compiled language, so I had a look around - there were the main ones - C, C++, Java or C# - I was talking to a friend and he said to look at C# because it’s so kickass. Cross compatibility, easy RAD, lots of resources - why not? It’s everything Java was supposed to be, but didn’t end up being 🙂

My laptop’s definitely not what you’d class as a high-performance machine by any modern standards. It’s got a celeron 400 processor, 128MB of ram and a 6gb hdd. This doesn’t leave much room for an operating system with all the bells and whistles - Windows XP is definitely off the list - I’ve been running Windows 2000 Professional on it for the past six months so I could do things like simple graphics editing of my photographs on the run, and coding in my spare time at work.

I’ve got a dollar, I’ve got a dollar, I’ve got a dollar hey hey hey hey!

A funny little song, and it applies to me! I was out in the carpark stretching my legs and getting some fresh air via my cigarette and found a shiny cold dollar on the ground - score! 🙂

Recently I bought a new hard drive - finally getting a half-decent speed SATA drive, upgrading from my quartet of 80gb IDE drives. I had a few woes trying to tie it all in, so I ended up reinstalling my PC. At first I stuck with Gentoo, then got sick of trying to work out its annoying bugs and went to SUSE.

As I tend to have a load of windows open at the one time, and I like to see them all at once having dual monitors is a must for me. The ATI 9600 card I have supports this, being dual head, and I’d had it running (kinda) on Gentoo just before I went through the reinstall process.

Well, that was an amazing long weekend for me. I was working my usual overnight shift on Friday night and decided that I wanted to climb a mountain. Years and years ago my family and I (well, mum, my little sister and I; the other two are wussies) climbed Mount Beerwah, so that was a good start. Looking on the web I found the Glass House Mountains and Surrounds page on the Queensland Environmental Protection Agency (now National Parks, Sport and Recreation) website. There’s a few pages there with maps and so forth - we ended up relying on this map in PDF form to get us there.

Well, it’s been a long time since this site’s had naughty pictures on it, but I had to post this… I always make references to what I’m going to do to people with a pineapple, but I think this takes the cake 😉

Well, so much for us losing our jobs at the end of August, as of a couple of days ago that’s changed to 30th of June. Damnit. That means I’m a month and a bit short of my employment anniversary, missing out on two week’s redundancy payout; not to mention a bunch of wages in the meantime. I’m hoping that I get one of the collections positions they’ve offered - there’s 15 going and they said they would prioritise by tenure and our KPI’s - which tends to help me 🙂

Ok, so Novell in their infinite wisdom decided to remove MP3 support from SuSE around v10.0. It’s a bit hard to find concrete information on how to get some sort of mp3 support in SuSE, so here it is:

1. Install XMMS
2. Download the XMMS mpg123 rpm from this page.
3. Install it:

\#rpm -ivh xmms-mpg123-1.2.7-13.i386.rpm
Preparing... ########################################### [100%]
1:xmms-mpg123 ########################################### [100%]

4. Run XMMS and enjoy!

I don’t know how to get mp3 working in a lot of the other programs, I’ll try and work that out later. There’s a short article here in DesktopLinux.com on Hacking OpenSuSE - getting mp3 and dvd support in SuSE.

Ok, so I work for a call center outsourcing company on a contract doing customer care for a mobile company. The company’s been around for a while, and now it’s shutting down because their parent company Hutchison decided that 3g is a better bet (it is) and CDMA isn’t the way to go anymore.

I’d have to agree with them - most of the customers on the network were there because they got the cheapest service they could find, and it worked for them - most of the time. The phones sucked, the network sucked more, and while it was more profitable than 3g before they decided that the end was near, maintaining an old network isn’t a good business plan. The ability to focus your capital and human resources on a newer product tends to be the smart idea in business.

Well, I’ve finally gone to a hairdressers’ for the first time in about twelve months or so - not to get my hair cut short of course, just a clean-up trim and do something different. I’ll post more later, bit lazy and sneaky to mention too much 🙂

I’ve needed a new pair of shoes for a while, the 10 hole Dr. Martens I’ve been wearing for nearly 18 months are looking a little worse for wear. It seems that Australian importers don’t bring them in anymore, so I had a choice - 14 hole size 14’s that probably wouldn’t be too comfortable (not a good thing) - or a pair of 8 hole size 15’s which will be nice once they are worn in. I went with the 8 holes, setting me back $189, not bad for another 18 months or so wear, I hope 🙂