Monthly Archives: March 2009

Geekery

★ Posted on at 09:01 pm ★

guinness

Went to one of the local pubs late last weekend to meet up with Vyanne’s colleagues for drinks. Heh, it’s never really been my thing to go to pubs unless they served beer on tap that they got fresh from local suppliers. The place featured a jazz band of sorts. Ordered a Guinness Draught, something I used to drink lots when I was in New York as me and my ex boss loved the stuff. It’s dark, malty and full of flavour but 2 pints used to give me a headache. This here was from a can and nowhere near as tasty as it should be.

* * *

Time passes so quick at times. Had a weekend busy looking at places, getting groceries and meeting up with friends. Did manage to spend a little time with some personal interests. The new design is coming along fine. There’s no milestones or deadlines set, so I’m just chugging along as I see fit. Also dug out the old laptop I bought a couple of years ago to try my hand at installing Arch Linux on it. The installation went fine, using my Eee PC as a manual looking up the wiki guides off the internet. The system was quick to boot up (this is an old laptop with a 1.2GHz Pentium III and 512MB of RAM, definitely not a slouch) and I was all happy until I was greeted with a Bash command prompt. Ok, so what do I do next. Heh, I had to go configure bits and pieces one by one, like getting basic Internet capability on the thing.

Arch Linux is a cool distro where you get a basic working OS to put layers upon it customised to your needs. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have the patience to go slowly read up and try to configure it bit by bit. I got my networking up, and basically stopped there as I tried to configure Xorg to give me a graphical user interface. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing and after being greeted with a blank screen a few times I gave up.

Now I’m waiting for CrunchBang to download overnight. It’s a trimmed down version of Ubuntu with less resource intensive parts to make it functional yet snappy. I’ve tried it on my Eee before but running it off a USB key isn’t really ideal as boot times was still over a minute for it. I want to see the performance gains of putting it on the hard disk and how much juice I can squeeze from it with only 512MB of memory. It was only five or so years ago I was using Windows XP on a laptop with half the specifications of this ‘old’ laptop I have now as a daily machine. Heh, my expectations regarding performance are quite high as I like machines that you can start using within 30 seconds (which is where the Eee PC performs remarkably well at the moment as the default install of Windows is still relatively clean with no new programs installed).

It’s all a good distraction from other everyday things.

Back to Basics

★ Posted on at 05:50 pm ★

basil

The basil here was a recent addition to my herb garden. Bought a tiny pot from the supermarket, which is meant more for instant consumption than cultivation. The herbs are thriving at the moment, since the disaster when it was attacked by a swarm of bugs that killed my parsley and coriander. Dealt with that spraying garlic juice on them (natural pesticide). Then there was the heat wave while I was away with the plants looking like they had dried to a crisp. After many infusions of water and some fertilizer, the herbs are back to looking their best. The mint shown here is a good indicator of it and I find autumn the best time to grow anything, with all the elements providing the right conditions.

mint

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Keeping pretty busy at work these days. I’m just keen to get on with my job, and perform it to the best of my ability. There are days when I don’t mind things that much, feeling more charitable and quite simply, enjoying myself. Heh, just waiting for the weekend now, a little tired from dealing with the nitty gritty stuff.

Having a long weekend come up due to Labour Day on Monday. Have a satay party planned by my cousin on Sunday. Going to look at more property this weekend. I’d also like to sit down to install Arch Linux on one of my old laptops. It should be an interesting experience. Also plan to do a little cooking this weekend. Bought osso bucco (veal shanks) last weekend and cooked it a few days ago. It’s the kind of meat you braise for a couple of hours and it just becomes soft and melts off the bone. The part I like about osso bucco is the marrow from the bones that become accessible after you cook it long enough. It’s gelatinous and tastes quite good. To cook this dish, I bought celery, something I haven’t bought in long while as I’m not quite sure what uses it has. Lately I’ve been finding more ways to use the vegetable.

Just happy to keep things simple these days.

Starting March

★ Posted on at 08:09 pm ★

drenched slippers - monotone

I don’t recall the last time I heard the rain fall in Melbourne. Dozed off in the living room couch and awoke to the sound of raindrops on the concrete walkway outside. Melbourne’s been so dry lately that you really just wish it’d rain more often.

* * *

I’ve never been good with disrupting my sleeping schedule, and I was semi zombified the last two days of the work week when I dragged myself out of bed to watch the Champion’s League match between Manchester United and Inter Milan. I only managed the first forty five minutes as I had to go to work, but it was still a good display from United at the San Siro stadium.

United play Tottenham in the Carling Cup final tonight and as much as I’d like to watch it, a 2am kick off time is in no man’s land. Will just have to be content with watching video replays in the morning when I get up.

On more soccer items, Melbourne Victory managed to beat Adelaide United in the A-League grand final. It was a hotly contested match, with Victory winning by just 1-0. I still recall watching the same two teams in the same match 2 years ago at Ken’s place. Heh, that match was a 6-0 thrashing by Victory, with one of the Adelaide players being sent off. This time around, their player was sent off again and you can’t help but feel sorry for them, as if they’ve been jinxed on this ground at the Telstra Dome in Melbourne.

* * *

Nothing much planned for the month, other than work and going around looking at more prospective properties. Have to sort out finances and know roughly how much Vyanne and I qualify to loan, but we just need to put that all down on paper soon. Interest rates might fall a little more but there seems to be a segmented view of the economy with organisations cutting jobs yet individuals seem to still be hoarding plenty of cash and willing to snap up a place if they like it enough.

Still working on this website. There’s nothing I’ve designed so far that I haven’t done before, so I’m trying to freshen things up a bit, trying new code, new concepts. My brain is not quite wired to be that creative and I lack practice, so this will be taking a while longer than anticipated. Lately I’m of the opinion that you don’t need to be very talented to do anything, as long as you are willing to part with the time and effort to keep doing something you enjoy, you will sooner or later become good at it. Heh.