Misc

Iain M. Banks died today, in my mind Iain is one of the few people who was capable of building a world so vast yet so detailed that it would take a life time to understand the ramifications and practicalities of living in this kind of pan-galactic near-post-physical civilization. Iain masterfully takes you through a single thread introducing ideas and concepts that underpin something much larger than the story itself. He does this again and again, winding threads together to build a book. Beyond my awe of Banks’ world building and book writing skills, there are some very specific things that he introduced to me that have contributed to me as a person: ...

Somewhere in the middle of 2007 I was encouraged to use OneNote to clear my desk and move to a “paperless” system, initially this was a little painful as it seemed a gargantuan task to scan in all of the bits of paper on and around my desk that appeared to contain useful information. As it turned out I realised that if a bit of paper was covered by another (or in fact covered by anything) it wasn’t that important to the execution of my role and could probably be thrown in the bin. At the time I was not using Microsoft Office at home, opting to use OpenOffice for the limited needs I had for productivity software. I did however want a better way of organising my paperwork at home, OneNote 2007 came in at about £70 which isn’t unreasonable for what you got. Then I discovered Evernote. Seemed perfect, I don’t generate so much paperwork that I would bust the 40mb/month limit on the free account. In the end I decided to adopt Evernote at home and continue to use OneNote at work, it proved quite a handy separation of work and life. Recently I have run into two problems that are pushing me towards using Evernote for everything, and ditching OneNote entirely: ...

For my regular day job I am a Systems Administrator, my team and I manage a network with 7 servers and approximately 600 workstations, 200 laptops and 2500 users. All clients are Windows XP SP2 or SP3 and all servers are Windows 2003 SP2 or Windows 2003 R2 SP2. I am sure I am not alone in knowing least 5 commands that I use day in and day out to manage workstations or servers on the network. I thought I would take the time to share some of these with you now. ...

In Europe at least, Twitter was unable to come to an agreement with mobile phone operators to continue to send incoming Tweets to mobile phones via SMS, at least one person thinks that SMS is a deceptively profitable service for the network operators. Surely services that use SMS are going to generate more revenue as people pass funny Tweets onto non-Twitter users. After all, all of those jokes that zip round like wildfire whenever something happens in the news aren’t just the creative juices of the masses expressed in a short message, they are written by the networks to encourage people to send more messages (by passing the jokes on). ...

Bought the game last week, finished the single player campaign a couple of days ago. It plays more like being in a film than a game, which for me is great, as a cinematic experience it is superb, the game play is better than any other game I have played before (which doesn’t say much really - have been out of touch of the FPS market over the past few years). ...

Seeing as Catherine and I finally bought our own house and it looks like we might be staying here for much longer than we have ever stayed anywhere else, we are looking at options for home networking, our current solution involves a 802.11b Wireless Network for laptop connectivity and a cable for my PC, that has to be removed each night to close the living room door. The Options 1) Wireless Network 802.11g provides a maximum wire speed of 54mbps which results in a typical throughput of 25-27mbps, our existing 802.11b network gives us a typical throughput of about 4mbps which is below that of our broadband service (6.6mbps - Zen Internet ADSL Max Service) ...

Looking at getting myself a new computer so I have come up with a setup which looks good, we will have to see if I can afford it however. 1x Abit AN8 SLi nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) £102.17 Reasons: SATAII RAID for future proofing, SLI for future expansion 1x ThermalRight XP-120 £39.89 Reasons: Never faulted previous models 1x Vantec SF12025L Stealth 120mm fan £9.34 Reasons: Quiet yet fairly high (59) CFM ...

I am listening to the BBC Radio 5 Live feeds from the house of commons about the London Transport Blasts, it seems very little is known a unknown islamic group seems to of claimed responsability for the blasts however no one is sure if they can be beleived.

Excited dosn’t even begin to explain how I am feeling about the climax of the current series of Dr. Who; I am not going to be able to watch it on the night so that is going to get to me even more knowing that I am going to have to wait an extra day to see the end of the series. The thought that this episode explains how Christopher Eccleston comes to an end as The Doctor? how the Daleks managed to survive the time war? are the time lords still in existance? Aaagh so many questions. ...