Review

Long time no post.
Review of the past 2 months:

Broke up with my long term girlfriend at the end of Nov. My mistake, but can't change the past ;)
Dropped a bunch of weight and getting back into sport (I'm almost as fit as I was when I was 11! :)
Re-building habits in my life to be the best I can be. Books, CD's from the business support system...learning Vietnamese...among other things.

Getting back to roots in IT, really surrounding myself with it. Sir Technology is growing, and I'm building the infrastructure with that, and it's fun. I've just finished looking at reviews of various OS. Sun's ZFS architecture looks cool, like software RAID, but the file systems are virtual and so don't need to be redefined to take advantage of added drive space - just add it on the fly, and the file system gets access to it straight away (cool). Doesn't look like solaris x86 performance is quite up to Linux performance yet (Apache / MySQL are about 5% slower in Solaris 10), but it will make a good NFS / Samba file server.

Also, AmigoOS is back!!!! Version 4 is around, somewhere, though I couldn't figure out how to obtain a copy of it from the website. I love the microkernel architecture, gels with RISC nicely, and I've always loved that. RISC / CISC have sort of merged now days, but the ideaology is still there: design your chip as simple as possible so that you can concentrate on streamlining execution rather than redesigning your chip.

Haiku is also coming along nicely for a desktop OS on low end hardware (e.g. Pentium 2's). Like Linux...but a little more user friendly (at least, BeOS was). E/OS looks cool as well, I love the idea of embedding emulation into the OS so you don't have to install additional software. Just one OS :) Don't think it's production ready for people who are computer illiterate yet though.

Thats it for me, off to Summer Conference on the weekend, I'll take lots of pics and come back and post them all!! :)

- James

FEEC 2006

Well FEC was now 2 weeks ago so I thought I'd post the photos, get some fire in your belly again!


Hah, and that's just in money paid out for incentives...the bonus money would have been a loottttttttt more than that. I'll have some of that thanks! ;)



Bert Gulick & Co. Bert is the one in the bright red shirt. I guess when you make as much money as he does, you really can wear whatever you want!! (just kidding Bert! :)



Pat Mesiti - Back to talk to us again Pat?? This guy moves fast, but then he is pretty small hehe :)



Watch'a doin' with all those girls Jordan - pick one and settle already! :)



As above, but on the other side of the stage is the rest of the guys -- time to migrate perhaps fellas ? :)



Did I forget to mention that we had a catwalk show while we were there? Well we did, and it was good, and we cheered lots, although I think those models would make better cheerleaders than us!


Craig & Anna Deane. He's thinner than I thought he would be. With Bert being sort of larger-than-life, I thought the more money you make, the bigger man you are - now we know anyone can build this business. Lets do it, and get some of that bonus money!

Corporate Uni?

I was thinking yesterday, about how if you learn a skill and don't use it, you lose (forget) it. I think this has been one of the major benefits that an apprenticeship has over a university degree. For some reason though, many employers still favour university graduates. I understand that completing a university degree demonstrates commitment to a task, but would 3-5 years not be better spent learning skills that we remember?

For hard-diciplines, such as Law and Medecine, this is exactly what happens. You are taught the knowledge that you are required to know in order to legal matters (for example), and much of the course is demonstrating that you have a grasp of the principles and are capable of justifying a point of view legally.

Lets contrast that to a BA or BCom. In my BA, I've touched on everything from Accounting, to Strategising; From Finance to Law. Now a BA is designed to be generic. But people who do a BCom specialize in one field - this is where most of our Accountants, Financial Officers etc come from. In this case, why is there so much time spent on erroneous information they do not directly use? If you wanted your Finance department to have a "reasonable" knowledge of accounting, send them to a seminar at your own expense! That way, they will learn information they use straight away. By learning it at the 1st year uni level, by the time we graduate, we've forgotten it anyway, and have to relearn it at your expense again!

Perhaps university would benefit from being more generic, shorter courses (i.e. just the 1 year), and when you choose a "major" or dicipline (depending on what course you are studying, same thing though), you actually work with a company in that industry who trains you for that field. Civil Engineers would do generic maths and physics in the first year, then spend 3 years honing that theory in the field with people who know what is going to be used and what is not!

One day, I'll start a corporation that does this :)

Ideas Man!

Wow, read enough books that encourage the mind, and you come up with random ideas. At work today, and just thought: it would be cool if when you search for something on google.com , if it had the ability to summarize the page...intelligently, not like MS Word Autosummarize (where the summary is non-sensical). There are just too many words on the internet, and no one has time to sift through them all! An automated tool would fit right into Google's toolbase.

I went to tell Google about this, only to find they don't have a way to submit ideas to them! So I thought I'd blog it instead, maybe someone out there will feel inspired to write some software that does it anyway :)

Settle Now = Settled For Life

One of the big problems I think I'm encountering on my way up the wealth tree, is the fact that I was brought up with the philosphy of making-do.

Lets take the example of computers, since I'm a geek. Wanna play a new game, but the comp is old. Time to upgrade right? Wrong, squeeze more power out of the existing machine, and lower the settings in the game.

Lets translate that into real life. I want to break a million in business revenue before 2010. Translation: Put pressure on existing business resources, and lower the dream from $1M to, say, $500,000. Something tells me that is not going to work so well.

Napoleon Hill, in Think And Grow Rich, states the concept of burning all bridges to our current situation. This should force our direction to what we desire (if done right). Of course, if you refuse to go forward, then you're stuck, heh.

I think he has a point though. Of course he has a point, he made a lot of money from writing it. He's not the first person I've heard / read this from though. It's still scary :/

Go Nomads! :)

Best Celebrity Smiles :)

Ok I thought I'd start an impulse list of the best smiles I see in flicks. You know, the ones that don't look fake :)

First up is my girlfriend. Of course, she's my celebrity, which is even better :)

But next up, Kate Bosworth, from Blue Crush / Win A Date With Ted Hamilton. I think it's the high cheek bones that make me like this one heh.



I'll post more when it occurs to me ;)

Perth Maps For Palm

Well after getting my Palm TX, I wanted to use it as a portable map for Perth, Australia. After reading a bit about GPS, it sounded pretty easy. Get a nice Bluetooth GPS unit, and the software will plot routes for me. Awesome :)

Unfortunately, GPS software for the Palm is not exactly easy to come by. In fact, there are only a couple of companies who do it. Of those companies, I could only find 2 for Australia. One looked ok, but not available for for Perth. The other was raster map based, so you can't really zoom. I don't want to pay for that!

Even the raster maps were not available for Perth! So, rather than pay for something that is not yet produced, we can use what's already out there: whereis.com.au. If you get the map for the area you want, view the printable image, then you can download that to your PDA. Easy, and works for Perth :)