Author: Matt Johnston

The long weekend is coming to an end…

I spent a lot of it tidying up the house. I also spent some looking up stuff on the internet and keeping an eye on the temperature of some of my switches in work which aren’t being cooled properly due to a malfunctioning compressor in the air/con unit.

Still..I love my work….I just feel better working from home.

We are such gits sometimes. We bring such misery among us. We HURT people. We wound them.

Sometimes without even knowing it.

A while back I read a comic series – V for Vendetta – one section about a prisoner (okay…it was a little more complex than that) in a prison cell. She kept her diary on loo paper. I think the final point of it was that she and cell had been together for a very long time. The cell knew every inch of her. Except one.

Everyone should have their own inch.

I’m a network geek by trade. I build networks.

Two years back I decided to take on a bit of extra work by teaching. I’ve been teaching for the last two school years – the subject being computer architecture. I’ve also taught PC maintenance and introductions to computing. Teaching is fun, sometimes it really stretches the mind.

Well….the term is coming to a close and I’ve been asked by entirely another source to do some training over the summer – not teaching – training. Turns out that this company is meant to be providing Mac OS X training and they don’t know anyone who knows enough about the system to actually do the training. That’s where I come in.

Oh…and I have to give a 1 hour lecture at the local university about IT Strategy.

Makes me think that if I was at a loss I could probably make the readies in teaching, training and lecturing….

I’m looking at buying a new palmtop. My Newton was retired about a year or so ago and I’ve been using a PalmVx since then and frankly I’m not that impressed. It does the job but whwre’s the fun. I remember having lots of fun with the Newton.

Anyway…it’ll either be a Casio E125 or an ipaq H36xx. Not sure and it’ll be a couple of months before I can afford the bugger but that’s the plan anyway…

The training course was great – the Passport 8000 really is a neat piece of kit. Beats the knickers off anything else out there.

Off work tomorrow…dentists appointment…ewww…

Oni….ack…i’m going to have to mail order this…I’ve waited enough…

Diablo II….’er indoors is whacking ehr way through it. With the speakers attached to the iMac it makes some pretty sounds…

Anyway…just starting to cook. Better go stick the turkey on…

Just spent four days in Maidenhead. Without a ‘net connection.

Over four hundred emails awaited for me.

Just. Finished. Reading. Them.

Sheesh…

My ISDN is down….

*insert long belaboured sigh*

Which means that, for the time being, I’m stuck with a little modem router with a 56K modem and refuses to connect at anything faster than 33K. I know it’s not the quality of the lines – it’s the ISP.

Last night I was at a friends house (I mentioned him, Paul) and he has a Cable modem runnign at a spritely 512Kbits. Compared to my ISDN that’s depressing (a massive 128Kbits) but compared to modem hell I’m feeling certainly hard done by.

Course, I should count myself lucky. I live in a church, in a field. I should feel lucky I have a phone at all. Better check NTLBroadband (uh..nope) BTOpenWorld again…

Holy ****

Jinks! It says yes! Holy ****

I know an expert. This guy is a professor in an IT-related discipline…

And he can’t get a simple IP connection to work between two computers.

Driving me mad I tell you…

After a good nights sleep and a couple of simple phone calls I feel muchly refreshed. Haven’t had brekky yet – going to wait til L. gets back and then we’ll have a brunch. Just the usual cup of Tetleys to wake me up a little.

I’m a network guy but I’m still really interested in things like perl, python, UNIX, and the network services therein. I sorta miss the ability to work on the whole range of things and I think I see specialisation as being the death of creativity. I’ll have to settle for being a network geek in work and an “everything else” geek at home. Makes me sorta sad. I recall in the old days that versatility was actually appreciated while these days everyone wants specialists. I used to be very much a jack-of-all-trades and the cross-discipline knowledge often meant I could easily see where solutions lay. I’m not sure I can ever be as techie in the network arena as some of my colleagues but I have to try!

Add to that the desire to be a published writer (actually achieved but why stop at two or three books) and doing the odd bit of (admittedly poor) web design…

Anyway, hope ya have a good day…

I was talking about some interesting techie stuff with John via email but mail crashed before I sent the message so I’m feeling some small amount of hostility towards humanity right now.

Anyway…it was all about Semantic Web Agents

http://www.scientificamerican.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html

I think tim B-L labours the point a little when we’re really looking at what “cookies” are doing for us. Example: I’m not interested in alcohol, cigarettes or gambling. Therefore advertisements for those products are completely wasted on me. Some privacy nutters worry about targetted advertising – I say…where’s my darned targetted advertising! I want to be targetted. I don’t want to see ads for booze and gambling because it’s both a waste of my time, a waste of the advertisers time and don’t get me started on SPAM…

Send me ads about cool techie gear (I already subscribe to several email lists that are nothing more than promotional vehicles)

Anyway…rant over. i’m off to bed.

Everyone should have an aggro list. There are two columns. The first had the header: Aggro List for Today. The second has Permanent Aggro List. Underneath each column you write the names of people who have causes you aggro (aggravation or annoyance). Some people go on the “day” list almost immediately, some people make it onto the permanent list. It’s also easy to graduate someone to the permanent list. It’s hard to justify relegating them to the day list…
It goes without saying (but I will anyway) that if you do keep one. Keep it private and don’t pin it up in your workplace. No sense in becoming an addition on someone elses aggro list.