Some days you have to sit back and thank those tireless bearded men and women who work on open-source projects. Other days… well, other days…

On other days you’re sitting at a client’s house, pondering why the new release of Apple’s operating system won’t play nice with XP’s SMB protocol, or is it perhaps the other way round… either way, something isn’t happy and skipping breakfast was probably not the best idea. With ideas and patience running low, you idly fiddle around with the network and workgroup IDs, thinking that maybe changing this rather oddly named workgroup to something more usual like “MSHOME” or “WORKGROUP” might make it work. Wondering why Windows wants to reboot, and failing to see any reason to not let it, you agree to it’s terms, stare blankly at the screen as the shut down dialog flickers past and then out of nowhere you experience a sizeable OH FUCK moment.

Something important to take into consideration when changing Windows’ network settings, is that if the owner of the aforementioned computer used to work at a big company with the typical MS network (Exchange et al.), then the user’s user account will be of the domain user variety. And if you are now offline (in terms of this work network) then changing the workgroup and network ID is a rather unuseful way of permanently locking this user out of the machine (taking into account that the administrator password for this laptop is, well, no one is sure what it is).

So you’re sitting there, cheerful login screen in front of you, trying the same user/pass combination for the tenth time in a row, you know, because maybe you typo’d nine times in a row… I mean it’s totally possible. Eyeing the window, you begin to wonder if a full grown man can fit between those burglar bars, and what kind of explanation would that entail. At the very least you’re quite glad that not many people use EFS, because that would be totally uncool right now.

On days like these, you don’t want to thank those crazy open-source folk, the kind of people who release things like ntpasswd, you want to get down on your knees and thank the invisible wizard in the sky that there are people like this in the world.

I’ve kinda moved into my new place - bed base is still to be delivered (sometime this week apparently) - so I have a mattress to sleep on currently. The couch for the lounge is still being made, and will only be ready in about 3 weeks. Coffee table… haven’t found a good one yet, hopefully there’s no delivery time on it when I find one.

IBurst is pretty cool, quite fast, although latency isn’t great obviously. It has gone down a couple times, and has some issues with mail for some reason. It seems that there is no through-connection from IBurst to my work mail server, and both ISP and mail host say it’s not them (IBurst has also stopped replying to my support tickets) - so for now I have to tunnel the connection over SSH through a server in Germany. IBurst also insists you use their SMTP server (transparent proxying and stuff apparently) - which is fairly annoying.

My laptop is cool, although the keyboard not so much - I definitely prefer a full-size keyboard, but I am getting used to it. OS X has some “interesting” design flaws; Finder (the file manager) has no option to Cut a file, and also no ability to apply a standardised set up across all your file windows (e.g. Sort by folders first, then files, and display in a list view). Grrr. I’m looking at alternatives, XFolders is free and quite cool, but does lack a certain polish. PathFinder is $30 or something, but I haven’t tried the demo out. Cyberduck is a free FTP app which is quite nice, but Panic’s Transmit looks like it is worth paying for. Textmate is a cool editor which I’ve already paid for, and I must still check out BBEdit 2, which has a scary cult following.

I had a list of excuses ready, but it’s not worth it - I now own a Apple Macbook, and it’s great. I won’t feign disgust about becoming a laptop-carrying member of the sheep generation, the machine is pretty (very pretty), and it all works out’ve the box. My final salvation lies in the circumstances in which I came to own it; it was deemed a bonus from my ever-generous boss, which was a lovely gesture, and now I am able to enjoy it mostly guilt-free. Don’t take this post too seriously (unless you think you should be) - I am very happy at the moment, and just pandering to my urge to write elaborate posts.

OS X is nice, click stuff and stuff happens without too much hassle - I don’t doubt that it’ll still be a bit of a mission to get everything running as I like it (the same with Windows and Linux), but at the moment the fact that it’s Apple software running on Apple hardware makes for a great driver-less experience, everything is already installed and configured. Vista’s widgets and window switcher are obviously “inspired” by the OS X, I don’t want to argue with anyone about it, standing on the shoulders of giants, etc. What’s interesting is that when Vista came out, apparently everyone at the press release ignored the graphical effects, but when Apple has a press release showing the same effects everyone oohs-and-aahs. Leopard is coming out with Spaces (identical to workspaces in Linux), and multi-tabbed terminal windows, and I bet the Apple crowd will attribute them to Apple. Whoo, fanboys.

I’m moving at the end of the month to a nice flat off Roeland Street, in town. Quite looking forward to a change, but also will be sad to leave my current place - had some good times here. Anyway, it’s necessary, I couldn’t commit to another 6-month lease when I don’t know exactly what I’m doing. I’m probably not traveling anywhere, but it is nice to have the freedom to.

Whenever I’m in a bad mood or something is bothering me (or even just feeling slightly out of place) it’s nice to know that I always good music to turn to.

My current “comfort” songs are (current, being the last few months at least):

Deftones ft. Maynard James Keenan - Passenger
Dream Theater - As I Am
Machinehead - Aesthetics of Hate
Porcupine Tree - Open Car

I went to Pay to Play at the Armchair last night - a Nirvana tribute show. Yes, tribute show sounds like some crusty band doing some half-assed gig covering good songs badly… but not when you throw the Guile brothers into the mix. On stage, Jason and Sebastian from Zenith were joined by their little brother Matthew and David Hodgson on bass. The performance was ridiculously good; every time I looked away from the stage, I had to check back again to make sure I wasn’t (in some bizarre twist of space-time) seeing Nirvana live somewhere. Playing again April 28 at Mercury Live - I’m probably going to go through again.

Another month almost done, and so many things still to do! Looking back, work wasn’t absolutely crazy, but there’ve been so many different projects floating around that it has really felt like an intense month. On top of work, in my free time I’ve been working on my own projects as usual, slowly getting there - but still don’t really know if it’s worth the effort.

I’ve had to start learning about forex trading recently, in order to do some work for my employer. Finance has never interested me, especially with all those stupid terms, bullish market etc., but this is actually pretty entertaining. Forex trading is a lot of looking at your daily/weekly/(time period) graphs and watching trends whilst developing strategies; this all seems very close to the data classification and regression work I did in the fuzzy logic and computational intelligence course at university. Anyway, apparently the market is very volatile at the moment, so we’re trying to develop and back-test a stable strategy that copes with bad patches.

Been playing a lot of guitar again lately, I’m hoping that it’ll stick this time and I’ll actually progress. I’ve already noticed a lot of changes in my playing - I started to pay attention to what my hands were doing, and have been actively trying to improve fingering/picking as I notice the bad habits. And yeh, it is already paying off, it seems.

I’ve got a little jumping spider that lives in the light above my computer screens - whilst that may sound like the opening to a rather bizarre poem or short story, it is in fact the truth.

Here is some pictorial evidence, notice specimen A in the bottom right-hand corner of the image.

I figure as long as I don’t get more than 5 spiders, and definitely do not adopt any street spiders, I have a good chance of not turning into crazy spider guy. Actually, I used to be pretty scared of spiders, but only the big black ones really. They still freak me out.

Meet the world.

From Melissa: World Mapper.

I wanted to start posting more photos along with written posts - so I’ll start with these two.

This is our local cat resident (one of them). She officially belongs to Melissa.

This is the mysterious neighbour cat who kept visiting, but has now stopped coming round. Perhaps we’re a bad influence.

Now, let me get back to eating my 2-minute chicken-flavoured noodles which I tracked and killed outside, earlier this morning.

I’m beginning to really dislike the end of poker games - more often than not you end up with two people holding the majority of the chips, and any pair hand is quite possibly good enough to beat your opponent’s hand. This makes for quite frustrating play, with large amounts being wagered carelessly, just to get it over with. Gavin and I ended up in that situation on Saturday; we decided to declare a token winner based on the next hand, and he nailed it with a King high.

I also discovered on Saturday that silver tequila is actually quite smooth, provided you are having it with lemons/oranges plus salt/sugar (let’s not detail the more exotic combinations, for now).

I have more to tell about my experience with the before mentioned company from hell - I have some form of inside man who is keeping me updated - I will post separately about it at a later stage, but for now let’s just say that I am pretty much being blamed internally for anything that goes wrong, despite the fact it has been repeatedly proven to have nothing to do with me. Last I heard, I had broken a website I had never even worked on. My powers are increasing.

I had my JET interview on Thursday morning, along with an English proficiency test. I went into the interview first, although originally I was meant to do the test before, but there seemed to be some kind of mix up with times. The interview was quite nerve-wracking; they asked questions I wasn’t really expecting, things like how would I explain apartheid to a class of children who have very little exposure to South Africa. Also, how would I deal with ill-disciplined kids, and other related things (give them a black-eye is not the correct answer, sorry Nick).

The test was fairly simple, mostly picking the right word to use, and the sentence that is incorrectly structured. The other people really complained about it, but it seemed fine to me. Oh well.

On Friday I ate at Fujiyama in Sea Point - they boast an authentic Japanese menu, right down to the size of dishes and order that you receive them. I had yakitori and chicken katsu-don, both which were delicious. I also received a cup of really rich miso soup, but I hadn’t ordered it, so I guess it was part of the meal. For pre-appetisers, they gave us pickled daikon (I think), which really seemed to work in taking the edge off your hunger, and cleansing your palette. Outside there seemed to be a big arrest going on, outside the 7-11 - cops were running around and lights were flashing.

On the way through, the lane that leads onto the freeway (next to the waterfront entrance) was completely closed off by cones and police cars. There were also tow-trucks and a fire-engine, so there was either a big accident or some kind of police incident. I hope everyone involved is ok…

After wandering around Sea Point for a bit, a reconnaisance mission was made into Adult World, which is surprisingly not-dodgy. The shopkeeper had plenty to say, and even the bouncer guy was having a laugh at something or other.

No time to proof-read this, I will later - off for a bike ride with Gavin, the weather is pretty nice for it. Tonight I’m heading out for some poker, possibly followed by a mission, but we’ll see.