Loop Invariant

While not as good as the bob cringley series from a few years back still worth a watch. Also showed me a cool feature of google video that youtube lacks - you can download the video for your ipod. Which I found quite handy, I know in the past you could download the videos but that was only to googles own player.

Part space marine part starshiptroopers and almost zero chance of making it into production. Still very very cool.

I'm in the middle of 3 exams this week between summer semester and graduate testing, so I'll leave my 5 things post untill thursday I think.

Ok I too have been watching this go through technical blogs that I know and respect and turn them into a 14 year old girls myspace page. I however don't have any high standards to maintain so here we go.

I am finding it a little hard to get started. I think it's meant to be five things that people don't know about me, which is a bit hard as I'm not exactly introverted. But then again Al didn't have any new info in his, so here we are;

1. I have completed two years of a Bachelor of Arts at UQ. My majors were Philosophy and Classics(Latin and Classical Greek) I loved the campus at St Lucia but not the traveling to and from it, and I would have enjoyed studying more if I didn't feel the pressing need to get a job at the end of it. I had originally wanted to study Arts/Law but was side tracked by Arts and eventually decided to throw it all in and return to my original love of technology. I would still like to complete my degree and as I have mentioned if I move to Canberra I would like to take advantage of that to finish it at ANU.

2. When I first started to 'court' my girlfriend Lauren I was petrified that I might have been guilty of sexually harassing her. I met her at work when I fixed her computer one day. After that I made a point of asking her if she wanted to come to after work drinks but she always politely declined. This state of affairs might have gone on for some time but my flat mate Lara told me that I should ask her to lunch. I emailed her asking her to lunch (I am such a coward when it comes to these things) and she didn't reply. As I had never attended the traditional corporate induction until she replied three weeks later I was petrified that I was going to be sued for sexual harassment.

3. I am a monarchist. I don't see any reason why we need an Australian president, and in fact I like the idea that I can't be the head of state. It really removes so much pressure from your life, you need never be told "You could be the president when you grow up!" And the fact is if we follow Americas lead in terms of a republic which would seem likely (and somewhat vulgar) then you wouldn't have any chance of becoming president anyway unless you had at least 20 or 30 million dollars in your well connected political family.

4. I read historical detective stories. It's a bit of a niche I know but I do like them.

5. I meditate every day or so, I find that it calms me down immensely and allows me to step back from my life. I would hesitate before saying I'm a Zen Buddhist as I think that has some horrible poseur connotations, and I think that it is more of a philosophy than a religion, but it actually affects me in a way that my Anglican upbringing didn't.

There you go five things about me

So it's late and in the absence of anything more rigorous than a university summer semester I have started to become nocturnal once again. This has some advantages in that I can keep tabs on late night TV (what the fuck is going on with the quiz shows, I mean I know I'm not the first person to mention them but come on how can you find something worse than infomercials???)

I have also decided to keep this blog updated more regularly as I am just conceited enough to think that people might want to know what I'm up to. But I'm also certain that in the future blogging will be quite useful in a business sense, and even though it might be hard to see the link between posting AOL database searches and blogging about information security I feel that the more practice you have writing the better your writing will be. And lets face it my writing can only get better!

I had briefly mentioned Podcasts in my last post but I feel that I should elaborate and point out that even if you don't have an ipod you should download iTunes and head to the music store. The breadth of subjects covered is amazing, for the first time sense I left UQ I've been listening to people discussing philosophy on the podcast of the Radio National show 'The Philosophers Zone" I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed philosophy and the pursuit of knowledge. If as I hope I move to Canberra in the future I'm entertaining the fantasy of finishing my undergrad degree in philosophy and classics at ANU, I don't know if I would have time and I know that it wouldn't advance my career but we can all dream!

Which I guess leads me to grad programs; as some people will know I have interviewed in Canberra for a job in the defense department, people probably don't know too much about it but discretion was mentioned in the process so I'm afraid thats all I can really say about it at the moment. Since then I have also been invited to the second round of testing for the DSD graduate program next week. As these are the only jobs that I have applied for at the moment I'm quite pleased with the progress so far. It's also a little awkward for me as I'm finishing in the middle of the year and the grad programs are all geared for the more traditional end of year finish. I've also been tossing up joining the reserves as an officer. At the moment the RAAF are the front runners but Lol doesn't seem to keen, still it's just an idea at the moment.

I guess that the problem with not doing much is that I don't have much to write about... But more will follow!

I found the Tao of Programming again during one of my morning web wandering sessions, it reminds me of the early Internet (early for me anyways) those halcyon days of 1996 when search engines were a new novelty and 'surfing the web' as a term was used to describe the practice of clicking through links from one page to another. And a time when I would guess a quarter of all web pages were humour pages with jokes about Klingon programmers. Anyway it has gems such as this

Thus spake the master programmer:
``You can demonstrate a program for a corporate executive, but you can't make him computer literate.''

hmm.

So it has once again been several months since my last post, but then again I've never been good at keeping diaries calendars or records. I thought that I would do a mish mash of things that I've been doing over the last couple of weeks, so here goes.



I was lucky enough to receive a sexy new black ipod for Christmas, I've had a 3rd generation white ipod for a couple of years now but my music collection has long since outgrown it's 20 gigabytes of space, and the fact that I couldn't carry all my music around at one time meant that more often than not I just didn't use it at all. My new 80gb neatly solves this problem and should allow me some breathing space before I have to upgrade again.

It wasn't all smooth sailing though, my music collection resides on my Windows desktop and getting my iPod to work on it was a frustrating exercise. When I say getting it to work I really mean attempting to as I eventually had to pack it in and instead transfer my 50gb of music to my Mac laptop, where as is the Apple way it 'just worked'

Anyways the upshot of all of this is that I've been listening to a lot more new music. One of my recent finds is Gary Jules, perhaps rediscovery is more accurate, his song "Mad World" probably isn't instantly recognisable but you would have heard it on an ad or two recently or perhaps on one of the new years retrospectives. I first heard it in Donnie Darko and both the movie and song touched me more than usual. And it's funny because I think it's the lyrics that really get to me, and it turns out that it is actually a cover of a Tears for Fears song! I've been listening to it on a continuous loop and I never do that with songs. I usually prefer the whole album listening method. The film clip for the song is here

Podcasts are another revelation or rediscovery the iTunes store has such huge selection of podcasts everything from Chaser videos to a weekly rap up of stories from The Economist (My current favourite new source apart from the BBC) - I can see reading this again in half an hour and thinking I sound like a pretentious twat. Pretentious twat sounds quite pretentious now actually, getting recursive here..... Ricky Gervais has 3 free podcasts up at the moment that are worth listening to, very funny show with his co writer Steven Merchant and their mate Karl Pickering who I feel manages to steal the show with his deadpan act.

I think I'll leave this here for the moment and hopefully come back tomorrow and continue....