Discovering Neill is working for Greensward has made me rather nostalgic. While I probably still consider a large part of my college/highschool life as the worst part in my life, there were still some good times.

And while it seems stupid, cycling from Southend to Hockley at 3am on a bitterly cold day, wearing a t-shirt just to check up on Neill to make sure he was okay, after he “vanished” after a “bad” conversation with a “friend” was one of them.

And while it might also be stupid, thinking of Martin and James kicking the crap out of an old computer found on the floor in the “outcasts” break room, and yelling “beating the wang” was rather amusing (yes, the manufacturer was “Wang computers”).

And thinking of college, while at the time, I thought it was incredibly annoying at the time, looking back it was quite impressive, I think everybody in the school knew my name because I worked with the IT staff a lot, and walking down the hallway to the lunchhall and having everybody saying hi jon (and not knowing there name) is quite fun. Looking back gives a sense of “power”, at the time I found it really annoying.

sighs Sometimes I miss home, and my friends.

While I was in college/high school, I always figured either myself, or one of a few of my friends would end up working there. I had this gutt feeling.

Well I escaped, I got to the US before I got entrapped. I was speaking to my old IT Teacher (then Cisco teacher, and a few other things), and found out Neill ended up working there. Fun stuff. Seems he is the network manager, and is having plenty of fun… doing exactly what I’m doing here on the other side of the pond, and having similar issues with (list off various networking, and application issues you can think of).

Work… I like my job… don’t get me wrong, but there are certainly days where I just want to go home, and stick my head under my pillow, and pretend it didn’t exist.

….

I had started to write a nice long explanation on how my day is going.. was full of techno-babble, and general bitching… so I gave up.

I really do. I quite like my D70s. It’s taking a little getting used to, lots more buttons, and the size is bigger than my N65, but now it feels right at home in my hand, the grip feels great. I only have a little trouble getting to some of the buttons, but they’re not needed a huge amount anyway. Here is one of Christopher I took yesterday:

You can see a full image here, with EXIF information. I think I quite like it, didn’t realize when I took it that when I put the slant on it (yes it was done on purpose), that the path ended up right at the middle of the image, which is pretty cool.

Arrived today is my new Nikon D70s. Lots of pictures, and fun coming soon.

I’m getting kind of tired of some people’s philosophies in OpenSource. Tonight I spent well over an hour trawling through Sourceforge, looking for something very simple. A time tracker. Nothing more complicated that being able to click a button showing I am doing something, and another to say I’m done… and add some comments. I know, I could probably write one myself, but I’m feeling lazy, instead I wasted an hour in which I could have just written it. Back on course… why am I getting tired? Tonight I must have clicked on over 40 projects. A majority of which were registered right around the big hype on the internet, known to everybody as the .com period… I probably should have known not to look at them, but some of the descriptions were enticing. Only to be taken to a dead project. Then I stumbled across a dozen projects that had comments like “inspired by project X but better”… and those were dead too… surely if it’s better, you could contribute back to the original project, instead of spawning your own project that dies a few months after original conseption? I mean seriously… it’s not that difficult. If I like something on a project, and think I can add improvements, I’ll jump on that project to help out, submit patches, do what I can… instead of spawning my own garbage that I know will eventually die due to lack of interest, or my lack of time….

And there is my rant… See… Tired of a lot of OpenSource projects purely because they go nowhere, or spawn from others in an attempt to be better, but don’t go anywhere… yada yada

You really can do anything with duct tape.

This says it all…

E [\......] F

About a month ago, I posted a quick article on a home grown light tent I saw. I discovered another version the other day, less work, looks quite interesting. Might try it out.

I also discovered these instructions/guides on how to make a whole bunch of different items, from backdrop stands, to carrying cases. All very interesting.

While driving into work this morning, it dawned on me that generally corporations, and organizations, don’t appear to have any intelligence at all. This was mostly spawned by two news stories that make you think… “how stupid”. I’m not saying you should do one of these, and lying about the other one is just plain stupid as you will eventually be found out.

The first one is the US armed forces, and Abu Ghraib. Yes, you’ve guessed it, the next round of images. Today, Salon released additional images from Abu Ghraib relating to the tortures of detainees. BBC also has this story covered, and so does many other sources. My comment on this one… If you’re going to do something illegal, do NOT be stupid enough to take pictures, videos, and diaries of the event. It will come back and bite your ass.

The second story is about RadioShack’s CEO. Fort Worth’s Star-Telegram released an article disclosing possible information that Dave Edmondson’s resume might not been entirely valid. A day later, Edmundson confirmed that he might have mislead people on his resume stating that he made a mistake, and was sure he got a ThG instead of a BS. He further added that he didn’t realize the information on the RadioShack’s website was also incorrect. Mmmm… tasty. What more could you want from a rather large corporate entity than complete incompetence. Surely if you were hiring somebody to be your CEO you’d at least confirm the information on the applicants’ resumes.