Good Morning

Good morning indeed but for no particular reason. Life goes on, ride the storm (Roachford). I have a new job for 1 year now. It has taken a year to get to the point where it rules my days, nights and weekends. Today I start operation cold turkey. I will be 100% about the job from 9-5 5 days a week. I will forget the job at all other times. Fingers crossed.
Nearly 2 years between posts. Nice effort :-)

Nothing Much

Weeks blur into months. It feels like a long time and no time since my last post. I have been cruising at work. Due mainly to lack of leadership and motivation along with rewards for cost savings in the form of budget cuts. Now that I think about it my personal life seems to have followed the same pattern. Days are spent doing nothing because that doesn't incur cost. Thinking is free though. I have probably spent too much time in recent months indulging my imagination. Pondering science and technology mostly.

I have spent more time working with linux and have made some good progress. I have completed installation of a home server machine running ubuntu. It is my home network gateway/firewall/dhcp/dns/proxy server and also hosts some web pages. I went domain hunting and settled on exfinium.com. It seemed short, memorable and representative of the think-outside-the-square type of web site I envision running someday soon.

Latin:
ex - out of, from
finium - limit, boundary

Do as I say, not as I do

I have a really hard time doing as I'm told. Always have. I'm not the openly rebellious type. I'll take orders just fine. Following orders is more of a hit and miss thing for me. I shudder to think what would become of me if I were to be drafted to an armed force or something.

This disobedient streak extends beyond just authority figures though. I have realized that I seldom do what I want myself to do. Is that weird or what? I have managed to live with this shortcoming in a variety of ways. I don't plan ahead because I usually don't follow my own plans. If I must make plans I set aside an entire day to do the one thing even if that one thing will only take half an hour. Even then I may forget completely or just stubbornly refuse to do what I had planned.

hmm... It just occurred to me that it could be related to my memory. Often I just forget to do what I was told. Other times I just forget why I agreed or decided to do this thing. I have already forgotten why I started this blog entry but it looks like it is nearly done so I guess I'll finish it.

These days I am not exactly surrounded by authority figures. In fact my life is conspicuously absent of them. I think I may have subconsciously planned it that way to avoid inevitably disappointing them. The one authority in my life I do continue to disappoint regularly though is myself.

End While

Two weeks holiday has come and gone. I am on the train heading back to the office. It took a while but I did manage to wind down and enjoy the time with my family. Mel, my eldest sister is visiting on holiday from her home and work in Scotland and stayed with us for the last five days. That has been good too.

I have been eager to add to my blog for a while now. I think the words are coming back. I have done more thinking on the why blog question and still don't have a conclusive answer, I would like to think that the things I do all have a greater purpose but I often feel that very few, of my pastimes offer much in the way of contribution to the world. I will continue to make entries in my blog as the urge strikes me but I think the original target I set for myself of three a week was a little artificial. It even added to my perceived workload a little I think. I see some people making multiple entries a day, people who I know also have demanding careers. Some have value in every word, some have painful play-by-plays of life's every mundane moment. I guess my rule for my own blog will be: I will post for my own enjoyment and will not feel pressure from any audience, imagined or real.

Episode 1

I haven't blogged for a while. Mainly because I just don't have any words. None. I have made it through the last couple of weeks with an assortment of grunts, clicks and whistles. There is also the stream of cursing and out loud gibberish. You could say I have had a week long tourette episode, an episode of somethin anyway. I wish I could explain but, like I said, no words.

It's been nearly a week.

I've had blogger's block.

Not that nothing has been happening. Quite the opposite. A paradox, you could say. The more you live life the less you think about life.

I spent another few days in Sydney over the weekend. After a Friday onsite I headed for the hotel I had booked online. I had been standing in line at the check-in counter for about twenty minutes, thinking the whole time, how long does it take these people to check in to a bloody room!? It won't even take me two minutes. I got to the counter and they had no booking.
"This is the Marriott Sydney isn't it?"
"Yes. One of them"
"Hmm. Perhaps you could check the others for a booking and transfer it here?"
No such luck. Found the booking at another but no room at this one. I spent more time at the counter than anyone before me and didn't even check in.

While wandering the streets with another non-local guy looking for a place to have a beer or three I came across a busker and remembered that I had not played guitar for more than a week. The callous on my fingertips was already starting to peel away from lack of use. I stood and ogled the guitar. I think the busker took pity on me because she offered to let me play. Fantastic. I belted out a truly flaccid rendition of know better and felt much better. (It's difficult to keep a firm melody after a few drinks...) Needless to say the busker was none the richer for my effort. Bummer. By the way if you have a thing for jazz/folk or uncommon melodies you should really checkout www.catherineobrien.com. She played a couple of her own tunes and I was impressed. I really didn't expect a busker to have a website but there you go.

Thank you Cath. You made my Sydney trip memorable, in a good way.

Technobabble

I have been swearing at my computer a lot today. Well not so much at my computer as at the various people and situations represented on screen. I have always carried on a healthy level(??) of conversation with my PC. I have never been coy about letting it know the extent of my anger when it is outright misbehaving though I have never actually damaged it, that would be wrong. I tell a lie. I have damaged several of my PCs over the years but usually not in anger.

I guess everyone at the office is used to me or something because noone seems to notice me alternating between babbling at and cursing my workstation but I worked from home today and Robyn was regularly checking to see if I had perhaps stubbed my toe or lost the family fortune in a game of bingo.

I'm fine. It's these ####ing ####heads from ###kerville. They interrupt a perfectly good nap just to make unreasonable damands for assistance with messups that are not my fault nor my responsibility. ahem

Stepping Out of the Box

It just occured to me that I haven't posted anything particularly geeky. When I kicked off this blog I assumed that it would be mostly technology related stuff since that's what I deal with for most of my waking hours. All I can say is I guess there have been other things on my mind recently. I tend to go through cycles of interest in technology both at a hobby and work level and right now I am on a down cycle. I haven't even done any basic reading on the Intel Core architecture, EFI or the AMD socket S. I'm not even sure it's called Socket S. I also really need to dig into MCP study. My lack of experience with administering managed windows PCs is starting to hold me back at work with some of the rollout issues I am called in on. I don't think I am in a hurry to push myself back into the thick of it. It's more important that I take advantage of this break to build other parts of my life that have been neglected of late.
I have decided to take Robyn on a date very soon, this Friday I think. We have only had a handful of night's out alone over the last couple of years, partly because I am a home body at heart. Getting out of the house is an effort for me but nearly always worth it once I get off my arse and do it. I still haven't decided what to do yet. Maybe a walk through the botanical gardens or the new Roma St gardens. Some drinks at one of the quieter beer gardens. Maybe I'll surprise her with a trip to a karaoke spot. She loves singing in front of strangers and is pretty good at it too.
In general I have decided to get out of my comfort zone more and put a lot more effort into building the relationships that I have let slide recently, particularly with my family. For me this is more of a challenge than you would think but I think it is one of those things that will be easier once I have taken the first steps.

Three Wishes

What do you really want? Really really?
Do you know why you do the things you do every day? Is what you do taking you closer to what you want? Are you on a path to achievement? Discovery? Reinvention? Liberty? Adventure? I find it hard to think about what I want without feeling selfish. I was raised to believe that those who truly serve others will want for nothing, that those who feed others before themselves will never be hungry. I am learning though, that to be part of such a utopian system I must be willing to allow others to serve me and be able to explain what I want to those who wish to serve me.

[enter magical genie, able to change anything in the universe to suit your wish]
1. I want to be able to understand and use all the subtleties of human communication expertly so I can better understand what I can do to make a positive difference in the lives of the people I care about.
2. I want to be able to take a prescient peek at the final outcome of some of life's heavier decisions. Call it 20/20 foresight. I'm sure it would be much more valuable than the hindsight version.
3. World peace.

Not Seeing Sydney

I have flown to Sydney for a customer situation. I had visions of a room with harbour views and a nice evening stroll through darling park. So far the tour has been a little more like work. Actually yeah it's just plain work. Instead of darling park I strolled to 7eleven. Instead of harbour views I have "city views" which is really just a view of the boring office building across the road.

Well I'm off to deliver some training on my way to the airport. Heh, yeah I found a way to travel for training, just get tangled up in a presale issue and sales will fly you there. It's a little sneaky but very effective. ;-)

Don't Hire Me

I will start by forgetting to arrive for the interview. Three days later I will call to "confirm" the interview date/time/address/company. I will arrive at the rescheduled interview with the interview details post-it still stapled to my forearm. I will ask for your name three times and the next day when I drop in the resumé I meant to bring I will ask for "the guy that did the interviews".

I have always figured I was just too lazy to bother remembering most stuff but I have been thinking recently that maybe I am just built a little differently. Now I really don't like the idea of self diagnosis or of labeling people. ...but here I go.

I have done some extended research over the last 0.01 days and have a couple of likely possibilities. Amnesia was the obvious first choice, source amnesia in particular and maybe memory distrust syndrome. I find it trivial to remember facts, numbers and solid concepts but context and human details are lost to me very rapidly, often in seconds. I figure that my frequent déjà vu experiences might be related but I don't know how that helps. I have thought before that I may be a little on the autistic spectral side on account of the difficulty I have with the subtleties of personal communication with most people and the unnatural talent I have for "guessing" the right answers to some kinds of puzzles. I haven't really found anything that matches my strange set of strengths and weaknesses. That's ok with me though I guess. I prefer to think that everyone is unique and dropping them into neat categories is, at best, limiting their potential.

The other morning I saw someone that I know in the lobby of the building where I work. All I had was a flicker of recognition. I thought maybe he just looked like someone else that I know. Maybe he was a new member of my team that I had only seen from a distance? We shared a lift and he started chatting to me. It wasn't long before I had to admit that I had no idea where I knew him from. It turns out that he has just started a job with another team in my building. He had to explain to me that six years ago we worked together for six months. That doesn't sound so bad right? I mean I've worked with a lot of people since then. Easy enough to misplace one team member right? Well it wasn't so much a team as a partnership. He was my right hand man in a workshop staffed by only two people, him and me. ...for six months. Aye aye aye. I asked for his name twice but right now I haven't a clue what it is.

On the plus side having a partially 7 second memory has been a bonus in solving complex problems. In the space of ten minutes of working on a problem I will have thought about the problem from a dozen different angles. It's kind of like forgetting my train of thought and starting over but always from a different perspective. Assumptions are tested multiple times and facts are restated. It seems to make me a worthwhile addition to brainstorming groups too.

As much as I love talking about myself I think I should observe the clarity paradox at this point.

Obligitary Blah Post

I have spent way too much time writing my next blog entry. It's not anything special yet. Two short paragraphs in fact. It doesn't help that I am onto my fourth SG Atlantis episode of the evening.

blah blah blah