What to write though? Sadly those posts that had been semi-formed in my mind have long since departed and thinking about it now I can’t recall their contents at all. Ho hum!

Perhaps a good way to ‘restart’ this blog then is trying to explain why the barren spell occurred and, perhaps more importantly, why it has come to an end. It’s really quite simple.

My last post coincided with the start of my final academic year and in that first week I started to loathe IT. Looking back it wasn’t IT I was disenchanted with but Uni. Truth is I’ve had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the last 6 months by some very good friends. Why though? Why should the last 6 months have felt so much harder?

The workload certainly increased but that wasn’t the problem. No, the problem was motivation. Whilst my time at HP wasn’t the greatest the months between my placement ending and my wedding were. I’d found myself in a job that was both challenging and rewarding. Perhaps most importantly I felt like I was  meant to be there and the work I was doing had value to it. And that was the problem with my Uni work; it was a means to an end.

Sure it has value; it gets me a degree but for me work needs to be more. It has to effect others, hopefully in a positive way, that I can thrive on. Uni work doesn’t have this element. It feels cold with little purpose, other than to get a degree! Which, as a type this, is of course all it is!

I am  a firm believer in the mantra that ‘no one cares about IT because it works’ or however it goes. That’s what I strive for in my career. My reward is the satisfaction of knowing that everyone else has the tools at their disposal to complete their job to the best of their ability and that my job doesn’t get in their way. Uni work never satisfied this, how could it?

How could a piece of coursework on ‘Investigating the use of Pan, Tilt and Zoom Remote IP CCTV Cameras over WAN connections’ or some Java programming ever satisfy? But then why should this stop my blogging? Simply because it felt like every time I sat down at a keyboard the work I was producing was pointless and that in turn led to me trying to minimize the time I spent bashing keys.

Now though, as I sit here bashing keys with a pint of Tangle Foot, my outlook on IT feels a lot rosier. My work has purpose and I no longer feel frustration when things aren’t going well (IT wise). No, these frustrations are now challenges and overcoming challenges is rewarding.

The work? My final year project.

Admittedly its for the same company that I worked for between HP and my wedding; Chris Lewis Fire & Security. However, I don’t think it’s the company that’s important, it’s the work.

I’ll try and keep this blog up to date again, I certainly feel motivated to. Apologies if it becomes quite final year project orientated and sorry again for the lean 6 months.

Dan

I’ve a couple of decent sized blog posts in my head that I think I’ll write up near the end of this week, once we’ve moved some more into our marital home and I’ve had a chance to set-up my desktop. Whilst I really like my diddy 9″ netbook/hackintosh toy it’s really more for digesting and consuming the digital age rather than contributing to it, if that makes sense?

Dan

First off the input selector went on my 2+ year old amp last Thursday, thankfully my parents took out the extended warranty on it and so that’s back at Richer Sounds, hopefully being sorted as I type. I must admit I do slightly hope that it’s not ‘cost effective’ for them to fix it and a suitable replacement is offered. I doubt it but I can hope.

Second toy to go was the hard drive on my 3+ year old Mac mini. Boy oh boy am I soooo glad that I’m running Leopard now, Time Machine has been a real life saver. Ok life saver is a little extreme but the convenience of being back up and running so quickly with no data lost is, well ideal and perfect. The cost of upgrading to Leopard has been worth every penny and then some.

I must admit I don’t know if Vista or Win7 have a built in backup daemon, for Microsoft’s sake I certainly hope so. Further to that I hope it is as easy to use as Time Machine. Short of my impatience it has been a dream to use.

So the huge downside to a HD crash, losing all the data has been averted but the other downside is finding a replacement drive. Seems the older (P)ATA 2.5″ tech is old enough now to be something of an antique and thus somewhat pricier. Still, I’ve ordered a 160GB drive for about £50 that should see me through until this Mac gets replaced.

So how do I know Time Machine worked so well to back up from?

Thankfully I have a disk lying about from my old laptop that I’ve been able to wedge in until the new disk turns up, phew!

The silk pants? Ok I haven’t got any but heck, got your attention right?

Dan

First off the performance thing. Usually the minimum requirements of any OS are kind of an ‘if you must use such lowly software then we can cut a few corners here and there to accomodate you, poor person’ not so with this fast cat. Genuinely the performance is better, a couple of nights ago I had the following open:

• iPhoto 09, face tagging (which I’ll post about later)
• iTunes, syncing an iPod (compressing songs on the fly for Kita’s iPod) and importing a CD for said iPod
• Mail, Firefox (still a bit of a memory hog), Adium

And the machine was good, not blistering but good, not hanging, multi-task handling has clearly been improved and switching between apps with Exposé was all smooth. Don’t get me wrong Tiger was fine but three memory intensive apps open and it would hang on my little old G4 based Mac Mini.

The graphics, again another area where clearly the kernel has been further optimised. As I said earlier Exposé is nice and smooth as is Dashboard and the effects in iPhoto. I still don’t get all the benefits of Core Animation but then I am running on hardware that was dated when it came out 3 years ago on this mini!

The tweaks, the evolution of Finder is pleasing and the network shares in it are an improvement, the only thing I can’t help but wonder is imagine if you were on a large corporate network, that left pane would get very full very quickly but then I’m sure you can change it. As it is it found Ben’s mini instantly with Bonjour (M$ please implement this protocol, please?). Likewise Stacks in the Dock proved useful whilst going through downloading apps and installing them keeping the Desktop clutter free.

In summary, Leopard is faster and better to use. Tiger was a very good friend and I’ll always have a place for it. It’s just Leopard is leaner and faster, did I mention Spotlight is usable as well now?

It was worth every penny.

Dan

It’s about time I should upgrade, there are some features in iPhoto ‘09 that look really good and useful but that needs Leopard to run and likewise some new software that I like the look of such as EventBox all need spots to run. Plus things such as Time Machine, built in VNC server, finder updates and addons all meant the upgrade seemed like a sensible way to stop me thinking about buying a whole new machine for a little while longer.

Tiger’s been great, in fact I would say it has been something of a revolution for me in terms of personal computing. It also seems to have pushed some others in the direction of the Mac, Ben and Jon for two.

Now I just need to perform a couple of little backups, not sleep tonight over the excitement and have a really slow day at work tomorrow, home time isn’t going to come quick enough!

So all being well and the delivery on time, this is Tiger signing off.

Dan

That’s all really but it should make a big difference as it means I can comfortably work for a significant period of time at home. Before the mac was on a foot tall table and working on my knees for an hour isn’t fun.

So much better now.

Dan

**edit**

As Jon requested, a photo:

Now I can work at home

I’m getting a lot more experience now, not learning so much in an academic ‘this’ll be useful next year’ kind of way but more business savvy. Having now worked for local, national and global companies its giving me a really good idea of how business’ grow and what makes them successful. To an extent this is what I wanted my internship to be about, I wanted the experience of working in a large company to see what it’s like and have a good idea of the kind of environment I’d like to work in following graduation.

Anyway, those opening paragraphs were really preamble. As the title suggests, the workload is picking up. This is partly down to me being assigned some independant tasks, partly down to more coming into my Inbox and also a fair bit down to some more motivation on my part.

I’ve been looking around the ECE forums (the Uni. departments internal forum) to get an idea of what’ll be needed next year and it looks like there’s going to be a fair bit of programming involved. Seeing as something I struggle with is remembering how to code/syntax et al I’m now making a concious effort to do a good few hours progamming a week. Hopefully this will keep me ticking over but I’d also like it to become somewhat second nature in the same way that HTML scripting is and CSS is slowly becoming.

In light of this I’ve been more proactive on working on small things that could well end up being used by the team I work in. This page is designed to provide engagement ID’s for various teams around the globe, sure it’s not pretty, I’m not too bothered about that unless it becomes part of our working environment. It was just pleasing to program and get it to a usable and stable state.

Sadly part of this increasing workload includes more administrative functions but now with the programming it feels like I’m striking a far better balance

Dan

On the plus side my new NUS card arrived in the post today and they do an Amazon discount that I’m going to take advantage of. Got to wait for the NUS card to be activated, hopefully by the middle of next week, then I’m going to order myself an Optiarc AD-7630A. Amazon was the cheapest I could find so with the student discount it should be about the same as the refund from ebuyer.

Poor Mini, keep undressing and redressing it, must be wondering what the heck is going on!

Dan

That’s the plan, heck I might even put the drive on my Christmas list, that or wait for the January sales. Of course this all assumes that the orginal drive is still good and given that it has likely been battered around a bit in boxes for the last few months I’m not hugely confident it’s going to work.

That’s the quick plan for when I get in from work, although it’ll likely get pushed back into the weekend as this evening we’re off to a cell group where we’re painting someones house. I’m quite looking forward to it as it should be a good opportunity to get to know people there some more.

Dan

What I couldn’t get over was that I’m an IT geek/nerd etc and it’s taken for this long to be the case, I should have done this a long time ago.  Now though, for my next machine a gig of memory will be a minimum requirement and actually, I suspect it would be quite hard not to have that as a minimum. Oh, how quick this industry moves.

So that was the Mini upgrade but the Mini Failure Nothing to do with the Mac or in fact any failing of what I got out the shop all those years ago, instead the only previous upgrade I had done on it, the optical drive, has decided it no longer likes CD’s. DVD’s are fine, read/write happy as anything but CD’s are a no no.

Alas it would appear I am not alone in this Pioneer DVR-K06 failure. Thankfully it is still in warranty and I’m hopeful that ebuyer will do a like for like replacement ASAP. Just a shame I didn’t know about this issue 10 months ago but oh well, at least it’s in warranty. This would have been really annoying if it failed at 13 months for instance. I guess it will likely have to be replaced again in a year, judging by others experience but, well, there’s not a lot I can do.

Anyone got experience of ebuyer returns?

Dan

**UPDATE**

Well, the drive is all packed up and I got an RMA out of ebuyer so things are looking up The drives not available on their site any more so I’m hopeful that they will credit my account and I can get a more up to date model etc, here’s hoping!