Conall's Blog

So, Christmas the annual arbitrary numerical rollover day have been and gone. This week, I’ve been off work finally (I was oncall over Christmas week) for a full week for the first time in quite a while. I’ve been spending it lazying round, trying to recover from a cold I caught last week and working on little, annoying tasks I’ve been meaning to do for ages, but never got around to doing them until now.

I’ve never really been one for new years resolutions, but this year, I’m going to be more active and get more exercise. I’ve never really been a big fan of athletics, and I gave up swimming regularly a long time ago. :-/ I’m also going to try and get around to watching some of the classic movies I’ve always wanted to watch, but never actually did anything about it. Dr Strangelove is top of my list, especially since I bought it on DVD ages ago and I still haven’t watched it.

2007 was a busy year, both work wise and travel wise. I realised I took 21 flights, visited 4 different countries (many of them a few times over the year) and wandered around 13 cities and saw 7 US states during the year (and I had only been to California before). 2008 doesn’t look like with will be any quieter, Ciara and I are off to Copenhagen in early February. After that, who knows where I’ll end up.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been tinkering with a few techy things which I am planning on posting about here, but not now. Sometime soon, when it’s not 01:00

Now that life, particularly work is getting more and more stable and less frantic, I’m going to try and post here more frequently.

Recent things I’ve gotten up to, in no particular order:

• Occasional cinema trips to see things like Spiderman 3 and Pirates of the Carribean: At World’s End. I recommend both, certainly for the fight scenes. (Yes, the originals were the best, but I’m still a bit of a sucker regarding the story lines of each francise.)
• I’ve very recently acquired another lens for my SLR collection, this time a very, very fast Canon lens, which I’m looking forward to playing with.
• Voted in the Dail Elections (second time voting in an election, since I conveniently “fell off the register” in 2004). If you don’t vote, you can’t complain about the government.
• Nearly went geocaching in Wexford, which didn’t happen in the end, since I hadn’t properly planned it and the registration page on geocaching.org isn’t exactly mobile internet friendly. :-/

My first week here is over. Work was mainly meeting people over here and getting used to the way things work at the ‘Plex (ie, I still have to learn to stop walking between buildings. Hello death scooters… ) Apart from the office, I ended up in Palo Alto, home of the rich and shameless during trips to the Apple Store and Fry’s Electronics, mainly looking for toys…

On Saturday, I went into San Francisco (after spending an hour waiting for a Caltrain – damn queue in Starbucks meant I got to watch the train leave from the wrong platform). Once I (finally) got into San Francisco, I discovered what proper US cities look like. They’re big, very big and tall, very tall…

Saturday afternoon decended into nothing more than a shopping trip, probably because I started in Union Square. I ended up acquiring things like a decent set of portable headphones to replace the ones I thought I lost earlier in the day (only to find them again that evening) and a much sought after, decent camera bag and more California friendly clothes (t-shirts and shorts). After a failed attempt to go to the cinema (would have involved a 2 hour wait for a midnight Caltrain back to Mointain View), I ended up getting lost on the Muni before getting a Caltrain back to Mountain View and my apartment.

Sunday was much better day in San Francisco, now that I had worked out the public transport systems. Despite missing the Caltrain (yet again), I went to two museums for some culture – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, since I’m becoming a sucker for art galleries, particularly modern art and the unique Museum of Cartoon Art – where I saw original Disney, Peanuts/Snoopy and Calvin and Hobbes strips and cells.

After my cultural quota for the day, I went off on a photography shooting spree around a few preselected venues for the rest of the day. The result of which are up on Flickr. All that’s left on my adgenda for sight seeing next Saturday is the big one – The Golden Gate Bridge, which I’ve intentionally left until last to avail of what looks like forecasted good weather next Saturday (I find the less clouds the better for my landscape photographs), and since it’s disjoint from the other interesting areas of the city.

I really am thankful that I ended up getting a Video iPod a few months ago. Until now, I had never really used the video playback functionality, but I’m making up for it now… I’m also very impressed with my new camera. It’s quite enjoyable to use. I just need to be a little less tame and step away from the automatic photo settings (hence why I got two books off Amazon during the week about how to use my specific camera with weird and cool effects…). I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up with a proper tripod before I go home, but I have to resist the temptation urge to buy a second lense…

Now, it’s late and I’m off to get some shut eye before another week of work before even more exploration…

I got a pleasent surprise a few minutes ago, flicking around the movie channels on Sky+. I stumbled into Coldblooded, one of my all time favourite films, which at just begun a few minutes earlier. (It’s a hilarious black comedy film; Jason Priestly is a newly appointed hit-man who takes yoga and has no remorse. Think Grosse Point Blank, with lots and lots of extra sadistic black humour. )

I’ve been looking for it on DVD for years, but it doesn’t appear to have ever been released on DVD, or even VHS for that matter. Horray for Sky! It’s scheduled again in the early hours of Thursday morning, so I’ve already set it up to record for me. Now all I have to do is work out some way to encode it in XviD off the Sky+ box…

/me strokey beard

The last few days have been good. Last Thursday, I met up with Mark and Dermot, (two friends I was in school with) who are both back from the UK (where they are both doing postgrads) for Christmas. Last minute shopping turned into anecdotes over drinks, followed by more drinks and bumping into all sorts of people I know from college, proving the world is very small indeed.

Christmas itself was quiet enough, the usual family gatherings occurred and I got a few nice gifts, mainly DVDs from my Amazon wishlist, as well as the Bosco DVD (I’m an 80′s child after all… )

My main tinkering over the last few days has been to revert back to my plan of using Asterisk, since I was unable to get my VoIP phone to connect to Blue Face directly.

After a bit of hassle, I eventually got my head around the problems I kept encountering using the Asterisk port, I eventually worked out why I couldn’t get SIP clients to register and dial each other properly – the codec, protocol and action modules weren’t loading properly.

Shortly after this revation this afternoon, I had Asterisk trunking my calls over IAX2 to Blue Face. Now everything works except for incoming phone calls, which I think is a glitch at the Blue Face end. Horray! One less thing to do, particularly a rather large, distracting thing which has sometimes (well, often) been more appealing than doing my project and other college work…

Now, since I’m off to Venice as of tomorrow, I’m officially inncommunicado as of noon tomorrow until the 3rd of January…

Hmmm, now it makes sense.

For years, ever since I was 12 and saw it in the cinema, I’ve been a fan of the film The American President. It has even been on my DVD Wish List for a while now. So, when I was out shopping this evening, I gave into temptation and bought it for myself. Then looking at the DVD box, things began to make more sense…

I knew there were a few stars from it who went onto becoming cast members of The West Wing, but I didn’t realise it’s at least 4 actors and actresses, not to mention the key – Aaron Sorkin, is responsible for writing them both. It’s all so clear now…

In other news, I finally (after 6 weeks of waiting) received my copy of Time Management for System Administrators this morning. By page xiii, the first page of the preface, it says “I’m trying to say that system adminsitration is not a job. It’s a lifestyle.”. Yes, I think I found the right book for me. I can acknowledge I don’t usually know when to let go.

I’m definitely going to be interested in the tips given in this book, particularly the email on managing your email…

Last week was busy, but fun.

After being quite busy early on in the week working on a college assignment I arranged to present early, I went off to the exotic location that is Athlone on Wednesday, to attend the HEAnet Networking Conference. The conference was very good. Many techy talks on a wide range of subjects from online idendities and online legal liability to RIPE NCC Whois, IPv6 and Data Retention. I’m definitely considering going next year. If for no other reason to see what the HEAnet “ninja admins” will do next…

Straight from the train back to Dublin, Ciara, Dave and I went to see Elizabethtown. It was ok. Plot has the potential to be very good, but is a bit of a let down. Great soundtrack though, but that’s to be expected of a Cameron Crowe film.

The rest of the weekend was mainly spent reinstalling Windows XP onto Ciara’s laptop ad nausiam in an attempt to get it to work. Eventually I gave up, suspecting the hard disk to be the culprit, but Ciara managed to get Windows reinstalled and actually installing programs today, which was further than I got. I kept having problems after theraputic reboots for newly installed drivers.

Speaking of Ciara, she collected her piece of paper from TCD today. Congratulations to her.

On Saturday, I went off to Tech Camp, out in Coolock. Altough I only stayed until lunchtime, the talks were interesting, plus it was good to be able to put a face to certain people I’ve heard of, such as Anton O Lachtnain, Bernie Goldbach and Tom Raferty.

I found the DRI presentation particularly interesting, so I’ve quite happy to be involved with them, both on a technical level (I’ve helped geographically distribute their DNS) and I’m looking forward to discussions on their mailing list.

I didn’t stick around for the afternoon’s talks, since they were mainly about Web 2.0 and other topics which I’m not too interested in. Instead, thanks to Colin, I got a guided tour around Magnet Networks. It’s quite interesting to see what sort of setup an ISP use, particularly one who offers facilities like fibre optic connections, VoIP and IP TV.

This evening, I went to see Wallace & Gromit – The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. A great film, it really is. Even when all the girls I went with kept gushing over “cute, little bunnies” as the end credits went past. Definitely a film everyone would enjoy.

I’ve also been messing around with my Cisco 7960G IP Phone, which arrived on Thursday. I’m currently having difficulties upgrading it’s firmware from the default, to make it SIP capable, which is the recommended setup with Asterisk. Hopefully, I’ll have it setup and working in the next few days.

I decided a few months ago that I’d replace my old, battered 3G 40GB iPod with a nice new 60GB 4G iPod. My only problem is I’ve a cash flow issue currently with some payments outstanding. Once payments come in, I’m in a position to buy myself a 60GB iPod Photo. Or so the plan was until this afternoon.

Now Apple have unveiled the 5G iPod, aka the iPod Video, which do even more.

• They play MPEG-4, which I could certainly put to good use.
• They also have an even better battery and are much thinner, also good news for me (my current iPod is lasting about 4 hours between charging, whether I use it or not).
• And finally, there is a choice of colours (the U2 iPod doesn’t count as a choice).

Quite simply, I want a new 60GB iPod video, in black.

Since the price didn’t go up, my Apple wish list (constructed of multiple saved baskets in the Apple Store) is looking pretty good. With any luck, before the end of the month, I can order the little black temptress, an iSight for a bit of fun, and numerous other bit and pieces I prefer to order together to get free shipping.

Hmmm, went to see Revenge of the Sith last night. The film was ok, the plot was good (could have been better), but the reviews were right, the script and the direction really did let it down.

One thing I did see yesterday which I really, really (can’t stress that enough) enjoyed was the season 5 finale of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. It was a double feature, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Very good story and let’s just say the Tarantino Autopspy is a sight to be seen…