One Geek

The Pope has said that the evolution and creation can co-exist, and is also showing interest in the environment.

Read more here.

J.K. Rowling has elaborated on the epilogue of the last Harry Potter book. It is of course full of spoilers but if you have read it you can read up on it here.

Good film. Funny long episode of the Simpsons. Not fantastic, but pretty good.

After the recent departures I am left wondering what my part is in the community I belong to and what it should be.

I feel like I am being challenge to be more outward focus on people on the edge of it, but I really don’t know how to do it well. There are so many issues that are faced in doing this.

How do you invite people freely to come or not to come to things?
When do people need to just be listened to, and when does a man also need a loaf of bread?
How can I be generous without being condescending?
How do you avoid dependencies whilst reaching out to help people when they truly are in need?
How do I balance my needs with those of others?
How do I ensure that their are regular non-exclusive events for people to take part into?
How do I balance my like of personal more intimate gathering with the need for more open ones?

So really I guess it’s just the standard questions of life.

Going to see The Simpsons tonight. Not sure what to expect, it will be nice to go back into the old familiar surrounds of Springfield for 90minutes though.

The following TV shows need a new film or an extra season:

Cities of Gold (Release an English version of the DVD at least someone).

Firefly Cut tragically short. What a fine series. I know one movie has been made but I want more.

Angel the end of Angel left me hanging a bit.

Buffy I’d love to see a world full of slayers and what that means. Alternatively I’d like to see a Buffy movie that was not ruined by one of the actors getting a big head.

I am rather bored at the moment. I’ve spent the past couple of days converting some old tapes of a railway conference into digital formats. The material is rather umm, uninteresting and the process is not particularly interesting either.

I think I understand why Howie and Tom procrastinate so much when it comes to working with video stuff. Hmm, I wonder if Howie ever finished editing the weddings he was ask to do all those years ago..

At the moment I am encoding two different lots of video whilst still using my laptop for normal stuff. It’s amazing that I can still surf the net whilst my CPUs are at almost 100% load. Good work Intel and Apple.

Walking up to work today for the first time in a long time I was not feeling very cold. In fact I was actually almost feeling hot by the time I got to work. Bring on some warmer weather I say.

The government is increasing the AusAID HIV/AID budget by $400 million in the Asia Pacific region. The money is for awareness and education which is interesting. I think that is good, but I find it interesting that there is no money there for prevention. If you are going to educate people on HIV and Sexually Transmitted Infections then you might want to have money so people can get needles and condoms. Unless of course the education is 100% abstinence based which has many issues.

As far as I can work out the main reason for changing the term Information Technology(IT) to Information and Communications Technology(ICT) could well of been to make Google work better. Seriously search for “it” leads to so many false hits. I guess it is more common then IT. Anyway better get back to my research now.

Went to the airport to pick up Emily this morning. Was fun, we ended up going twice because the flight was delayed. We also went to the Why cafe in Enmore twice. Much fun. Good to have her back here in Sydney.

How much do I hate poorly written software. It drives me nuts.

Bigpond’s Movie Download client is complete rubbish, seriously I mean the client on my computer couldn’t keep track of how much of the movie had been downloaded. It crashed more times then I care to count, and was generally bad. It lacked any kind of indication anywhere of it’s current status and what was going on. It eventually somehow downloaded my movie, the key seems to be to NOT run the download client, and let the creepy background service do it’s own thing. The most annoying thing though is that there is no good technical need for the existence of the Movie Download software in the first place. It really is just there to stop you copying the movies, and to hold your hand. So frustrating.

Today, I have amongst other things been working on an online store using MIGS, a MasterCard gateway service. The documentation and the error messages for that system are not very nice. A weird thing that happened to me was it took hours to get an auto reply message from MasterCard. What’s the go with that?

Then take the example of a nice piece of Apple software I just used, Isync. Enable bluetooth, launch the application, click on my phone and suddenly my contacts, and calendar are synchronised. So beautiful and easy.

I really have the greatest empathy these days for people who use computers without having a good amount of experience and knowledge. Some software is just awful, and there is absolutely no need for it to be.

Went and saw Clubland last night with Tom. It had some of the best awkward romantic scenes I have seen in a while. Other then that the film was alright, not a classic but still a fun Australian movie.

We out for dinner afterwards at an Indian restaurant. Tom had suggested a dodgy looking Chinese place which I had rejected because I didn’t like that kind of dodgy. Then we had a conversation of the different kinds of dodge we enjoy. For me there is something great about Indian restaurants where the service just isn’t quite right.

A guy from Sydney goes on a rampage using an armoured vehicle to attack cell phone towers. Wonder if he was a Telstra customer.