Frustration
I think I'm overworked. Three difficult years with no vacations. No rest. The only break being a couple of sick leaves.
Perhaps I shall have to ask people to give me a week. To digest all the backlog. To send to hell everything I don't need anymore. To rest. To calm down. Fill the batteries.
Shit. I don't even have the time to clean up my place anymore.
Perhaps I'll take longer vacations. And disappear for a while. Perhaps.
Reproduction Too Common
Our and a partner company organised a dinner this Saturday to celebrate the end of this year. I didn't like it. Not very much. Actually, I didn't like the last few hours. They were too long. Perhaps because everyone wanted to see me dancing. Yea, right. I'd rather eat a moon. Deimos. Phobos. Europa. Io. Ganymede. Callisto. Titania. Oberon. Whichever. I'll have to come up with a very good excuse for the next year. So they won't use a damn mike for the whole joint to hear them inviting me to dance. Next time they do this I'm sending them invoice for my deteriorating psychological condition.
Otherwise,
here is another one of those things that make you laugh. So you won't die from my ranting. Caution: included on the page is a 5 MB video.
Yes, too many have been given the opportunity to reproduce. I don't think I like this fact. But I must. Otherwise I'd be out of job. Everyone as smart as me, or even smarter... naaah. I'd hate that even more.
Books Are Here
Got the first package from Amazon containing all the books and a CD I ordered back in October. I grew fed up with them and set my delivery preferences to dispatch items as they become available. So during this week I'll receive one more package with one CD, and then perhaps in January the last package with one more CD.
One of the books is also
Crossing the Rubicon. It's thick. And printed on acid-free paper that is 100% old growth forest-free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free, and printed with vegetable based, low VOC inks. Whatever. It says so inside the book. I think I'll need a month or four to read it. After glancing at a few pages I find it written in an interesting way. And I also found a diagram of events on 9/11 with a lot of "unexplained xx minute delay" labels all over it. Just turn to the page 319. Lots and lots of interesting material. And I thought history is boring. ;)
A Bit of Windows Security
While waiting for my hair to dry I've been surfing the
Slashdot forums and stumbled upon a few links with freeware security utilities for Windows. The first thing a clueless windows user should install is an antivirus program. There's a
free version of AVG antivirus program for personal home use. There's
Spybot Search & Destroy to remove all of your spyware. There are three simple utilities at
Gibson Research Corporation:
UnPlug n'Pray to shut down the Windows UPnP service (an oddity that scans the network for some sort of auto-configuring devices),
DCOMbombulator that shuts down the DCOM system which cares for remote program execution, and
Shoot The Messenger which has NOTHING to do with the MSN Messenger, but instead shuts down a completely different messenger service that is there to receive SMB messages (the "net send" command, if that rings any bells).
And now I go shopping. :]
Blogs
Since there's nothing interesting to put into my blog, I've put it into
The dregs of I.T. blog. That post has been cooking in my head for the past three weeks. Lately there's just not that much time left for blogging. ;)
Domen from
The L Files blog discovered online tests. Good. Perhaps his keyboard shall suffer less now. That guy has a tremendous lot of posts per day. ;) Anyway, that
famous leader test seemed interesting so I took it myself. The variant with 45 questions.
Happy December
I spent this year's company bonus on an LCD monitor. 20".
Dell 2001FP. With the 1600x1200 resolution. That's like a small TV. I have to be at least one meter away to see everything. It's great! 16 ms response time, no dead pixels I could find, sharp bright picture... I mean, wow! It can pivot between landscape and portrait positions. Programming in portrait mode... Yay, I can finally see procedures in their entirety. VGA, DVI, S-Video and composite inputs. I can hook up some video equipment. And last but not least: the viewing angle is damn large! 88 degrees in every direction, they say, and I can only confirm that. No more CRT for me!
And today I bought a computer for my sister. A second-hand desktop computer with Pentium 3 866 MHz processor, 256 MB RAM and 20G disk, with on-board sound, graphics and network adapter, for only 28900 SIT (that's about $160 at today's exchange rate). It also has a DVD drive. A bargain, I'd say. I'll add my old monitor and let my sister have it. So she can finally write her reports and see the learning material for her study. And the landlord told her he'll subscribe to an ADSL internet service if she'll have a computer. Perhaps I'll finally get back the key for my appartment. ;)
And I still have a LOT of work.
