Nothing to see, move along

Reading back over my previous rant about the Blackberry is now amusing – both of us are now happy iPhone consumers and are deeply meshed into the whole Apple/Mac/IPhone ecosystem.

My personal machine is a three year old MacBook Pro, still working perfectly. The SO is using an airbook and refuses to go anywhere near windows ever again. Our music comes from iTunes (although I do buy from Amazon/kindle – not iBooks).

Having a smartphone makes things like public transport and odd moments waiting around both productive or not – your choice. Read a book? Between Stanza and Kindle software, I have more reading matter than I know what to do with. Podcasts? Lots and varied.

The only thing I can’t quite understand ( for my use case anyway) is an iPad. A lot of people, yes but with ok eyes and a fondness for small fonts, I have no requirement for one yet (perhaps for a long while).

Things done this year:

• A new job – little or no overtime, no after hours work unless I want to, completely different to the previous life that was HAL.
• Masters at University. Work, work, work, work…and never enough hours in the week.
• World of Warcraft…enough said.

So let me see – hmmm, this is 200.., yes 2006.

And the month is? uhhhh May

Right, ok, where did this year go? What happened to 2005?

The short answer is blog apathy, general apathy, work, Linux and that damn life-altering crack called World of Warcraft.

Things that are keeping me busy at the moment:

• 1. Work – still as much fun as ever
• 2. Study – finally got off my ass and started a Masters in IT
• 3. World of Warcraft (in my copious spare time

Things I haven’t done

• Kept in touch with family type people
• Moved this part of the website from Movable Type to WordPress (if only to see what all the fuss is about
• Actually finish changing the look of isileth.org

In other things, the new Ubuntu version is rather nice, I’m even trying Gnome 2.14 (which is rather odd considering my passion for good ol fluxbox).

An enjoyable Sunday morning down the South Coast of NSW is a very nice way to end the week. Listening to the rain come down, the thunder make loud noises in the not-so-far distance is all oddly relaxing (and looking around at the surge protection on everything to make sure that it all still looks ok…) Plans for today:

• Perl
• World of Warcraft (bloody bloody addictive game)
• reading

And that is about it.

Some more nails in the coffin this week about “climate change” or “global warming” depending on what you want to call it (in America, the answer to that question reveals what side of the political fence you are on). The interesting figure was that over the last 5000 years, the seas have risen by 1mm/year (as almost every nay-sayer will tell you) but over the last 150 years, the rate has doubled to 2mm/year. The expectation is that by 2100, the sea level will have risen by 40cm – I believe the only response to that is “oh crap”. Consider that for a few moments – the impact on industry, housing etc. Then look at the pictures of the shrinking Artic ice and think about ecological disaster.

Just in case you still believe the other side saying “this is just part of a natural cycle…blah…blah”, a 2 mile long ice core sample was taken in Antartica and shows that in the last 650,000 years, the level of carbon dioxide and methane has never been this high. Ever. Carbon dioxide levels are 27% higher and methane are 130% higher. Oh, and this is being published in Science, not exactly an unknown publication.

This sort of news makes me very proud to be a citizen of one of two major Western nations who haven’t signed the Kyoto Protocol and the country that has the highest per capita output of greenhouse gases (sarcasm in case you didn’t guess).

I see that certain family members are having what can only be described as an interesting time in England but it does make for interesting reading. It does show how used you can become to life in Australia and not realise that everywhere in the Western world has similiar standards or work practices.

The only question I have is now whether to do some perl stuff, play some World of Warcraft or settle in to start looking at databases again. For the first time in many years, I’m starting to have a need to use a database again. Flat text files are fine and can be very handy but for some of the work I’m doing, a proper SQL database would be much more suitable. Having to store multi-day data from various sources and compare/interpret gets rather difficult with only text files. I’ve setup and ran my own mysql databases for a number of years but I’ve never actually constructed my own. Decisions, decisions….

Or alternatively, how lucky are we? One of the great things about living in Australia is the beach but this has a downside (well, a few actually: global climate change causing the sea levels to rise will be interesting within my lifetime and lets not talk about skin cancer) that most of us live close to the sea (obviously enough). Having a holiday away like this in the little weekend shack is lovely but it is very close to the sea. So much so that when you see some of the footage, it is not nice to realise that if it had happened here, this house would just be a memory.

Doing my daily bit of internet browsing I came across some interesting (and thought provoking) links from a site in the UK (that linked to John’s site). The two particular days that made me think were a discussion on how much Britain spent on Christmas and the other was the fact that he had donated to the tsunami relief effort. So I toddled off to worldvision and did what I should have done a couple of days ago and donated.

The tricky thing about “donor fatigue” or whatever you want to call it, is that the West (or the rich nations) are always asked to donate funds to events like this – but why shouldn’t we? We have the money, we have the ability and in this era of flagrant consumerism, will we even notice the difference at the end of the month (ie what ever we actually do donate)? But a counter argument is that, for example, India spends rather a lot of money building up its nuclear ability, Indonesia has a very modern airforce (far better than Australia’s), so shouldn’t they spend that money? I have no idea what the answer is but it does tend to raise questions (and questions make people less likely to give – in my opinion anyway).