I forgot my birthday

While it's officially this Tuesday, I forgot all about it and a couple of mates asked me about what I have planned for this year.

Truth is, or was I should say I forgot my birthday was this close. I had been so busy with business and concentrating on other business ventures that I wasn't even thinking of myself.

A lot has been happening, and the scary part is, another year has gone by and I feel as though I've accomplished nothing. Actually, I've done a fair amount of work. Though most of it sadly has mainly been fixing other people's problems. So from now till the end of the year I'm making it my mission to work on all my own crap.

The short version is, I'm going to slowly taper off and eventually cut off my IT support services. I'll be opening a couple of online stores that specialise in IT related areas. One of which is selling PC's with Linux pre-installed on it. This will be similar to what System76 does.

The other store will sell system upgrades. RAM, Hard drives, video cards. Also, I'm thinking of setting up an online store selling recycled products. By recycling, I mean I am going to manufacture my own products from materials that normally end up in the bin. I'll give you a hint.... packaging. Products made from recycled packaging.

There are a couple of other unique ideas I want to get off the ground. They cost time and money, more so than other ideas. Though it could pay off big. However, because it is such a unique idea, I can't talk much about it yet. Though I will share as it develops.

Watch this space. Why? Because I'm getting older, and I'm playing catchup for all that laziness in my youth.

Opera is good, but sucks

Opera is a web browser that's not too popular. However it works really well. I like it because it's different. I like it because for everyday web browsing, it's great at what it does.

That is, until your everyday web browsing includes blogging, here. I can't seem to log in. And there are many instances online when I search for the issue where others are experiencing much the same thing. People can't log into their Gmail accounts, blogger, etc. Basically Opera becomes useless. Since Google is taking over the world one technology at a time, I don't think they're in competition with Microsoft, I think they're in competition with Virgin.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Opera is great to use. However, the more I use it the more I realise how crap it is.

The other day I tried logging into my website control panel. I get an error saying the site doesn't exist. WHOA?

I open it fine in Firefox, Safari, IE even.

I tried again in Opera. No dice.

I can't blog from Opera because I have to use my gmail account to login, which fails every time. No error though. Which is worse. You can't search for nothing. It just loops back to the login screen.

Then I tried logging into my webmail for my company, which uses Zimbra. I couldn't decipher the screen.

Opera is broken. If you want to see what a broken browser looks like, try it out. You'll love all the features until you try to load a webpage you frequent and no longer can.

It's fun when you have to have a separate web browser just so you can blog and access your own websites.

Vietnamese Food Safari

Way back in Christmas 08' my wife bought me a voucher to go on a day tour of Sydney, anywhere of my choice. As long as it was with the Food Safari. A show which airs on SBS. The tours are actually called Gourmet Safaris and each tour is different. One may be a tour of Leichhardt, otherwise known as Little Italy. Some may take a Greek food tour, with... well... Greek food.

I decided since I come from an ethnic background and I have a certain amount of knowledge of good old fashioned wog food like mamma used to make, I'd try something a little different. Something I love, but have never made myself.

I did the Vienamese tour which was located around Cabramatta.

The tour starts off with some education on the background of Vietnamese culture and where the food comes from. We also delved into the origins of why this type of food and how it differs from other parts of Asia. The reason why Vietnamese food is very fresh and refreshing is because the produce was picked immediately for consuming. Since there was no refrigeration you either eat it straight off the pant or you pickled it for later. This is why most Vietnamese dishes have fresh herbs and seasoning and/or pickled veggies.

Once we were familiar with the various herbs and why they're used. We got to sample them in the form of a Vietnamese "Summer" Roll. Sort of like a spring roll but with rice paper, and it's not fried. I personally love these and could have eaten the whole plate. But there were other people in the group. About 30 of us in total.

And just to satisfy my mates, the person sitting in front of me, was a hottie with assets. I always seem to sit in front of them. We go out, I'm the first to see the panty shot, or the brilliant cleavage. I don't mean to, I just seem to pick the right seat. Saying that, I've also been to gay clubs where I've been "felt" up by interested parties. I show them my wedding ring and the effect is like garlic to a vampire.

Anyway, I digress.....

Ah yes, the tour.... So, after our rolls, we washed them down with some iced tea. Though I wish they sweetened it up a bit. We were off walking around Cabramatta. It was funny to observe the facial expression on the locals, watching a group of all us round eyes infiltrate their territory.

We walked though some dark alley ways and through small, confined arcades full of people, food and heat. Stopping at the tour guides favourite stops. He's a local, born and breed. So he knows what's good and what's bad.

We stopped at the local bakery to enjoy a serve of Vietnamese Pork Roll. Which is more like a 6 inch Subway sandwich than a spring roll. I normally have 2 of them, which is the equivalent to a 12" sub. I don't eat subway since I heard the unconfirmed rumour that there's the same chemical found in fertiliser as is in their bread. It may be true, but I'd still rather the extra freshness of a Vietnamese roll over a Subway one.

Once we were out of the tour of shops. We made it back to a local restaurant where we were seated and asked to prepare our own summer roll. Wetting the rice paper, laying it on our plate and filling it with our favourite ingredients. Roll it up, dunk it in some light dipping sauce and scoff it down. Make another one, repeat.

After that we were given a bowl full of beef stock which we used to assemble our own noodle soup with bean shoots and raw beef that cooks in the extremely hot stock sitting in the bowl.

After that, the tour was over and we could leave any time we chose. It wasn't long before I got up and said thank you to the tour guide.

There were times on the tour when I would say to myself "hurry up, this bits dragging on" but most of it was fantastic. I'll easily do another one next time someone buys me a voucher for it on my birthday or Christmas. Which reminds me, my birthday is almost here. 8 days to go and I'll be 31.... still going on to 7 though. I'll never grow up.

Just be

This has been floating around, in and out of my head for a little while now. I thought I'd talk about some that really got to me today. Being me.

See, more and more I come across people that want to be like the person next to them. What's wrong with being yourself?

Last night I was at a party where there was a woman who couldn't stop talking herself up. She's a musician and wanted you to know about it.

While there was really nothing wrong with this, her delivery... the way she told her story tuned me right out. The sad part for me was that I knew what she meant. Being a muso is hard work with no pay. Behind all the love for it I sensed she had a need for help. Sadly, I couldn't help her. But I understood in my subtle way and moved on with the conversation until my wife said "Steve plays too"

And so the torrent came. I felt bad for not listening. But I was really in no mood. A full on week with problems of my own to solve really took it out of me both mentally and physically. I had no energy to meet her enthusiasm for her meeting someone just like her.

I felt bad that I gave nothing back into the conversation, and I think she picked up on it. Though the funny part is, I've met her once before, though she didn't remember too well when I asked her if she needed help to call me. She never did. I would assume she remembered me because what she said was pretty much the same as the last time I met her.

While I am generally a giving person, even when it means I miss out or get into strife.... usually with my wife. I didn't have the patients to deal with her. Much like how I made my mind up a while back that I won't be babysitting self proclaimed musicians anymore. The ones that say everything is easy and that's simple but they can't hold a candle to Jingle Bells or Happy Birthday. And while I'm sure there are musos out there that can rock, but still can't play Bah Bah Black Sheep. The ones I'm talking about can't rock or play Insy Wincey Spider.

I have all the patients in the world though. I can sit there for hours teaching a kid one plus one. But I can't do the same with an adult. My wife reckons it's because I expect the adult to know better. I guess I expect someone who plays music for half their life to know as well. And when they don't, I get cranky.

But at the end of the day, they are trying hard to be something they are not. Why not just be. And stop trying to be like everyone else, or something that you think society wants you to be. Just be, be yourself. Be you. Be. Just be.

How can you expect anyone to accept you, if you can't accept who you are. Just be.

When you want it done right, don't get someone else to do it.

Recently I experienced what some would call incompetence. When you don't see a bill from a supplier, however much you try and contact them via phone, mobile, sms, email, twitter, myfacebooktubes and you still can't contact them after three months, you start to worry. Then, because you haven't paid your bill. Your service gets cut off.

Eventually I got a hold of the person I'm referring to. However, even that wasn't easy because communication was done Chinese Whispers style, through a friend, through a friend (yep, two of them).

While the problems have been sorted out, my lesson learnt is if you want something done correctly, you still have to do it yourself. The hardest thing I've ever had to do in business is make sure the people I pay to do stuff for me are doing it right. I don't know about you, but I'd rather the stress of taking the workload myself than the possibility of someone else screwing it up in vein of my having somewhat of a more casual time running my business.

So. That problem is fixed.... and now I'm pulling my services off to do it all myself. However, over the last 6 months Ive started to grow tired of not what I do, but what I've been dealing with. And I've started to look around for other opportunities. Opportunities for business in a different field.

Some friends have noted that while it may look like I'm trying to run away from my problems, I am in fact running away from these types of problems and running towards problems that I know I can handle better.

IT business is harsh at the best of times. My biggest issue besides people who say they can do something, but can't is customers who don't pay, likely because they don't value good IT support. I spend more time training people of the importance of computers and if you rely on them, the outlay of a new one is a negligible compared to a task that may take 15 minutes only taking 15 seconds. This is just one issue that's getting old.

But as if to sound as though I'm giving up. I am hardly ready to throw in the towel. Another reason for my being fed up with IT is that while it was a great hobby for me, it was never suppose to be a career. IT became a career due to a life changing experience more suitably told over a pint of amber ale.

Now I'm at that stage in my life where I'm looking and wondering what the hell I'm doing wasting my time? I should be doing something more akin to my skills and working to my strengths.

Over the last 12 months, my musical side has really picked up and I've become very active in that area again. So much so that I enquirer about a purchase of a music shop. Sadly this was both out of my price range and perhaps not the area I was looking for.

One of the places I rehearse my music with one of the bands I play in has a guy who runs the studio. He's got his hands full with a million projects running all at the same time. I spoke to him about the music shop idea and he ever looked into a bit for me. At the same time, I have another mate who runs his own music shop who said "Mate, any idiot... even me can run one. If you want to do it, do it yourself." He speaks the truth. But in the end it isn't what I was looking for.

So yesterday I'm back at the rehearsal studio talking to my mate when we started to bounce some ideas around. Some of the things he said got me thinking and some of the things I suggested were really cool ideas he said he would love to see happen.

However, one of the things he said was about expanding what he has in the studio into something much much bigger. So I asked, "Do you need help with it?"

It turns out he does. And he's possibly looking for a partner to join forces with. Here's where I just wasn't sure.... I've seen many partnerships. They've all failed. Perhaps this one will to, and sadly, with those failed ones, the relationship goes out the door with it. However, maybe because we both know this, we can try our best to put in every preventive method to avoid the ackwardness in the end, if there is an end.

Now I'm at a point where I don't know what to do, and I'm not even sure what I can bring to the table with this guy. He's a great person, and I don't want to ruin our friendship or waste his time.

So, while I was leaving, I brought up another business idea I had involving motorcycles. Something I think I want to get back into, despite it being something I had interest in from a former life. I spoke to him about the idea and he thought it was brilliant. So far others I've spoken to about it think it's brilliant.

However, I'm not sure how to go about it, how to acquire the money to start it up, how to set up everything it needs, and the staff it will need to operate the idea. I think it's time I started to look a some form of business education or at least speak to someone who's do it all before. I have one person in mind......

Watch this space

Complaints? Take a number....

Recently reading a blog of a good friend on the other side of the planet I have just got to know over the last couple of weeks made me start to think about how things aren't that different here.

A lot of people complain.... I do too. But a lot of people complain. People move right next door to an airport and when the plains go by, they start ringing people.

There was an advert on TV recently. I don't watch the stuff myself.... the ads or the TV for that matter, which a friend was letting me about. Apparently the advert was pulled off the air with a total of 2 people complaining. TWO!!!

I stopped listening to talk-back radio as well because most callers have something to complain about. Now, I'll be fair. What they're complaining about is usually legitimate. However the more legitimate their cause, the more I get worked up about thier situation and how done wrong the person is.

These are genuine people with genuine problems. I feel sorry for them. They're only doing the right thing and they get trod on by some nasty person who doesn't give a flying proverbial.

I guess you can call this my complaint. I'll take a number and get back to you.....

Tweet tweet

Now that I have a few tweets on my twitter account, I guess this makes me a twit.

Here's a link to my account. I think it will eventually be used for my business. Hence calling it Harmonytech. I assume I'll post instant news on specials and one off madness sales. This will work well. I hope, with my soon to be active online store. Finishing off adding items for sale and attempting to set up my paypal account to become my merchant for online payment.

OMGWTFBBQTWITTER!!!!1!!ELEVEN

Yes. I've joined twitter. In a bid to help find a person that is has been very difficult to contact.

Four things will happen with twitter;
1. I'll lose interest in it once I have what I want from it.
2. I'll forget about it in a week
3. Ill delete my account once I have what I want.

and 4. I'll use it to my advantage for my business or it gives me something to do between blogging and emailing which I normally use the time to do something useful like work or be with my family.

I'm not sure where "tweeting" fits into all this. Looks like another piece of technology that prevents you from getting up off your arse and not using a computer. Sounds funny doesn't it? Coming from an IT geek.

Thank you for the music.... lesson

There isn't a lot I do know despite my adoption of Charlie's Book of Everything, re-titled Pip's Book of Everything. I try and learn something new each day. Actually, I said that all wrong. I don't try to learn, I just happen to.

Most of my friends think I'm really smart. Some get asked silly questions from their children and their response is "Ask Pip when he comes around". Either way, I'm the person people come to for questions they can't be bothered Googling.

The sad part about this is, some people want to know something but won't listen to the answer. I've been frustrated by this for years. From the time I was asked to ride all the way to an audio shop just so my friend and his wife could pick the correct components for a new entertainment system. They went against all my recommendations and decided to buy everything the sales guy said. In the end I stopped bothering and just responded with "What's for dinner?"

Audio components are something I know a little about, and my time and patients were both wasted doing this small favour for a friend. This didn't really affect my friendship with my mate. It would have been silly to argue over something so superficial.

I'll give you another real life example of friends asking for my help, but not listening to the answer. I have a friend who's been playing guitar for about 12 years or something. I also have a mate who's been playing guitar for about 2 years. My friend who has been playing for 12 years hasn't listened to anything I suggest about music. While he's stuck in one genre and has limited experienced in musicology and performing. I have had the opportunity to play at the Sydney Opera House. I listen to all genre's, provided the music is good... I'll listen to it.

So, it pains me when I have been trying to pass on what I know for the last 5 years since I discovered I had more to offer my mate towards his musical ability and I hear that he starts taking guitar lessons.... Now, this isn't the bad part. The part that kills me is that he's just repeating all the things I have ever said to him, showed him and helped him with. We joked about the fact that I've been telling him this stuff for years, I should have charged him for it. Maybe if he paid for the advice it would get through to him.

On the other hand, my other friend who's been playing guitar for 2 years takes on everything I say and sadly for my other friend, this one is almost a better musician.

Lately, I've started to go to open mic nights to practice my performance skills and mate number one has decided that he wants to as well. This is something that I've been telling him he must do to get over his shyness and fear of performing live in front of people. However, while this is going to be excellent practice for him as well as a good wake up call. I am trying to psych myself up to support him because I know that people in the crowd aren't going to be impressed. After all, it will be his first time on stage, ever. He's going to butcher the perfect song he practised at home. I don't blame him. Saying he'll be nervous would be an understatement. And the scary part for me is, I'm not sure I want to see it or not.

Mate number two on the other hand will be ready for his first performance by the end of this year.

So, how can one person who's never played music at all, within 2 years of learning to play guitar be ready for the stage and the other, who knows all, been playing for years, calls simple music "too easy" not be able to hold their own in the lime light?

I don't want to come across as offensive or sound like I'm putting down my mate. But what do you do when you see a friend who needs help but doesn't accept what you give them? Do you let them sink or swim? Do you persist and keep helping despite the frustration of it all appearing like you're talking to a brick wall?

Another form of recycling

I was in my office today having a chat with another IT guy that works next door to me. We were talking about our usual catch up stories of people calling with stupid issues that you hear about and think "surely, that's a joke". Then he noticed my Acer Aspire One netbook and asked how I got it working?

Well, this netbook has a bit of a story. The netbook was brought in by a client of mine who came home one day to find his children playing with the Aspire One..... when I say playing.... I mean they were jumping on it. By doing so they cracked the screen. I quoted him the cost of a brand new screen and while diagnosing other issues, I discovered the battery was not being detected at all.

With my labour fee added to the job it came in pretty close to just going out and buying a new netbook. Ths is exactly what the customer ended up doing. When I asked him what of this broken Aspire, he said "Chuck it". Like hell.

I wiped the operating system off the hard drive, installed Crunchbang Linux and used the laptop as a small desktop PC, connected to an external monitor and the charger for life.

I played around with it for a few months, eventually taking advantage of the built-in webcam by installing motion, a Linux project that turns webcams into surveillance cameras, and the PC they're connected to, a hard drive recorder.... all the while still keeping the functionality of a regular Linux based PC. The webcam was always on and could be viewed remotely via the web (I had also installed Apache). But it only recorded when it detected motion at my office between the hours of 6pm and 10am. I drive to work after peak hour. Saves time, money, the environment and my sanity. But one day I came to work early to see if the detection worked. It did, so I was happy.

Then, while travelling through the land of Ebay, I found an LCD screen for the little netbook and thought it might be worth fixing, seeing as all the other hardware worked. I'd hold off on the battery, since it was not as big a deal. A week later the screen arrived, 5 minutes later I had the old screen off and the new one getting put in place. Before fully reassembling the laptop, I tested it out. BOOM! It worked. I put the rest of it together and had a reasonable PC working nearly 100%.

Fast forward another month, and I'm searching Ebay for a battery. I decided that I wanted to replace my old Asus EeePC 701 since it really is a pain in the behind reading websites on the dismally resolved 7 inch LCD. The Acer, while only another 1.9" bigger offers a much higher resolution that makes reading websites easier while not distracting from the actual form factor of the netbook. I like to use the EeePC in bed before heading off to sleep when catching up on blogs, digg.com and threehugger.com

Having this extra screen size and res is much nicer, and as such my EeePC will now be sold to the person who best deserves it.

So, what became of the battery? Well, before I went shopping on Ebay, I did what I usually do... Never waste an opportunity to dissect a piece of hardware I want to know about. I pulled the battery apart to see what was inside. The first thing that stuck out was a loose cable. I got out my soldering iron, fixed the cable back in place and tested out the battery. It charges!!!

What's the moral of all this? Well, this is the story I told my fellow IT mate next door.

Why?

Because I illustrated that this was a form of recycling. The funny thing was, while this person is quite learned, he always thought of recycling as something you put your cans, bottles and cardboard into and off it went.

I told him that's recycling too. Then I rested the Aspire One on my recycled cardboard box cut-out that I turned into a laptop stand. In fact, I've made about 40 cardboard laptop stands just from cardboard I get from suppliers who I order parts and accessories off for my IT business.

I give away each laptop stand with any laptop purchase.

My IT mate looked at me in amazement and commented that I got to all that trouble. Funny, I didn't think of it as trouble at all. I saved a perfectly fine laptop from landfill and I have probably saved a few tens of kilograms in cardboard hitting the landfill too. I do the same at home.

I also do the same with mates. Particularly one of my mates who loves nothing more than finding someone else's junk that they have discarded and giving it a polish and a new lease on life.

Recycling isn't just about cans, cardboard and bottles.

Solar - We probably need less than you think

Ever since I was a kid, I loved free energy. As I grew up I realised there's no such thing. Well, we could argue perpetual motion engines all night. And I did once have an idea to make a self powered generator out of a couple of car alternators and an electric motor. However, the electric motor would pretty much consume the power created, regulated and rectified by the alternator. Two alternators would create drag and the motor would need to be more powerful.... and so the cycle continued until I never bothered trying to make the idea come to life at all. Maybe when I'm retired.

There are other forms of free energy. Solar. While not entirely free... they say it'll take you 10-15 years, maybe 20 before the cost of the system has paid itself off. And much like the reason why I drive a Diesel car, I believe that people who go solar do it not for the thrift, but for the environment. I drive my Diesel car because it pollutes less than a Prius, has the power of a modern V6 with two less cylinders and half the engine capacity.

When I build my new home, I plan on covering the entire North facing roof in panels. I plan on providing power to most of the house with these panels. When I tell my friends this, they laugh and say, "yeah, but you'll still need mains power"

While this may be true. I won't need so much, and to top that off, I'm hoping mains power is solar powered too. Then they say "Well, solar won't be able to provide enough power for the entire population unless they cover the entire planet in panels."

While at first I thought they might be right, along comes an article in one of my favourite websites, treehugger.com.

If you look at the little squares, these are solar panel arrays that will effectively provide the entire planet with enough power. So little in comparison to the land area.

So, now that we know we don't need to blanket the Earth with solar panels, how does this all happen.... the panels would need to come down in price. The sad part about this is, I've been hearing that "they" have come out with a panel that is flexible, or I heard that it is 20% or 50% more efficient and one tenth the price. I've been hearing about this for the last 10 years. But prices are still the same, panels haven't changed all that much and it still seems like after all these years, the end result is that it's still too expensive to purchase solar.

Even if the electricity providers change over completely, the costs of setting this up will be pushed down to people like you and me. We'll end up paying for it. While that's not so much a big issue, the concern for me is that I'm sure the price won't go down later on when the infrastructure is paid off and the electrical company is making more and more profit. I wouldn't be surprised if the rates went up even higher. Justified by introducing environmental tax and so on.

But never the less. Apart from those hypothetical issues, that map shows that not a lot of solar is needed.

While this looks promising, some might say the power that the panels generate will need to be stored. Well, electricity companies already do that.

Another idea is, rather than having power lines around the streets, have poles with panels on them. Though this might look ugly in suburbia, having the panels hanging off the big towers that are ugly enough might be a better option.

I'm not sure what path will end up being taken. However, I'm living on the premise that this idea will go forth and happen. So little solar panels for the entire planet, no emissions, and if the idea does go forth, it may actually lead to more efficient solar panels, which means cheaper, less surface area for the same power requirements or more power with the same surface area as before.

Either way, it's win-win-win. Win for the hip pocket, win for the power requirements, win for the environment. How can that be a bad thing?