Guitar

So tonight I go to my first Guitar Lesson, I’ve also laybuyed a Squire By Fender Stratocaster kit with an amp and such… this should be fun

Miss me?

Hey blog, so it turns out I got the job, and I’ve been plodding away at it, hence the me being absent part. I’m not sure how much I can tell you about the job, but basically it’s at a Bank, and looking after the bank computer systems and servers. FUN ON THE BUN

IBM AIX 5.3, Prepare to be my bitch

I’m having fun adapting to the system here, at it’s core theres an IBM AIX 5.3 box that does most of the hard stuff, but then there is this horrible windows monster network attached to it, along with a dedicated machine for MS-SQL and a few other machines for fileservers and Exchange, the system is clunky and at best in-efficient. The off-shore support for the software we use is ridiculous (it took an entire week for them to login and make me a new sysop user) I’m sorry but that’s just sad, and totally unacceptable in any industry let alone the BANKING industry, the sad part is that there is really no other choice but to use them or develop your own software, and the bank I am at is not big enough to handle that kind of project on its own… so there we are between a rock and a hard place.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

So… I just got an invitation to a possition at a new FULL TIME JOB BOOOYAAAAAAAA!

might be extremely busy for a bit

Mangled

Sorry blog, I was too rage yesterday to post, some stupid twat has mangled my drivers side front door, not enough to crack the paint but it looks like someone just walked up and knee’d my door as hard as they could. Good Times, so today I’ll be watching my car a little closer.

Look Everyone, Its TUESDAY!

So today its more sorting data for me, I’m trying to track member numbers from a manual file of names and addresses that dont have member numbers… grrr

Because the lovely staff thought it would be great to start editing the name and surname fields in the system to include things like CANCELLED, the date in 00/00/00 format, various X’s, initials of the person who cancelled it, BAD DEBT, MORE DETAILS NEEDED and partially erased member names to fit such comments in, matching people to records by their name is extremely TEDIOUS, I’ve found a lot of lost ones tracking their addresses at least, and I erased most of the extra crap but the easure procedure probably broke other records I’ll find, and then you come to the people who have gotten married and only 1 set of records has been updated with their new last name, I’m just flagging them with “I think they are now this person same first name and address” and the staff will have to verify them

at least I feel somewhat more productive now, I have about 90% of the members automatically linked, I just need to find the extremely anoying final 10%

Fingers crossed on some job opportunities commang back to me on the phone today as well

Daily

So I’m going to try and update this daily for a week with whatever trivial nonsense is going through my day, just to see what it would be like to do something like that, who knows maybe I’ll find something I was looking for, maybe not.

So last night we watched both the Tomb Raider movies back to back on a free DVD player we got from the in laws, the DVD player was apparently broken but it appears to work flawlessly at our house… also it has USB input and understands MPEG4 so I will be playing with that tonight.

Today I am sorting data out for a Gym, what kind of Gym keeps a manual record of their members, but doesn’t put their membership number in the spreadsheet next to their name… it’s madness… anywho, at least I will be paid for the 4 days it will take to sift manually through these 7000 odd records

Oh also the City I live in was recently swallowed in red dust, I’ll have photo’s when I pull the memmery card out of my camera and retrieve them.

Planning

So I’m currently doing a job at a firm that shall remain anonnymous, and I’m finding it quite anoying because I’m costing them a lot of money, for reasons that are theirs.

I initially was given a time frame of 2 weeks to have this job completed, but the goals keep moving.

This isn’t really a complaint as such, I get paid a hell of a lot more, but it makes me feel bad that I can’t be more useful, basically the project has come to a stand still at this point because we are waiting for some software to be delivered from New Zealand, and I have pretty much nothing to do untill it arrives.

I can’t help them with other things in their system because I haven’t been formally inducted into their OH&S so pretty much all I can do is sit here on the internet until the post arrives… yawn.

Boycott Gloria Jeans?!

Nabi Saleh and Peter Irvine are prominent, active members of Hillsong Church and Gloria Jean’s Coffees Australia is a major sponsor of Hillsong Church. A Cult built to evade tax and cash in on born again Christians.

Gloria Jean’s Coffees sponsors many Hillsong-related initiatives such as Mercy Ministries, a pro-life anti-gay charity that helps women with drug issues and eating disorders as well as women during their pregnancy. “Gloria Jean’s Coffees chose to support Mercy Ministries because there is a need in Australia for a dedicated charity that helps women with these difficult issues,” said Peter Irvine, Co-Founder of Gloria Jean’s Coffees” Gloria Jean’s Coffees has stated it is not intending to change its funding arrangements of Mercy Ministries, despite recent allegations that Mercy Ministries removes its charges from proven medical therapies and puts them in the hands of amateur counselors who employ techniques including exorcisms.

I for one am now boycotting Gloria Jeans, it’s a shame because the only thing left for me in the way of convenient coffee is McCafe… Crazy Cults, or Rich Multinationals… I think I’ll bring a thermos.

I’m thinking about going down to our friendly wireless cult sponsor and playing with their wifi now… who’s got idea’s for their wifi SSID

“Gloria Jeans – We Hate Gays and Love The Hillsong Cult” sounds like a great wireless network

For those interested in this subject there’s a face book group you can join

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21028732968

Update: Peter Irvine, is actually the director of Mercy Ministries Australia

Stack Builder 2.1.0

PostGreSQL.org

I’ve taken on a contract recently that meant I needed to install a PostGreSQL  database on a windows server, so I figured I’d brush up on it a little before I began the real job. I installed Windows Server 2003 Standard in a virtual machine in my net-book using virtualbox and downloaded the latest pre-built binary of PostGres for Windows which meant I had a portable copy of my little testing chamber to take with me on-site for reference if needed.

I’d never installed PostGreSQL on a windows system before so I expected some teething issues to play with, but I was very wrong. It was dead easy.

Installing the actual database wasn’t the main thing that impressed me though, the main thing that impressed me about installing PostGreSQL on a windows server was an application called “Stack Builder” which makes installing a database server and web server (ApachePHP with phppgadmin and a few other programs) on windows as easy as it is in Debian, easier than debian if you are the kind of person who shrieks in fear of a Linux bash console (like some managers I could name)

On completion of the install of the database I was surprised by a nice looking GUI that gave me options for it to download, install and configure several applications and a few web apps (like drupal and media wiki) so they were setup and ready to roll with my new database, being a person all for trying new things, I went ahead and ticked what I wanted, ApachePHP, phppgadmin and the postgres ODBC driver, then clicked next.

It then downloaded everything it needed, presented me with a port option for Apache (I’m glad it did that as it takes out another step out of messing around with configs to get it to run on the same machine as IIS if you already had that running on the standard web server port, it’s default offering was 8080 which I left as is ) It then asked me for database information for phppgadmin which I left at its default settings for server and port as I had not modified that from the database install and clicked next. PostgresqlODBC was next and that was as easy as clicking next then finish.

After that it let me know that it was all done and I should really reboot my server now, so  I did.

Upon reboot everything was in convenient start-menu locations, even phppgadmin had a link.

The default web-root of “C:Program FilesPostgreSQLEnterpriseDB-ApachePhpapachewww” was a little buried but easily fixed and IS customizable in the install script if you change the install directory.

Thank you VERY much PostGreSQL & Stack Builder, everything ran perfectly!

Rasterbation

I Want To Believe (X-FILES)

So I thought I would try out some rasterbation using the rasterbator and see how easy it was to make some cool looking posters.

The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Download the stand-alone application or Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size.

Heres the first one I tried, the “I WANT TO BELIEVE” poster from Fox Mulder’s office from the television series X-Files, a personal fav of mine, and it came out surprisingly well considering I didn’t measure the size of the door, and I also didn’t bother trimming the white space off this one, next up I beleive I will be rasterbating a copy of a calvin hobbes cartoon, perticularly one scene that has a T-Rex piloting a F-16 Fighter Jet, this time I think I will trim the white space off though and see how it looks with my clumsy scissor marks all over it

Check out the program for yourself it has an offline version you can download, or an easy web-based version where you just give it the file and it gives you the rasterbation back in PDF form ready to print.

http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/