I’ve finally gone the whole hog and moved the front page of my web site over to Drumknott so that it really looks like I update my web page (which I do). The old page is now archived as about me.
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Author: Mark
The "::Parlos":: are extremely close friends of ours. They live only a few minutes away from us, and we tend to see them at least twice a week. Jase has his own site, and there is lots of stuff about the family on it, but I wanted a bit here to link to for the other members of the family (though it wouldn’t surprise me if Ash had her own web page soon). Jase and I are partners in GeekZone. There is lots more I could say about them, but I’ll just say I love them heaps, coz it’s time to go to bed.
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Tammy, Danny & Acacia Pearce
Tammy &:: Danny are very good friends of ours. Bernie &:: Tammy went to high school together but we all really go to know each other through Antioch. Common interests include Cards (500, Oh Shit and Joey) Tennis, Waterskiing, Drinking Red Wine etc. Danny and I also both work in computers and enjoy the odd game, especially puzzles like Myst &:: Schism.
Tammy’s parents, Chris and Rosemary live in a beautiful place called Jamieson where we occasionally go to get away from it all and relax, swim, fish and ski and drink.
The latest addition to their family is Acacia Hayley who was born on 04/03/02 which is an interesting date, 4-3-2 as well as being my sister Jen’s Birthday.
Update: 11 September 2005, 10:54pm
Tammy &:: Danny now have two little girls (Grace Ekala born 7th December 2003) (with another one on the way). We tend to just chill out with over a few glasses of wine and chat, or play a couple of rounds of 500, which the guys almost always win!
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Which Muppet are you?
I just got this email from Mon, which is a quiz to decide which muppet you are, so I thought I’d post it here.
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You are Rowlf! |
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Compromised System
It has been a long a frustrating couple of days.
On Monday afternoon a bit after 2pm, three emails turned up in my mail box with the ip address of this server as the subject. This made me instantly suspicious, so I ssh’d into the server and found it had been hacked. I downed it straight away to avoid further problems, but I already had problems enough. Someone using ManiaC r00tkit had got in and defaced the main web page among other things.
We ended up rebuilding the server Monday night, and got all the we pages back up, but there was a problem with email until Wednesday lunchtime. Much more work needs to be done on hardeneing the system. The new server is already more secure, and it will get better.
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Riddle of the Sphinx
Riddle of the Sphinx is an excellent use of the Quicktime VR technology to explore the ancient pyramids.
The game plays quite well and has very low system requirements (P166/32Mb). The game is visually splendid and mentally challenging, with many puzzles to solve and objects to manipulate.
There are the occasional annoyances where you can’t go where you think you should be able to, but overall the game is a lot of fun.There is a patch that needs to be installed to make the game run on some systems (we had this problem on one system we played on.)
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What would your stats be in AD&D?
I found an item on slashdot.org that was an interview with Gary Gygax, the creater of D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) amongst other things. In the course of the Slashdot comments, I found a link to a site that calculates your AD&D stats from a bunch of questions.
My Stats Came out as:
Str: 9
Int: 13
Wis: 16
Dex: 14
Con: 11
Chr: 12
All of which I’d like to feel is rather believable.
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What weighs more???
I started on a thought process the other day of sending a document to someone when their email was too slow. My thoughts went to a carrier pigeon, and I began to wonder how much a floppy weighs, compared to a CD. I wondered for a couple of days, and then I eventually got them out and threw on the scales. And the results are………………
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A floppy Disk weights about 16g without a label, and up to 20g with a label on it.
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A bare CD-R Weighs 16g and about 20g with one of those paper covers on it.
The upshot of that is that they both weigh about the same, but the floppy is probably better protected, but the CD wins over all by having much greater capacity and generally greater resistance to damage.
At least now I know.
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Getting it off my chest..
I had a great chat with my boss Steve today. We talked long and hard about the plans for the lab and what that would mean for us and the fact that if we grew much we would need more staff. I also expressed an opinion (that I really didn’t even know I had) that I was not enjoying some of the work we did for the Magazine any longer and I preferred doing the government and corporate contract work. This is mainly due to the less geek/more business focus of the new magazine, which I’m struggling to get used to.
He took this all pretty well, and I was glad to get it off my chest. We were then able to get down to the nitty gritty of what needed to be done for this month, and I felt much better from just having talked about it and started.
I feel that as time moves on my role will change to be more of a project manager (which is what the bigger boss, Lee wants anyway) and i’ll be overseeing projects in a way that means I can still get my hands dirty and use my talents in the field, but also use my organizational and lateral thinking talents to develop the business even further.
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USB Mobile phone Charger
Steve was looking through a catalogue the other day when he found a small USB cable that you can plug into your desktop/notebook and use it to charge your Nokia mobile phone batteries. It only costs about AU$15 and is available from Innovision
It is the perfect thing to keep at work to charge your phone, or to take on holidays. I’d much rather carry it than the bulky 240V charger and I can just plug it into my laptop when the phone needs a charge.
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