I’ve wasted a ton of time recently being annoyed at my recurring absense of any kind of motivation, and concentration, though I find the two go nicely hand in hand.  I seem to have fallen into the same trap of late where I want to get a chunk of work done, the desire’s there, but when it comes to actually putting pen to paper (so to speak), I’m off with the faries thinking about whats for dinner, or the last time I had a Guiness, or perhaps how great I looked in my mankini last night.  You get the picture.

Wind back 6 months ago when I was noticed myself having the same problem (it’s definitely a common recurring theme for me, but its been especially bad over the last couple of weeks), and I was thinking about what I was doing back then to try and improve the situation.  I spent a few minutes trawling google earlier yesterday for some answers to curing motivation/concentration issues, and the common theme seemed to be depression and other mental health issues.  This is nonsense of course, I’m just as happy and laid back ask I’ve always been though I definitely feel the stress of money and financial situations a hell of a lot more than I used to.  If anything being motivationless is depressing, but not so much vice versa, I don’t think.

Money is definitely an ingredient of motivation though, I can usually push out required work with ease if theres an instant reward at the end, but this seems to fade when the money is not bankable within a month or so!

So, I’ve spent a few days just thinking about what I’m going to do about the situation, and i’m noticing (obviously) that some of the things I’m figuring out, I worked out last time I felt this way, so like a viscious cycle, I’m once again learning from past mistakes

I’ll attack it this way, and like a childish game give myself a score of 1 - 10 for my percieved moto-rating.

Thinking about:

• Being positive at all times, despite what s*#t the day throws
• Systematic approach to get a job done by cutting down everything into miniscule tasks
• Attempt to fight laziness and apathy by not checking email/forums every two seconds, just because
• At work, Insist (unless its important) that communication is carried out via email/IM, as being interrupted 30 times an hour is a recipe for mind blocks and mental muddle

Now the question one might pose to me, is why on Earth am I posting this?!? I answer in one way, if this I.T jig falls through but my self motivation is successful, coach the other 87.3% of corporate/business workers in my way of thinking.

I’m going to be the next Anthony Robbins… Bitch!

Two months ago, I wrote about the Icybox NAS-4220B Network storage unit, my first choice in the search for a set it, and forget it storage and home server solution, and if anyone’s used an Icybox before I have no doubt they’d be at least as dissappointed as I was in my few months of battle with it.  I won’t get into it again, no one likes a whinger but it was so flawed but writing everything to 1,000,000 floppy disks would probably have been a quicker, easier and more reliable solution.

Recently an oppurtunity came up to buy another NAS unit, the QNAP TS-409 Pro, from a friend at work for a good price, so after quick thought and some research (more than I had done for the Icybox!), I snapped it up.  And after a month of use, I havent regretted it.  It’s a four drive SOHO (prosumer, maybe) backup solution which currently has 4x 500GB drives in a RAID5 configuration.

The best things:

• Gigabit network connectivity (realworld gigabit, this time (20 - 40MB/s, much better than the 5 - 10MB/s from the Icybox)
• 4x SATA Bays capable of RAID0, 1, 5, 6 and JBOD configs
• Inbuilt media, iTunes, music streaming server
• Torrent/HTTP queue downloader
• NSLU2 support with iPKG management (basic linux OS with Debian like package installer).
• FTP/Samba/NFS/HTTP file access
• support for USB drives/keys and one touch/scheduled backup of core files, either from the unit itself or from locations around the local network.
• and a whole bunch of other features like web server, database, time server etc etc.

I’m especially interested in the IPKG manager and NSLU2 based linux console as it really closes the gap between useless (or limited use) network device, and fully configurable server or computer, and I’ve got a bunch of scheduled tasks UnRAR’ing downloads, backing up photos and documents, rebuilding/exporting the music collection and downloading new album artwork and doing other system and network diagnostic tasks.  Infinitely useful!

Nothings perfect though, and it can’t all be good, in the case of the QNAP, its loud as hell and building the initial RAID array took a fair few hours but that’s to be expected, and under the circumstances, I think I can let it pass.

I’m not sure what happened to me in the last six weeks, I got back from Greece and apart from a brief post a few weeks ago, I’d all but forgotten about HD911.  I seem to have been floating in some kind of bubble for the past 4-6 weeks and have forgotten all but a few responsibilities and I’m starting to go stir crazy in my own head at the boredom that i’ve created, in my head… Or something like that.

I figured I’d pick up where I left off, and give an after thought on the book I was about to read at the time called Playing for Pizza by John Grisham, and after reading the blurb on its cover, I sniggered and panned it like an arrogant film critic pans a Rob Schneider flick.  Well, shame on me for doing so, and I hate to be cliche’d, but there must be some truth in that saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover…”

Quite frankly if there’s one author who can turn a short story about a failed NFL footballer who gets shipped off to Italy to play in their (minor) league and gets friends, a girl, a love for pizza and a championship trophy into a good story, even in my short experience in reading, I’d have to say it’d be John Grisham.

I’d love to say it’s taken me all this time to read and was a really complex story, it wasn’t, but I was interested from start to finish, and I liked not having to thnk about what I was reading.  So kudos to you, and shame on me for my quick judgement and poor form.

I’m almost 800 pages into the 1,000 page mammoth that is Shantaram Gregory David Roberts, which has kept me right on the edge of my seat since I first picked it up, until last Thursday, when I left it at the pub, moments before stumbling on to the last train home, only to pass out and wake up one stop from Windsor (yes, the place with the castle) in the lovely town of Datchet, to finally get home an hour later cost of £50 as a result of a late night cab ride from the outskirts.  But that’s a story for another day.

John Grisham does In a League of Their Own crossed with The Wiggles

I finished my latest book the other day (Andy Mcnab’s - Crisis Four), which ended dissappointingly I’m sad to say, but we’ll get back to that later, and my housemate handed me a book by the famous author, John Grisham. Not that I’ve read any of his wares, apart from about an hour spent trying to get into The Firm, but a world famous author with such titles (and Hollywood movies) as The Pelican Brief, The Rain Maker, The Firm and The Innocent Man I was expecting a top notch crime thriller.

The books title is Playing for Pizza, and this is it’s blurb:

“Rick Dockery was a quarterback for one of America’s most famous football teams when he gave arguably the worst performance in his league’s history.  Overnight Rich became a laughing stock and unemployable in his own country.

But somehow RIck’s agent finds him a job.  He is guaranteed a starting position and a salary.  The only problem is that the team that wants him is in Parma, Italy.  The American footabll league in Italy is tiny and unlike RIck, the Italian players only get paid in free meals.

Rick has never been to Italy, so it’s no surprise that the country has a few surprises for him.  What follows is a delightful, heart-warming storay of an innocent abroad.”

Now, I’m not one to judge.  I’m not a critic, and my experience with reading books for pleasure only goes back about 9 months, but could you think of a more boring (nor ridculous sounding) synopsis for a book?  It’s like every 80’s American sports movie (… You know the ones, underdogs fight hard to win all season, then drama, then the team wins in overtime), crossed with the likes of Home and Away (an Australian soap opera).  

I honestly thought I was being had, and the cover was indeed a satircal ploy to get you sucked into a book with all kinds of death and debauchery, but on inspection, its a real book, by a real author, and a good autor at that.  The top of the book even claims it to be, “The International Number One Bestseller”, though I’ll garuntee that has nothing to do with this particular title.

As I said though, who am I to judge?!? The quagmire of life experiences undertaken in the story surely leave my solid reading history of crime thrillers for dead, and put the reader at a new level of enlightenment.  At least I hope this is the case.  I’ll read it though, it sounds interesting enough, and I’m intrigued to find out if there’s something I’m missing like the short for a movie that tells you nothing at all about the movie in general.

Time for me to get started, and report back as soon as possible.

What a movie!

The Growing List

Since I started reading again I’ve notched up fair few titles on the literaty bed post, whatever that means, and I’m loving it so far.  I’ll be looking at branching out a bit and trying some new genre’s too.  Any suggestions?

The list so far, in the last 12 months:

• I Hope They Server Beer In Hell - Tucker Max
• The Alphabet of Manliness - Maddox
• Gun’s Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond

• Playing for Pizza - John Grisham (I’m looking forward to it now!)
• Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts (Sitting here waiting to be read)
• Freakonomics - Steven Levitt
• Digital Fortress - Dan Brown
• The rest of the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child
• The rest of the Nick Stone series by Andy McNab
• The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll
• Kite Runner
• One of Peter Hamilton’s Trilogies
• More Harlen Coben
• Try John Grisham’s more serious titles
• One of Len Deighton’s Non Fiction books (a recommendation)

I’m always open to suggestion though, so post any replies, please!  I’m turned off by girlie stories (Danielle Steel), middle earth Scifi (like Lord of the Rings, I’m not sure why) and Mills and Boon (If I wanted porno, i’d download it).

Afterthoughts

I said at the top of this post that I’d get back to why I found the end of Crisis Four (the third book in Andy McNab’s Nick Stone series), and it won’t mean much without having read the book, but I just thought it was too transparent.  I could see the outcome of the story after about the first 15 - 20% of the book, and it just ended so abruptly.  

I’d say this is a really good reason to space out these series I’ve been reading as I guess like anything else thats done repeatedly you get to know the author, and how his/her writing works, and can quickly weed out plot lines if they’re similar to previous titles.  Not only this, I found a dissapointing book a bit of a kick in the guts from what is so far such an awesome series, I’d imagine its better to space out the pleasure of the other books as long as possible.

It’s not quite as catchy a title as Enter the Dragon, nor does it pack the one-inch-punch shown off by Bruce Lee, as shown in the movie, but my new toy can take a fantastic looking picture.

It’s my new Nikon D40, an entry-level Digital SLR camera that’s small, light and packs a load of features that I couldn’t list, nor describe off the top of my head.  I’ve had what you might call a keen interest in hobby photography for a while now without good equipment or any real knowledge of what I should actually be doing.  Basically this has meant keeping my phone or our Sony Point&Shoot camera in my pocket and pointing it at anything (everything).

Nikon D40 - My new baby

I’ve had my eyes opened though, not just with the quality of the photos or beauty of the camera (yes, its awesome looking), but I’ve very quickly started to understand all the photographic terms and tools in a way that I’ve never been able to before.  Having full control (SLR helps.. a lot) over manual settings and seeing the result has helped to immediately see some of the places I’m going wrong and how to improve on these.

I can remember from a very young age my father (an avid photographer hobbyist from way back) explaining in super technical terms what exposure, aperture, ISO speed and shutter speed were, or what a light meter, polarising filter or macro lens does.  I felt I knew the basics, but it didn’t really help to understand when to use a high aperture, or change ISO speeds (an old Canon Powershot I own allowed manual controls over such things).

I’ve had a whirlwind introduction to the basics and I’m starting to understand how differing ISO speeds affect the shot in different situations (low light, speed/motion blur, etc), and how changing the aperture or f number (ooooh techy!) can give a different depth of field.  The main thing is though, just how good the photos come out as a finished product.  WIthout any post editing (though most still need it, I’m in no way perfect) or cropping here are some examples of a few shots:

Temple at top of Acropolis, Athens

Late Afternoon in Santorini

Dusk in Paros

The main thing I’ve noticed is the colour and clarity, (I know, I sound like a diamond salesman), in the photos, like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  The detail that comes out from a closeup portrait is nothing less than amazing, and this is all from the basic entry level Digital SLR with the standard kit lens (18-55mm) taking 6.1 megapixel photos.  And crazy enough, the resulting JPEG image is smaller than our previous camera, the lower resolution and MUCH, MUCH lower quality Sony Cybershot.

So much to learn, but I’ve found the main thing I’ll have to master first is how to compose each shot, as I found from almost 900 photos taken over the week in Greece at least 90% of them are either completely wrong (out of focus, wiped out exposure), or are just taken incorrectly with the wrong amount of information in (or out) of the photo.  Learning exactly what to photograph in a way that actually looks good is the first hurdle.

It’s going to be an expensive hobby though, as upgrading the lens (to a much higher zoom such as the 18-200mm) costs almost three times as much as the camera did to start with!

Check out Ken Rockwells site for some D40 lovin: http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d40.htm

I’ve been lazy recently, and haven’t really posted for the better part of a month.  This is not my usual style and I’d like to get back to my normal routine of posting crap and nonsensical tales.

But I’m going to Greece next week to tour the islands, so it’ll have to wait.  Enjoy

Ah! Paradise

A few things to part with the boredom:

• Damn Interesting is back after a long recess (while they prepared/published their book), with two new articles,
• Coding Horror’s author Jeff Atwood has finally finished his side project, Stack Overflow, a digg-like tech FAQ system.  This was unfortunately at the expense of his usually regular blog posts.
• Photoshop.com’s Flex based gallery/photo storage app has been released and gives you full drag & drop access between other common Photo storage apps (Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket).  All that with a fairly nifty online photo editor under the name of Photoshop Express (a plus version with Photoshop filters and advanced editing exists too).

An exciting new app was bought to my attention recently, and it goes by the name of Tagggit.  Tagggit is a social networking application where you add friends and build communities, and then tag locations with photographs to share with the public or those within your communities.

The interesting part comes when you add it as a mobile application (avaiable as a Symbian application), using the inbuilt location finder (GPS, Wifi), geotagging your current activity is as easy as pressing a button.  From here, your friends, family, and the public around you can see where you’re currently located, or the event/location/highlight you’ve just tagged, depending on your desired privacy level.

Some obvious uses for this are listed on the site, such as:

• Tagging points of interest around a city (Streets on the Monopoly Board anyone?)
• Tagging a location for a party/dinner with photo/directions on how to get there
• Telling your friends which pub you’re at for after work drinks

I was thinking some other idea’s could be:

• A digg-styled tag system where users can Vote Up/Vote Down other tags
• Location finding game where small snapshots are taken around a city and have to be located by other players (like naming a movie or product from a small cut-out of a bill board or poster).
• Non vandalistic Graffiti?!  Maybe not.

Clearly the best thing is the Symbian application which works perfectly on my phone (yes, the same Nokia N95), and is a welcome addition to the growing library of apps I’m using on a daily basis.

Tagggit is in private beta release stage at the moment, but is soon to be available to the public, so stay tuned.

I’ve never really been interested in the whole social networking scene, especially not for anything other than communication.  But due to recent boredom with my music collection (mostly after running out of songs on my iPod on a daily basis), I’ve taken to listening to Last.fm recently.

It’s great so far, and is turning out to be a welcome change to being mid way through a 2 hour mix as I’m currently used to, and I can listen to a whole range of music I wouldn’t usually get to.

I’m still wondering what the point of the social networking side to this is though, so I can compare my music taste with someone named jeebee34 halfway accross the world and realise my music compatitibility with him/her is only 12%?  What does this prove, that I should start listening to Madonna or Justin Timberlake to boost this rating with my new found online friend?

Last.fm makes use of the concept of scrobbling, which is where whatever you’re currently listening to is submitted up to the last.fm server for everyone to see, and scrutinise.  This doesn’t just work for when you’re listening to last.fm radio itself but through any popular media player (such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, amarok, Exaile, etc), or through any number of music devices, such as an iPod or my Nokia N95.  You’ve go to wonder though, what do they do with all those stored music preferences?  Could it be used to tailor a bunch of music adverts to our inboxes around Christmas time, or perhaps used in court to prove that we’d listened to a bunch of Metallica music, far more than one person could possibly own?

All that aside though, I’ve been quite impressed at how well it can map music choices to a chosen genre or tag, and searching by tags or artists return results you’d expect (mostly, anyway).  A friend searched for music like Daft Punk the other day and was blessed with the sweet soothing sounds of koRn, so I’m not sure what went wrong there.

Favourite Tags so far:

• dnb
• progressive trance
• psytrance (see a trend happening here?)

So if you’re a last.fm’er, jump on, look at my profile and add me

As many of you know, I bitch frequently, and today is no exception.  I’m not just bitching about slow transfer speeds from a restricted device which should be capable of far more (yes, the N95), I’m over that now, as there a bigger demon in its midst.  One that defies all logic completely, to which I can find no possible explanation, apart from shit-ness by the manufacturer in question.

Disclaimer: The paragraphs below will be boring, and slightly technical, and my contain Vendor Verdicts which whilst not directly opposing HD911’s stringent rules regarding Product/Name Defamation and the Fair-trade and Distribution Protection act of Liverpool 1983*

I bought a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit from a relatively reputable online computer dealer in England at the end of last year after much deliberation and a little mis-directed (and now seemingly useless) research.  For the money, the unit was supposed to be one of the better performers.  At the time I bought two hard drives to go along with the unit, which were one of the faster drives available on the market at the time.  The NAS, an ICYBOX NAS4220-B (you can see here the name of the offending company has been removed to comply with HD911’s policies), flat out refused to boot/function or do pretty much anything with the new drives.

A little time ticked by, and (stupidly) the owner and purchaser did not RMA either the drives, nor the NAS unit in time, and the store would no longer accept the products as refunds, so I used the hard drives elsewhere and shelved the obviously trusty unit for another day.  Over the next few months, I tried the drives with a few different versions of the Icybox’s firmware, and even went to the extent of disabling features on the drives themselves to see if they would wotk, but still had no luck.

Fast forward to August 2008, I purchased a cheaer, lower spec harddrive to go in the unit as it could surely serve a better purpose than sitting in the cupboard gaining dust, for this aluminium monstrosity cost £100, and that could have been better spent on beer or a treatment program for the authors ever growing fascination with the game World of Warcraft, and a level 40 dwarf (sorry, little person) named El-dorf.

You must understand, by this point I had an amazingly profuse dislike for the pre-purchased NAS unit, neither it nor its manuracturer website or support forums inspired any confidence at all in a good product.  But I wanted it to work, at least in half the way you’d expect a unit to function.  There’s an element of pride here too, and an IT guys damaged ego over a poor purchase decision can be difficult to mend, as I usually make good, educated decisions about what a good product is and where/how to buy it.

So the new hard drive worked as it should and I was away, madly copying the collected works of self-recorded flute solos, and bad karaoke-style ABBA renditions, but noticed something astounding, transfers via built in “gigabit” network connection were going unusually slow.  Just to back this up, I have a laptop hard drive that can quite happily read/write at 40-50MB/s for sustained periods, a Broadcom gigabit port that should be capable of at least this plugged into another gigabit port on the NAS.  The top speed for the 15 hours of transferring was 5MB/s, not even a quarter of what I would deem reasonable, and hardware I had 12 years ago quite happily chugged away at a quicker speed than this.

I’ve done the normal thing and taken everything possible out of the equation, tested via different PC, new/different cable, through a switch, over wireless (not that I was expecting higher speeds this way mind you), and chanted sweet nothings at it, but to no avail.  It seems that the manufacturer thought they’d add yet another shitty feature (to enhance the plethora of other teeth-nashing inadequacies), that being horrendous speed.  In fact, I can quite happily transfer over the gigabit network to other devices at 50MB/s, and the 802.11g wireless network at 3.5MB/s.

If I was to review this product, and say something nice about it, I’d say it would stand the test of time as a door stop, and wouldn’t look out of place next to the 1960’s Parasonik tube amplifier rip-off that your parents still have sitting in the garage, it really is that cool.

Subsequently I’m saving up the money for a better unit (with supporting research) as we speak.

* Link to Legal Documentation required, consult this document for further information (#1443253)

Not particularly exciting, but HD911 is now one year old!  From its humble beginnings, it’s tickled the worlds news sources on a daily basis, and been the source of much controversy from Boston to Baghdad…

Oh wait, that’s not true, or should I say ture.

However, now I’m left wondering exactly what to do with my lovechild, that which I’ve nurtured into adulthood, and has give me back so much.  I’ve said it before, and I’m pretty sure I’ll say it again, I’d like to get out “talking cod-shit to strangers”, and embark on a whole new level of world domination, and i have high plans for the next 12 months.

But do I disband HD911 and let it fall by the way side into the otherwise packed scum bucket that is the internet?  Or do I transition, from blog about nothing, to empire about something?

Wait and see… I know I am.