Daily Writing ... too tough?

At the start of the month I set myself the task of writing on a daily basis.

It has now been 17 days since I started, and today's post will be number 10 since the resurrection of this blog (I originally started it 2-3 years back).

Now I make no attempt to hide the fact that I'm a big fan of numbers and statistics and analysing things (perhaps too much, but more on that later). So basically I'm a self confessed stat-whore, so I figured what better to write about than some numbers...

So this is post #10 in 17 days, so thats roughly 1.7 days per post or a post every 1 day 16 hours 50 minutes, a post every 147,000 seconds.

Including this post, I've written 2,827 words, which is an average of 282.7 words per post and approximately 6.92 words per hour (assuming a full 17 days).

Now while I may not have actually succeeded in writing each and every day, I have at least started writing a bit more frequently and hopefully my posts improve with time and practice

and now I will have to think of a way to measure post quality... (any suggestions ?)

Philosophy and Sci-fi Fiction...

Before I begin to delve deeper into my post I have to admit that I have a bad habit of devouring books, much like one might devour some fast-food. Where others reading-pace might compare to savouring all of the flavours in a fine cuisine.

Recently I have been reading some Science fiction, (which I have to recommend) and the current book I'm currently reading now is on Philosophy and it got me thinking about Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" and how if these laws/rules were applied to humans and society it might lead to some sort of utopia?

The first law is fairly straight forward, with exception of the second condition "or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." I imagine in practice this law could prove quite difficult to enforce, the closest thing that comes to mind would be criminal negligence.

The second law would need some sort of implied total trust in the ability and guidance of the governing body, in Asimov's example the second law sets the robots in total subservience to humans. However as a law applied to society I'm not so sure it would work in practice...

But lets assume that every single human (including those who gave instructions) had to follow the first law explicitly the outcome of the second law might not be as grim as Orwell paints it...

Now the last of Asimov's laws "A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law." has interesting implications if applied to my Utopian society example...

The first observation is that suicide or self harm would be prohibited (which I believe is an actual law in most modern societies anyway) however given that the first law says "do no harm" and the second law says "follow all instructions unless it might lead to harm" and now the last law says "protect yourself except where instructed to otherwise and where it will lead to harm" ...

Where I'm going with this is I believe that this last law (with the other laws in place) suggests a society of Non-violent resistance, which seems to agree/fit-in quite well with the idea of a Utopian society.

Now that I have committed my thoughts to paper (in essence) I'm certain that this isn't the first time that someone has considered Asimov's 3-Laws in such a manner, I wonder if anyone else has any thoughts or comments on the topic?

tl;dr version

Asimov's 3 laws present an interesting way to govern a utopian society if they could be implemented & enforced fully.

New Computer Conundrum

So I have been recently been given the go ahead to purchase/build a brand new computer. Having done this in the past with my previous computer and also for a few computers for friends, I figured that this would be a fairly simple task.

Unfortunately I was wrong.

In the last few months there has been quite a lot of new specifications released, which make the simple comparison between X part and Y part not so easy any more, I'll explain...

My old computer was an Intel Core 2 Duo e-6600 with 6 GB of DDR2 memory (amongst other things). Comparing it say to an Intel Core 2 Duo e-8400 is a fairly trivial task, it's obvious that the e-8400 will be faster/better than its e-6600 counterpart.

However when specifying (read: browsing online stores and putting prices together) my latest machine I encountered a few areas of uncertainty, which CPU to get, which motherboard, which case etc...

The main problem that I encountered was with the release of SATA-3.0 standard and USB-3.0 standard, which with all new things can be difficult to dissect. Essentially the new standard allows USB devices and Hard-drives to run at much higher speeds, the downside being that (on some systems at least) this speed is shared with the graphics card (which if you are trying to play the latest games isn't exactly a good thing)

The next issue that I came across was with the Hard-drive(s), initially I thought I would just run 2x mechanical drives in a RAID-0 configuration, but with the price of Solid-State-Drives falling recently they present an interesting alternative. The specifications/speeds of SSD's are incredible but they are much more expensive than their mechanical brothers (i.e. $240 for 60GB vs $129 for 1000 GB)

In the past you had the option of 2 main CPU makers (AMD & Intel) and that was really the toughest choice, now days you have 2 CPU makers, 20 different variations on actual chips, 6-8 different memory speeds, 2 different Hard-drive technologies and that's just the tip of the iceberg...

I have to ask, in this circumstance is more choice better for the consumer or does it just lend itself to confusing specifications and difficulty in comparing these?

Mondayitis

So I figured today I would post a short summary of my day today.

Many people despise Monday's and it's not too hard to see why... it signifies the end of the weekend and the start to (yet) another working week. Now I'm going to say that I love Monday mornings like a fat kid loves cake, but I like to see some positives about the return to work if I can.

One of the biggest pleasures that I get from Monday, and something I certainly enjoyed today was catching up with everyone and what adventures they got up-to (or in some cases didn't get up to).

Today was no exception, however I got to work and was immediately put into crisis-mode (not by choice mind you) one of my colleagues was experiencing some strange behavior with their browser. This is the same workstation that had a rather nasty Scareware "virus" just a few days earlier, I was certain that I had found and removed it.

Turns out that I was right and did clear out the previous infection, but they had allowed/installed a brand new one(!) before I go any further really must plug Malware Bytes as it's super-awesome at finding these infections and removing them (even if you do need to jump into Safemode just to get it to run!)

Being a Monday, part of my job requires that I check the integrity of the server backups from the previous Friday which typically is a 5 minute job... remote into the server, open up the backup program check the log... yep all good and move on to other stuff.

No not today, it seems the backup logs weren't as complete as I would have hoped, with this line in particular ensuring a quick headache ... "The requested media failed to mount. The operation was aborted. The operated was ended." ... Now if that sentence confuses you, I'm not surprised... but essentially it (should) mean that for what ever reason the tape drive couldn't load/be accessed any more so it gave up.

The rest of my day was spent trying to find the needle in the hay-stack that is the solution to the problem (which I'm sad to say I haven't yet solved) and some other minor things...

So lets hope Tuesday is much better and I can close the case to my backup woes.

So do you hate Monday's ?

Did you have a good day today or have some fun aswell?

The Daily Rant

So I missed one day in my goal of daily writing... funny thing is I did start to write a post late yesterday afternoon, however I couldn't really think of anything worthwhile to post. (not that I'm making any promises about the quality of this particular post)

Today at work one of my colleagues asked me to help him with a print problem he was having, being the helpful IT Support person I am I investigated further...

I found out that he was attempting to print of a PDF catalog of products & prices from a certain supplier. (no problems so far) However he was attempting to print said document in colour, but the printer was just spitting out blank pages (strange).

First I thought it might have something to do with his colour access code not sending through to the printer correctly (nope, I was wrong) so I asked him to send me a copy of the document so that I could attempt printing it myself (... and here is where it gets interesting)

After having a brief look over the document I was perplexed why he needed the document in colour when the only colour in the entire document was the suppliers logo/colours as a background image (think an A4 page just obliterated with darkish blue hues), so I questioned if he even needed to have the document in colour at all ? (fairly straight forward question I thought)

In an attempt to be useful I figured I'd print the document in it's glory in wonderful Black & White, so to highlight the fact that no information was lost in the process (this didn't work either). The printer not playing fair decided that it would have a bit of a "brain-fart" in the middle of the day, so I rebooted it (powercycle FTW) and re-sent the black & white print request.

Shortly afterwards the printer buzzed to life and started to spit out the document as I had asked it to (awesome problem solved, or so I thought). Once the printer had finished I wanted to be thoughtful and stapled & hole-punched it all ready for my colleague to use.

To my surprise it seemed that my efforts were in vain, despite the document being a perfectly valid and useful piece of material (it's at this point I would like to apologize to any tree's reading this) he declared quite boldly... "this isn't any good to me, I want it in colour" and then proceeded to re-print the suppliers information in it's full (hideous) colour glory.

While I don't have to personally pay for the paper or the toner that was wasted, I feel somewhat diminished that my suggestion to just use a black & white copy fell on deaf ears and also made me consider just how wasteful some people can be.

On that last point I feel that I really should try my hardest to waste as little as possible in order to balance out others.

So do you know people like this, is there a Wasteful Wayne (not his actual name) in your life?

and if so is there anything you can do to help?

Money the root of all evil?

After yesterday's post I feel that I should elaborate slightly on my comments on "things I like"

Now I feel that the pursuit of money in of itself can be a bad thing, but conversely having enough money does allow particular freedom(s).

I may only be in my late 20's but I do consider retirement or at least, what I want out of retirement and the overwhelming thought that comes to mind is that of financial freedom. Which I would define as not being constrained by my finances.

Obviously their are many different paths to achieve this, but the simplest method that I'm know is passive income(s) or put simply, income that you can earn without you having to actively work at it...

There are different forms of passive income each with their pros and cons

- Rent returns from Investment Property(s)

- Dividends from a Share portfolio

- Interest from bank deposits/cash assets

I'm sure that there are some other passive forms of income that I've missed, but for the most part these 3 are the main ones...

Now to link this back to my original retirement thoughts, the idea is that when you retire you have enough income/savings to allow you to live comfortably in the last parts of your life.

The difficult part is that $50,000.00 in 2010 won't be "worth" $50,000.00 by the time you retire (thanks largely in part to inflation and rises in living standards, which I believe Accountants calculate at around 4-5% per year). So $50,000 in 2010 would be equivalent to $25,000 in 2020 (in buying power) (at least thats how I think it works)...

As you can see obtaining financial freedom isn't exactly straight forward, hence why most people will pay someone else to work it all out for them (financial advisors,Accountants etc)...

I'll post more tomorrow, but if anyone has any questions/suggestions please leave a comment below...

Things I like...

Yesterday I opened the door for suggestions on topic's to talk about in today's post, however it seems that my loyal readership of zero hasn't been particularly forthcoming.

So for today I figure that I would write a short post on some of the things that I like or "I'm in too..."

So in no particular order here are some of the things that I'm interested in, maybe have a bit of knowledge about and could be interesting to read.

Money

Now some might argue that the pursuit of money is the root of all evil, however I believe that money is neither good nor evil, but simply an object for people to do either good or evil with.

Fast Cars

Now this one might seem a no-brainer, but it's not just the fast cars themselves, but also the incredible amount of engineering behind them to make them fast. The thought of tiny little cylinders moving around at insane speeds per second to propel a 1,000kg metal shell towards the moon is really amazing (at least I find it interesting)

and finally...

Womenz(tm)

I think this one is obvious but figured I'd post it to round off the blog...

So what are you interested in and why?

Day Two of the Daily Dump...

So it's quickly approaching the end of the second day and as promised, I'm posting for the second day in a row.

Unfortunately at this stage, I'm not exactly sure what to write about, which given that this is only day number two, is a concerning trend. I did have a quick look over a few friend's blog posts and some of the topics that they themselves write about, however simply regurgitating someone else's words as my own would be cheating myself.

So I think my new goal should be to find some interesting topics to write about, with bonus points for a topic that I'm:-

• knowledgeable in
• passionate about
• is interesting to read

Now if by miracle chance someone who read's this blog wants to suggest something for me I'll greatly appreciate it.

The Daily Dump...

So I have read in some on-line blogs amongst other places, that it can be good to write daily. Both for creativity purposes and also simply to get thoughts down on paper (so to speak).

With that knowledge I will attempt to write some thoughts down on a daily basis, now I can't promise that any of these posts will be interesting or informative but that isn't really the point.

Hopefully over-time the quality of my posts will improve as I write more frequently, but I suspect that the opposite maybe true... I guess time will tell.

That is if I can keep up the daily posting...

There was something else that I was thinking of posting, but can't remember what it was now... ah well perhaps I can redeem myself tomorrow.

What's on my mind...

I think there are sometimes that I simply think too much.

Often there are times where I will try to plan out a whole conversation in my mind, debating with myself with what I might say and attempt to guess what others might respond with. Sometimes I will surprise myself with how accurately I can predict what the other person replies with.

Depending on how I think the conversion might turn out, there are many times where I will not even say anything out of fear.

It's been said that I don't always have to listen to that little voice inside, but it can certainly be difficult to switch-off, especially if it's been a habit for so long.

I will probably post more on this later... or not depending on how I think it'll turn out...