First lecture for 555 today. Rather uninteresting, I suppose he was covering pre-requisites, seems very thorough, making sure every one is following, but it was very slow. Geoff seems a geek though, great to see. Was starting to think the world was lacking, maybe I've been doing too many distance subjects.

Clayton today introduced me to a new TV series, an American show called "Numb3rs". Its not too bad, another waste of time though :| some of the uses of the theories are a bit outrageous, but they're interesting none-the-less. Keep wikipedia handy while watching it and you learn the odd thing or two.

Slow day. Played more bass, I did get blisters :| Its OK, shouldn't slow me down much, just have to remember to alternate the fingers I slide with.

Grace and I attempted to set up Apache/PHP/MySQL manually today, with limited success. Got apache up (easy enough), php was working, but could not access many standard functions. Will have to do some reading and find better instructions. The next hurdle will be to do the same on linux.

Clayton lent me Metal Gear Solid today. I've been trying not to take it, not really a gamer, but he makes it sound like a very interesting game (philosophically). He tells me it wont take me too long to play (not as long as I thought), so i'll give it a go. He doesn't need it back too soon, so I can take my time.

First lecture for ITC555 tomorrow. Looking forward to it. Never had Geoff Fellows before, but I'm told by Nick that he does a good job.

Highlight of the day: borrowed a bass guitar (one pick-up version) off Dave. Spent a few hours playing today, my fingers feel like they're going to get blisters. Standard electrics have small strings that tend to cut into your fingers, but the bass has such thick strings, doing bends and slides really burns your fingers, more so than a nylon (from which I have received blisters). Hopefully my fingers will have recovered by morning, and become a little tougher (I haven't been playing enough guitar lately, my fingers have gone soft).
I was surprised when I saw the bass, its a 5 string, I had forgotten it was (last time I saw it was about a year ago). Bonus!! I have always thought its almost pointless to get a 4 string when you can get a 5, but now I'm not 100% sure, the 5th string gets in the way when playing songs typically played on a 4. On a 4 you can access the E string (or D if you tune it down) with the first two fingers, but the 5th C string gets in the way. Its also very low pitched, its surprisingly hard to play by ear, because the frequencies are so low, there's only a cycle or less between semitones, I'll keep practising. Think I'll have a listen to "The Gathering" and "Pale Forest" tomorrow, and try to play some of that.

Downloaded Apache HTTPD, PHP, and MySQL as separate packages today. We have been using XAMPP for our ITC307 project, but when we put it into production it would be best to use a more compact and controlled distribution. Grace (in another project team) needs a php/mysql system working, so tomorrow we are both going to try and figure out how to manually install the three packages, save us both some time.

Tonight Alan and I tried to get Dark-Reign working over the Internet. Haven't played it for years, and although I'm not a great fan of it, it would have made a nice change of pace, if it had worked. The problem is probably caused by the fact we are both running dedicated firewalls, config problem there somewhere I expect, anyway, off to bed.

PS. I did find a spell-checking plug-in for firefox, SpellBound works nicely. It can be downloaded from the site, installed, and once run, it will have no dictionary, simply choose download more from the spell check box, and pick one.

PPS. Another interesting thing today:

Requested by Trevor..
Site Feed
Whispers: I don't really know what this is for...

I dont know how long it has been there. FYI, it allows me to read the blog via my email client (almost as if it was an email), which I can at last. Thanks Katrina.

Started another semester at university. I have 6 times as much class as i did last semester!!! making a total of 6 hours :)
Doing 3 internal subjects, ITC382 (Client Server Applications), ITC555 (Networking and Security), ITC307 (Software Development Project, no set classes for this), and a distance subject ITC262 (Operating Systems, also no set classes). Have had 2 lectures for one subject so far for ITC382. Ken (the lecturer) describes the subject as a "shell" allowing us to choose much of the content ourselves, while staying within a broad common framework.
Currently reading a book lent to me by one of the international students who have just arrived (a great group of people from the US, Canada, France, and a few others). Braden, who is writing a paper on "The Economics of Happiness" has lent me "The Paradox of Choice - Why More is Less (How the culture of abundance robs us of satisfaction)" by Barry Schwarts, in which he makes the point that university's have become "intellectual shopping malls", where once there were set structures and subjects that exposed students to common subjects that taught the student students how "to live a good and ethical life". Something Ken has mentioned (the ACS (and similar organisations) requires members to be competent in ethics, communication, and project management, as well as their core element of computing, and thus our course should be designed to reflect this, whereas there is currently only one subject on each (excepting communication, which is theoretically covered in every subject)).
Something i have discovered talking to the international students from the US and Canada, is the value they place in becoming "well rounded individuals". Their course structure reflects this, with all students doing subjects such as history, photography and philosophy, regardless of their major.

Back on topic, started reading through the requirements of the first assignment today, I think it just confused me. As part of this assignment though, we must keep a learning journal. Ken in class has recommended doing this in the form of an on-line blog. I have contemplated in the past keeping a blog, but generally passed it off as a waste of time. I understand it would serve as a useful record of my experiences, and perhaps more useful, a log of what i have learned, and how i have solved various problems (i often spend some time re-solving problems because i cant remember how i did it last time). I already have 2 forms of this in part, both less demanding of my time. One is Slogger, a firefox plug-in that automatically saves every web page you visit. Along with Aduna Autofocus which allows me to search the huge amounts of data (5Gb since Jan 1st 2005), it serves as a useful "subset" of the Internet, a collection of everything i have seen/read.
The second is that I also communicate daily with my best friend from home via IM (Yahoo typically). The logs of those conversations contain conversations about daily problems, we send each other links of interesting web pages, and so the logs are a most valuable resource.

Seeing as it seems strongly recommended to use a blog, i will treat it as a trial, as well as keeping a learning journal for the subject, i will also attempt to keep a personal blog for the duration of the subject, to see if it is worth the few minutes a day to write. I only know one other person (Katrina Tolentino) who keeps a regular blog. Many friends doing multimedia here in Wagga were required to keep a blog for one of their subjects, but none that i know of continued after they completed the subject.

Seeing as there is a possibility that i will use this blog after finishing my course, i have set up my own blog on my server, in preference to using the service provided on the ISPG server.

I have also (last night) installed Debian Linux on my test machine (with a little help from Clayton with the graphics settings). An operating system that used to have a reputation for being "hard core", and complex to install and configure, the new version does almost everything for you, and the synaptic package manager allows you to install a huge library of software from the two dvds. I will attempt to get my php editing environment running on the system (XAMPP, Eclipse and TruStudio). It should help me bridge the gap between windows and linux

It also occurs to me if i am going to be writing these blogs i need to find myself a spell checking plugin for Mozilla Firefox.