Vacant Mind

Been Busy September 13th, 2006

I know that I haven’t posted much is quite some time, and I apologise for that.
I have been caught up in a fair bit of Uni and Work Life and couldn’t balence both for some time, it seems to have died down for some time and I should be back on board now.
I have forgotten quite a few things that I wished to write about which is a shame.

But much love and much thanks to those of you who have been visiting.

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Between the Lines: India’s Third Gender August 10th, 2006

BETWEEN THE LINES – INDIA’S THIRD GENDER

Is about the self proclaimed third gender in India, the documentary follows three such hijras: Asha, Rambha and Laxmi. What I did like about the film is the fact that the photographer/narrator Anita Khemka was able to engage with the three individuals on a more personal level through language and familarity to bring out conversations and topics that I don’t believe would have been possible otherwise.

Most documentaries that I tend to see take sides or put out a point of view, but this one didn’t and I’m rather grateful for that fact because not only was the film interestingly informative about a topic I never knew existed but also sad at the same time. After about 30 minutes I could sort of empathise with the three people (they don’t refer to themselves as men or women) in a way and their strange predicament in society. I enjoyed how the movie was factual in the way that it showed both sides of the coin, their place on the social ladder and what they do to keep themselves there. During the movie I started to make comparisons towards homosexuals and trans gender society but as the movie progressed and I realised that the link couldn’t be reliably established mainly because of the way that they thought of themselves and dressed, also the history in their own country (and surrounding counties), culture and religion added more depth to their state of being, I suppose.

All in all I really enjoyed seeing this, I almost didn’t go because I thought about it and it was something that was unfamiliar to me and I wasn’t sure if a trip into the city would be worth it on what turned out to be a very busy Saturday…but it was.

Posted in Cinema, Culture, Film, General, Melbourne Events | No Comments »

Jury Duty August 3rd, 2006

Got a letter in the mail the other day about attending jury duty, I can’t do it because I am still a full-time student so I had to defer. As I was getting my statutory declaration signed by a justice of peace I was thinking about how effective I would be in a jury I don’t really like entertaining the fact that I could hold some one’s future in my hands, but I’m sure that it wouldn’t be that dramatic.

Have any of you done the jury duty gig?
How was it?

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Busy Sunday July 30th, 2006

I’ve had a busy week doing 13 hour days on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday because of a combination of my dodgy uni timetable and working as well, it was no surprise that my weekend was going to be busy as well. After pretty much crashing out on Friday night which isn’t excatly what I wanted but had no choice Saturday included some shopping for a new computer workstation station desk to accompany the soon to be bought new computer, which that proved to be unsuccessful, I did end up finding a filing cabinet so that I can start filing alway documents a little more efficiently than just under the bed in one of those storage boxes.

After a lack luster Saturday night I decided to do a few extra things on Sunday that I was used to doing, I did some washing and completely cleaned my car out, now these might not seem extraordinary to you but to me they are, the car only gets washed every six months and my washing only gets done every fortnight, which is fine but means that every time each of these exercies are done there is a considerable amount of effort that is needed so to curb this problem I’m going to try to do a little bit more often – something that I want to try to apply to my studies.

Even though I had started the day off well I seem to have fallen off the ride so to speak, I have slowed down and as you are obiously reading gotten a little distracted.

Ummm…be right back.

Well now the computer room as been completely rearranged, I don’t quite need the complex network setup that I used to because I don’t host this blog at home anymore.
The room will now be used for more practical tasks such as printing, while still having a few computers in there, it will mainly involve experiments with clustering, linux distro’s, and just general tinkering. I have also made some space for the soon to be built 1TB file server, my personal storage is quickly running out of space, and I also want an area for the whole family to send back ups of important data, also my brother and I seem to have duplicate music files, so in the end it just makes sense.

More news as it happens later.

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Network Changes June 27th, 2006

It was a bitter sweet day today, I had my last exam for this semester but I was alos lamenting the loss of the Australian Socceroos.
I am rather thankful for finishing and so it gives me time to do a few things with the home network that I have been planning.

I’m not certain how many readers I have for this blog, I don’t think that it’s too many as yet, as I haven’t really been posting all that much and I’m not as involved in the blog sphere as I want to be.

The site probably won’t be accessible for a couple of days and will probably have intermittent accessibility for a little while, the server that it is running on also needs to be rebuild, at the moment it’s running FreeBSD 5.4 and I know that I could update it that way but I have a bit more HDD space in the box its self that could be utilised a little better so I’m going have to wipe that whole system clean and install everything.

How long it takes to get everything back up and running will depend on how well I have done my back ups which I will be preforming and checking over the next couple of days.

Currently my network topology pretty much looks like:

Internet -> Modem/Router -> Switch -> LAN and Servers

But I would like to change it to this:

Internet -> Modem/Router -> Proxy/DNS -> Switch -> LAN and Servers

Now this is all well and good but I’m going to have a few routing issues particularly with the mail and web server that is running which I think I will have to resolve with some dodgy NAT’s – this will most likely cause the intermittent access.

Over and out.

Posted in General, Technology | No Comments »

Exams June 19th, 2006

Even though I did 5 subjects this semester I have 4 exams on, the subject was geared towards getting us ready for job applocations and interviews so it was pretty much an attend and pass with was good.

I have now finished 3 out of the 4 exams which explained the lack of attention that I have been paying to this blog, I have my last one on the 27th which is a fair while to to wait, so I can’t really work so I have decided to take a few days off to do a few essentials, such as clean the room and do some shopping for a few things.

I decided that I’m not too keen on the look of this theme so I’m going to have a go and creating a new one myself which should be a whole lot of fun in it’s self.

Posted in General | 3 Comments »

Dinner May 10th, 2006

I tired to cook dinner, but it didn’t quite turn out right. Don’t get me wrong it was still eatable, but didn’t have as much flavour as I had hoped.
I did think that it looked quite good though.

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Rose April 28th, 2006

Read more..

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Apple Boot Camp April 6th, 2006

I get up this morning on the train ride to Uni and i get a couple of messages saying something about apple being able to run windows xp on the intel based mac products.

So I jumped on the Internet as soon as possible to notice that it was a buzz about apple’s new developments, and rightly so.
As for most things mac I headed over to Paul’s site

As always Apple love to make spash and they keep doing it time and time again. This time with BootCamp

And as is mentioned on OSx86

Windows aren’t known as a hardware vendor as such so this shoudn’t really effect their sales of the windows operation system and related software. If anything it should increase because people will need to buy legal copies of office, windows etc…

From high end to mum and dad the implications are far and wide which to me really means more choice, which we know results in better options because of more competition which is only a good thing.

Posted in Apple, General, news, Technology | No Comments »

Melbourne Wireless March 7th, 2006

Melbourne Wireless is a community wireless project that aims to develop a cost effective wireless network spanning as much as melbourne as possible.

I have been kind of involved in the project for some years but never really got practically involved, hopefully until now.

I have started buying gear for the setup, but then I got up on the roof and hit a bit of a wall, it looks like I am completely surrounded by trees which going to be a problem because i need Line of Sight to the other person that I am trying to connect to.

I have so far found it a little hard to get good info on the way that I want to do things, so I will try to document what I will be doing so that hopefully I will be able to help someone.

Posted in Geek, General | No Comments »