It was December 4, 2006 when my brother flew up to Vancouver to help me drive all my things down here to California. Time sure does fly.
My time here has been eventful, especially in the last few months with the financial crisis, the presidential elections, and now the general collapse of the US economy. The headlines here are never boring.
I’m moving house again in January, in an effort to stay close to the office, which also moved recently. It’s a nice little condo and I’m renting the upstairs bedroom. I have yet to stay at any of my dwellings past the original lease term and I hate moving so I hope that trend changes.
I do miss home. I miss my friends, actual rain, and Tim Horton’s. The Bay Area is a really nice place, but for some reason, it just isn’t home. I don’t know if that will ever change no matter how much time I spend here. It’s been a great experience so far though.
Charlie and I are well. Hope you are too.
December 15th, 2008
Ubuntu comes up with some silly names for its releases, and this latest one is no exception. Despite the strange name however, this latest release is a darn good one. For the first time since I’ve been messing around with Linux for my desktop/notebook, everything “just works”. The last time I tried Ubuntu on my notebook, I had to go through a tedious hacking process to get various things to work, usually related to hardware (webcam, audio, standby/susped, wide-screen resolution, etc). In fact, I ended up switching back to win-xp after a few weeks of frustration. This is not an uncommon theme in the Linux world. My experiences with SuSe and Fedora Core were even worse. It’s not that you can’t get things to work eventually, it’s just that you have spend so much time digging around support forums. And of course, if you dare update your system, your fixes are often lost in the process and you have to go digging around the forums again. Ununtu Intrepid Ibex however, ran perfectly after installation, which was an extremely simple process (far simpler than Windows).
The main reason I wanted to install a new OS is because for some strange reason the standby and suspend modes on my notebook stopped working (under win-xp). I have no idea why, and trying to debug a problem like that in Windows is pretty much impossible. So ironically, I’ve switched from Windows to Ubuntu for better hardware compatibility!
Now if only Apple would release Itunes for Linux so I could sync my Iphone…
November 3rd, 2008
I’ve enrolled in some classes for the fall semester at the local community college. I have to say it’s great to be back in school learning new things, especially when I don’t care about the grades I get. There’s nothing like learning just for the sake of learning.
It occurs to me that back in my university days, I was way too focused on getting good grades, and this often meant focusing on exam “tactics” rather than truly internalizing the concepts being taught. I happened to be in a somewhat competitive program (a.k.a. consultant/ibanker factory) with a lot of peer pressure to hit the marks. I really wish I had had the foresight to realize how stupid that game was. Not to say that I didn’t learn a lot in university, but I definitely could have learned more. This is one of those “if I could go back and do it over again…” things in my life. The nice thing is that to some extent, I can.
September 28th, 2008
Just over a year ago, I wrote about how great it was to be able to take Charlie into the office with me everyday, and how of all the perks that I enjoy in my job, nothing could even come close to having Charlie around. My two previous jobs (Invoke, Navarik) also allowed me to bring Charlie into the office. Well, perhaps I jinxed it, because a few weeks ago, we moved into a new office building which has a strict policy against dogs.
The good times are over.
Damn.
September 26th, 2008
Previous Posts