Category: Personal

Thought for the day

Hyperballad

We live on a mountain–right at the top.
This beautiful view from the top of the mountain.

Every morning I walk towards the edge
And throw little things off
Like car-parts, bottles, and cutlery
Or whatever I find lying around.
It’s become a habit–a way to start the day.

I go through all this before you wake up
So I can feel happier to be safe up here with you.
I go through all this before you wake up
So I can feel happier to be safe up here with you.

— Bjork

FOSS in Sydney education and busy times

A few days ago I did a short 1 hour talk on FOSS for about 30 IT teachers in Sydney. It was a lot of fun and it reminded me how spending just a little time can have such a great effect! Finding people who are keen to hear about and who can really use FOSS really helps the chances of success in your message having an impact. Thus far the people I’ve found to be most open to hearing about FOSS and also the concepts of Software Freedom, Free Knowledge and a digital democracy are teachers, activists, people in the NGO/non-profit sector and students. Politicians are also good to chat to, and there is a growing community of FOSS saavy lawyers too.

Any opportunity you get to talk to these people can often have a great flow on effect to their spheres of influence. I’ve had many occasions where someone I spoke to comes back to me months or years later to help them take it further, or to assist in some great scheme they’ve created with others.

It has been flat out recently. Jeff and I are working hard and getting some great new work (more news to come!), FOSS is really taking off in Australia in Government, corporate and education, and apart from being so flat out, life is really good 🙂

Software Freedom Day is only 5 weeks away, and the website (which is hosted by Canonical) is down and has been for 2 days. Terrible timing! We expect it to be back up soon and it isn’t slowing down our shipment or other plans, but we’ve no way to let the teams know that yet.

Buddhist conference this weekend in Sydney

So this is one of those blog posts where everyone finds out something new about a person 🙂 I have been studying Chan Buddhism casually since I was 15 and with a more serious focus in the past 2 years. Chan Buddhism is an big part of Shaolin Kung Fu which is what I started at aged 15 (after 3 years of Karate training). I really love my Kung Fu and Chan studies. They promote a sense of purpose, clarity and self-responsibility that I try to reflect in my life.

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up is because in Sydney this weekend is a large Buddhist conference called Change you mind, change the world with loads of different Buddhist schools coming together to learn and share. If there are people out there who read my blog interested in Buddhism, it would be a great experience for you! Several of my teachers are participating including the head of my school who is a major inspiration, Abbot Shi Yuan Zhi on the second day.

Anyone interested in studying either Chan Buddhism or Shaolin martial arts can check out my school here. I have looked around at loads of schools and always came back to this one. There are schools in Sydney, Canberra, Wollongong and the Blue Mountains.

Microsoft Office support rage

It is exactly for the following reason that I strongly dislike doing support for Windows. I have one client that I’m helping out at the moment in between Waugh Partners work, and it is driving me nuts!

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002). Click on OK to terminate the application.

This behavior may occur if you install Office 2003 and Windows XP Service Pack 1a (SP1a) on your computer, and do any of the following:
• You upgrade your Windows XP Home-based computer to Windows XP Professional.
• You reinstall Windows XP on your computer.
• You perform a repair of Windows XP on your computer.

Support message found here.

So basically, if I run a repair, which I did, it’ll give me a random error that doesn’t mean anything. And the fix is to apply a service pack.

What the…!!!