Happy New Year!

Carla and I just finished watching Sydney's New Year's fireworks. We had to watch it on TV as we had just flown in from Adelaide, but next year we will have to go downtown and go for the full experience.

If you have never seen the Sydney's New Year's fireworks, make sure to go to youtube and search on sydney fireworks. They do a pretty good job.

I will tell you one thing for sure. If you had told me a couple of years ago that I would be in Sydney for New Year's fireworks and living in Sydney, I would not have believed you. How many more great experiences are ahead of us? Can't wait to find out! :-)

It's a Panda-monium

Yesterday, we went to Adelaide Zoo to visit Wang Wang and Funi, the newly-arrived Chinese panda bears. The pandas had arrived to the Zoo three weeks ago and are still in quarantine, but we we able to go see them.

The attendance to the zoo has doubled since the arrival of pandas, and it was evident in the line-up to see the pandas. We lined up and stood there in 35 C sun. HOT!!! Pack water and then drink a lot of it, as you are losing litres of water in that heat.

Back to pandas. They were Cute!!! The male and the female are kept in separate cages, and are only brought together for mating, which supposedly does not happen very often.

It was great to see pandas up close. They are big, fuzzy, and keep eating their bamboo. It was really hard to take a good picture as pandas were behind thick glass panes. You can find the pictures below.

Funny Name of the Week

This week's pick is:

WOY WOY

Got my geek on/Backup warning

I got home from work pretty late tonight, again. Since I did not want to spend another evening home alone (as Carla is in Adelaide), I decided to go for a walk. Luckily, the stores happened to be open until midnight (due to Christmas shopping season) so I wondered through the mall. And walked right into an ELECTRONICS store.

Ahhh! Just seeing all those new, flashy gadgets makes my knees go weak. Got to play with shiny new laptops (thumbs up for the ASUS UL80vt (light, fast, LONG battery life) and the HP dm3). Currently looking for a wireless keyboard/mouse set, but needs to have a "unified" tiny USB transciever. 24" monitors are looking tempting, especially with prices around $200.

And then there are the mobile phones. I played with an HTC Diamond 2 and was surprised how quick and easy it was to use. HTC does a good job of making user friendly phones, even though they run Windows Mobile.

Last, but not least, there seems to be a plethora of portable hard drives available for backing up your data and moving files around. I would like to give a short public announcement regarding computer backup (especially since my bosses laptop crashed and would not start up Windows when I was installing a program for him. Luckily, I had all his important files already backed up to the Internet.) Backup, backup, and then backup your backup. Data loss WILL happen. Hard drives last on average 3 years. Computers get stolen, kicked, dropped, lost.

The best backup strategy has the following qualities:

-easy to do, or even better, happens without you having to do anything

-backs up data off-site (if there is flood or fire in your place, your external hard drive with your backups is also gone)

-easy to restore data when needed

I have looked at a lot of different solutions, and the one that I like the most is JungleDisk. This service works on Windows, Mac and Linux computers and is so easy to operate, plus it is inexpensive. All you have to do is: a. sign up to their service, b. install software on your computer, c. select the folders you want backed up and that's it. It may initially take a while to upload everything, but once it's all there, you're safe.

You even have web access to the data, so lets say you are on a business trip or vacation and your laptop dies. What if you need some important files urgently off your computer. No worries, just log into your JungleDisk online account and get your files. Too easy!

JungleDisk will also keep deleted versions of your files for a specified number of days (I keep mine around for 60 days) and will also keep last x versions of your file (10 in my case). This feature really saved my bacon a few times as I had compressed some pictures (which drastically reduced the quality of the pictures), and only later realized what I had done. I needed to get the uncompressed pictures back, and viola, there they were. Phew!

As we accumulate more and more digital data, it becomes really important to protect your data properly. I backup my pictures and documents to JungleDisk, while my music and movies are backed up to an external hard drive. External hard drives will provide you with a decent level of protection, but for the ease of use and complete backup protection, use JungleDisk.

Funny Name of the Week

Today's pick is:

WIRAGULLA

Learning is fun!

I spent three hours today at my neighbourhood Borders (bookstore). I would have stayed longer but I forgot to pack water when I left home so I was dying of thirst! Since I've come to Australia, I try not to leave home without a bottle of water. Even the police carry a bottle of water in their belt, along with capsicum spray (pepper spray), handcuffs, flashlight, gun, and spare ammo. Talk about a large belt.

Back to my Borders visit. I love going to libraries as there is so much knowledge that can be obtained, but I prefer bookstores. Bookstores have the newest information and, especially when it comes to business and technology, it is all about the new information. I ended up reading (cover to cover) two Linux magazines, one PC magazine, one computer security magazine (skimmed), and two business magazines. Yes, my head was spinning after all this reading, and I guess it did not help to be dehydrated as well. :-)

I believe that it is important to continuously learn. The world is changing all the time, and we cannot succeed in tomorrow's world with today's knowledge. We need to gain new techniques, new information and new skills all the time. That is why it is so important to have a place to get this new information. We need libraries, bookstores, and above all, a good, high-speed connection to the Internet to continue to learn.

The best example of needing to learn quickly in order to succeed is my current job. My job description is pretty fluid, but could be summed up with "Do anything AND everything to get the job done." That kind of job description ends up covering a lot of different tasks, which I am not expected to know how to do in advance. Luckily, I am willing to learn and able to learn so that is 2 out of 3 factors that are required for success. But, if the books and the Internet were not there, I would have accomplished only a tenth of what I have done so far.

There are people out there who believe that internet is the worst thing that has happened to humanity, because it promotes porn and piracy to a large userbase. Well, every other form of media did the same, from newspapers and magazines, to TV and DVDs. The people who oppose internet on moral grounds fail to realize the great benefits that are enabled by internet. What I think is the greatest benefit of internet (and this can be debated to great lengths) is freeing of knowledge. Knowledge is not sitting in a book or a magazine on a shelf in a library. When this book is taken out of the library or destroyed, the knowledge in the book is withheld from everybody else. Internet is different. Internet is an endless fountain of knowledge.

The internet does not care if one or a thousand people are reading certain content. We all have access to it. We can all learn, do better, grow. We all have access to the same information and can now do and learn that in which we are interested. This may be hard to believe for those that are under the age of 20, but things did not always work like this. In the past, knowledge was held in expensive books, or in organizations like corporations, governments and universities. If you were not part of the club, it was really hard to get the knowledge.

Luckily, things have changed. The only thing stopping your from learning and doing better is YOU! With the help of books and internet, you can overcome even that stumbling block. :-)

Funny Name of the Week

This week's pick is:

TURRAMURRA

Another great weekend

We had another fun weekend! Yesterday, we decided to try a new beach. We chose to go to Dee Why beach, which is probably the closest beach to our apartment by bus. It took about 45 minutes to get there, and the bus ride was worth it.

The beach was pretty long, at least a kilometer. The beach was not very busy at all even though it was a Saturday. The temperature was around 27 C and it was just a perfect day to be out. For lunch, we took a 10 minute stroll to a nearby town centre, populated with shops and restaurants. We even found a Croatian food store. I know, I seem to be finding them everywhere I go. I even found Vitaminka ajvar! It's the best, but since they were selling it for $9 a jar (while it is only $4-5 in Croatia) I had to pass on this opportunity.

After grabbing a quick lunch, we went back to the beach and spent three more hours enjoying the sound of waves and the warmth of the sun. It looks like we did not do a good job of applying sunscreen lotion. A few patches on both of our bodies were really sunburned. Well, I think we will have to enforce a better sunscreen lotion application procedure next time. :-)

Funny Name of the Week

I remember, when I first moved to Saskatchewan, how I thought that a lot of towns had funny names. Good examples are Swift Current, Moose Jaw, Waskasiu, Pasqua, etc.

Well, Australia takes it to a whole new level. They have so many funny-named towns that I have decided to do a "Funny Name of The Week" post every so often.

I figured I should start with a pretty good name, so here it is:

WAHROONGA

Network setup

I am having really FUN at work. One of the first things they needed me to do at work was to setup their computer network. No problem.

I did some quick research and came up with a super setup. I ordered a Dual WAN router (Draytek VIGOR 2910) and set it up with 4 Linksys GigE switches so that our whole network is on Gigabit Ethernet. For most of you this is a whole lot of gobbledygook, so let me translate. Our company now has two different connections to the Internet. If one of them goes down, we automatically switch over to the other one. The users would not even know that one of the networks is down. Actually, one connection did go down the second day I had this setup going, and we merrily continued accessing the internet through the other link.

The router also supports VPN connections so we are utilizing that feature heavily. VPN allows us to connect to our work network securely from anywhere. This feature comes in handy when you are on the road and need access to internal network resources.

I am using Google Apps for our corporate email. This greatly simplifies email management, and as a bonus, we get shared calendar and document capabilities. It is a very powerful setup, and, best of all, it is free! As a startup, we like free things.

For backup purposes, I setup JungleDisk on each computer, with private and shared folders. So, people's private files are being backed up into their own vaults, and shared stuff is also backed up but available to all users. I am also going to have shared capabilities on the network for bigger files and for use when in office, but I don't intend to backup this setup. Backup aspect is important, but it is also important to know what really needs to be backed up.

For simple file and print sharing within the company, I am installing SMElinux. Setup is quick and easy, and configuration is done through a web browser. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle.

For our code repository, issue/bug tracking and project wiki we use JIRA by Atlassian. They have a very good solution, and they also provide hosting for your projects if needed. I opted for the hosted version of their software, to reduce the setup and support aspects on our side. We don't have time to be fiddling with this kind of stuff. I like setup and forget type of solutions.

For our phone setup, I intend to go with the powerful and very cost effective solution from Talkswitch. Their PBX supports analog and VOIP lines, and offers many capabilities, like voicemail to email, auto-attendant, IP phones, remote extensions, VOIP trunks, etc. It is super!

Feel free to share any alternatives to this type of setup. I am in the process of implementation, so I can still change if I see a better solution.

What did YOU do last weekend?

We went to the beach this weekend. A BIG improvement over what we did on this date two years ago! Water was cold, but definitely not as cold as Ottawa right now. :-)

http://picasaweb.google.com.au/ivanonthemove/2009Nov3?authkey=Gv1sRgCKW9xqCPtt_RswE#slideshow/5406305219212023938