Mind rape sucks...

...especially when you're on the end being raped. It's always nice to see friends ripping your old ideas and concepts for other uses. Awesome. Thanks a fucking bunch.

Wankers.

How do you decide?

I love my job most of the time, but I don't know if I could see myself doing it for the rest of my life. Being a member of the general IT staff isn't quite what I had planned for my life, but it's an easy option. I really want to be paid to play games and program all day, but life hasn't quite worked out that way.

It all seems to revolve around uni. Most of my family believe to succeed in life I need to goto uni. I can't decide if they're right; I've never been through it, and whilst most of them haven't either, I can see their point. Just looking in the jobs section of most newspaper's tells me this. But, most people I know who have been to uni are being turned down jobs for lack of experience; also which is heavily requested in the jobs section. Now, do I stay in this job and work up from the bottom, gathering as many other qualifications as possible - including an Open University course? Or do I go on a proper course, come out with a massive debt, and be an ex-student bum? Tough decision.

Either way, I'm probably not going to a "proper" uni this year. But what about next year? Or the year after that? When is it too late to apply? It's funny how all these feelings come back up after submitting a unnameable uni's online questionnaire about where I am, and how I feel now about uni.

To be honest, I'm not a big group person. It takes me a long, long time to be comfortable with people - even now most people I consider to be my closest friend's don't know about the "real me". Perhaps not even Amy. For this reason, I don't think I'd fit in at uni; even with the other spod's. But then again, you don't know until you try.

So, I stay at this job for a little longer - then I do stay or do I risk everything and go? Unlike most of my peers I've got a stable job, a reasonably good working environment, a good boss; all in a line of work which interests me. But fuck all to back myself up if it all goes wrong. Perhaps its time to start work on that open university course, and con the boss into some LPI certification, as well as the Microsoft (philosophically its against my Free and Open attitude, but it pays the bills) stuff.

Taking the piss, user-style

There must be a club, or something, for some users who love to just take the piss. Across various companies we support, theres literally hundreds of iTunes directories. Since we don't actually get employed for the companies, we can't just go in and trample on said directories (invasion of privacy, etc.). Today one company gave us the go-ahead to sort out their data. Awesome, and possibly a little silly too. We've moved about 8GB of iTunes data, between about 3 or 4 people. One such user is 4GB of this in total.

Now I know some will cry ignorance, but the main offender has been spoken to about this before. She's pretty much taking the piss now; this is the 3rd time and previously I believe she was taking up at least 10GB herself. If only it was my place to say something...I miss the days where verbal smack-downs could be delivered without fear of being sacked. It was like instagib-ing mentally.

Just the one new Aston Martin, Sir?

According to Jacob Appelbaum's experience, any one in the UK, Canada, or Russia could be in danger of having their current account locked out.

Awesome. Whats even better is that we've heard nothing about it and some bastard could be buying a new Aston with my hard earned cash.

Edit:
It seems like other people have experienced this too: Simon Rumble, CC, and SecurityFocus has a statement on it. Perhaps it might be time to start moving all that cash to The Bunker?

Infectious Illness?

Illness must be infectious between my main PC and my body. I've been feeling a bit rough the last few days, but since last night I've felt like someones dropped a bookcase of unsold Linux Desktop Hacks on my head. It also seems my computer must be suffering the same though, as after going for some food last night, I return to find that my machine has crashed and in an endless loop as it tries to boot.

Now, as much as I hate proprietory software, I do use Windows for work and working from home requires Windows pretty much - sure I can remotely desktop in to servers from linux, but it can make supporting users harder if you can't bring up the exact interface immediately. Virtual Servers are good for this, but sometimes not fast enough - especially via VNC/RDP/SSH over the 'net.

Anyway, I've digressed. It seems that the PC won't even boot into linux or Windows safe mode. Oh dear. Now I recently rebuilt this PC software-wise, so I knew it was fine in terms of that, and given that neither would boot I was really starting to crap myself as I needed the PC today for work. So its 10pm and I'm sat cleaning out my machine, reseating everything, and moving it all around just to get the damn thing to boot. In the end I just left it, put the case back on and gave it one final boot - at 3am.

Praise be to the binary gods! It actually worked. Perhaps it was just all a big processor cache cold or something? Now if only my unknown illness would just go in the same way.