October 22, 2007

I couldn't resist...

When I read about this command in the HP printer control, I just couldn't resist...

CIMG3045

October 18, 2007

My mindset in words

From time to time I'm asked how I can cope with different things happening in my life. Usually I've been giving the answer that my motto is "Never look back or hang on things you're unable to change". Usually people are not quite satisfied with this answer but I've been unable so far to come up with a better description of my midset.

Today I read a tip at the Positivityblog about Decrease Suffering In Your Life which pretty much covers many of the wires in my head. I've been surprised to see it written down, but in essence for me this already works for years...

October 16, 2007

Quick update

Just realized, that my last post was more than two weeks ago and I thought it'd be time for a quick update of how's life has been in the meantime.

On the weekend of the 6th and 7th Oct. we had quite a large maintenance task at a customer. We replaced the main database and business server, which was an IBM server running AIX 4.3 and Oracle 9i, with a brand new Linux server, RedHat EL 4 on a HP Proliant and Oracle 10g R2. This was an incredible task, needing monts of preparations and porting effords as the interfaces, applications and scripts from an old Unix platform are not usable 1:1 on a fairly modern Linux system. And there were several dozends of them running on that machine, many not even documented anywhere but nevertheless business-critical. All in all on that weekend I've been working for about 24 hours straight, but on Monday morning when business started again it took not too long before the customer called in enthusiastically and reported a tremendous increase of speed and all critical interfaces working flawlessly. YES! These moments are the essence of a developers life. Of course, there are some minor glitches at some interfaces, but none of them being time- or business-critical and have been resolved during the week.

The following week has been a bit of a fight of two projects both requiring more time from me than I can provide. The sum of my time is always 100% and when both projects wanted to allocate 80% of it, I passed this issue on to my managers. Now I'm back at 80/20 :)

And over all the weekends is the cover of the university. Studying has been quite enjoyable so far and my classmates are great. The e-learning nevertheless is a quite different experience in attending lectures than I expected because it is much harder to stay focussed when you're just staring at a VNC session of your tutor and listening to the explainations on the headset. But I think, once getting used to this it can be an efficient way of learning.

October 2, 2007

Lucid dreaming...

A few days ago I had again an experience which until today I just had two times in my life. In the morning I had a "Lucid dream", which can be a quite thrilling happening for someone on the first time.

Lucid dreaming is actually a special dream during which you're aware that you're asleep and where you are able to take control of your dream.

I first experienced such a dream some years ago, which was a big surprise for me back then as, of course, I've never known or imagined that it would be possible to control ones own dream. All my lucid dreams so far occoured near the end of my sleep-phase in the morning when I was woken up just for moments and faded away again almost instantly. This second sleep happened to be such a lucid dream. What's strange is, that altough on every of these dreams I can remember quite clearly that short awakening phase and almost everything what happened in the dream, which is, as far as I've read so far, not very common on the first lucid dreams.

This is also a topic which from time to time pops up on several pages, here I'm giving a few of them: