random

Following on from my post about the ACE program, Yuri from Pythian asked what I get out of presenting that makes it worthwhile. In this post I will tell a few little stories to explain why I think writing and presenting are important skills for people, regardless of their ambitions.

Presenting

In a previous post I said that UltraEdit moves through beta really quickly. Today I’m rocking UltraEdit v4.0 Release Candidate on Fedora 18…

Cheers

Tim…

Hot on the heels of the recent UltraEdit v19 release for Windows, comes the UltraEdit v4 Beta II release for Linux/Mac.

I’ve just started using it and so far so good. They usually progress through the betas pretty quick. I didn’t have time to install the beta I before this one dropped.

Cheers

Tim…

The internet has been awash with people bemoaning the decision by Google to close Google Reader. Probably the next biggest talking point has been people asking what they can use to replace it when it’s gone. I’m planning on giving TheOldReader.com a test-drive, once I can get my feeds imported.

The problem with free

When you read the term “Total Cost of Ownership” (TCO), the word “Total” is pretty important!

Here is a paraphrased conversation I had recently…

• Person: Product X is free!
• Myself and others: The staff training costs to enable the long term support of product X, are not free though. Added to that, these people still have to support products Y and Z, so you are adding to their workload. You might even have to add people to the existing team, so the TCO may be far from free.
• Person: But the product is free!

You can see where this is going.

I wrote the following tweet the other day.

I love technology, but hate working in IT. The politics and bullshit drag you down… #baddayatwork

— Tim Hall (@oraclebase) February 28, 2013

I’ve been known to say on numerous occasions,

“Sometimes, a bad decision is better than no decision at all!”

I’m currently reading God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert and I just read this passage, which is a conversation between Leto (The God Emperor) and an Ixian Ambassador.

Android 4.2.2 dropped a couple of days ago and the updates of my Nexus4 and Nexus7 went without a problem. The reason for this post is to point out something I found amusing about my usage of the Nexus4…

I just attempted to send a text message and noticed my Nexus4 was not connected to my phone network. I don’t think it’s been connected since the update two days ago. When I noticed, I did a search for the phone network, found it and played catch up on a couple of old messages.

What I found amusing is it shows how little I actually need a phone network. I am almost continually in wifi range and most of my communication is via email, twitter and skype, so having no data connection for two days went unnoticed. I’m glad I only pay £8/month.

Cheers

Tim…

WordPress 3.5.1 has been released. The changelog and downloads are in the usual places. I’ve just done the auto-upgrade with no problems.

Happy upgrading.

Cheers

Tim…

This morning I was called because my mom’s email wasn’t working. As usual, no clear explanation of the issue was available. This sounds like a job for Captain Support!  The problem turned out to be Microsoft had switched her from the Hotmail interface to the Outlook.com interface. A quick explanation of the new interface and she bravely decided to stick with it, rather than switching back to the original Hotmail interface. I’m sure Captain Support will be needed a few times in the coming days…

Today I received a case for my Nexus 4. I got this case for £2.90 from Amazon along with free delivery. It came with a screen protector and polish cloth.

I put some sellotape over the shattered glass on the back, but couldn’t be bothered to tape over all the radiating cracks, since they are not shedding glass shards. I put the phone into the case and I’m now going to try my best to forget that LG (and Google by association) are a bunch of asses over the design of the back panel of this phone.

From a functional perspective, it’s hard to tell the phone apart from the Nexus 7 tablet, so I have no gripes in that respect. My rantings have purely been about the terrible choice of materials for the back panel.