The NSW government has created the Baby Names Explorer. It uses the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages to chart the top baby names over the past 100 years. Its pretty cool, unfortunately, ‘Kunaal’ has never seemed to be a popular name in NSW, I wonder why?

Now, however, since most of the hard work is out of the way, I can get down to relaxing in my own place and setting up my things exactly how I want .

The thing that I have been spending most of my time over the past couple of days has been the comp (naturally). I have been setting up a dual boot system that uses the pre installed Windows Vista and Linux flavour of the month, ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron. (This post incidentally, has been made using Firefox 3 running on Ubuntu).

Installing Ubuntu was a breeze and this is the first time that I have installed a version of Linux and not had any (major) issues with drivers. It recognised and correctly configured most of them right out of the box (the open source ones), and its easy installer found non open source ones like for my Nvidia graphics card. I am still getting the comp set up the way I like, tweaking things here and there, but I must say that so far Ubuntu has not disappointed.
There are a LOT of sites out there with easy to follow information on how to do almost anything in Ubuntu, starting off with the Ubuntu Team Wiki. Oh well, enough of a break, back to setting up

In the mean time have a play with this little time waster known as the ‘scribbler‘.
Here is what I came up with after about 10 minutes of playing around with it.

I received an email from Schmap a couple of days ago letting me know that they had shortlisted one of my photographs to appear on their Brisbane map, and they wanted my permission before they used it! I always liked this picture, even though it is not one of the best (according to me at least).

I took this picture around the end of Dec 2006 while on a 10 day road trip to Brisbane and the Gold Coast, I was spending the day at Sea World and this was the show going on in the Dolphin enclosure. Needless to say that this email made my day. Now I just hope they like the picture enough to actually use it in their next update.

To see more pics I took, you can try the photos section of this site or quicker to checkout my flickr page

Until now however I had always considered my move to Sydney as being one of the hardest, because for the first time in my life I was not only saying goodbye to my friends, I was also having to say goodbye to my family! I have now been here about 6 years (the longest I have ever been in one place), and I thought that I was finally done dealing with the Goodbye monster. How wrong could I have been?

Recently , I had to use the dreaded G word again, and it was still as hard as I last remembered.
A few days ago I told my employers of over two years that I would be resigning soon. This was my first full time employment after graduating from university, and I had met and become friends with some amazing people while working here. As such, I was expecting the announcement to be difficult; but no where near as hard as it ultimately turned out to be. I’m not sure if it is the fact that even though I am excited to be starting at a new place, I am dreading the reality, that very soon I am not going to be seeing my friends every morning.
I can only hope that the fabulous relationships that I have here are maintained (at least to some degree) after the move, but I guess this is something only time will tell.
Goodbyes are hard; but is leaving a job always this hard, or is this something that gets easier with time?

Bored with the net

Engineering Hubris

Dating Pools

Commitment

Pwned

And Lastly:
Velociraptors

In between buying out phone software companies, making statements like “Your Mobile Phone Should Be Free” and reading claims about Execs denying its existence , one cannot help but be confused as to what is actually going to happen.
Is Google going to release a gPhone or just phone software packages? You can read some more in the Google gphone rumor timeline, and judge for yourself.

Now, as exciting as the gPhone rumors are, the development that has me most intrigued is the rumor of the Sony Ericsson PSP Phone!
Now just like the gPhone, there are mixed reports to keep people confused and guessing. On one hand you have the recent patent that Sony have filed for a phone with a screen that swivels, has a button layout that is (very) familiar, has gaming features and looks an awful lot like a PSP (See Image Below); and on the other hand you have the SCEE CEO David Reeves denying the claims (deja vu anyone?).

Personally, I would not be surprised if a PSP phone IS in the works. It just makes sense.
There are billions of dollars at stake in the mobile phone industry internationally and any edge that makes one phone stand out from the other would be massive (lets face it, everyone wants something unique). A PSP phone would/could also boost UMD sales, especially for UMD Movies and Music.

However till either of these rumors are confirmed/laid to rest conclusively , and till the iPhone actually makes its long awaited debut down under, I am just going to have to pacify myself thinking about what other companies are going to try and enter the mobile phone market, and failing that, I always have my sleek new Nokia E90 for company

The first stuff up was worth over 1.4 million in damages and has also resulted in a court case.
Basically, IBM had sent its $1.4 million super computer to the US Patents office. It managed to fall off the fork lift managed by a federal contractor. Now in a normal world, one would expect the contractor to take the blame and maybe even pay a portion of the damages, however in this case the contractor decided to sue IBM for more than 1.4 million, for their apparent bad packaging!
Not sure how far this is true, but it definitely makes me feel a lot better.

Now as good as the last gem was, this second stuff up is even better.
A technician at the Alaska Dept of Revenue formatted a hard drive during maintenance work which contained an account worth $38 billion! This in itself should not be a big issue, since surely an account of that size would have plenty of backups floating around. This one had 1, which the technician in all his/her infinite wisdom decided to delete as well! They did ultimately manage to get all the information back by re digitizing all the paper work (300 boxes worth!).
Before you think that the poor technician was then made an example of so that something like this never happened again, you’ll be surprised to hear that no one was punished for this. Its probably like a friend said, “Its hard when the population of the town is 50 and most of them are working in that office.”
In either case, news like this really puts things in perspective for me, and lets me know that no matter how bad my day is going, it could go a lot worse