Category: diary

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My new address

It’s been more than a month in the making, but I’ve finally realized a long-time childhood dream.

Take a peek at your address bar, if everything is working as expected, you’ll find that the URL now begins with isaac.su rather than ye’olde isaacsu.com.

Just a bit of background: the .su country code top-level domain was actually set aside for the former Soviet Union. Back in my younger nerd days, I was thrilled to find that such a TLD existed. I used to dream of acquiring the whole TLD, and have an email address that read isaac@su. Alas, back in the day, I’d moving from monikers like [email protected], to [email protected] to finally settling in at [email protected].

Lots of things have changed since then. The Internet as we know it has become far less stringent with the emergence of vanity domain names and url shorteners like bit.ly, is.gd, goo.gl and the ever ubiquitous t.co. So just a couple of months ago, I thought I’d take a punt at acquiring isaac.su.

There it was, up for grabs at some no-name domain registrar for a very reasonable yearly fee. I did need to provide some personal identification documents, but it all went smoothly and soon thereafter, I was a proud owner of said domain name.

I’m still in the process of working out the best way forward with regards to email. [email protected] has a nice clarity to it, but there may be some spam concerns for such an uncommon domain. On top of that, email addresses have become something of an immutable identity for websites that require sign-on which makes swapping identities cumbersome and generally frowned upon.

For now, I’m contactable at either [email protected] or [email protected]

So thanks for dropping by. Consider this your attendance to my virtual house-warming party. If you’ve been snooping around for a while now, the very least you can do is leave a comment as part of this auspicious event so I can get to know you.

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Digital Sentimentalism

Just last week, I learned from a colleague that the Android Ice Cream Sandwich was finally available for my Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF-101. After briefly going through the installation docs, I decided I’d give it a go.

There were two parts to the installation. The first was a scary sounding step called Super Wipe which essentially clears out the internal storage of the tablet before putting on the new software. Thankfully there were two versions. a Full and a Lite. I thought to my self “How clever, I can go with the Lite, and it’ll all my user data”.

So just before powering down the device in preparation for the procedure, I did a quick mental check “is there anything I might need to backup?”, followed promptly by a non-chalant “Naah…”.

I have this principle called the x-month rule of unneccessity: If something has been sitting in storage untouched for more than x number of months, it can be safely discarded (thrown away, sold, etc.) as an unnecessity. The value of x for me was 6 months, which is about how long I’ve been using my svelte Thinkpad X201 as my primary machine. Ever since then, the Transformer has seen very little use.

It all happened so quickly. Super Wipe Lite took less than 2 minutes, and flashing on the new ROM took about 10. After that, the thrill of watching the full potential of my tablet unleashed by a software upgrade took my mind of whatever digital etching were there before.

Until last night.

Maybe it was the dinner time conversation which inevitable turned to the subject of family holidays, but it suddenly occured to me that a large body of the photos from our Taipei trip were on the tablet, and nowhere else. It was during that trip that I bought the tablet, and I’d emptied all the photos from my phone to the tablet. Wifey and I would always enjoy the photos on the tablet so I never bother copying it anywhere else.

It was 1am at in the morning. The wine from dinner was keeping me awake, but the thought of our losing our photos forever haunted me. I rarely feel so helpless with my technology, I’ve never been more emotionally attached to 1’s and 0’s, and I never hated “digital” more.

One last puzzle to cap off the week, I suppose. But the stakes on these were astronomical. And it had to happened right after me accepting a post-dinner riddle from the father-in-law.

You can read a blow by blow account of how I eventually recovered the photos, but it was nerve wrecking.

More than a broad frustration with technology, it’s made me very hesitant to entrust any sentimentalism to these electrical signals. The less you have, the less you have to lose.

So much for being a technologist and a digital native.

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My adventurous week

Dad would get brother and I hooked on a genre of computer games called adventure games. He was one who enjoyed a solving a good puzzle, and it was his way of passing on the thrill to his boys; and pass on, he did.

I’ve since grown out of playing computer games, opting instead to apply that urge to figure out or solve something with slightly more tangible, real life puzzles – hence my foray into computer programming, and the inclination with making, fixing, tweaking and tinkering with things.

The past week has been particularly satisfying in that respect. Among the things I had the pleasure of conquering was a flat car battery, a leakly toilet, a duplicated key that was too thick to fit through the keyhole. Oh, we also brought our beast of an SOA system online in production for the very first time. It’s now powering one of the biggest online grocery stores in Australia.

There’s something about being able to approach difficulties in life as puzzles to be solved and enjoyed. For one, it removes a lot of the stress and emotional fog that gets in the way of approaching and unraveling the solution; like when you’re trying to undo a difficult knot. Secondly, it takes the edge off failing, because when you’re working with a puzzle, you just try and try again.

Dad probably thought it was a good way for his kids to occupy their spare time, not realizing how profound an impression he was making in our little psyches.

I guess I have dad to thank for a good week.

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The In’s and Outs of posting daily

It’s the cyberspace equivalent writers block when one has to succumb to blogging about blogging, but I charge you to bear with me, there is insight to be found in this.

This has gone on for a month now – my little attempt to post something at least once a day. I didn’t really think either of these would happen, that I my daily blogging efforts would last this long, and that I would run out of things to write about.

I direct your attention back to a post that I made two weeks ago on Reflection where I detailed the idea of an input and an output of a person. I’ve come to conclude that in order to produce meaningful output, one needs input, and above that, one needs to engage the painstaking process of curation at that end.

Needless to say, I haven’t been quite so diligent with my input. One could say that I’ve been writing out of my reserves – latent thoughts that have gone stale, and perhaps a little unpalatable.

Consider this a lesson learned.

So here’s to a second experiment in writing – where mindful input hopefully leads to meaning writing.

Thank you for keeping with me.

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Post-dinner conversations

Post-dinner conversations with the wifey have been the highlight of my days of late. It is over conversations and assaying very large ideas that we fell in love – so my side of the story goes.

She may tell you that it was my incredible good looks, flawless physique, irresistible charm and drop-dead romancing that she succumbed to – do not believe her.