Life Status Update

2nd July, 2007     Blog, Life, Ubuntu, University, WWW,

With my last blog entry being back in March, back when I was just starting my last semester of Uni, a lot has changed, and that semester of Uni is now over, so I thought I would give a kind of status update.

University

The current semester is over, and it will most likely be my last semester at Uni at this time. I did my last 40 credit points (4 units), this semester, so now I just need to wait on results, and make sure that I have passed everything. If I didn't, I am going to have to go back for another semester, but at this stage, everything looks good. fingers crossed.

Work

Still working with the same company, and still enjoying it. Just last weekend, we had the Guns 'n Roses concerts in Sydney, which were an interesting night, but fun none the less. On Saturday is Live Earth, which means a full day for me, hopefully without too many dramas.

Coming up in the next few weeks is Christina Aguilera, Gwen Stefani and Disney on Ice. August is set to be big as well, and most likely will be a busy end of the year.

New Phone

I made mention to a friend a while ago, that I would discuss my new Phone, so now's the time.

Just before the Sydney Royal Easter Show, my Motorola V3, which I had for almost 2 years, suffered a painful death after a night alone with the condensation off a McDonalds drink container.

But thankfully for insurance, I was able to get the same phone, but in black for $0, or pay the difference in cost between that phone and a phone I wanted, and get that instead.

So, naturally, I chose the later, and for now almost the last 3 months, I have a Nokia E61, a great Phone/PDA.

While it does have a few quirks which I can easily live with, it does make a great phone for someone continually on the go. ATM I use it to store rosters for work (as the .xls it comes as, as well as in the calendar), documents and contact info.

I also have PuTTy for Symbian loaded on to it, so i can use its inbuilt WiFi to connect to a box at home, or elsewhere, if I have internet access. Saves carrying a laptop in case a server dies.

The phone also has a SIP Client by default, which means it can also do VOIP calls. I have it set up at the moment, to be a client for my asterisk box at home, which it connects to over the wireless. This means I always can have my Phone book in one place, and with me. Security is not a problem for the WiFi, as it has support for WPA, which I use for all communications.

The keyboard did take a bit of getting use to, but it really is quite easy and friendly, once you use it for a bit. And boy does it make typing a SMS fast. The wide screen is great for playing games (while travelling on trains), and surfing sites (tho that is still costly to do all the time).

It has a Mini-SD card slot for storage, apps or files, and also has a movie and media player, as well as voice recordings.

I really love the phone :)

SCM

Source Code Managment rocks. I don't know why I didn't set one up earlier, as it has really helped with me being more energetic to get this new site up and running. Not sure why, but it just has, and that is for the better.

*

As mentioned above, I set up a asterisk server recently, and It now handles incoming and outgoing calls for both my VOIP line and PSTN line. Wasn't easy to get started, as came to a few problems with Arch Linux's asterisk packages, not really being up to date, or complete. I tried out both TrixBox and Elastix, neither of which I liked, and in the end, installed Ubuntu Server, and tried again with what on Arch Linux, and it worked, first time.

Future

While I am still doing my casual work, as noted above, it is almost getting to the stage, especially once my grades come out for this semester, and I graduate, that I will need to start looking around for full time work, hopefully this can be in the same industry/employer as at the moment, tho I feel that I may need to look outside it.

I am looking at getting some of my projects which I had planned under way, hopefully including some stuff which may generate income.

That is enough for a recap for now, does feel good to blog again, and to have the new site up and working (which you should check out if you are reading this via a RSS Aggregator - www.nullis.net.