Lately I’ve been somewhat doubting my choice of degree and career. The basic thrust of my thinking has been “Given unlimited resources and time I’d spend my days tinkering with electronics, obscure software and the odd mechanical device. That said, what the hell am I doing in a business degree?” And it’s kind of been bothering me. When I forgo doing my lecture readings in favour of mucking about with a homebrew Wii sensor bar, shouldn’t I take notice of that?

What I’ve come to realise in the last couple of days, however, is that while I like doing those things, I’m not going to get paid millions of dollars to do them. Sure, I could pursue an electrical engineering degree, but there’s a couple of problems with that:

1) There’s a lot of mathematics involved. This is something I could probably overcome, however it would be hard, and would probably limit me.

2) I’d be limited to a technical role for a long time, if not forever, while working for someone else. Engineers can make great money, however they can’t make CEO money. It’s also a lot harder for a pure engineer to be self employed. They either start an engineering firm, for which you need to be a great manager and not a great engineer, or they invent something brilliant that the whole world can’t live without, then license it to a corporation and make a trillion dollars. That’s kind of a risky life strategy.

So where that leaves me is: “There are other career paths that might interest me more, but business and marketing do still interest me, and they don’t limit my future earning potential.” Which basically translates to: “I’m a complete mercenary who is sacrificing life happiness for money” or “C.R.E.A.M. suckah”. Now I’m not entirely unhappy with that. I have no compunction in saying that money is a major motivator in everything I do. Money buys things, and I really like things. Nevertheless, it still niggled at me a bit. There was still margin for error there. Was I really making the right call?

Today it all crystallised for me. What’s the core reason I love tinkering? I like doing things that people haven’t thought of before. I recognise areas for possible improvement that other people don’t see, and I visualise ways to fill them. I think I’m pretty good at that. For example, right now I’m part way through creating a visual basic solution that will let me quickly visualise a bunch of specific data at work.

Where I’m going with this is, what’s the core goal of a marketer? To take in a bunch of factors (customer feedback, market conditions, technological landscape etc) and divine from that a product offering that no-one else has thought of but fills a need.

So; a satisfying reaffirmation of my existing life path, or a fabulous exercise in rationalisation and justification? I’m pretty certain it’s the former, and I’m happy with where it’s left me.

That said, I still need to stop tinkering and get down to some damned study. Exams are in a week and a bit. Argh!

I bought a Wii recently with a bunch of vouchers I scored from work. While this entire thing is undoubtedly awesome, there’s one problem for me. I have a projector in my loungeroom, and the Wii needs a “sensor” bar for the Wiimote to work. What’s annoying is that this bar needs a cable that has to run across the centre of my loungeroom in order to work.

Luckily, all that’s in that “sensor” bar is a bunch of infrared LEDs. Nothing more. So, why not build your own? There are plenty of people out there that have done so, and I decided to do it as well, with a few differences from what else is out there. I’ll leave the gritty details to a future post on garagehacker. This post is merely to highlight my retardedness.

I spent an hour or so wiring up the circuit, and spent a decent portion of that calibrating a potentiometer to the right level of resistance. Unfortunately, I then wired up both points to the same leg, completely removing the resistor from the circuit.

Niiiice.

Needless to say, removing 440ohms resistance from your circuit results in Colonel Dave’s Crispy Fried LEDs. I’m not sure how many I’ve burnt but I’d say it’s at least 4-5. Financially, they’re only $1 a peice. It’s still bloody annoying, however, and I feel like a real moron.

So hence the title, don’t try and hack if you’re retarded (like me).

And I’m really loving it. I spend most of my non-work computer time using Linux, I read slashdot and I get the sudo jokes on xkcd. It’s good to be part of yet another geek subculture.

Anyway, onto the nuts and bolts of it. I started using Vista on my laptop a while ago and, while I liked it for a little while, the performance and the nagging started giving me the shits. A few weeks before Uncle Kev had been telling me about Linux and showed me Ubuntu on his macbook. While it looked kinda cool I wrote it off at the time as “linuxnerdbullshit”. When I got the shits with Vista, however, I decided to have a crack at Ubuntu rather than just reinstall XP, which seemed like a step backwards.

So I downloaded an image and loaded it up. One of the really cool things about Ubuntu is that the default image includes a LiveCD. This basically means that when you boot from the CD it loads the whole OS from it. It’s obviously a bit slower than an installed operating system, but it’s a great way to get a feel for the OS and see that everything in your system has appropriate drivers.

As it turned out for me, everything worked on my laptop (it’s a Dell) and I was really impressed with the Gnome UI that comes standard with Ubuntu. I went ahead and installed it in a dual boot scenario. Protip for people migrating from Vista to Ubuntu, the default partition resizer will bone your Vista installation. From all reports it works fine with XP, however Vista does something different with NTFS… or something. Anyway it ended up with me needing to reinstall Vista. Not a big deal since Ubuntu can read NTFS partitions (natively with Feisty, with another thing installed on Edgy) so I could back up all my files.

Install process for Ubuntu went flawlessly. It automatically installs Grub, which is a bootloader which lets you choose between operating systems upon bootup. Everything Grub related is automatically configured, however when I reinstalled Vista it overwrote the master boot record and fubarred Grub. I used the Ultimate Boot Cd to get back into Ubuntu and it was then a fairly trivial matter to fix it up. I forget how exactly, but google is your friend here.

While I did initially set it up as a dual boot, I’ve been using Ubuntu almost exclusively since I installed it. When I tried to boot Vista a couple of weeks ago I realised it had actually been expired for some time. There’s nothing I miss about XP and only two things I miss about Vista. I really like the start-menu-search feature of Vista and Office 2007 is great. However, I really hated the constant goddamned nagging of Vista. XP SP2 was bad enough but Vista takes it to a whole new level. I read a blog a while ago that lambasted (isn’t that a great word?) Microsoft’s nagware approach to security. The reasoning being that if you give someone a security notification every time they try and perform the most benign of tasks, they cease to become imporrant security warnings and start becoming “some crap I need to click in order to get my work done”. They already annoyed competent users that understand security, and now they don’t even serve to educate standard users who have no idea what’s going on.

Ubuntu, I feel, has the balance right. It’s secure-by-default so it still asks for a password when you modify system settings and things like that. However, there’s none of this garbage about asking you twice whether it’s okay to open a file you’ve just downloaded. Also, there’s no need for virus scanners since with Linux vulnerabilities are patched as they become apparent.

Since my first install of Edgy I’ve done a bit of tweaking. I used the beta of Feisty for a while, then ended up upgrading once the final release became available. I’ve also toyed with a few applications and plugins, which I’ll detail in another post.

To sum it up, I’d wholeheartedly recommend Ubuntu for anyone not entirely satisfied with windows. Even if it’s just some tiny thing that bugs you, fire up a LiveCD. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. It’s really easy to get a hold of (no more Linux of old, no manually mounting drives) and really easy to use. Get it done.

Okay so this blog sort of fell by the wayside lately. I admit it, I’m crap. However, a new age is dawning.

Alex Dolton recently found this blog by googling his name. There are two things to come out of this:

1) Alex is really vain and he got sprung for it.

2) It reminded me that this thing was here and that I haven’t posted to it in ages.

So I’ll be getting back into the swing posting about junk. I’ve even got stuff to talk about, mainly geek related. I’ve switched to Linux (Ubuntu) in the last couple of months and I’ve been doing Wii related modding stuff. Also there’s been general Uni business and work  and life junk happening.
The other thing that may help me out keeping this updated is letting people know this blog exists. Up until now it’s just Alex that’s read it (without my knowledge) and bots that make spam comments about car parts and nudie websites.

So mark this day, non-existent readers. It will bring a new dawn!