Alex Pooley's Blog

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The “hibernate” feature in Windows enables you to turn off the machine, and back on again without losing your place! This includes leaving documents open on the last read page, leaving FireFox with all it’s tabs intact, and even leaving your local webrick server intact!

My impression is that this is a little known, or little used feature of Windows that would benefit a lot of people greatly. I’ve bound my shutdown key on my laptop to hibernate. This means I simple turn off my machine at night by hitting the off button on my laptop, and resuming my work in the morning exactly where I left off. This has been the case for months now and I have encountered no problems while doing this.

No fuss, no time wasted, no thinking involved!

In case you didn’t notice, my dedicated server was mysteriously offline for several _days_. My hosting provider “Serverpronto”:http//serverpronto.com has since rebooted my machine and everything appears fine now. While serverpronto provide me with a dedicated server at a pretty good price, I can’t afford to stay offline for days on end! Whether it was the hardware or software that froze I guess I’ll never know. Either way, Serverpronto place the responsibility on me to sort this out despite the facts that:

# I’m in Australia and they are in North America.
# I’m not awake checking my machine is up 24 hours a day.
# They have to _manually_ reboot the machine upon my request, at which point they will *charge* me after my first reboot.

There’s all sorts of technical complications that arise in situations like this. The most important one being that if the box goes down, my DNS also goes down. So then, my registered email address is no longer valid with them.

Also, I found Serverpronto to be a slow hosting provider - whether that was their network, or my server configuration - I would rather not have to worry about either.

Anyway, I’m off to “Dreamhost”:http://dreamhost.com as they offer incredible value for money. Despite being a shared hosting package, they still offer everything I’m after (SSH, Ruby, etc), and I’m hoping that the “managed” part of their service means they will keep my server online and functioning normally.

Ahhh! It’s good to be back online.

We live in a world largely devoid of people with passion. Does the majority of the population really live such a shallow life? I guess that’s not much of an imaginative stretch.

What is with software?! Why is it soooo aweful? I’ve had it with crap! Bad quality stuff needs to stay away from me from now on unless it’s after a Chuck Norris style roundhouse to the head!

Here’s what set me off. I had a day off work last week because of a sore shoulder. I used to simply print out a form and tick off a couple of boxes and pass it on to my manager. However now we have a home grown computerised leave application form. Firstly, why didn’t we just buy this leave software? I’m _sure_ that this problem would have been solved a million times over by various companies. But I digress.. Why does this new fangled whiz bang clicky clicky application form require me to enter my payroll number?! Guys and girls, I wouldn’t remember my payroll number if you tatoo’ed it to my forehead and made me recite it every morning while brushing my teeth. Do you know why? Because I don’t care!

Now I get technical… why do I even need to enter my name? I’ve already authenticated through our proxy - they know who I am. Why don’t I get back to my desk the day after being away and receive a little pop up that says something like, “We noticed you didn’t do anything on your computer yesterday. Were you a) sick? b) on vacation? c) lazy?”.

I think there’s a lot of factors that contribute to this type of poor quality. However, I think a large factor is that people just don’t take pride in their work. When you were young and naive, you would finger paint with pride. _You had created that_, you would tell your parents. It was probably a picture of something you cared about too - your family, your cat or dog.

Fast forward to now. The overwhelming majority of people work because they need the money and not because they love what they do. Instead of finger painting stuff that you care about, your outsourcing your finger paintings to India because it’s cheaper, or you’re blotching paint on paper without care because you know that your parents wont hold you accountable.

The reality of life is that you need to fill customer demand and that may not necessarily be exactly what you want to do. So what to do? Hrm, it’s a tough one… I don’t really have an answer :( You need to eat right? but your wasting every breath if you’re not enjoying life. Keep searching for something you enjoy and that makes you money? Perhaps.