A New Blog

Some very exciting things have been happening in my life over the past 2 months. To avoid re-typing a long story: Tiarnee & I are moving back to the country where I'll attempt farming, and she'll be a teacher.

So as the title 'Country Nerd in the City' will no longer apply in 3 weeks I've started a new blog complete with my own domain! On my new blog I'll be posting about all the things that life throws at me as I learn to farm and again live rural life.

So, update your bookmarks & RSS feeds (all 14 of you!) to point at the fantastic new blog. If you're feeling really adventurous, leave a comment and tell me what you think of the new site/layout etc:

http://nerdfarmer.com/

Freedom of Speech?

I blogged the other day about 'Free Speech' and how awesome it is. It it truly wonderfull. Think where we'd be without it.

But really, how free is our speech? Do we really feel as though we have the ability to articulate our opinions? I know there have been occasions when I haven't blogged about issues because I wonder, 'what will my work colleagues think about that?' As a result I'm in the bizarre situation of not posting on my own personal blog because I'm scared of what other people might be thinking. Which on one hand is ridiculous. If I'm confident in my own opinion and as free as the media tells me I am, I should be free to express myself. But on the other hand this is just common sense. I shouldn't blog anything that I wouldn't happily distribute in public.

I'm also a Christian, and many times in Christian circles I haven't spoken my true thoughts because I may be seen as some kind of un-godly heretic. Here, I'm in the situation where because of Jesus I'm 'free indeed'. Unless I want to express that freedom.

I got thinking about this while reading about an application that manages Facebook & Twitter. The speak of a 'personal brand' is strange to me. As though I'm some sort of product wanting to market myself. Yet, that is exactly why I don't always speak my mind at church, or work or with family or anywhere. Because of some personal fear or want of career advancement or some other personal agenda.

We all say we are free, yet we are all entrapped by our own agendas and fears. This is not the sort of person I want to be. I want to be honest, but not in an 'in your face' way. Gaining the courage to be authentic will take time.

New Template

Ok so I got bored tonight and applied a new template to my blog. Not quite sure why. Especially since the only people that read my blog do so through RSS. Maybe it was because I thought that as I'm a web programmer, I should have a semi-respectable looking blog. I'm also not sure why I'm doing this post to alert all you RSSers (7 of you according to google reader!) as now you will go to the blog to see the new template and then see that it's a work in progress.

Anyways, if you do so despite the above warning you will see I shamelessly downloaded a free template and will eventually finish customising it. Over the next few days you should see dud links removed, new ones added, and better content generally on my page.

Who knows? I may even get around to uploading the official photos of the wedding. Or the photos of our reception venue. Both before and after it was destroyed.

Long Time No Blog

It's been over 2 months since my last message here & as a result my blog traffic has died. SO to the person from:

Domain Name		people.net.au ? (Australia)
IP Address		218.215.59.# (SWIFTEL COMMUNICATIONS)
ISP		SWIFTEL COMMUNICATIONS

Thankyou for your interest in my blog. I'm not quite sure why you've been visiting up to 3 times a day for the last month (at least) waiting for an update, but I appreciate your interest! This is a shout out to you. I admire your persistance. I also wonder why you would check so often?

I'm still alive.

I have not been abandoned, no I have not been
Deserted and I have not been forgotten
- I Need You, Relient K

There's been a long absence of blogs recently. The reasons for this are many and varied. I'll update it with some of lifes recent happenings at a time when I'm not working 12 hour days.

Like 'The Simpsons', there is a Relient K lyric applicable to almost every situation I think.

Shout out

This one is a shout out to Ange. My sister who finished Year 12 yesterday. Congrats sis. May you never have to think about the quadratic formula ever again. I know I havn't since my Year 12 exams.

Free Burma

From time to time you'll read on this blog my rants about how inept my government is. But I can do that without fear of reprisals. I'm not blogging about how my government is hunting down & killing protestors.

Flatout Neglect

I've been negelcting this blog quite alot recently, with only 4 (this makes 5) posts in the last month. My site statistics have reflected this, with August likely to be the second lowest number of hits in a month since the inception of this blog. The positive side to those statistics is that it shows that people will come & read what I have to say, as long as I'm saying stuff. So why the neglect? Two reasons that I can pinpoint:

1. After the excitement of getting engaged, everything else that I'd normally blog about suddenly seemed trivial & un-important.
2. I am pretty flatout with different things at the moment.
   

Here's a rough listing of events on each weekend starting 1 week ago from today.

• Went home for the weekend.
  
• Team weekend for Rock Solid Kidz mission.
• Going to Adelaide (next weekend) to visit Tiarnee.
• Nothing at this stage (Switchfoot, Pillar Antiskeptic Gig in Melb on the 6th.)
• Engagement Party weekend (at home/ Bordertown)
  
• Rock-Solid Kids Mission in Ballarat from the 22nd-28th Sept.
  
• Home for the final weekend of the holidays, before coming back for final few weeks at Uni.
  

So all that on top of the roughly 15 hours a week at IBM & the final Semester Uni assignments. Speaking of which, I've gotta go and design me a website. I have 2 assignments due before I leave for Adelaide on Thursday. I'd better start one of them....

Counter Terrorism Warming

A few random observations about various things, that most people probably aren't interested in:

1. My visitor counter seems to have returned after a mysterious leave of absence. I did nothing to remove or bring back the counter. (Unfortunatly it's now showing that Aaron is more popular than me)
   
2. Terror threat: If people delay/cancel any planned travel to Indonesia, does this hand victory to the terrorists regardless of if there is an attack or not?
3. There's been a bit in the media about climate change recently for people from both sides of the fence. On the 'For' side we have the 'Live Earth' concerts which true to their name & cause are attempting to be the first major music event to be 'carbon-neutral'. On the 'Against' side: the ABC is screening a controversial documentary on Thursday which some scientists are claiming shouldn't be aired because it goes against the beliefs of the majority of the scientific community.
   

Are these the same scientists that say the teaching of creationism should be banned? Are these people that narrow minded that they belong to the Flat Earth Society? The people who originally flagged the idea of a round earth where ridiculed by the scientific community of the day. The debate on this issue, and any other like it should be encouraged and not suppressed. The media should give people the chance to hear alternate points of view, look into them and decide for themselves. Why are scientists sometimes so un-scientific?

Friendly Competition

Aaron & I are quite good mates. We both started Uni & Res. life at the same time, both studying I.T. and more importantly, we are Christian brothers. These many similarities have lead to quite a bit of friendly, but high-spirited competition between the two of us. The best example of this, began at the start of 2006, when we took up playing squash against each other. For a start I was beating Aaron convincingly, as I'd played before a lot more, then over time he improved and for the latter half of 2006 we where both quite even in skill level. However, this year that all changed, me having won only 2 of our weekly encounters all year to date. I almost literally had to beat him, in order to defeat him.

But as this list shows, squash isn't the only thing we've managed to make competitive:

• Best PC - Me winning at present
• Best Uni marks - Aaron
  
• Football teams - Spoils shared here, with Essendon fairing better overall in 2007, but with Port giving the Mighty Bombers a shock loss a week or so ago.
• His bigger res. bedroom Vs not having to cook for myself as much.
• Call of Duty: United Offensive - Only just taken it up again after a long break, Aaron used to have the wood over me, but after some practice, I seem to be slightly better, for the time being.

This competition has now reached the online world. For quite a long while my blog was racking up many more hits than his, but over the last month or so the tide has changed. His overall count has almost reached mine, his counter being at roughly 700, & mine (even though it seems to have disappeared of my main page, not sure why) being about 770 at present. If current trends continue, he'll overtake me in the next 5 - 7 days. But as of today, we're both on holidays, so with the extra time on our hands, expect a flurry of activity on this blog in particular over the next 2-3 weeks. So it would help me out a lot if you could all check back regularly...

My Two Systems

Since it's inception this blog has carried the title: 'The Blogs on an IT Nerd in the Country.' Yet up until now, I have not listed the specs of my 'system'. Surely it's not truly a Nerds blog until I list the details of my 'Rig'. Today I fix this anomaly.

Currently my main system specs are:

• AMD Athlon 64 bit 3400+ CPU socket 754, 2.41Ghz
  
• 1Gb (2 x 512Mb) PC3200 DDR400 RAM
• Abit KV8 Pro Socket 754 Chipset
• XpertVision ATi Radeon X800GTO 256Mb AGP 256-bit DDR, DVI, TV-Out, AGP 8X
• Seagate 300Gb 7200 SATA 8Mb Cache
• Western Digital 120Gb 7200RPM 2Mb Cache IDE
• Videomate DVB-T 300 Digital/Analog TV Tuner Card
• Windows XP Home SP2

I've also just built another PC from old parts that I've upgraded on the above PC & bits I've got off mates & eBay.

It is:

• AMD Sempron 3000+ 64-bit CPU, 1.8GHz, SOCKET 754
• 512Mb PC3200 DDR400 RAM
• ATI Radeon 9250 128Mb AGP 8X
• Western Digital WD800JD 80GB 7200RPM SATA II 8MB Cache

When I get it up and running it'll be the perfect games server. Only problem is, the Hard-drive above is SATA II. The motherboard is only SATA I compliant. So I need a HDD jumper to jump the Hard-Drive back to SATA I speed. I don't have any HDD jumpers. So if you have a spare one lying around, let me know.

So I now have the combined power of a Dual-Core machine.....

New Template

I decided it was time for a bit of a make-over. I'd been looking for a new & free template for a while, and finally found one I liked. What do you think?

Analogy

I'm pretty sure I've blogged about Scott Adams before, but today's blog of his really made me think about the world around us. I spend a bit of idle time reading up on conflicts & thinking about morals of them etc. I wonder if this analogy is closer too the truth than any of us would care to think about or acknowledge. If you're at all interested in society, morality or war than check out: Fuel

PS. Sorry about my lack of blogging recently, I did have a minor epiphany last night that I will blog about in the near future. So stay tuned.....

Mash-up

"UPDATE your blog"
- Sus

My head is a mash-up of stuff at the moment. Probably one of the reasons that this is my first blog in week or so. Some of the many things floating through my head are as follows:

• I have no idea about 'predicate calculus' and can't seem to grasp this new concept in the previously mentioned AI.
• I regularly feel out of my depth in any social situation outside of my normal friends. I'm quite shy.
• Being this far away from Tiarnee sucks, I know it's for a good reason and this is where God wants us etc. etc. But a weekend every 2-3 weeks is never enough and it's hard and not getting any easier. (Over 2 years later....)
  
• I said that I'll lead some studies at 'The Empty Chair' our small group that I've been going to whilst I'm at Uni. I've never done this before, so I'm a little bit nervous.
  
• I need to start researching and applying for Graduate jobs now! That's way scary, not to mention time consuming.
  

They're the really serious ones, a couple of less important ones are:

• Australia won it's opening World Cup match by 206 runs. The second highest World Cup victory in history. That's pretty cool.
  
• I found the funniest blog ever the other day: "The Dilbert Blog." It cracks me up something chronic. It's written by Scott Adams, the guy who invented and writes the Dilbert comics. He humerously points out the faults in alot of attitudes and ideas going around.
  

200

Congratulations go to my anonymous **cough Jas **cough** visitor from WA for being my 200th unique visitor to my Blog. Congrats must go to this same person for possibly being the first person to visit my blog on a Mac, using Safari V2.0 as their web browser. This momentus achievement happened at 1:45am EST which translates to about 11:45pm Perth time. You where almost defintely using an RSS feeder as well.

Gotten used to the Daylight Savings Times yet?

On Debut

Welcome One, Welcome all, to the blog of me. Jonny.

For some, this has been a long time coming. For most, nobody cared.

But alas, Jonny has finally sold out to join the online blogging masses, although I was too slow to become Time Magazines Person of the Year. Hopefully, I will be able to develop one of those 'blogging voices' over time. But we shall see. I think about stuff thats going on around me quite alot, but it's rarely the same thing that I mull over constantly. So don't be surprised to see blog posts that are somewhat random and venting in nature.

I'll sign off this debut blog with the explanation of the title. I'm about to commence my Final Year of a bachelor IT degree. Which is pretty exciting. I'm also sending this from my own PC on our own small home network on a farm in the drought ravaged Western Wimmera region of Victoria. I'd like to think this makes my perspective somewhat unique, in that I'm a proud owner of a Shooters Licence, a Truck License, an Athlon 64 3400+ CPU w/ 1GB DDR400 RAM & Battlefield 2. I hope you find it interesting, challenging, funny or in some other way a positive experience.

To quote the apostle Paul:

I hope you will put up with a little of my foolishness; but you are already doing that.
- 2 Corinthians 11:1