2003 Archives

I've decided to document my journal towards a PhD a little more thoroughly. Hopefully, this site will help me stay on track, and perhaps help others on their way.

We've decided to sell our house. We've engaged an agent and now we're sitting back waiting for the qualified buyers to start rolling in. However, before signing on the dotted line we both read Don't sign anything by Neil Jenman. It is a very interesting tail of how some real estate agents operate. It opened our eyes to many practices that could be considered suspect, if not down-right fraudulent.

But, I'm happy to report, that our agent has been pretty good so far.

What price to put the house on at? Well, we've no idea. Comparing recently sold properties in the area didn't help much. So we decided to use the services of a registered valuation agent. Most perperculiarly, they seem to charge based on the value of the house, rather than on the amount of work. Does a $300k house really take more time than a $250 house. I don't know, but it will be interesting when we find out what they have valued the house at.

It's Moreno, not Monroe. I just got one of his books out of the library. It's:

Moreno, J. L. (1978). Who shall survive?: Foundations of sociometry, group psychotherapy, and sociodrama (3d ed.). Beacon, NY: Beacon House.

Quite a weighty tome - it's about 750 pages long, so it will take some time to read. I'll try a leave notes hear about the interesting bits.

Well I've signed up for an introductory course (well they call it the Core curriculum) in psychodrama. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I know relatively litte about psychodrama, other than what I've read and the fact that Judith McMorland has demonstrated it a couple of times.

Any way the first class is to night, and continues tomorrow and Sunday. There are four experiential weekends like this through out the year, plus a number of evening sessions.

There should be nine of us on the course (myself included), and out of the nine the majority (7) are women. I wonder why that might be.

Really, I should spend sometime reading up on J. L. Monroe, who seems to be the founder of the method. Surpising, though, a quick search of the Internet throws up nothing of use - there are just too many Monroes out their.

Some files (often created under DOS/Windoze) have a ^M on the end of the line. This is okay under DOS/Windows but it is an ugly pain under a real OS (such as FreeBSD). To remove the ^M for a directory of files you can use the following script:

perl -pi -e 's/\r//g'

It works a treat.

Well, another problem has raised its ugly head. The onboard SiS 900 LAN controller is also not correctly recognised. I'm going right off the ASUS motherboard. In case anyone is interested its a P4S533. I thoguht I might have problems with the video, so I made sure that the card was a standard (I used a GE Force card), but I never expected these problems. ASUS has always been trouble free in the past.

I've decided to upgrade the server here. So, I've bought a box from PB Technologies, with an 2.5G Pentium CPU, 80GB of disk, and 512MB of memory. Alas, when started the installation process it kept hanging when it tried to access the hard disk. The last message on the screen was ata0: READ command timeout.

A quick search on the Intenet reveals that teh SiS651 controller used on this particular ASUS motherboard doesn't quiet work well with FreeBSD. The only option is to disable DMA on the hard disk driver (which works), but this slows the drive's peformance somewhat.

So, the system is working (albeit slowly) and now I'm into installing all the software I need (Apache, etc).

In the future everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes. -- Andy Warhol, 1928-1987

Perhaps, this won't be true. As we travel from the industrial society to the
knowledge society, and as people carve out a personal space in the world-wide-web, time is less important. One presence will not be measured by time. On the web, everyone can be famous forever; as systems, such as Google, relentlessly archive our words and thoughts. Rather the fame of people will be measured by the data that represents them. Instead of 15 minuted, people will be world famous for 15 Mega-bytes. Time doesn't matter
any more.

This, then, is my niche in hype-r-reality™;.

To mis-quote Monty Python, amongst the many purposes of this site are:

• To be a repository for my thoughts and reflections.
• To be a jumping of page; my own personal portal.
• To provide an opportunity to dabble on the web

Like many sites, this one is in a continual state of flux, so if you find anything
doesn't work the way you think should please let me know.

Some biographical odds and ends

I'm English, having been born in London.
I teach at the The University of Auckland,
where I work in the department of Management & Employment Relations.

There is more information here on teaching research activities, (if you are interested).

I am married to Lisa, my darling wife. We have two cats who are called Fred and Ginger.

My first career was in IT and the management of service professionals. I worked for Philips UK. I subsequently spent much time working in Europe with Philips.

When I moved to New Zealand in the late 1980s, I was lucky enough to work for
Philips New Zealand. At first I was based in Wellington, but we moved to Auckland when the head office was relocated.

After Philips I worked in service management for Ricoh New Zeland. However, I had a desire to return to University so I worked part time as an independent IT consultant, whilst doing an MCom at The University of Auckland.

Now, I've been hooked in to do a PhD.
For four years I also owned a hair-dressing salon with my brother, Bill. We've now sold that enterprise.

I've recently started to use Friends Reunited to try and catch up with some of my school chums.

I find it interesting and useful to revisit and reflect on the past.

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Had an email from the nice folks at Moveable Type that a new version of MT was out. It was painless to install. The longest part of the whole process was making the necessary backups.

We went and saw Chicago today at the Lido. If I haven't mentioned the Lido before I should say it is the best cinema in Auckland. It has the best coffee/leg-room/ice-cream/movies/staff/etc. I highly commend it to everyone. Oddly enough, in this day and age, it doesn't have a web site.

Anyway, back to the movie. It was very good and Lisa thinks that René Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones will get Oscars for their performances. I particularly liked Lucy Liu character - a nice performance, albeit somewhat short.

But was it better than the stage show. Well, being able to do two scense at the same time worked well for the movie; but I prefered the stage show - it was more electric.