Media Workshops, Networking and Programmin', Gaming, Clothes, The Odyssey and ... SEX!

[tcpip]

Prosper Australia were very happy with my first workshop on media and marketing, albeit it was more on organisational structure. More next Tuesday, this time on market segments for people who may think that resource rents are better than taxes on productive capital or labour. One point I emphasized with them is that as a political organisation a narrow focus is not helpful to building a large membership.

Tuesday was the begining of CCNA semester 2. Router configuration. Not nearly as exciting as it sounds ;-) Finished a review of "The Real World Network Troubleshooting Manual" for SAGE-AU, which has some good material, but could have done with an editor. For a bit of fun, and I'm sure it has some practical use, I'm working my way through some Java programming, which I think is slowly converting me from C++, even if the latter is better for most computer games.

Speaking of which met up with three lecturers on multimedia and computer games at Swinburne University on Thursday; Dr. Andrew Stapleton, Dr. Mark Finn and a physicist named... ahh... what was it now? Anyway, they're all mainstays in their Bachelor of Multimedia (Games and Interactivity). It sounds like the start of a beautiful friendship. They've invited me to come and give some guest lectures early next year. Have posted an update to the Immersion mailing list and timetable.

Later that evening had a dinner with severina_242 and her mother who has just returned from Europe. She handed me a big bag of clothes from her boss who throws out his clothes (name brand and higher thank you very much) every six months and who is exactly my size. This grab lot included three Hugo Boss suits, two of which seem to have never been worn at all.

Tonight off to see the Odyssey with lokicarbis and caseopaya. Appropriately, apparently Ulysses tomb has been found. The Odyssey is one of my favourite stories; not just because of the epic wandering adventure and the mythic creatures, but because when confronted with the supernatural, Ulysses uses his reasoning ability to defeat them (see Adorno and Horkheimer's great essay, "Odyssey or Myth and Enlightenment" in The Dialectic of Enlightenment).

Is George Bush the antichrist (from kraant)? If so it would explain the messages he has received from his master. On the opposite side of the theological spectrum Dr. Fernandes has had this little biographical review of Noam Chomsky published in Overland Express. Well worth a read.

I promised sex. Well, how about an "unauthorised reproduction" bill, courtesy of the land of the free? How about a mainstream church promoting panty parties to get more people involved? Or a website that wants sex toy testers? Tasmania's government was going to legalise brothels. Now it's changed it's mind.

Comments

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Of course I'm right, in every way except politically :-)

Yeah, java would probably be my language of choice for webapp programming, well, that or python and the choice would come down to app framework rather than language for most things.

If you are drifting towards the world of j2ee and web app servers (Tomcat, etc) I have been looking around there myself quite a bit in the last year. I am looking very carefully at Tapestry, Cayenne (though most people seem to be pointing at Hibernate instead), and am generally fairly pleased with Eclipse as a Java IDE. There are a lot of very interesting developments in the XML space too, XSLT is nifty.

Though a lot of people also keep pointing me at Zope 3 and python as powerful alternative to the whole thing.

I did a lot of Java webapp stuff in the last year, but it was mostly in WebObjects, which is all very well if you have an XServe but problematic for a lot of other projects. Familiarity with WebObjects somewhat informs my choices above, just to let you know.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pointers. I too have heard very good things about Eclipse, and that's not just in reference to it's very cheeky name.