(… And a partridge in a pear tree. Heh.)
Not much updates from me, except:
- Got three more great finds from Booksale: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, The Confusion (Vol. 2 of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson, and Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury — all for under a hundred pesos.
- I had the pleasure of trying out two sleek notebooks: an Acer Aspire Gemstone and a Gateway T-6311. Both were from balikbayan kamag-anaks who asked me to, er, stress-test their new toys. More on this when I’m done playing with them. Suddenly, I’m craving for a replacement to Mathilda (my Dell Inspiron) — not!
- My bro gave me a Seagate FreeAgent Desktop external hard drive. Yay! It’s 500 GB in a cool black finish, with a footprint of an office stapler. It now rests next to the 19″ LCD monitor. All I need now are a cheap NAS solution and a UPS, and my home computing setup is complete.
- Due to several NDAs I signed, I couldn’t blog much about what I do at work. Let’s just say it’s been a very interesting engagement. I’ll be in between team deployments (but with the same client) next quarter, so that gives me some breathing space to take on vendor and in-house training. My blogging will more or less be the same — I’m actually thinking of changing my tagline to “Posts of a weekend blogger”.
Originally uploaded by iandexter.
At SMX, SM Mall of Asia. Lots of prizes were given away, but none came my way. Still, it was fun. One word: Mocha. 
At work, I do a lot of directory traversal: going from one location to another within the whole (global) filesystem structure. So, to conveniently go back to a previous directory, I use pushd and popd, aside from the usual cd:
$ pwd
/home/iandexter
$ pushd /etc/sysconfig
$ pwd
/etc/sysconfig
$ popd
$ pwd
/home/iandexter
You can even echo $DIRSTACK to list the current directories in the stack, and push multiple directories.
After weeks of summer heat, it finally rained here in the metro. So I killed time in the mall. Free WiFi! Some updates are in order:
- I’m settling in at work, though there isn’t much to do yet except to get a feel of the system.
- The new workplace is an eye-opener. Lots of tech (*nix, net, Windows) geeks there. There’s this mailing list I subscribed to, and, man, the topics they tackle there are deep, in a hard-core geeky way.
- My son, Gabriel, passed the Department of Education’s special education curriculum exams. Four tough exams, would you believe? And that’s for Grade One! I got to accompany him for his math exam about three weeks ago, and I feel for the kids. I mean, the exam was about a hundred or so items. I even saw one kid crying while taking the test.
- The small one, Julian, is growing very fast, and showing signs of mischief already.
- Peng (the wife), on the other hand, is getting bored with work. Right now, she’s thinking of starting a business. Gotta help her with that.
Just a few minutes ago, I surrendered my ID card to the solutions delivery section at work. It’s my last day here.
On Monday, I will be reporting for work at the new workplace. It’s going to be pretty exciting. At the same time, I’ll miss this place, with the laid-back yet interesting environment. I sure learned a lot, and I got to try new things.
