Naquada

So Having now installed Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger on the Mac, its starting to feel like home again, starting to feel like my mac, and not someone’s I’ve borrowed.. But where do the little green dots fit in.. ? That was kinda of a side note when I started the entry..

I have over 2000 CD’s that I’m slowly trying to encode into iTunes. Once encoded the album or CD gets a sticky green dot on it.. It’s about the only way I can sensibly keep track of what’s been encoded and what hasn’t.. Blue Skies from Ima by BT just got a dot.. One of my all time favorites.. I’m slowly filling up the 1 terabyte of attached storage I put aside for audio..

I’m also posting to the blog using ecto on the Mac now. It’s actually a pretty cool blogging client, interfacing directly into my Amazon associates account, iTunes and iPhoto. At first I hated the whole interface, since it uploaded images into the wrong place, didn’t seem to work the way I wanted to, and generally didnt have that nice feel. But like with most things, with a little playing its working out really well, and very cheap too at £10.50..

I’ll definitely be buying it on the Mac, and will be checking out the windows version to see if its got the same functionality.. I always find that primary Mac applications that get ported to windows just aren’t the same..

So its 12:46 am on Sunday morning, I’m sat at the Mac listening to Searching For The Balearic Heartbeat from the album Heavy Mellow by Chris Coco.

Todays goal was pretty simple. To take time for me, and do stuff I wanted to do.

I’ve been playing with some muscle reading and waking hypnosis techniques in my magic over the last few weeks, and to help with the general ideas I’m having in that space I got The Speed Reading Book and Use Your Memory: Understand Your Mind to Improve Your Memory and Mental Power both by Tony Buzan from Waterstones today.

I then spent the evening with a very close friend who’s always been there over the years, and shares quite a few of the same interests as me, a curry some wine and some general horse talk.

My minds now racing on something I’ve just read in conjunction with a book test he showed me a week or two back. A book test, to those not in the know is magic effect of asking someone to pick any page in a book, look at a word, and you tell them the word they are looking at. Mixing some Muscle Reading, some Suggestion and the initial idea we discussed a while back I think I may have come up with a pretty good method for the whole effect, this is where the memory and speed reading requirements came in.

In the general ramblings I’ve also started to install my blog at www.enterprisedataintegration.com. Which is going to be a completely work related blog, I’m working on the assumption that since IBM encourage blogging by their employees I’d give a work related blog a go. I’ve already started my own internal blog at IBM, each employee gets their own blog space which is pretty cool, as well as the ability to podcast from the IBM servers. So life at IBM seems to be possibly looking quite cool going forward.

..and the final thought.. Heavy Mellow is a wonderfully relaxing album, as always from Chris Coco!

Well what better thing than to be stuck in the airport at stockholm sweden, waiting for a flight in 5 hours.

Luckily I have my copy of Transformations by grinder and bandler, its about hypnosis and mind structures.. Dead interesting..

I forgot about this photo I took some time ago.. Its another use of a slate based TabletPC..

Propping up the TabletPC on a normal cookery book stand, it makes a great electronic cook book for cooking all those tasty meals..

..With the built in wireless I could follow the instructions on the website, or hook up to the reciepes I had stored on the servers upstairs.. and yes thats the Delia Smith site over wireless..

Looks like its summer then, as my family of four hedgehogs, have woken up from hedgehog hibernation and come searching for food.

Picasso (named for the white patches on his spines that make it look like hes had paint dripped on him!) was pretty timely on his visits last year, starting about 9pm or 10pm and returning a number of times during the night.

They all seem to have lost a lot of weight during the winter, but seem to be munching heavily on tonights food, and drinking a lot of water.

As I’ve said before the best food for hedgehogs is catfood or, a less messy and smelly alternative is Spikes Dinner a specially formulated dry food for hedgehogs, dont give them bread and milk, its absolutely the worst thing you can give them..

You can also get Spikes Dinner from pretty much most pet stores now, including Pet Smart or Pets at Home.

So I went out for a drink last night and fooled someone that was there really badly with some mind magic I’ve been working on recently..

Getting her to only imagine a deck of cards, and slowly throwing them away in her head to leave only a single card, I asked her to think hard about the last remaining card and visualise it brightly in her minds eye. I then told her exactly the name of the card that she was left with..

On her excitement of ‘wanting to see another’ I asked her to tell me three things, I wanted her to make sure two of them were true, and the other was a lie, but not to give me any clues.

She said that her brother had met Jay Kay of Jamiroquai, her friend had been to Dennis Watermans house, and that she had met the pope..

It was actually difficult since one of those was in fact an ‘almost’ lie.. I managed to tell her that I felt the third statement was a lie, since she had not actually met the pope, she’d only been close to him, when she’d visited the vatican.. of course I was right..

Theres still alot more work to do on it, but the material I’m researching and reading at the moment is pretty good stuff, Kenton Knepper’s Wonder Words, Ian Rowlandds and Banachek..

Its great when you fool someone..

Ok so I’ve brought myself the ultimate toy..

Today I ordered my new car. A new style Audi A6 Quattro Sline 2.4, and of course I had to load it with some extra’s, The Bose Sound System, MMI Plus, BlueTooth GSM enablement, Acoustic parking system, heated leather seats, sports pack (sports seats, lowered suspension, cooler alloys..) and 10 CD changer.

Its basically a beast of a car, a dark blue perl effect with a black leather interior. The great thing about it? Its only going to cost me about

Well, its now official. I’m a IBM employee..

Its all been fairly painless (from my point of view..) and theres another set of product name changes to get used to..

Ascential DataStage becomes IBM WebSphere DataStage, and so on, meaning the IBM WebSphere Data Integration Suite comprises of the newly named IBM WebSphere DataStage, IBM WebSphere QualityStage, IBM WebSphere ProfileStage, IBM WebSphere DataStage TX, IBM WebSphere AuditStage, and IBM WebSphere MetaStage..

The new IBM WebSphere Data Integration Suite provides data profiling for understanding data and relationships; data quality for cleansing, standardizing, and matching information; data transformation for preparing information for analysis or exchange; and data movement for high-volume data extraction and loading. As well as WebSphere Information Integrator providing enterprise search technology for finding relevant information; federation technology for dynamically integrating data and content sources as if it were coming from one system; and replication and publishing technology for distributing, consolidating, and synchronizing data. Pretty much creating a knock dead solution for all the integration requirements out there..

I think the next 6 months will be an interesting time, especially for our competition.. the big beast is now being data integration, and will be powering ahead with it..

God rest Ascential… long live IBM..