ATAAHUA ORA

I admit, I missed the date. This Tuesday, 27 March, was my 6 year anniversary at the company I work for. When I started here in 2001 I thought I’ll be here for 3 years - tops. Now I’ve just doubled my initial estimate.

I must say, Linux is slowly catching up usability-wise. Installation was a breeze and I even managed to boot it into XWindows after a few failed attempts. All drivers seemed to have been installed - including sound! Wow, I thought that was impressive.

Anyway, less impressive were my attempts to try and change the default 800×600 resolution to something a bit more usable (my smaller screen takes 1440×1280, so 800×600 looked…. funny). I figured out how to change the display from “Generic” to “LCD 1280×1024″ but that didn’t have any impact on my choices when it came to selecting the resolution. Googling wasn’t much help but after some digging I managed to find Windley’s Technometria (Organizations Get The IT They Deserve - cool motto) and the trick turned out to be editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf and changing the Modes line to:

Modes “1280×1024″ “800×600″

Now, let’s see how easy it will be to setup LAMP…

Added about 20 minutes later: Pretty easy, actually. Installing A LAMP System With Fedora Core 6

My best friend at work has a phobia. She’s petrified of birds and she won’t come close to a feather (even a tiny, little, small one!). It’s always been a problem for her because NZ is a bit of an aviary - there’s birds everywhere, not only sparrows but pigeons and sea gulls congregate wherever there might be a chance of people feeding them. So lunches down Queen St are out of the question - there’ll be pigeons on the way. Outings to a beach - no way! Sea gulls! We either drive to Newmarket (which is blissfully rid of birds - not that I ever noticed) or we DRIVE (the whole 300m) down Queen St to Borders or Smith & Caugheys. It’s so bad that the sight of a feather duster makes her jump and walk in a big circle. Even a little feather can make her cry - and once I pick it up she won’t come close to me until I get rid of it and she’s sure there is no fluffy surprise in my hand. The only thing she saw in this picture (click for bigger):

was featers. This is A. last Sunday.

A. this Tuesday is A. with two feathers in her hand. It’s A. walking on the beach in Mission Bay watching sea gulls walk away from her. It’s A. striding across Aotea Square with pigeons making way for her among their squabbling masses. It’s A. FIXED!

What happened was two sessions of hypnosis. That’s it. Two sessions, about 4 hours in total. Amazing.

I’m so proud of her for conquering this crippling phobia.

Congratulations to our friends Agata & Tomasz on getting married! The event took place last Saturday and I posted some photos that I took during the day here.

I was way more nervous before this wedding than I was before my own wedding day. I have a theory it’s because this time I was actually involved in making the day go smoothly rather than just riding the wave as a bride. I couldn’t sleep the night before, only managing to fall asleep way past 2am! Couldn’t eat in the morning (completely opposite to the bride, who was snacking on everything that fell into her hands), had butterflies in my stomach and hot flushes every few minutes (OK, I think the last one was due to hellish temperatures on the day and me running around with wild eyes, scissors and flowers).

But the day did go smoothly, the venues were gorgeous and everyone had a blast. So it was all worth the stress!

And the lovely couple: