Month: May 2006

On my way to work today I was thinking about attitudes. I’ve read it many times that it is somewhat possible to control how good or how bad your day is going to be by just adjusting your mood and attitude in the morning.

I decided to run a small experiment. I chose to set myself for a negative day. I thought that I would do anything bad on purpose, and I won’t focus on anything negative, but I’ll just imagine that I’ll have a bad day today.

It worked! I had one of the worst days ever!

Three minutes after I set myself for a bad day, I almost ran into an accident. Not my fault – someone else travelling on a red light. Just a few millimeters more and I’d spend my day talking to police, insurance, and car service.

I came to work. What was the first thing that happenned? I got a warning from my manager. It was regarding one of those things that everyone does and noone notices. Ever. Our all department was doing it for the last two years, at least. Management decided to change that, and started from today and me. And it’s not even a Monday or the first day of the month. Wow.

Then I got into three awkward situations with my collegues. Out of nothing. Three in a row.

Then I realized that there were some problems with my paperwork down in the HR department. For the first time in three years or so, I had to go to Limassol Immigration Office (for those of you not in the know – this is one of the worst experiences you can have in Cyprus as a foreigner). And they weren’t all that glad to see me either.

I came back to the office just to find out that there was further misunderstanding between me and our HR department. Yey!

By lunch time I was so fed up with all of it that I was re-programming my mood and attitudes. I needed some good. I absolutely had to get some.

After lunch, bad stuff slowed down, but not completely disappeared. I managed to get back home, where I realized in full how terrible my day was.

I don’t know if all of these were a coincidence, but I am not playing with my luck again. From now on – positive all the way!

Did you guys have any similar experiences?

For this or that reason, I have installed a IRC server on my home computer. The choice of software was as simple as looking though yum repositories and getting hybrid-ircd. I just needed anything at all.

Fetching and installing an RPM was extremely fast and easy. Then I openned a configuration file and quickly scrolled through it, changing some of the obviously appropriate options. The default configuration file was over 20K, so, obviously, I haven’t read it through.

When I tried to start the daemon, it was coming up, but then immediately dying. I looked here and there and found a log file. In the log file, I saw these lines:

You haven’t read your config file properly. There is a line in the example conf that will kill your server if not removed. Consider actually reading/editing the conf file, and removing this line.

Hmm… I went back to the configuration file and scrolled through it again, paying a little bit more attention. But it was mostly filled with options that I didn’t care about. All I needed was a standalone IRC server as fast as possible.

I searched through the file for a couple of patterns, but that didn’t came up with anything. 20K is still way too much to read, I thought. So, I turned to Google. Within seconds I had exactly what I needed. This forum thread suggested that I look for:

/* REMOVE ME.  ... checks you've been reading. */
havent_read_conf = 1;

That helped – I fixed the configuration option and the daemon started just fine.

Now, I am thinking if such methods are smart of stupid? On one hand, it made me look through the configuration file with more attention. But on the other hand, I quickly found the solution the problem with Google and not with my own two eyes.

There are pros and cons, as usual. I am more against such methods, than in favor. If there are some really important options in the configuration file that you want your users to edit, just say so – “This section is very important! Please read carefully and edit all options.”. Introducing special options that prevent software from running, just because the user hasn’t found them (or haven’t understood the instructions) is mean.

Many years ago, when I was in highschool, I had an encyclopedia, called “From alpha to omega”. It was a soft cover book with a whole bunch of interesting facts and measures. A sort of mix between Guiness World Records book and units utility on UNIX.

Judging by the title, I thought that I had volume 1 of a two-books set. Alpha is like A in English alphabet, or A in Russian alphabet – the first letter. Omega, I figured, is like O – somewhere in the middle. There should be another volume with the title like “From Pita to Zeta”. Or something along those lines.

Today, I attended the first lesson of Greek language. Alphabet is usually among the first things they teach you, when starting with a new language. Today wasn’t an exception. I learned that alpha is the first letter of Greek alphabet, and omega is the last. My view of the world changed. Suddenly, it seemed like there was much less information out there, than I thought there is.

Lately I’ve been reading more interviews with millionairs than I usually do. Hmm. That didn’t come out right. Let me rephrase it. Usually, I don’t read interviews with millionairs, but recently I scrolled through a couple. Those were from different people. And by different I mean totally different – background, education, stamina, industry, working life, connections, and so on and so forth.

The only two things which were in common for all of them were:

1. All of them started of as non-millionairs, and now they are millionairs.
2. All of them said that as the first step of the way they had to decide what is it exactly did they want.

The first point is obvious. At point X in time, all of them had less than $1,000,000USD. At point Y in time (which occured after point X), all of them had $1,000,000USD or more.

The second point is more interesting though. But simple. All of them said, that one has to clearly see the goal. “I want to be rich” is not a goal. It’s an endless process, and very much vague at that. The goal is more concrete, like “I want to live in a house, which has the market value of $500,000USD” or “I want to owe five Jaguar cars, each of which is valued as $100,000USD”. Setting the goal, they all said, is the absolutely necessary first step.

It struck me as interesting. I am very bad at setting goals. (I am much worse at completing them, but that’s not important right now.) So ,I decided, just for the practice-sake, to set a goal.

I was thinking about all the wonderful things that I may have, as well as pure cash, tossed things around, and summed it all up. It came up to 2,740,000 CYP (in USD that’s about x2). If I’ll have so much money by the age I’m 30, I won’t have to think about money ever again. Or so I think. Now.

What’s your number?