So, its been quite some time since I did a proper update.
I’m still working at CSC. I haven’t crashed my car. I am still single.

Ok, now lets move to the interesting stuff. Over the past 6 working days I have been doing some training at IBM – 2 courses each of 3 days. The first was on servicing system x servers (IBM x86 servers), and the second on IBM Director 5 (Free software for central management of IBM servers).
The training courses were held in the IBM building in Sydney city, Level 10 201 Sussex street to be precise. They were quite interesting, although the servicing system x servers course was more interesting. I guess it really has a lot to do with the instructor – I found the instructor for the Director course to be a little annoying, and didn’t really like his teaching style. Its understandable though – he’s from Melbourne.
Lunch was provided in the cafe in the ground floor of the building, and was pretty nice. A variety of hot food and sandwiches (naturally I stuck to the hot food – the pies were very good).

Anyway, the other piece of news I have is about a new toy. Yes, I’ve gone and bought my most expensive toy yet – an Intel Mac mini – the dual core version.

Its so small and tiny and heavy and pretty. The power supply brick is almost as large as the mini itself! Think of a stack of 5 cd jewel cases, and you’ve got the size of the mac mini. It fits on top of my other desktop nicely.

So far, I’ve played around a fair bit in OS X, getting the hang of things. I did play around with it in the apple store for around 40 minutes (over 3 days) before purchasing it, so I had a bit of an idea. Apparently Tiger 10.4.7 was just released, so that was amongst the first software updates I did. All up, there was around 500MB of updates – thank goodness for my 1500kbps adsl connection!

I also downloaded Apple’s Bootcamp, and eventually got it installed. I had a few dramas though. After running the installation for Bootcamp assistant, I couldn’t get the assistant to run as described in the documentation. It kept complaining that I needed to update the firmware on the mac mini, even though there was an update listed in the software update list which I had already installed.
Google to the rescue! It turns out there was another firmware update that wasn’t showing up in Software Updater, for version 1.0.1 of the firmware. After installing that, and running the upgrade (shutdown, turn on mac mini and hold on power button till indicator light on front flashes, wait for progress bar to finish) I was able to run Bootcamp Assistant. Hooray!
I created a 20GB partition for XP, and installed XP – probably the quickest install of XP I’ve ever done. The install went without a hitch, and the driver cd that Bootcamp Assistant created for me installed all the relevant device drivers. Interestingly enough I had no alerts about unsigned drivers – I guess the drivers were Microsoft® certified.

And thats about as far as I’ve gotten with my nice new shiny toy. I’ll have to wait till I get home after work today to continue playing with it.