132 replaces 42 as the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

I wonder if FrankArr has picked up on this little bit of trivia. Tonight at midnight, in one hour and forty two minutes Foxtel in Australia will be launching their local SciFi Channel. This is the single event that I hoped would happen ever since I subscribed to Foxtel on cable back in 1998.

You can download the program guide for the SciFi channel in PDF format, and for those of you who need to be able to flick to the SciFi as soon as they walk in the door - the channel designation is 132. Since watching the SciFi channel is going to take up so much of my life I thought it would be fun to divide the number 132 by 42 - guess what, the result is π (Pi), or at least as close as you can get to it when all you can deal with is whole numbers.

Is this a coincidence? I don’t think so, I think that there is a geek hiding somewhere in Foxtel which has “made it so” - and I think that this bodes well for the SciFi channel here in Australia.

Hugo on Dr. Neil’s Notes

I am listening to Dr. Neil and Hugo Ortega on the Dr. Neil’s Notes podcast. I was disappointed to hear that Hugo hasn’t made the leap to Vista on his day-to-day Tablet which is the same as mine (Fujitsu Lifebook T4210 – actually I note that the T4215 is out and can take up to 4GB of RAM!).

Anyway – Hugo – I’ve been blazing the Vista trail for you mate. I’ve got screen rotation working, the only thing missing for me now is Bluetooth stack support from Toshiba, and I think that is out in December. If you have a JasJar you could use this driver to get USB modem support going.

Fantastic article on “managing upwards”.

I was reading James Snape’s blog and found this link to “training your IT manager” by Phil Factor (what a cool name) over on the simple-talk site. In my experience you need to help make the people around you successful, that includes your manager. You can shine brightly yourself for a little while but at the end of the day it takes a team to do the job properly – especially in this industry where the body of knowledge is HUGE.

Amazon Web Services, don’t forget about BigSafeBox.

I found this great article on the Amazon Web Services platform including their queuing, storage and compute cloud facility. The focus was on how companies are making successful businesses using these services. Mentioned were a few companies that are providing backup services which use the S3 storage system. I thought it was a crime that BigSafeBox wasn’t mentioned in the article.

BigSafeBox is the brain child of Akshay Luther who is based here in Australia. What I liked about Akshay’s solution was how brain dead simple it was to use. The fact that it is a .NET application is also a bonus!