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One day I’m going to sit down and learn Unix. This wil be useful in so many situation especially now that most Mac computers are fully Unix-compliant.

Here you can find some tips from IBM.

The guy sitting next to me on the flight back from LA (Tom) started talking to me once he (and I) had had a few drinks.

After the usual chitchat about work and LA, he explained the threat of fresh water shortage that threaten the world. He said that Australia is one of the first countries that has this problem at the moment but due to the spread of pollution into the fresh water supplies, we face a serious prospect of not having enough fresh water for our needs within 10-15 years from now!

He painted a grim picture but added that there’s a lot of research being carried out in Australia and elsewhere in finding ways of purifying polluted water into safe water.

Think a little bit of research into this is required. Maybe I can publish my research here later on.

Got back today having slept on the flight for 4+ hours. Now that’s a first for me, sleeping on the long-haul flight. Fatigue and alcohol (2 G&Ts + red wine) were the main causes. Although waking up with a hangover on a 11hr flight is probably not the best experience.

We flew with MaxJet – an airline that that specialises in Business class only so you have a 300+ seater plan that only has 110 passengers! The leg room is incredible! The service is good too and you get given your own little entertainment box which has around 20 movies plus lots of tv shows etc. – not as good as Virgin but good enough. To be honest I was so grateful I was flying business after the long hours of work at the Autoshow in LA Convention Center. Amen!

The whole experience at the LA Convention Center where the show was held was pretty good. Everyone seemed very chilled and relaxed.

We had 3 interactives to deliver. Had problems with one in particular when the programmer who had the flu simply didn’t have the focus or the strength to work through the night (London is 8 hrs ahead of LA). Having said that the programmer who’s a really nice guy came up with the goods and delivered the project almost complete the night before the start of the show! Top marks to him.

One thing I learnt was that never can you assume that  programmers can fully test their own code. Being a programmer myself should’ve made me realise this a lot earlier – you sometimes learn the hard way.

Got to LAX on Saturday night and got a cab to the hotel – the Standard Downtown. When I got out of the cab I thought the driver had got it wrong as there was a queue outside and music was pumping out of the building. I then realised that the hotel turns into a club on the weekend. I dropped my bags in my funky room and went straight to the roof bar which was amazing. The hotel is right between lots of high-rise buildings and the view is just ace.

As I was jetlagged so the alcohol went to my head pretty quickly and I along with a few others from the company carried on till the earlyhours of Sunday. Oh bless the Imagination crew.

This is a French made hand-drawn animated movie set in the late 70s to 90s in Iran and Europe.

The story follows a young girl’s (Marjane) life in the affleunt north of Tehran and her often sad journey through life in the midst of the Iranian [Islamic] revolution and her struggles when she’s sent to Europe.

Although the whole story is about fighting for your right to live a happy life, there are so many moments of pure joy and laughter that you come out of the cinema feeling up beat and somehow content.

To be honest lots of scenes set in Tehran in the early eighties reminded me of my own brief time in that smokey city. There are moments that I thought “this is exactly how it was!”, “this is what I saw, was told, experienced!.

A truly magical movie adapted from a graphics novel based on a true story of Marjane Satrapi.

I believe the English version will not be released until December but Iggy Pop and Sean Penn are going to be doing voice-overs!

The night turned out to be a great success. At least 5 people turned up because of my Facebook event which I think is a result.

It started pretty quietly with Louis and myself – gradually friends came and I started the first set with my vocal house made up set. Louis told me the day before that he wanted to play only house music and preferably old-school house which meant I had to go find the tunes. Luckily my bro had quite a few unmixed Hed Candy CDs that came in handy.

The second DJ had problems getting hold of his own records! He’d lent them to his cousin who somehow refused to bring them back for the gig. He was pretty good though.

Louis played his blendof old-school music which I actually enjoyed a lot. At that stage the place was full of people (most of whom we didn’t know) and of course, the alcohol had kicked in too!

Good night was had by all.

Looking forward to the next one which is on 23rd December.

God, it’s taken me almost a week to get the details from my mate Louis about his club night ‘Unique World’, and then it’s taken me even longer to let people know about it

It’s been in the making for a while now. We’ve been talking about it every time we meet for beers – so finally it’s on and I’m going to playing some tunes at some point on the night.

I just created my first ever event on Facebook (which is naturally a big deal!) for this party but it is pretty short notice (day after tomorrow) and there are two other parties on the same night but I’m looking forward to seeing how many people will respond to it on this great social network site. It’ll even be funnier to see how many will actually turn up!

We shall find out .. Wish us luck.

It’s been a long day… Got to work early thinking I’m gonna get stuff done.

Turned out one of the clients used our latest version of an application which didn’t have the correct content and surprisingly couldn’t navigate her way through it – she had a bit of a go at my colleagues and they panicked accordingly!

I stayed late to fix the software – seems to me that we always need more people to stay late and fix stuff – well that’s just the way it is.

On another note, as if I didn’t know, I’m well into reading Lost Wisdom at the moment. There are plent of words per almost each paragraph that I don’t really understand but on the whole I think I’m getting it. The third chapter is about one the kings (Shahs) of Iran in the later part of the the nineteenth century who went traveling in Europe and wrote his memoirs to be published. It seems he did this to impress the European more than his own people.

The book is about modernity in Iran – this particular king thought he was being modern but he forgot about Iran and concentrated on his own success. What an ass!

This is the title of a book I’m reading by an Iranian author called Abbas Milani who is based in the US.

The sub-title is “Rethinking Modernity in Iran” – the book deals with the history of Iran and how/why Iran and its people rejected modernism (I’m learning about this!) even though the Persian empire around 2000 years ago embraced modernism and set forth an example which was followed by the Greco-Roman thinkers.

I’ve only covered the first 2 chapters and I can say right now that I’ll need to re-read it to fully understand some of the passages.

Think I’ll write more on this in the near future.

Over and out.