So I finally got myself a decent phone. I’m not saying my old Nokia 5800 was that bad. Well actually it was a slow, single touch device with very little useful apps. It didn’t even have proper threaded messaging for crying out loud. So that’s why I’ve gone and gotten myself a brand new Samsung Galaxy S2, code name I9100 for all you tech geeks out there.

I’m really happy with for now, although I’ve still got a lot of apps to find and customize the hell out of it. And that’s actually what I’m doing now. I found this WordPress app and I’m taking it for a test drive.

So I guess I’m done for now.

It’s been quite a while since my last post. I’ve been busy. Not a good excuse, but it’s all I’ve got. I had 2 exams left at the end of September and I’m glad to say their finally behind me. It’s quite an achievement for me and it’s implications are only now beginning to dawn on me.

No more exams.

It’s a mind boggling thought. I can not believe that from now on I can actually learn what I want to. Don’t get me wrong. I definitely picked the right school to go to and the courses themselves or rather the ideas for them were mostly OK. The problems lay in the execution of these courses. Some went too deep yet others went to wide. Professors didn’t seem to get were the sweet spot is. The worst thing about it was, that they didn’t seem to try or even care and find it. This left us students frustrated which is not a way to go if you want to motivate young minds. I must admit that these last 2 exams took everything I’ve got to get through. But I did it and I’m really proud of myself.

So what does this mean? It means I’ve only got one thing left to reach the end of the path that is formal education - diploma. On Friday I’m going to hand in all the forms and papers to make it formal. If you’re interested my thesis is going to be about recommender systems. I’m still waiting on a formal title, but that’s my mentor’s job. I’m actually really looking forward to getting to work. Should be fun.

Just to keep this a wholesome post let add that this is the only part (finish school) of my New Year’s resolution I’ve been working on. With exams behind me it now makes it a lot easier to focus on other goals. My parents were kind enough to help me through the past few months financially, but getting a job is now quite high on my priority list. I’ll also start working out as it started to warm up outside. Socializing is probably the last on my list, but I’ve got to make sacrifices somewhere, don’t I?

Yet another New Year’s resolution post, you might say. Well, it is. This post is meant for me to share with you my plans for this year. But more importantly its purpose is to put these plans on black and white, so they don’t escape my mind.

Let start with what I accomplished over this past year. As I didn’t yet have a blog back then, I posted this on Facebook:

2010 New Year’s resolutions? Got those. Maybe too much of them, but the biggest ones: Finish school (due date January 2011), finish at least four small and one medium/big project and go on one bigger trip (probably Australia). Other ones are of secondary nature or still under consideration.

Unfortunately most of these fell through. Why, you ask. Let’s see - Australia didn’t work out because I didn’t have enough money. And school just got dragged out a bit. I did manage to publish at least one small project - MvcOpenID. And this blog can be another one.

But it’s 2011 now, so let’s focus on that. A few goals will closely resemble last year ones. As I don’t have that much school to worry about I’m also adding some new ones. And here, in order of order of importance, they are:

1. Finish school - With some luck I’ll finish it by June, but the end of September is the ultimate goal to get my diploma.
2. Get a job - I want to stay in Ljubljana, but for that I need a job to pay the rent. This goal is a bit on the urgent side, as I need the job by the end of this month. Wish me luck.
3. 4 web projects - I won’t specify sizes this year, but I hope at least one of these 4 will grow into something bigger. This is the only real all-year-long goal and as I want to make a career with web projects, I’m setting a goal at least $300 a month from these projects.
4. Travel to USA - This is 2011’s big trip plan. Me and my mates are planning to go to the west coast of USA. You know - LA, San Francisco, Las Vegas, maybe a bit of Mexico. The trip should take place at the end of summer or in the start of fall. After all of us get our diplomas. This is another reason I need a job.
5. Loose weight and get fit - This is a topic I’ve written about before. I’ll give it my all this year. And because they say goals work better if your specific - I want to have 70kg and a six pack before summer.
6. Socialize more - I’ve been neglecting my social life a bit over the past year as I focused my attention on school and career, but I hope to find time and get out a bit more.

There you go. Seems a lot to do, eh? Well it probably is. But I’ll give it my best shot. I’ve read an interesting article about New Year’s resolutions and it gave me an idea. I’ll have some kind of a goal management system that will keep me on track and enable me to further specify my goals. I’ll of course write about these goals and how they’re coming along right here, on my blog.

Well that’s that. Wish me luck and if you have any New Year’s resolutions yourself, share them in the comments.

I’ve been thinking about getting myself a new computer for a while now. For the past 3 years I’ve owned an Acer 5920G laptop which is slowly dying on me. But increasingly frequent random crashes, as annoying as they are, are not the biggest problem. With me being (at least recently) a web developer and my style of programming I burn through those 2 gigs of RAM in an instant. I thought about replacing them with 4 gigs, but that would just fix the problem for a few months. So I decided to replace my laptop, that gets a 4.7 rating in Windows 7, with a brand new desktop computer.

I chose a desktop computer over a new laptop because of a few simple reasons. First, I’ll still have this laptop if I need one. I don’t really need my primary machine to be portable and with tools like DropBox I can always have the important stuff with me. The second reason is a bit subjective. With a laptop I don’t really feel that I have enough control over the hardware. Yes, you can change the optical unit, add more memory, swap the hard drive, but you can’t really change the important stuff like the CPU or the graphics card. And don’t event get me started with how you can change a thing about the cooling. And you can do all of these things with a desktop computer, hence my choice.

I found quite a nice pre-built computer on an Austrian online shop, but could not order because I don’t live in Austria. So I started reading reviews and test and other whatnots about the hardware out there. I was at it for almost the whole per-Christmas week. But I did it. So let me present you with a list of the components I chose:

• Asus Sabertooth X58 - a motherboard with a bit of futuristic stuff like USB3 and SATA3, 2 PCI-e slots and quite a few good reviews.
• Intel i7-950 - a snappy 3.06GHz processor with 4 cores.
• Corsair XMS3 6GB Triple Channel DDR3 Memory Kit (CMX6GX3M3A1333C9) - 3 times more memory then my laptop should suffice for now. The motherboard will still have 3 empty slots so an upgrade to 12 or 18 GB won’t be a problem in the future.
• Sapphire 5770HD 1GB GDDR5 - the graphics card that should play all the modern games and full HD 1080p videos on my 24” LCD.
• Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB - a hard drive that is big enough to hold all of my data.
• Samsung SH-S223C - a cheap DVD burner just so I have an optical unit.
• LC-Power LC6650GP3 V2.3 GREEN POWER - a 650W power supply should be enough to power all of components above.
• Antec SLK3700 - an older Antec case to fit in all the parts.

If you know anything about computer hardware (and I think you do if you’re still reading), you see that this will be quite a powerful piece of machinery. And that’s what I wanted. I finally have a computer I always wanted.

So the orders are in and I hope to get all the parts in first week of 2011. I’ll post some pictures of the components themselves as they come in and then the whole rig. So stay tuned.