Andy's Mind

When recently someone asked me where I’m from I jokingly answered that I’m from the railway. In fact, for the last four weeks I was on a train almost every other day and for at least 10 hours each week. I was a bit skeptical at first and I’m still worried about the winter (with snow and freezing cold I don’t really enjoy being outside) but I begun to appreciate and value those hours I spend in railway carriages. It turned out pretty quickly that on this job those are really my quiet desk hours – time for writing e-mails and conceptualizing which I don’t get enough otherwise. No one comes to disturb, somehow few people do call then and my ugly HP laptop can run for about three hours on the batteries, which is really enough for most cases.

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Yes, I have a new job, and it’s so intensive that during the week I’ve barely time to skim through my private e-mail. My blog has been hit hard as a result and I’m afraid it would be updated about once a week in the near future. Thanks for your kind comments and wishes, they really made a difference for me.

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I had two totally unrelated realizations yesterday. One concerning file sharing and another space. Two subjects as far appart as you can imagine.

First came from visiting a web site that monitors the activity of peer-to-peer sharing networks, or p2ps. It’s called Slyck and it also shows how many users are there on a given day. The numbers from those stats intrigued me, because I was a bit surprised by how small they are. So I did some estimating.

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Looks like I have some explaining and catching up to do on this blog, as it can be clearly seen that I haven’t posted in quite a while. First explaining then – there are two reasons behind the recent lack of updates: first I had some technical trouble again, this time with my home computer. Not to bore you with details my Windows XP broke down on Tuesday and it was only on Friday that I gave up on trying to revive it and did a fresh install. I guess it was due to fail after 2.5 years since its initial installation, it’s miracle it did hold so long – Microsoft’s stuff has a nasty habit of degrading with time by itself. Installing anew wasn’t easy as my hard disks are packed tight with data and I don’t want to invest in my desktop since I plan to acquire a state of the art laptop at the end of September. But, somehow, by Friday afternoon I got it up and running again.

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