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… was the cheer from the Australian crowd as Michael Bisping was attempting to defeat Wanderlei Silva yesterday at the UFC 110 premier in Sydney, Australia today. It was indeed a proud moment when all Australians present took delight in booing the Englishman (Michael Bisping) and cheering anyone with an Australian (George Sotiropoulis) or New Zealand (James Tu Huna) accent.

Since his skull pounding loss to Dan Henderson in UFC 100, Michael Bisping has been trying *really* hard to play the nice guy and show a bit of good grace and humility. Fortunately, Bisping’s recent show of humility hasn’t fooled a lot of UFC 110 fans who boo’ed him (1) before the fight, (2) during the fight and after the (3) fight.

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These days there are plenty of reasons to have a second computer to do all those technologically “dangerous” tasks that could compromise a computer’s operating system integrity.

You might be downloading new software, either legally or illegally, which could contain spyware or viruses that could cause your PC or Mac to grind to a halt or leak personal and financial information.

Personal privacy is also another good reason for second computer, especially when you have family members or work colleges accessing your computer. Nobody needs to know about the tell-tale novel you are writing or the “special interest” websites you like to visit and download software or media from.

Coming to your rescue are two unlikely partners that, working together, can provide you with a little piece of mind: Microsoft Windows and TrueCrypt.

Virtually “Windows”

Microsoft have been providing their users with some fairly reliable and free virtualisation technology for desktop machines called Virtual PC. With the release of Windows 7, users can now download a free copy of Windows XP (or install your own copy of any Windows version) and run their “legacy” applications in a virtual environment hosted by your laptop or desktop.

All Windows virtual machines save their operating system and user data within a virtual hard drive container. This virtual drive is stored as a single [large] file on your host machine, much like a Zip or RAR archive …

This means that you can test out new or dubious software in a protected, virtual environment that doesn’t effect your desktop environment. If there is a problem then you can simply delete the virtual image and copy in a new virtual operating system image to start again.

A virtual life for the average user …

Traditionally organisations have used virtual environments to test their software under controlled conditions (usually with Virtual Server or Hyper-V), but for a regular user with a few odds and ends to hide a virtual machine can help then lead a relatively secret virtual life.

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Sometimes the stupidest ads are actually to most interesting and Trading Post has got one of the stupidest I’ve seen in a while … Bless their crazy marketing little hearts!

For a week or two I drove past a roadside billboard ad that had a goofy looking goat with a green frog on it head, but no actual indication of the product. The ad was as cute as it was weird, but I wasn’t inclined to hunt it down via Google. Finally last night I saw a the first ad where an excited father brings home the goat and frog to his family (which he must have bought on TradingPost), much to the disgust of his wife and amusement of his daughter. I love the child-like innocence and wonder on the father’s face as the goat and frog talk for the first time … Obviously once his family has left the room.

Scrounging around YouTube I found two more ads in the series which haven’t been aired yet (well I haven’t seen them). Each progressive ad shows the father getting more desperate as his attempts share his new purchase’s catch phrase, “Bargain! Reckon!”, fails. Its fantastic that in each advert how the goat and frog are attune to their surroundings by actively looking at things like the family or the father’s mobile phone.  

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I purchase a few Western Digital WD RE4-GP 2.0 TB hard drives a last year for my ReadyNAS Pro (Business Edition) which was to be my shining 10.0 TB X-RAID storage solution. This one ReadyNAS box houses all my commercial work from the past decade plus has plenty of room for MSDN DVDs, software installation packages and server backups.

These “Green” WD RE4-GP drives implement an Idle3 mode which was designed to reduce power consumption, in part by positioning the heads in a park position (unloading the heads) and turning off unnecessary electronics, resulting in substantial power savings. The only problem was that as soon as Idle3 mode kicked in (after 12.8 seconds of inactivity) the ReadyNAS Pro woke it straight back up again with background system activity. This meant that the drive heads were being mechanically parked and unparked every 13 seconds … About 6,500 times a day!

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The first thing that I thought when I saw the above clip an hour ago was “Who are these nerds?“, followed by “Please tell me he’s not slap-fighting?” and “Close your fist and call it boxing!“. Then I started to notice the body movement and how relaxed slapping nerd #1 was and thought “This guy isn’t too bad. It looks pretty fluid and powerful!” …

This was my very awesome visual introduction to Ba Gua.

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