It means, essentially, that every Google service will track you and keep a history of what what you’re typing whenever you use one of them, sharing the information (for Google’s monetary reward) with all the others. If you’re logged into Gmail, every search on google.com you perform in a different browser tab will be attributed back to your Gmail account. If you just want to upload some photos to Picasa, tough: that has to be associated with your Google+ account… and so on.

Already, Google have built up a pretty accurate picture of me:

The new terms and conditions can only mean more information will be fed into producing this sort of thing, whether I really like it or not. (Check your own profile out by logging into, say, Gmail and then visiting this site).

Well, I’ve had enough of this. I “repatriated” my email server to my own domain’s server a few weeks ago: where before everything went via Gmail’s servers, lately I’ve only used Gmail to read the contents of my own pop3 servers. Its spam filters are excellent, so there was method in that particular bit of round-about madness. But no more even of this minimal Gmail involvement: as of yesterday, I now read my emails in Evolution directly, relying on my email server’s Spam Assassin and the Evolution client-side junk filter.

The Google Chrome web browser is also being de-installed from all my PCs. In its place, Opera. That used to be a bit of a risky choice, back in the day. But nearly all websites are HTML-5 compliant these days -or getting there- and so they generally work pretty much identically across all browsers. I don’t get all the extensions that you can plug into Firefox, it’s true. But I do get adblock and script blockers if I want them, which suits me. As a bonus, I get Opera’s simple way of synchronising bookmarks between different PCs (I have never quite understood why Firefox’s should be so complicated!)

What about the biggie? Search, that is. Well, I’ve switched to using the rather ridiculously-named DuckDuckGo. It’s an incredibly clean interface (Google used to have one of them, if you remember, before it got greedy) and the search results seem fine for me. What about the convenience of just typing in a search term in the browser’s search panel or even in its main address bar? Easy: Opera comes with a DuckDuckGo selector for the search panel. Just click Opera > Settings > Preferences > Search then double-click the entry for DuckDuckGo, click the [Details] button and switch on the options to make DuckDuckGo your default search and Speed Dial engine.

(If you had decided to use Firefox as your main browser instead, just add yourself a DuckDuckGo Search Extension. That gets the Firefox search panel going to ddg by default, but to get the address bar doing the same thing, you need to open a new tab, type about:config, agree that you’ll be careful, find the keyword.url setting and alter it to read http://duckduckgo.com/?q= …problem solved.)

What else? Ah yes… Picasa. That’s tricky. Flickr is the obvious free photo-hosting replacement here, but it’s part of the Yahoo! empire -and I regard them as not much different from Google in their desire to insert their tentacles everywhere. They’re just not quite as good as Google at doing it! So, I’d prefer to give Flickr the flick. There’s always photoshop.com, of course: you’d expect Adobe to know how to handle photography! It does mean having to use Flash in your browser, though, which I’d prefer not to have to do. And so this one is tricky: I honestly don’t have a definitive answer to it as yet. Maybe I’ll have to repatriate this to my own servers, too, in the end (Gallery works quite well, for example).

Of course, my Google+ account will be going the way of the dodo in the near future. I have a Facebook account, but they’re actually much worse than Google, so I don’t exactly use it very often! Maybe I’ll just have to be antisocial for a while.

I know of no good alternatives for Google Maps or Street View (not ones that don’t involve using Microsoft’s efforts, anyway). But at least doing everything else I’ve mentioned in this post, my use of these tools won’t be attributable to me as an individual.

Paranoia, I hear you say? Yeah, probably. But you take your stand on these things as you see them. I disliked Microsoft ruling the roost a few years ago; I now run a mostly Windows-free home. Now I am nervous about Google’s ambitions and its proposed privacy infringements to achieve them; in response, I simply choose to switch off as much Google infrastructure in my life as possible. Not something everyone will do, I realise. But maybe everyone can at least think about the issues!

‘Tis traditionally a day for drinking copious quantities of what the locals quaintly call ‘beer’ and burning assorted meats to buggery on the barbecue.

I have experience with this last requirement for true-blue, dinky-di Aussie-dom:

The outcome was not exactly a culinary triumph that particular year:

The good news this year for food-lovers is this:

That’s the current weather over Sydney. Blue is rain; the darker, the wetter. Yellow is sheets of it. To switch metaphors, the short story is that it’s bucketing down, and likely to stay that way for the rest of the week, apparently. As my old school fête used to say: Indoors if wet!

The upside is that I won’t have to share my food with such native inhabitants of these shores as:

…or, worse:

(for she is venomous).

But I may still have to share my cups of tea with others:

So, when I tuck into my bonza lamb roast indoors, I’ll not be battling flies or arachnids just for once and can therefore wish you all a happy Australia Day and mean it.

Which does, I think, go some way to explain why, whenever I’ve tried to produce network topology diagrams in the past, no matter whether I’m using Visio (on a Windows PC at work) or Dia (on a Linux PC at home), they’ve always come out looking like a deranged two year-old had given it a whirl and then thought that ice cream sounded a better idea 48 seconds later.

I tender in evidence my latest effort:

The network itself is a thing of majesty. My feeble attempts to represent it during my hours of unemployment… not so much.

I will shortly have two new (physical) servers to accommodate in that mess somewhere, too -one of them a nice dual Xeon, 24GB affair. Time to read some more physics books (and the Dia manual, I guess).

On the basis of that, I could almost cancel the face-lift.

The year started well enough: a birthday viewing of The King’s Speech was thoroughly enjoyable. But my birthday meal took place in an appalling restaurant in Sydney that has acoustics only someone totally deaf could like. I couldn’t hear a bloody word being said by anyone, and refused to eat any of the food as a consequence.

An old friend of mine turned up to said birthday meal white as a sheet. I’ve never actually seen someone who fitted that clichéd description before, but Rodger did, and I made a point of mentioning to him that he probably needed to see a doctor.

My birthday meal being on a Friday, Rodger finally made it to the doctor’s on the following Monday -at which point the staff there declared that he was literally in the process of having a heart attack and he was whisked off to the nearest coronary unit immediately. The Other Half spent a lot of the next four days visiting Rodger as he recovered from an emergency stenting procedure. The two of them walked out of the hospital on the Friday afternoon and made it to the nearest pub for a celebratory ginger ale. I turned up after work, just in time to see Rodger off in a taxi back to his home.

Which is where he died sometime that night.

We had to get the police to break into his apartment the next Tuesday, having not heard from him for a while. They found him in bed. At least he’d died in his sleep. He was 69.

He had no close family, but a sister of a 1970s friend was the closest thing he had to next-of-kin. She swooped down from Queensland as soon as we told her the bad news to “take charge of things”, announced that there’d be no funeral, and that was that. Within a fortnight, with house contents and body summarily disposed of, it was as if Rodger had never existed.

Things settled down a bit after that, until in March one of the cats had two strokes (of the cerebral variety). Since he didn’t end up walking around in circles, the vet declined to put him down, but Gracie’s never been quite the same since. He had a third ‘incident’ just three weeks ago. He’s slightly unsteady on his paws, but otherwise apparently fine. But we’ve spent most of this year expecting him to bow out, which doesn’t work wonders for one’s morale. The prognosis for this coming year isn’t much better, either.

Being made redundant is also not exactly a bundle of laughs, which was the next surprise to hit us, in May. My employer was bought out by their largest competitor, who is based in Seattle -and is a SQL Server shop. There was some requirement to keep our existing Oracle databases running for a transition period -and, indeed, to move them lock, stock and control files to the Seattle data center in November. As a result, I am (at the time of writing) still employed by them …but only until January 6th 2012. Meanwhile, I can reliably report that spending 7 months dismantling everything you’d built and managed for the previous 5 years is not exactly fun. I should probably be grateful for being kept on at full pay for not doing a great deal of original work, but I’ll be glad when the clock finally runs out next week.

The year picked up a bit after May (it was, to be honest, hard to imagine it being able to get much worse). We holidayed in Tasmania about then, and cruised the South Pacific at the beginning of December. I worked out how to propagate the Kangaroo Apple from cuttings. We saved a red-bellied black snake from doom and destruction. Two new wallaby joeys joined the resident mob.

On the other hand, two Shuttle PCs I bought turned out to be complete duds (though we did end up with 100% refunds, so no permanent harm done) and my old Internet passwords got hacked as a result of a screw-up on the part of Lastpass (who are, indeed, now the last people I’d ever entrust my passwords to!) So the year seemed to continue on its mostly gloomy way, despite the occasional sunny spell.

The year ended, however, with us winning three Trivia contests on board the Pacific Pearl. So hurrah for general knowledge and knowing that Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia, not Facebook.

Well, anyway. I didn’t much like 2011 (can you tell?!), but here’s a virtual beer to the possibilities inherent in a new 2012. Happy New Year, everyone.

And vale, Rodger Hall (1941 – 2011).

The left and middle monitors are attached to the main PC in twinview configuration; the right monitor is attached to the main file server (under the desk). The one keyboard and mouse combination controls them both thanks to Synergy.

Keyboard and mouse are standard issue HP kit, legitimately liberated from work when they disposed of old kit. Nothing fancy or glow-in-the-dark, but it’s comfortable enough for me in the office, so seemed suitable for the home, too.

The Pioneer receiver and Bose speakers are rigged up to the output of my main PC’s sound card. Pretty good sound reproduction results, which is important as this is where I do most of my listening to music.

The conductor’s baton was previously used to conduct the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.   It is kept handy for when my background music needs to be more foreground!

The bottom shelf of the right-hand bookcase should have been labelled “even more opera scores”, but I forgot to do so.

The Kindle replaces almost everything that’s on the shelves… but not the opera scores, funnily enough.

The gramophone player still works. It was purchased for me from somewhere in the Camden Markets, London. It’s apparently a deluxe model, since two doors on its front face open and close, acting as an effective volume control.

Kit’s Coty house is located near Maidstone, England -close to where I was born and lived for most of the first half of my life. The print was my 18th birthday present.

The house is air-conditioned, but in Winter, I prefer having a local source of heat. Hence the additional radiator.

Additionally, I probably won’t be posting much here before the New Year, so I’d like to throw in my best wishes for the New Year now, too.

May your halls be decked, and your holly boughs be always prickly.

Peace, prosperity and modprobes to all.

We were up on the eleventh deck, just above the second of the forward lifeboats. The cabin had drawers that would open and close themselves as the ship pitched in the swell. And a carpet that was mysteriously but constantly wet. And then, on the final night, the electric light fittings started pouring water in all directions… a little alarming, but only a little, because by then we didn’t care much! Shoddy, I’d call it, but maybe I’m just being picky.

Don’t get me wrong: bits of the cruise were wonderful:

That’s the Île des Pins (or Isle of Pines) in New Caledonia -a small island in the South Pacific, sitting practically on top of the Tropic of Capricorn. And I took that photo myself (of two complete strangers, I have to say), so if that looks like a tropical paradise to you, that’s really the way it was. Loved it!

But it’s really very difficult to plan to do nothing at all for eight days, and I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone, particularly. You’ve really got to be a ‘doing nothing’ person by nature, or someone who has truly mastered the art of switching off. Being neither fish nor fowl in that respect, I found the experience a tad tricky.

There are lots of bonuses, though:

Oh, and we had a full lunar eclipse the night we sailed into Noumea -a generous touch on the part of the Heavens, I think!

Anyway, I’m now back in time to consider things like turkeys, cranberry sauce and Christmas pud. And, having truly done sod-all for over a week, I’m re-energised enough to be able to do that and smile for a change!

November 22nd is Saint Cecilia’s Day (patron saint of music) and, by lucky happenstance, also the anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Britten -England’s greatest-ever composer.

In times past, no music would have been played today in the Diznix household that wasn’t written by Britten… but this year has been an exception. I confess to some Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams!

Nevertheless: Happy Birthday, Ben.

The load averages are nothing to write home about, but that box has been running uninterrupted for 2 years and 17 days. Until now.

Oh -and look. It is possible to use CentOS (4.x) in a production environment!