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I’m really getting through books fast at the moment and I’ve just finished another brilliant one - Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl.

This book is split into two distinct sections. The first is a very touching, inspiring account of the authors time in concentration camps during WW2. I found his analysis of the different psychological stages they went through really fascinating and the modest prose in which he spoke about his experience was humbling.

The second section is a summary of his philosophy of Logotherapy. Although this raised a number of insightful points, towards the end I realised that as I only have a passing interest in real psychology this section was largely wasted on me. Still, it’s not too hardcore and there’s plenty to take away from it.

So if you’re looking for meaning in your life, give it a read!

…make sure that it’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie.

I’ve gobbled this book up in just over a day (against the authors advice) and I have to say it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Go. Read. Now.

I was clicking around the interweb last night when I came across a site called Kublax.

Kublax grabs all your online bank accounts and gives you a “money overview”, with graphs and charts. It tells you how much of your money is being spent on bills and other things, and lets you setup alerts so you know the status of your bank account. Great customer service too, I emailed them at 7pm on a Sunday night and they got back to be within a few minutes.

I remember discussing a similar idea to this with Shazz about a year ago which never went anywhere, so I’m glad to see someone acting on it. Looks like they have got some pretty cool pipelined features too, so I look forward to trying it again when the product’s a bit more mature.

I’m a fan of using Subversion to manage projects. To some extent I’m also a fan of using Trac to view the repo / bugs / timeline. However, I find setting this up manually to be a time consuming pain in the ass, so today I set out on a hunt to find some subversion hosting. I wasn’t looking for long as I quickly came across Code Spaces.

Setting up a repo is done with a few clicks. Assigning users to a repo is done with a few clicks. Everything is done with a few clicks. The online  interface is simple, easy to use and responsive and there’s a free trial, rock on!

If your looking for easy svn / project management, go with these guys ’cause their product is hot.

Well I finally did it: I ditched my Gentoo installation. Many reasons for this but I think the main one is that I don’t have enough time to maintain it. I could never get acpi/bluetooth working quite right (amongst other things), my sound broke a few days ago somehow and I didn’t want to take another weekend out to fix it, plus I was a little sick of being scared to update. I wanted an installation I could update in seconds, not hours… one that just worked and one that most definitely was not a mac. For the learning experience Gentoo was something else and it’ll always have a place in my nerdy little heart. For old systems I’ll look to it again, but for the new hardware compiling everything really isn’t needed.

Out with the old and in with the new. When thinking about what to upgrade to the choice was obvious. Ubuntu has gained a massive following over the past few years so I just had to give it a shot to see what all the fuss was about.

Wireless Just works!

I’m very impressed. Installation was a breeze and took very little time. Installing the ATI graphics driver was a piece of cake and I was reconfigured and back up and running with most of my software in about 6 hours with everything working smoothly. I tried gnome for a while but quickly realised that I still don’t like it - although it does look nicer than I remember - so I enabled kubuntu-desktop in synaptic and bang! I had KDE.

Restricted Driver Manager

I’m not going to say anything else other than it’s good and if you’re looking to change from Windows, or maybe even Gentoo, then look no further. You can grab it here.

…were absolutely amazing! My lovely girlfriend surprised me with tickets Friday afternoon so yesterday we traveled up to London, checked into a hotel, grabbed a Maccy Dees and walked over to the Arena.

I’d never really listened to much Symphony X despite being a big DT fan, but I was very impressed. They put on one hell of a show and really got the crowd pumped.

Dream Theater were awesome, but what else would you expect? I must confess to not having bought the new album which I think they played a bit of, so I couldn’t sing / air drum along to everything. They played some classics though, namely Strange Deja Vu and As I am, plus the medley towards the end was brilliant.

Overall, great fun. The atmosphere at Wembley was charged and when they come back I’m definitely up for seeing them again.

(I might add some pictures to this if I ever get them off Lauras camera.)

I never really thought myself much of a Jane’s Addiction fan until I heard this.

Pretty much every track on this CD is a gem. Well worth buying if you’re into your alternative rock.