www.nickhodge.com

After spend­ing late 2007 writ­ing about and build­ing my own fast PC — I real­ised there was a lar­ger place for the story to be told. But not here. It was time to go PC enthu­si­ast over on Chan­nel 10.

The most dif­fi­cult piece to write was the over­ture. Know­ing at which tech­nical level to tar­get the writ­ing. Feed­back is welcome.

x64 is a bar­rier that the PC industry is going to push through dur­ing 2008. Laptops with only 4Gb of RAM are a bit cheezy and limited.

The over­ture:

• 64bits. More than 2 times 32

And the three acts:

1. My Dream Machine: Plan­ning
2. My Dream Machine: Con­struc­tion
3. My Dream Machine: Tuning

Next art­icles will be related to how I work on this machine. The old Toshiba crap­top just isn’t cut­ting it anymore.

Good to be rid of writer’s block.

Microsoft’s answer to Ewan McGregor, Nic Filling­ham, has joined the http://on10.net/ (Chan­nel 10, on10) team at Microsoft.

Apart from being Ewan good look­ing, he’s a smart and hard work­ing bloke.

…first day on the job, he gets to inter­view Bill Gates and Rob­bie Bach. How do you top that?

The Aus­tralian Mafia gains a posterboy.

Rob­bie Bach @ CES 2008

Bill Gates @ CES 2008

Editor of http://on10.net/, Larry Larsen gets the scoop exclus­ive: Fake Steve Jobs inter­viewed on the Microsoft cam­pus.

Must do more of these screen­cast thingys.

Amaz­ing to think 12 months ago I was essen­tially unem­ployed. Now I make stuff for Microsoft. Do videos, star in videos. Funny how the world works.

Thanks, Frank­arr.

Pas­sion is dif­fi­cult to hide.

Glenn and Kings­ley from Inter­node have per­sonal pas­sions for gam­ing — and they jobs that take this pas­sion and unleash it on the unsus­pect­ing gamers in Australia.

Find out how to get a ping­time of 1, the inside of a server rack in a secret Adelaide loc­a­tion and why Kings­ley uses mois­tur­iser in this On10.net interview

From Wired “Gimme a B! Gimme an L! Gimme an… ” (Wired 15.04) . On10.net (or some­times called Chan­nel 10) is one of the “out­puts” of the world-wide team I work for. Bunch of smart and enthu­si­astic people. Jeff is our quiet uber-boss.

This art­icle describes the his­tory behind Chan­nel 9, and the new open-ness of Microsoft.

It’s inter­est­ing to be a part of the small team that’s chan­ging the per­cep­tion of Microsoft.

It has been three days of abso­lute pleas­ure in Adelaide.

Firstly, a big shout out and major thanks to Mike, Mandy, Jamie and Jemma Sey­fang for their hos­pit­al­ity and record­ing stu­dio (which doubled as my late night work area and sleep area) for three days.  Oh, and happy birth­day Jemma. Get­ting out of the hotel room shenanigans and liv­ing with real people made the dif­fer­ence on this trip.

It also gave Uncle Mike and I to dis­cuss the day’s events in depth, explore ideas and sug­gest dir­ec­tions. I must deeply thank Uncle Mike for his sug­ges­tions on improve­ments to “The Geek Stor­ies”. Hav­ing Australia’s premiere Social Net­work­ing thinker at your beck and call night and day, mak­ing you cups of tea, is a rare exper­i­ence.  The value is inmeasurable.

Secondly, a major thanks to my video sub­jects: Dave “Lifekludger” Wal­lace, Mike “Fang” Sey­fang, Kevin Richard­son, Glenn Butcher and Kingl­sey Fore­man. Unlike last Fri­day, I pur­posely spread the video cap­tur­ing over three days to ensure I was on the ball through all interviews.

Oh, and I rang Robert Scoble after he Twittered he was bored on his way south from Petaluma to his home. That’s Cali­for­nia.  Con­nec­tions and wir­ing brings us together in strange ways.

Con­nec­tions. This social net­work­ing thing is about con­nec­tions. Using them to pro­duce value greater than the sum of the parts. A com­mon theme emer­ging from all my inter­views is that either for life (Lifekludger), learn­ing (Kevin) or enter­tain­ment (Glenn) humans value con­nec­tions. Mak­ing them, and rein­for­cing linkages.

With Munge Brother, Uncle Tim Kleemann, we explored this from a busi­ness per­spect­ive. Tim owns Next­Byte, and ori­gin­ally hired me way back when I was a pimply kid in 1985. To Tim I owe grat­it­ude for the 21+ years in this crazy industry.

These human traits of want­ing con­nec­ted­ness extend to our kids, too. They have strong social net­works that extend into the digital world, and out­side of school in the home and on the pro­ver­bial bus — and the lines between school and home are becom­ing equally as blurred as work and home. Pres­ence via Mes­sen­ger; pub­li­city via MySpace and You­Tube. All around are con­nec­tions. Both vis­ible and invisible.

Uncle Mike is explor­ing some of the learn­ing aspects to these social net­works through his work with education.au; Dave exper­i­ences this every­day in his extraordin­ary life.

Ensur­ing Par­ents and Teach­ers under­stand the envir­on­ment of social net­work­ing in all its forms is the major chal­lenge for tech­no­logy com­pan­ies work­ing in this space: Microsoft, Google or whomever. I think the time is ripe for a major model change in the way edu­cat­ors think about online access, and the skills kids are going to need to sur­vive in a smal­ler, greater con­nec­ted and inform­a­tion rich world.

Return­ing to Immanuel to speak to Kevin, I learnt many things. I did not expect this as an old scholar. One learn­ing was that I owe Noel Volk and Greg Sharp a major thankyou. In my school years there was a con­cious effort to install com­puters into the school and use these as a part of edu­ca­tion. This effort lead me into this industry I now find myself. Money was siphoned off other pro­jects into this some 22 years ago. Like the Angle Park Com­puter Centre, Abefoyle Park pro­ject and oth­ers — the product of these efforts have not gone to waste. So thanks.

Inter­node is a con­nec­tion com­pany; the inter­view with Glenn and Kings­ley will air some­time next week. Aus­tralian gamers know Inter­node as the best gam­ing net­work, and ser­vice, around. You can feel their pas­sion for games; a pas­sion that extends from the MD of Inter­node, Simon Hackett.

I feel that get­ting people’s stor­ies told, and out there for all to see is import­ant. Geek Stor­ies or not, the con­nec­tion poten­tial is huge.

Send in your story, and let’s go make a difference.

Tan­gler and Cylo: Aus­tralian tech­no­logy com­pan­ies go large at BarCampSydney.

Joel Pobar: I have this quiet pas­sion for dynamic lan­guages. Meet­ing Joel Pobar made me real­ise how little I know. There is another, longer story here. Watch this space!