Off to Melbourne for 4 days, so you're spared long winded attempts of synchronising musings with photos of the day. So you'll just be getting photos of the day instead. Maybe some wise-ass quips to go with it.

Hey I said you're spared long winded. I didn't say anything about short ones.

About half of my work involves troubleshooting why things go wrong. While I haven't been in the forefront theoretical science in a while, at the very least, it's things like this that somewhat satisfy my need to much around and experiment. My only issue is when I have to juggle the routine urgency of the hospital with the slow methodical approach of troubleshooting. In short, I've learned to slap something on and pray that it holds together until the next person takes over.

Some days though when I do have the time, I do like to sit down and geek out on the machines that serve me well. Much like the personal tech I surround myself with, lab instruments have a hum, an energy, a life of their own. I like to say because I'm a geek that I understand these machines more than most people in the lab. Some days I can't stand to see these machines being mistreated because people lack the methodical patience and common sense to operate them properly. Which is why I still prefer to work alone, that way I know the machines won't break down due to human error and I won't have people in my way when I try to fix things.

Of course you can't have everything in the world, so most times you have to think outside the box and deal with the situation as it comes along. Everything else is just minor details. Call it a work in progress. I'll tell you when I've succeeded at that bit.

Ringtones are probably the source of my stress at the moment. Even if the ringtone is in the form of some modern noise, as long as my mind registers it as a ringtone, I automatically get jumpy. It's an occupational hazard turned bad habit, especially after the amount of times I have to answer the phone at work or late at nights when I'm sound asleep in my bed.

I forsee that eventually I'm going to be diagnosed with some stress disorder relating to the phone and ordered to stay far from it for a period of time. Not that I mind since people rarely call me over the phone for personal things anyway.

So if you do happen to call me over the phone, don't be surprised if I answer it with "Pathology, Ed speaking.". The bright side is, you'll know you got a hold of me over the phone. Even if you didn't just make me pump a load of adrenalin in my body as I answered your call.

Sometimes it's not enough that you own a lot of computers that you use on a daily basis. You have to support it with a multitude of other gadgets and gizmos to make sure what you own doesn't die on you when you most need them. Us geeks have our own problems to face when dealing with the technology we so crave as a solution to our initial problems. Non-geeks say that these problems are unnecessary and wasteful. In a way, it's hard to argue otherwise, but as I've said many times before, it's never what we own that makes us geeks. It's what we do and how we do it that defines us as geeks.

Regardless of what we own and crave for, our arsenal and firepower doesn't exist in the material world. It was always our ingenuity and passion that makes us who we are. Of course, that doesn't mean that we can't use that same ingenuity and creativity to earn ourselves bleeding edge technology every now and again. After all, even us geeks need to have our own fun. Why not have it that we have fun every single day, for the rest of our lives?

Today, I like to depart from my attempts at creative photography to bring you something a little more geeky. After all, that is who I am and what I do on a usual basis. Mess around with forces that most mortals don't try and play around with.

To be honest, installing Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich is one of the easiest geeky things I have done. Ready a few installers, toss in a bootloader, add the OS and the additional software, run the code and that's pretty much it. However, Alpha builds are perhaps one of the most complicated bits to troubleshoot. Alpha strikes fear and doubt in most casual geeks. It's because they are untried and untested. They are prone it things going wrong with little to no support to fix the problem. Of course, being a geek, it's almost impossible to resist mucking around with Alpha builds, especially when you make time to play around if things go wrong. It just has to be done. If you're a geek too, you know where I'm coming from on this.

So for those that are willing to venture into the great unknown of Alpha builds I salute you. For within it lies the spirit of a true geek. Always willing to break the limits of what things were meant to be. Always saying, one more line of code, late into the night, until dawn breaks the glittering inky blackness.