Mandriva Linux has a 3D desktop!

Preview 3D desktop Video

It’s almost tempting me to download it and install it on one of my spare computers here. Then I can geek-obsess over my blog and a linux install. I’d never get any sleep at all.
Maybe I’ll wait.

Jon Aquino’s Mental Garden: Google Seeding

What a brilliant idea. Google’s incessant spidering of the web allows you to googletrap future searchers into answering your questions. Have an error you can’t fix? Blog it and wait. Trying to find someone? Blog about them including their name and maybe, someday they will find you.

I think it’s such a great idea that I am going to test it right here.

What is Pamela Anderson’s phone number? Anybody?

Use this link to check my progress

Back to work tomorrow. I stayed up late last night getting the new webhost configured and so ended up sleeping until about 12pm. There goes half of my day off right there. An hour or two cleaning and doing my washing and then there was very little left of the day to enjoy.

In my youth I wouldn’t have minded sleeping all day. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I would do it by choice. Just lie in bed and stay there until 2 or 3 in the afternoon. As I get older I’m finding that a day off has so much more to offer than it did when I was 18 or 19.

The trouble with sleeping all day is that I feel the need to stay up later to try and cram all the little things that I have wanted to do in to the final hours before I go to sleep. I end up going to sleep far later than I should and get to work tired and pissed off the next day.

So, to reassure myself that today has been well spent, I’m going to list everything that I got done.

• cleaned the house
• washed my dirty clothes
• spent a few hours playing Eve:Online and catching up with my online friends
• watched a movie or two
• upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.0.5
• did some more coding and adding plugins to the site
• ordered a pizza because I was too lazy to cook dinner tonight (and also because my fridge is empty)

That doesn’t look so bad, does it?

Well, I move house a few weeks ago and now I’ve moved blog homes as well. Wordpress on a private webhost allows me far more options to customise the site. It just means another set of coding to learn seeing as Wordpress uses php to serve the site.

It’s going to be fun getting this set up the way I want it.

Unfortunately the move from Blogger Beta to Wordpress has meant that I have lost all the comments on the posts but hopefully they will update the import feature to allow me to transfer the comments in the future.

[Edit: No longer using Blogger]

Venomous Kate from over at Electric Venom was kind enough to drop me an email and let me know that my comment links were having issues and that it took some digging to be able to post comments from some browsers.

The only place I could figure that the problems were coming from was the peekaboo comment code that I was using. I’ve removed that code now so that by clicking on the “X Comments” link it should now take you directly to the post comment page.

Chalk it up to being over eager and trying to add gadgets (the curse of being a techno geek). At some point I might switch over to Haloscan comments as they seem to be a little more robust and useful than the blogger stuff. For now the standard comments will suffice.

She also pointed out that the page doesn’t validate correctly. After checking through a large portion of the 1200 or so errors, it would seem that they come almost exclusively from the following

• Blogger’s own code in the templates
• External html being returned from a few of the hacks that I use
• a few errors coming from Live Writer

Unfortunately that means that most of them are errors that I can’t do anything about for now. Unless I move over to a different blog host that allows me more control over the template then I guess the errors are here to stay.

God has a wicked sense of humour! Here I sit, a blogger who for the past few weeks has been unable to stop opining over the latest woman in his life, when out of the blue I get a phone call from another unrequited love.

I toured a theatre show last year called “The Breath of Life”. The stage manager on that show is an amazing person. I fell for her hard but couldn’t do anything about it. I would have, believe me. For this girl I would have overcome every little insecurity in my body and moved heaven and earth. Why didn’t I? I know that’s the question that is bouncing around in your heads as you read this. She had a boyfriend. And not just any boyfriend. He is in the Australian Air Force and at the time that we were on tour he was serving in Iraq.

I am not condoning breaking up a relationship for your own ends. That is just wrong. But, how could I compete with someone who was putting his life on the line each and every day? (more…)

If you don’t know who Girl A is check these two posts - A Surreal Evening and Isn’t it supposed to get easier. (I call her Girl A because I don’t know which of my friends might be reading this blog, and the last thing I want to do is embarrass people, and most importantly, her, by putting real names in my posts)

She is studying web design at the moment, but, her computer has been broken for nearly a month and a half. Understandably that makes it rather difficult for her to finish the assignments required for the course.

So, I volunteered to fix her computer so that she can get her assignments done. I’ve been playing with computers for years and so solving minor issues such as hers are fairly easy for me.

But, underneath my gentlemanly concern for her studies, there is an ulterior motive. You see, on Friday night at the party (A Surreal Evening) she mentioned that she was going to the guy’s house that she has been seeing for the last few months to use his computer for her assignments. (more…)

I had 60’s legends, Herman’s Hermits, at the theatre last night. It was the first time that I was able to use the Digico D1 with a live band. The show we just finished was a musical which let me test the snapshot stuff but it wasn’t really a good test of the full capabilities of the desk.

The Hermits are a 4 piece with drums, bass, guitar and keyboards. 4 sends of foldback were run from front of house. (more…)

I went to a friend’s party on Friday night after I finished work. It’s been three weeks since I moved to Ipswich and I haven’t seen any of my friends in that time, so, I was due for some catching up and socialising.

These parties are normally quite riotous and fun. But this one wasn’t. Sure the party was toned down a lot from what we normally have, but the people were still there that I wanted to see. The main problem was the two sisters that were there.

You see, one of the sisters, (lets call her Girl A for the sake of privacy),is the woman I am slowly but surely falling for. She lives at the house where the party was being held. I was really looking forward to seeing her because we have both been extremely busy lately and haven’t had time to catch up at all.

The other sister, (Girl B), is what I can only describe as my first real love. Unrequited as that love may have been, it was still the very first time that I can remember being head over heels, follow her anywhere, do anything for her in love with this girl.

Nothing ever happened between the two of us. I spent years trying my damnedest to win her over but it never worked. (more…)

[Edit: No longer using Blogger]

I only just found today that comments aren’t appearing on individual post pages. They show up fine with the peekaboo comment script on the main page though.

Going to have to look into that on Monday.

[Edit: No longer using Blogger]

I thought that I had found a way to use Live Writer to add Blogger Beta Labels to my posts. Unfortunately I was only half right. I was able to make labels search links in the posts, but the labels for each post itself are not transferred to Blogger.

The only workaround I have at the moment is to insert Technorati tags and then manually copy those tag labels to Blogger by editing the post. It’s a pain but hopefully they will include this functionality in the future.

This video is the ultimate in sound guy geek fun. You see, I’m a sound guy, and anything to do with audio that combines the following,

1. Great music
2. Principles of Audio demonstrated in an interesting manner
3. and most importantly FIRE

is right up my alley. The video is of a Ruben’s Tube which demonstrates standing waves. I want one of these on my wall at home, or even better, sitting on the meter bridge of my console at work. It might annoy the theatre goers a little, and Workplace Health and Safety may have their issues with it, but I think it would make for the ultimate “Pimp my Sound Console” accessory.

Manly, or Sensitive

Neil at Citizen of the Month wrote a blog called Strong, Silent Type. He said that he was feeling worried about how he wrote and acted and if it was sufficiently manly and not too sensitive.

I ask myself this question every day. In my head of course, never out loud to actual people (not that anyone reading this isn’t an actual person. The Internet anonymity means I can say what I like here).

(more…)

Part of my blogging experience has been to read blogs at random. Generally I just hit the next blog button at the top of my page after I check for new comments etc. Sometimes they are indecipherable, other times they are news site regurgitators, and others are like this one by May.

When I hit a new blog I generally read only the top post. If it intrigues me then I read on. It’s a big challenge to always have something interesting as the first post on the page, and I’m sure that quite often my blog falls well short of interesting, but as long as I apply that rule to every site I visit then it maintains the random rule that I chose to follow.

May Day Cafe opened today with Cinderella Man. She tells of a man that she met and became attracted to at first sight. That he was gay and a Catholic priest mattered little because his personality was the main attraction. She shared a few hours conversation with him and then he was gone from her life. (more…)

WARNING - Rampant whining content follows this warning!

Yes I’m going to whine and whinge in this post. There may also be a Star Wars related rant in the middle of it. Just remember that you were warned.

Today was supposed to be my day off. I have to work Saturday and Sunday on shows this week which means I can basically choose which other days I need off. This week, the most convenient days happened to be today and next Monday.

Over the weekend I got emails at work that informed me of the need to setup a PA with a radio mic and a lapel mic on Tuesday, had a client coming in for a meeting Tuesday afternoon (That I never booked and the front office never confirmed with me), and had to pull a radio receiver out of the musical rig that is set up currently as it was faulty and needed to go back to the hire company at lunchtime on….that’s right…..TUESDAY!

Fair enough, I figured. It’s all part of the job and at least I will get a sleep in and can have a late start.

WRONG!

(more…)

I installed Google Desktop the other day and one of the gadgets you can install in it is a Quote of the day application. So, starting today I am going to add the quotes to my posts if they strike me as meaningful.

This one seems to fit my life at the moment, which is rather hectic and at times overwhelming.

Dag Hammarskjold:
“Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.”