It’s been quite a while since I last posted anything on my blog. There are some very good reasons for this, which I will now explain to you.

Work

Work has been stupidly busy over the last few weeks. There are plenty of lowlights. Dance schools, corporate work, and days of paperwork that backs up on my desk while I work on shows. These are just a few of the annoying as shit jobs that have been taking my time.

There was one highlight that became a lowlight. We had Dr Hook, the hit makers from the 70’s at our venue. I was looking forward to that show. It’s not often that I get to mix for honest to goodness legends of Rock and Roll. It’s also not often that I get to really crank up the volume of our PA system and really put on a Rock show.

I received the tech specs from the promoter and it was a big show. Seven sends of foldback monitors, requests for extra subwoofers, the list goes on and on. Unfortunately the promoter didn’t want to pay for any of the additional equipment that was required to meet the spec. I told them that a dedicated monitor engineer was needed to cater for the performers needs during the show, they told me I had to do it from the front of house position.

Now this is fairly normal for smaller shows. On this show however, we were talking about a lead singer who is in his 60’s, has spent the best part of 30 years in front of very loud bands, has two, count them, TWO hearing aids, and requires extremely loud monitor volumes to be heard over the drumkit and band amplifiers that are no more than five feet from him at all times.

Add to that the fact that my console is up three flights of stairs at the very back of the room and there are 800 people between me and the stage and you can start to get a picture of the problems that can occur.

And of course, they did. Part way through the show, Ray Sawyer’s foldback wedges start to cut in and out. He complains to me over the PA, but I can’t fix it. I send my guy on stage to go and figure out the problem. He can’t find it. It seems to be an intermittent issue that he can’t track down easily.

The show went on but it suffered, and I got the blame, even though I said it could happen and said they should have had a monitor engineer on stage to do it. Sometimes it sucks being right.

Games

I’ve been playing a lot of Eve:Online lately. It’s a space based MMORPG and is possibly the most addictive game I have ever had the fortune/misfortune of playing. This game sucks me in for hours at a time, and, although I know I should be writing a post on my blog, I always forget until midnight when I must sleep in preparation for work.

Sleep

The final and possibly most important reason for not writing. Any spare time that I can find between work, Eve, and general personal maintenance (food, bathing, toilet stops) is filled with sleep. That doesn’t mean that there is a lot of it going on, but all spare time is definitely being occupied by it.

And now, the weather.

While the Northern Hemisphere sits wonderfully cool and wintery, we here in Australia are one day away from the official start of summer.  For those of you who have never experienced and Australian summer, here is a brief overview.

By mid spring we have reached daytime temperatures of 30 degrees celsius. Night time temperatures are starting to rise and blankets and heaters have long been traded for a single sheet and a fan or air conditioning. (If only I could afford air con I’d be fine)

By the end of spring, such as today, we here in Ipswich have hit a midday high of 38 degrees celsius. You walk outside and the heat hits you like a giant wall of warm molasses. You sweat. Constantly. The breeze is hot, even in the shade. Tonight it will probably only get down to 22 or 23 degrees.

I’m sitting here on my lounge, with my laptop burning my legs, a fan on high pointed directly at me. I probably won’t move for the next few hours because to do so would mean more sweat.

I can’t wait for my holidays to start in a few weeks so I can go home to Hervey Bay and sit in cool ocean breezes while I drink on the back patio of my Mum’s house. Until then, I actually look forward to going to work, just so that I can sit in the air conditioning.

I know that I haven’t posted here in a while. I’m busy, I’ll get to it soon. I promise.

It seems that I have become the target of comment spammers. In fact, in the past three days I have received over 180 spam comments. Most of these are getting caught by my spam blocker Akismet but a few are sneaking through. Unfortunately, even though I can delete the comments, once a comment gets through it seems to increase the rate that they turn up.

To attempt to reduce and control this shit from turning up on my blog, I am switching to moderated comments, at least until the spam flood stops. Hopefully this won’t affect too many people.

If anyone knows some relatively foolproof methods to stop spam on Wordpress blogs, I’d love to hear about it.

One of the great things about website statistics is that I can see who is checking my blog, where they are coming from and what they are reading. I know what country the readers are from, what browser they use, what time they read my blog. It’s very cool.

It also shows me how few people are actually reading my site. That doesn’t really bother me. You see, I scan through the logs fairly regularly and see a few entries recurring through the records. And so, here is a short thank you to those who keep coming back that I recognise in the logs.

Lily - you were the first person ever to comment on my blog. You always seem to show up when I am feeling down and cheer my right up. Thank you.

Grumble - a buddy from Frugal’s World. You stick out in the logs as the only person from Japan who visits here. You are a link to my other internet life. Thanks for coming round.

Fatman - you haven’t commented yet, but, your IP is the only hit from Canberra that shows up. I wish we could catch up this weekend when you are up here.

The strangest thing for me is that I am slowly coming to terms with the idea that people I actually know in real life might be reading this blog. I say things here that I probably wouldn’t say face to face. But, I am also getting things off my chest, and that has to be good in the end.

I’m still not sure if this blog will ever have a theme. My mind is just too random to follow one style, or subject for very long. My posts aren’t regular, and don’t have a strict format. I just write whatever is on my mind, whenever I get the urge. Maybe that’s the theme. My blog is my scratchpad.

The Story - By Neil from Citizen of the Month

I love a good story, and this one touches on two of my very favourite things in the world. Magic Orbs.

Read it, love it, tell it to your grandkids. It’s a classic.

Ok, I have mostly fixed the issues with the webpage that IE was freaking out about while Firefox and Opera displayed it perfectly.  The main page works as expected in IE now, although the individual post pages for some reason show a horizontal and vertical scrollbar.

You know what? That’s good enough for me right now. I mean, surely everyone should know by now that IE is the largest piece of donkey turd ever and should have switched over to Firefox or Opera. So come on people! Get out there, download the excellent alternatives and see my page as it was intended

Or at the very least, reduce the security issues that you get with IE and be safe on the ‘net.

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]

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.

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. Continue Reading »

I found a quite handy part of Live Writer tonight. It has the ability to insert tags such as Technorati tags etc. The html for these tags can be edited so the appear as you want them.

A quick search through the source of the blog and it turns out that the new Labels addition in Blogger Beta is nothing more than a link to a search page for the blog. A quick cut and paste job and I can now insert Blogger Labels into the posts from Live Writer, as well as adding Technorati tags.

I don’t know who Bill stole the idea for this software from but it was a good idea to steal. Simple and effective blog publishing for the masses. Not too complicated like other blog clients that are out there. Most likely it will be free which gives it another tick in my book.

Windows Live Writer (Beta)

That’s what I am using to write this post. Now I am normally opposed to using much in the way of Microsoft products apart from the operating system itself. I refuse to use Internet Explorer. It is buggy, insecure, and is so slow and clunky compared to other options such as Firefox and Opera.

Office and Outlook are a ridiculous waste of cash. If only the myriad of users out there could be pointed to Open Office and Mozilla Thunderbird, they could find that almost all the functionality that anyone ever needs is contained in free software that is generally better supported and maintained than the hideously expensive offerings by Bill Gates.

Maybe, just maybe, the fact that Windows Live Writer is currently free, it might become a useful tool. Then again it might be made payware in the next six months and then I’ll have to stop using it.

The advantages I can see right now are:

Support for Technorati tags

WYSIWYG editing that beats the Blogger Beta interface hands down

Edit, design and layout your posts in the way it will actually look on the blog

Unlike Frontpage, Windows Live Writer seems to keep the HTML code a lot cleaner and uncluttered

So far, I’m liking it. We’ll see how it goes over the next few weeks.

In the past few weeks of setting up the blog, designing the site and generally trying to figure out how this whole new side of the interweb works, I have noticed a rather annoying trend. Much the same as anyone setting up a homepage or business website, people creating blogs seem to be caught up in the hunt to be number “1″. Comments on other peoples blogs are full of spam to promote the blogs or blog search engines of others, blogs are full of internet garbage like Ebay links, porn, or just junk with repetitive keywords to produce a better Google or Technorati result.

I’ve spent a large portion of today looking for interesting blogs. Not just groups of people who have only barely evolved from MySpace, or sites that are no more than a replica of a business website so that the company gets more exposure to search engines. I’ve found some that were vaguely interesting but hard to decipher, many that do nothing other than regurgitate CNN and BBC:Worldwide feeds, and only one or two that seemed as though they had something worthwhile to say.

Now, I am the first person to put my hand up and say that I am probably not the most interesting or innovative person on the ‘net. I will however, endeavour to make every post here an original post. If I quote a news site it will be because I have something to say about that article, and I will say it.

So, now that I have made that rather worrying promise, I can point you to a site that I found today on my searches. This site is called Strangers Among Us. It is a collaborative blog by a few guys who take photos around their towns that capture people in action. Not posed or planned, but people living their lives. The post that really grabbed my attention was this one - Errands at Box Stores. More specifically the photo of the cashier at a coffee shop in the process of being abused by a customer. There is something in that picture that, I think, captures the duality of life. This poor cashier has no choice but to assist the customer, no matter if he was at fault, or if the person is just plain unreasonable, and all the while he must be thinking that he is better than this.

How many times have we all been in a situation where we have been on the receiving end of something that was undeserved and yet have had to bear it because at that moment we have no other option. It seems obvious to me that if people would only remember those times in their life, that we would be treating each other a lot better. What ever happened to “Do unto others..”?