Also today ... significant day ..

I've been blogging for eleven years today .. happy blogiversary to me!

Also today marks the twentieth anniversary of the bushfires that tore through Como and Jannali in 1994, destroying our church and many of our friends' homes.

And it's David Bowie's birthday.

So 2013. Busy year!

We saw in 2013 with a small pool party at our place with Nat and Andrew and also Steve for a while.

  
We did a bit of travelling this year.

In January we went up the coast to South West Rocks to a school reunion of sorts for Stu and to visit Stu's dad. We drove up and down the coast, swam, visited Trial Bay Gaol, and caught up with Fiona and Margie on the way home.

We only managed to get to the coast once this year, in May. It was somewhat of a disaster with the spa being too cold on Friday night and too hot on Saturday night and a few other things that made it all a bit unpleasant (except for during the day on Saturday which was pretty good). Almost went again later in the year but had to go to Sydney and otherwise we've just been too busy.

We went to Queensland in July for a lovely long weekend to visit Chay and David.

At the end of July we flew up to Sydney for my Dad's 70th and one of my 40th parties (see below).

In October we decided at the last minute to go to Hong Kong for a week at the end of October. It was a great week, even if a little too humid. It's the most spontaneous holiday I've ever taken. I didn't do too much planning for it, because the more I researched, the more things I found of interest to see. So I stopped researching altogether and we took it as it came.

  
At work I had a mostly good year. I started off the year cleaning and pretty much cleaned all year. I started with the knowledge base articles for our team, then moved onto the log transfer system, then the load balancers. I also rehashed an old domino database for documentation which brought back a lot of memories of my last job. For the rest of the time it mostly felt like I was the "goto" person for any and all problems that came along. We were partly restructured, but the powers that be didn't really have a clear idea of what they wanted, so things didn't change as much as we originally thought they would. I made Stu drag out his tuxedo again for the work ball which was a lot of fun.

Healthwise I felt like I was sick the whole first half of the year - with colds in January, March, April, May and June. So that was pretty horrible. Not flus though, just annoying colds. Got another one the night before we went to Hong Kong too - yay :( But have been ok otherwise.

  
We had a super busy social year this year. In fact it was so busy that we went from May to September without having a free Saturday night. As a consequence our Buffy and Angel watching was almost non-existent. There were plenty of visits to/from Annie and Potty and the families. Various people came over for dinner and/or swims at the beginning of the year. Nat and Andrew came over a few times, as well as Andrew by himself when Nat was travelling. There were various after works drinks with my colleagues and Stu's and family and friends. Various Singstar/Mario Kart nights were had. Several BBQs at @CLBradley's. Several games nights at Mishi's. Had a video night at our place with work people. We visited people for lunches/dinners such as Matt and Helen, Andrew and Jen, Chris and Geoff, Josh and Ally, Windy and Nanette etc. We saw Daniel and Fi a few times when they came down. Several people came to stay including David and Yvonne, Ken and Jeanine, Fiona a couple of times and Stu's old school friend Tom. I met up with @StuartCRyan a few times in Sydney (we met in real life for the first time at my birthday). I also went to visit David in Junee.

Speaking of birthdays, I turned forty this year. To celebrate I had *three* great parties - one in Sydney, a big one at home the Saturday before my birthday, then a big lunch at work on my birthday followed by a nice dinner and seeing Phantom of the Opera. I was certainly in a different place mentally for my fortieth. During the whole run-up to my thirtieth I was very depressed, and my actual birthday was pretty meh. Such a different story this year though.

  
In sadder news, my Nana died of old age earlier in the year. And then I found out at the funeral that I have another cousin that I'd never heard about before!

Also in sad news, my father got diagnosed with a brain tumour in March. He had surgery immediately (and they had to cancel a holiday to New Zealand), followed by chemo and radiotherapy. Unfortunately it didn't really help, and he was hospitalised in July because he kept falling over and wasn't able to walk properly. He's been getting progressively worse and has been in a nursing home since September. In August I started going up to Sydney fairly regularly to see Dad and help Mum with the mammoth task of clearing out the garage and workshop. We've mostly been sorting things so far as I don't want to get rid of things until Dad goes. Fortunately I've been able to work out of the Sydney office so not having to take leave at the moment.

  
We've been enjoying a lot of visits to our little social club. We camped there over the Australia day long weekend, and the new tent survived a storm and massive downpour fairly well. But then a caravan came up for sale, so we bought it! We went to most of the club nights during the year, and plenty of other times as well. It's Stu's little get-away-from-the-world place and he thoroughly enjoys it.

With work people or the sweetie, tried out a few new restaurants. Continued going to Black Pepper for brunches and also Pulp Kitchen a few times. Went to Dumpling Inn a few times and Bella Vista as well. Didn't try too many desserts this year, although did make a Mars Bar slice and a peppermint rocky road, as well as an apple crumble and caramel slice that we tried at the club.

  
We bought another four baby angels for the angel tank. One died but the other three survived, so now have four angels and about seven danios in that tank. We got a lovely little betta for the macquarium, but he never thrived and died in six weeks. So thinking I'll probably give the macquarium away. The four foot still has a school of duboisis, two multies, a lelupi and a J.transcriptus. There's three multis downstairs, but after breeding once, the single baby I saw disappeared and haven't seen any since. There's still three or four quite old kribs downstairs as well.

Not much Lego action this year. I did get a cute little plane from Fiona, and a small City set from Ric for my birthday. I went with Nat and Andrew to Brick Expo, but was very frustrated with the crowds. I dismantled the Millennium Falcon which had been out for four years! Also over the Christmas break got to sort out and build all of Jake's lego which has been fun.

I did a lot of jigsaws this year. Mostly downstairs until downstairs got too cold. Mostly little ones, but also another section of the huge "Life" puzzle. Gave up on the skies of two jigsaws because their quality was just too poor.

I celebrated my tenth blogiversary this year. To mark the occasion I upgraded to Movable Type 5. But got very frustrated with the fact that I now cannot SSH to my host. Also with Movable Type which is *very* buggy. Next year my domain is up for renewal and I'm thinking about moving my domain to a new host with a new blogging platform. But the whole idea is pretty scary, so we'll see about that...

Shows

• The only show I saw this year was The Phantom of the Opera on my birthday.

Movies
Not many movies this year either...

• The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey
• Star Trek - Into Darkness
• Garden of Words and Ghost in the Shell: Arise

Books

• Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein
• Polgara the Sorceress by David and Leigh Eddings
• Careful, he might hear you, by Sumner Locke Elliott
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Déjà Dead by Kathy Reichs
• A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
• I Hate You - Don't Leave Me by Jerold Kreisman and Hal Straus
• The Naked Husband by Mark D'Arbanville
• Death du Jour by Kathy Reichs
• Airport by Arthur Hailey
• Body of Evidence by Patricia Cornwall

Other stuff

• Had a full day at the War Memorial with Ken and Jeanine
• Had a jigsaw race with Nat
• Found my first geocache with Nat and Andrew
• Saw a Roller Derby bout
• Mum got her first mobile phone
• Had a random day off work to tidy up all the fish tank stuff in the garage
• Went for some walks around Palmerville with the sweetie
• Spotted the ISS a few times and waved to @Cmdr_Hadfield. Wasn't quite the same when he came back to earth.
• Went to the balloon fiesta on Canberra Day
• Watched the last couple of episodes and finale of House, which considering the timing with dad was pretty sad
• Took Stu's car for a drive up Mount Ainslie and got covered in lady bugs
• Our PS3 stopped playing DVD disks. Bluray is still ok though.  We considered getting a PS4 but the device isn't backwards compatible with old games.
• Went out to Captain's Flat on our fifth wedding anniversary
• Finished a cross stitch I got for Christmas in 1992
• Went up Black Mountain Tower
• Voted in ABC Classic FM's top 100 music in the movies, and most of my votes were in the top two hundred
• Did a blog for our trip to America in 1983
• Gave up reading Boing Boing, Life Hacker and Neatorama, Dooce and Dilbert
• Got extremely pissed off when Google Reader shut down. Destroyed my faith in Google.
• Looked at Comma Feed, Feedly and The Old Reader. Stuck with The Old Reader.  The Old Reader subsequently crashed from all the extra load of departing Google users, but was able to get funding to run on better hosting and has been fine ever since.
• Got more of my photos onto the RiotACT
• Cancelled Aussie Farmers Direct orders
• Had a look around Wintercon at EPIC
• Stu had a few car dramas that Melba Motors didn't fix
• I had a LOT of car dramas that Melba Motors didn't fix
• Saw the Skywhale
• Played through Diablo with the sweetie.  On easy mode.  Sue me.
• Did proper karaoke for the first time ever (and I've been to Japan four times!)
• Went to a Christmas Carols service at Como

So that's the end of 2013.  New Year's Eve will be spent out at the club with food and booze and friends and fairy lights and fireworks :)

So this little blog turned ten years old today!

Happy blogiversary to me! heh

Ten years, or a quarter of my life in writing and online.  Ten pretty big years with a lot of ups and downs, four big overseas holidays, a wedding, a new house, a new job.  And mostly all chronicled here, to varying levels of detail.

I had no idea when I started this blog how dependent on it I would become.  Simply as an easy place to find when I did things or find a photo to show someone.  A place to put photos online for friends/family/strangers. My only regret with the blog is not starting it earlier (even though there really wasn't such a thing much before 2003).

I had wanted to update the style/design of the blog, but ran out of time, on account of being away the entire Christmas holiday, and having last weekend taken up by simply FTPing files up and down.  So I may get something new online in the next little while.  Maybe.  The best I could do was update a few things like the footer, my blogroll and the site description, add navigation links to each entry, and republish the whole site (took twenty seven minutes this time).

Thanks to everyone that's come along for the ride, it's been great!

.. birthday David Bowie!

I didn't blog anything particular for this year's blogiversary, which also happened to be the fifteenth anniversary of the January 1994 bushfires that ripped through Como/Jannali.  Those fires were closer to home (literally - about 300m away) and destroyed our church and several of our friend's houses, therefore having a massive impact on me to this day whenever I see bushfire images. 

But only one person died there that day.

The weekend bushfires in Victoria were epic sad.  135 lives lost so far.  And that's sure to rise.

Kinda puts my crap day at work into perspective...

2008 was certainly a momentous year in the life of Kazza.

The first big news story of the year was that I got married to Stu in April.  I spent several months planning the thing, and planned pretty much everything myself.  In the end, the day went pretty successfully and everyone seemed to have a nice time.  I got the wedding I wanted for the most part, although I did get very stressed out by the reception venue, and they ruined the enjoyment of the reception for me.

Following the wedding we took off on our honeymoon, spending a night in Japan, then a month touring Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.  Took six and a half thousand photos between us and generally had a blast.  Lots of places we'd like to go back to!

The other really big news story of the year is that we bought a house here in Canberra.  And seemingly at just the right time - right in the midst of the world financial crisis which was very scary, but the subsequent drop in interest rates will save us something like $12000 per year!!!  We still have a couple of messy rooms, but are very much enjoying the house and we've had several groups of people stay with us.

Work has been a bit variable.  The first couple of months of the year I was still feeling very overwhelmed by the place, yet didn't have too much to do so was very lost.  After the honeymoon I was put on call, which meant learning a lot of things by being thrown in the deep end.  I was also dumped on severely with work, and found it very stressful from time to time.  Can't see any sign of letup any time soon :(  After a particularly crap day one night in July, I starting drinking with the guys earlier than usual and finished relatively late, which really launched the weekly drinking sessions (which up until that time had been a lot shorter and quieter). 

Other travelling included the trip over new years last year to visit Chay and David, a weekend at the coast with Scott and Kerry, a weekend in Sydney in March and another in July to attend my Nana's 80th birthday party, visit James and George, and see Stu's grandmother and aunties.  Two days and ten hours of driving was pretty tiring.  Chay and David came down just after Christmas to stay, which meant we spent two new years in a row with them which would have been cooler had I not collapsed in a grumpy/depressed heap. 

In fish news, we cut the number of tanks from fourteen down to seven.  Fourteen was far too much work and fish were getting severly neglected.  Seven is a bit more manageable but we may still cull further.  Moving all the tanks to our new house was definitely not fun, but we got most fish moved with only a few casualties.  One of my original angel fishies is still alive, making her six years old now.  She has appreciated the big water change of the move and laid several batches of eggs after the move.

Eating out, we tried a few various restaurants.  We discovered Satis in Watson in the middle of winter.  Satis is vegetarian and we have been there three or four times, although not since we moved.  Then there is the Kingsland vegan restaurant in Dickson which is fantastic.  Have only been there twice, but will definitely be going again.  And Fortune Box in Gungahlin is still a favourite shopping day lunch spot.  Bella Vista in Belconnen and the Dumpling Inn in Jamison are favourites as well.  Fanciest restaurant we visited all year was Watersedge on Lake Burley Griffin.  This was two weeks before the wedding after I'd had my hair and makeup trial, so we got dressed up and went out for dinner.  Was very nice, but of course very expensive!

We tried to see Stu's brother every week for a "sci-fi" night.  We watched all of Firefly, Serenity and some Battlestar Galactica.  But towards the end of the year this all got too hard.  Hopefully we'll do something next year.

Movies seen this year:

• Juno - pretty good, if a little unrealistic
  
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - fun but too ridiculous and too much on the "yeah right" scale
  
• Appleseed Saga: Ex Machina - very well done, but hard to keep up with the subtitles and watch all the action
  
• The Dark Knight - good movie, but dark and very long
  
• Quantum of Solace - ok, was too tied to the last movie
  
• Australia - very enjoyable, but very long (really it's two stories back to back), so don't know how would stand up to repeated viewings
  

And finally, a few other snippets:

• This blog had its 5th blogiversary and was celebrated with a new design
• Visited the Planetarium before it closed and met Andrew
• Little Squishy was born
• Went to the balloon fiesta
• Bought an Eee PC
• Set off fireworks on cracker night
• Went to a six-day SANS course
• Got excited by snow falling in Canberra!
• Went to an astronomy night at Mt Stromlo
• Went to two trivia nights - one with Nat and Andrew, and one at work
• Had the house wired with cat 6 by my brother and Shane and Chris
  
• Took the booze train to Tarago
• Played Zone 3 for the first time and actually won a game
• Big family Christmas with all of Stu's family and Kerry's family
  

So that's about it for another year.  Hoping to be a little more organised next year and more relaxed about life...

So as mentioned previously, it was my fifth Blogiversary this week.  I decided last year that I wanted to update the style, and the version of Movable Type at the same time.  And move it to a Webcity cPanel box. Unfortunately the weeks leading up to Christmas I was busy with getting ready for Christmas, and then we went to Queensland.  So I basically had one weekend to work on it, which was a lot less than I'd hoped for!

So anyway.  Here's some of my comments and traumas.

Install Wizard
The setup wizard was incredibly easy to setup and use - and it just worked!  Soooo much easier that MT2, which required a tonne of hacking.  I've not decided if I'll keep the default path where I just happened to dump the files, or see about changing it.  My last blog didn't use MySQL - I used Movable Type's version 2.661 database, which I liked using as I could easily backup the database myself by just grabbing the files.  I've still to write something to backup my MySQL database regularly. 

File Permissions
In 2004 I hacked my old blog to change the file permissions that MT uses by default.  For this version I followed these instructions to hack mt-config.cgi to include:
DBUmask 0022
HTMLUmask 0022
UploadUmask 0022
DirUmask 0022
This means that the files aren't written as being world writable - not good on a shared hosting site!

Style
The next step was to pick some sort of style for the site.  I decided that I wanted Black Mountain Tower in the masthead somewhere, to indicate my new life.  But I didn't have any good panorama type shots of it.  So dragged Stu down to the lake last weekend after church to take some panorama photos.  I used one of the "Cityscape" MT styles - the Sydney one actually! and then hacked that to bits.  Well chunks really, not little bits ;)  Found some actual bugs in the style sheet where Tiffany had misspelt tags so they weren't actually being used - tragic really for a professional. 

Widgets
I don't know if these were included in version 3, as I skipped straight from 2 to 4.  But they're pretty nifty.  It took me a while to actually figure out the Movable Type interface to find them - hidden away in the footer templates!! - under your 2 or 3 column layouts includes.  This site gives more info on changing the templates to use the drag and drop widget management bizzo - which I did and I can now drag and drop my widgets.  But by doing that you do lose some of the MTif statements for whether things like the archive descriptions are displayed on the archive pages.  I could hack all my widgets, or just have an index style and a non-index style column layout.  Still thinking about that one.

Gravatar
Getting Gravatar working again involved simply downloading the plugin and not so simply hacking the style sheet for it to display ok (I'm not very good at style sheets!)

RSS Feed
MT4 has a full feed RSS feed by default now - I just use the rss.xml file.  So anyone using my old rss url should use this one now.

Google Analytics
Inserted this into my footer template.  Strangely visits have gone up heaps since the changeover.  So either the old code wasn't being loaded properly, or visits are now working differently because of the broken image searches (see below for more on that).  I'm thinking more likely the latter.

Captchas
Now included with Movable Type, but really really ugly.  Will look at finding a friendlier one.

Importing my old blog
Strangely I left this til the last minute after doing my styles - after all you don't want to be rebuilding a site of my size too often - it takes a good five minutes each time!
I didn't do any research into this before I went ahead with it, assuming that I'd be able to figure it out.  In the end the process was actually fairly simple, but it did take a few goes to get the formatting of the file right.  The way I did it was to go to my old installation of MT on the other server, and do the export.  Save that export to a text file (mine was about 3mb in size).  Then import into the new blog.  In the end used the unix format of the output file, and when importing using "Convert line breaks" and UTF-8 encoding.  (Used this page for hints on this which worked)

Broken Images
Of course once everything was imported, all the links to my images were wrong.  You see I'd decided not to use the old paths for my images.  Although this means less hits from Google image searches, it'd also screw up anyone that's been direct linking my images for the past five years.  Such people deserve to die.  So I attempted the search and replace feature.  But for some reason this worked really badly.  So I think I've fixed up my images, but I can't really be sure, and some of my pages might still be missing images.

Broken Links
This one was going to take some work.  Because in addition to the several hundred of my entries that refer to earlier entries, all external links were going to be broken.  I decided to use the .htaccess method of redirecting people. 
The biggest problem is that MT2 uses files in the format archives/002190.html while MT4 uses entry titles in the file name, and puts them in monthly directories.  So I needed to convert the old links to the new format.  In my old blog I downloaded Dirify Plus, then created another index template with the following in it:
<MTEntries lastn="2500">
RedirectMatch /mt-archives/<MTEntryID pad="1">.html /<MTEntryDate format="%Y/%m">/<MTEntryTitle trim_to="40" dirifyplus="pld">.html </MTEntries>
This generated a massive page of text that could be used directly in a .htaccess file.  This worked well, except for the few hundred broken links where I'd had duplicate entries, and the couple of hundred pages that were more than 30 characters, which appears to be the limit MT4 uses.  I tried setting my dirify to 30 characters, but that didn't seem to work, so I just hacked an excel file to rebuild the links for me.  The duplicate entry titles are still a problem (the first one is whatever-1, then whatever-2 etc).  I'm thinking I might have to hack the .htaccess file manually for those. 

Pages
MT4 lets you create static pages that aren't part of the blog, which is a useful feature.  I created a 404 error page, and put that in the .htaccess file, so people that come from broken image searches will see that. 

Search Feature
The new search tool is a bit retarded in that it returns the entire page of a blog entry.  If you put in something like "the" you'd probably end up returning the entire blog in one page.  Will have to read up on how to change that.

Photo Uploading
My first attempts at uploading photos were a bit frustrating.  It doesn't have the old feature to "show html" when uploading files, and wants to create a new entry every time.  I barely spent any time looking at this though, as it wasn't a priority for going live.  I might have a look at Better File Uploader, or do some more reading to find out if I've just missed something.

Comment Notifications
Haven't been able to get these to work, even though the test email when I was setting everything up worked.  So I know sendmail will work with the blog, but I just can't figure out how to get it to email me whenever a comment is posted.  Very annoying!

Todo
Still have a big todo list.  Things like:

• fix comment notification emails
  
• decide on sidebar widgets, and put Host1/CIA buttons back
• bring over my subblogs - Stoopid Quizzes, and the 10030 Star Destroyer page and my USA 2004 page
• create a new favicon.ico
• fix up imood background colour
• change my Gravatars to fit in with new style
• get a nicer captcha
• setup backups of the database
• figure out how to upload multiple images - can do this, but the html is butt ugly
  
• create a "Wishlist" widget - something I wanted as a plugin but noone seems to have ever written
• fix list of blogs style
• hack the link creator to put target="_blank" in
  
• fix up my Weather Pixie page
• fix search returns
• see if there's a simpler create entry form that'll work from the Blackberry
• hack the image insertion code so it puts br clear=left tags in - edited lib/MT/Asset.pm and put the br clear=left stuff in this line - return qq{<form mt:asset-id="$id" class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-$type">$html</form> <br clear="left">};  (discussion about this was found here). 
  July 2008: Hacked this further to completely remove the class bit from the form tag.  Also hacked lib/MT/Asset/Image.pm to hash out the wrap_style line for left aligned images and just set $wrap_style to blank, so as to not have any extra nonsense around the images that cause them to render badly in Google news reader
  
• put category and tags of entries in index template
  

So yeah, all in all it actually went really well.  And I managed to go live on schedule.  And to the little group of people that are still around reading this after five years, thanks for coming to read my drivel all these years :)

Five years ago today I started this blog.

So I thought after five years of the same design, I'd update it a little.

I also moved it to another server, so that all my various virtual hosts can be in the same place. 

Please excuse the mess for the next few hours :)