Stu asked me tonight what I'd see in the Mirror of Erised. The first thing that came to mind was a quiet but happy life with my sweetie, on our computers, doing our own things but still together in a life of domestic bliss.
So there. :)
(Gonna need more John Williams at the reception.. :) )
Results matching “Life”
So I took a break after book six of Anne of Green Gables to read a book lent to me by a guy at work - The Cuckoo's Egg, by Clifford Stoll. What a difference!
A book with a plot!!
I'd read the Reader's Digest version of this years and years ago, and so when someone mentioned it at work, someone else mentioned that they had a copy so I asked if I could borrow it.
As it turns out, Stu also has a copy, and he also has Silicon Snake Oil, so I'll probably read that when I've finished Anne of Green Gables.
But anyway. Great read. I could have used a little bit more technical detail but it was obviously targeted at a wider market. I liked reading about the worm attack at the end as part of the epilogue, and the sprinklings of his home life. Recommended :)
Spent a hideous amount of money today.
But one of my life-long goals is a step closer to reality...
But one of my life-long goals is a step closer to reality...
#24. To buy a 10mL bottle of paint costs 50km on your car and four and a half hours of your life.
That's one reason I dislike Canberra. Stuff is just so far away. You can't just do anything "on the way home". You have to dedicate a whole day to it.
And of course by the time you actually get home (in this case after 4pm), you're too exhausted to actually do anything, and the day may as well be over. *blip* there goes half my weekend :(
*sigh*
That's one reason I dislike Canberra. Stuff is just so far away. You can't just do anything "on the way home". You have to dedicate a whole day to it.
And of course by the time you actually get home (in this case after 4pm), you're too exhausted to actually do anything, and the day may as well be over. *blip* there goes half my weekend :(
*sigh*
Started watching Ali tonight.
I say *started* because it was just too crap to watch it all the way through. I seriously *never* give up on watching movies, but this was an exception. Unless you actually knew the story about this dude (which I don't really), you'd have absolutely no clue what was going on. So I'm sitting there wondering what the hell is going on.
Life is too short for crap movies.
I say *started* because it was just too crap to watch it all the way through. I seriously *never* give up on watching movies, but this was an exception. Unless you actually knew the story about this dude (which I don't really), you'd have absolutely no clue what was going on. So I'm sitting there wondering what the hell is going on.
Life is too short for crap movies.
So I've just finished reading book four of the Anne of Green Gables series.
Half way through!
I have to say that reading them has been quite pleasureable, but also a little annoying.
There's so little plot!! So little conflict or turmoil. Anne just seems to live this charmed life where everything goes right for her and everyone she touches is blessed. The books are written more as little serials where each little adventure takes only a chapter or two and then you never hear of it again. Throughout the series you are left wondering what is happening to Diana and Gilbert, as in book four you barely hear a peep over three years what is happening to them.
The second movie was a mish-mash of stories from the second-fourth books. I do rememeber the Pringle conflict in the movie sequel that came up in the fourth book, but the way it was dealt with in the book was so *silly* and *as if* prejudices could evaporate so quickly!
Don't get me wrong, I'm really enjoying reading these books.. it's just that they kinda lack *something*.. and don't know how much they'd stand up to repeated readings...
Half way through!
I have to say that reading them has been quite pleasureable, but also a little annoying.
There's so little plot!! So little conflict or turmoil. Anne just seems to live this charmed life where everything goes right for her and everyone she touches is blessed. The books are written more as little serials where each little adventure takes only a chapter or two and then you never hear of it again. Throughout the series you are left wondering what is happening to Diana and Gilbert, as in book four you barely hear a peep over three years what is happening to them.
The second movie was a mish-mash of stories from the second-fourth books. I do rememeber the Pringle conflict in the movie sequel that came up in the fourth book, but the way it was dealt with in the book was so *silly* and *as if* prejudices could evaporate so quickly!
Don't get me wrong, I'm really enjoying reading these books.. it's just that they kinda lack *something*.. and don't know how much they'd stand up to repeated readings...
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:
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 pageand 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
Nothing much to report. My life is boring. Working an extra half an hour per day sux. Not having much to do other than reading isn't much fun either. Christmas decorations go up this weekend. More photos of lights are sure to follow.
So the other day the Lil Lioness mentioned that her boy was out of town for this week as well, so I suggested we meet up.
So tonight we meandered into the city for dessert. We were originally going to go to Cream, however that was booked out by lots of girls, and Richard Wilkins. So we went to Cafe Essen instead for cake and drinks. I had a lemon meringue pie and a blueberry smoothie. After which I was completely full. Even though I hadn't actually had any dinner, having had a big lunch. Quite odd. But it was all very pleasant. Talked about the usual bits and pieces bloggers talk about, as well as life in Canberra in general.
And then I got home and found bits of blueberry all through my teeth. Yay. :(