I finally blogged my Millenium Falcon photos!!
Have a look - Lego Millenium Falcon (10179)
Results matching “Photos”
I saw this at The Pen the other day and collected the bits for it. Then of course Dave beats me to it and of course him being a graphic designer and all somewhat out-does my effort. Oh well.
To play:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. Mine was from definetheline - "Light in the Darkness"
Be sure to use an image with a Creative Commons Licence - keep refreshing until you find one!
To play:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
2. www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
3. www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. Mine was from definetheline - "Light in the Darkness"
Be sure to use an image with a Creative Commons Licence - keep refreshing until you find one!
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
ok so a little late :)
NYE Margie came over and we had a bbq (well an indoor version anyways as it was raining).. David cooked up a storm of a lot of meat .. mmmm meat :) We even finished off the leftover smoked turkey and ham that we brought up. Afterwards we played singstar, but it was insisted we play the new version, with no skips, which meant I got a few songs I've never heard of before.. doh.. And then I got beaten by an eight year old at Toxic.. doh! ;)
Spent a decent chunk of the evening doing my year in review. Then I declared it beer o'clock and had a few drinks while we watched The Fifth Element and I Am Legend. We were all too full from lunch to eat much, and in fact didn't even feel like drinking much, so by 11:30 we were all about ready to go to bed. But we hung in there, said our happy new years and watched the Sydney fireworks (that had been delayed an hour for us peoples in Queensland :) )
Yesterday we took it a bit easy, and then we headed off to the airport to go home. The takeoff was the freakiest I've ever been through. It seriously felt like we were about to get blown sideways off the runway! Distracting us from this was the little girl behind Stu who *screamed* for the entire taxi and takeoff until the seatbelt light was turned off. *yay*. Our flight took us right over the middle of Sydney, which frustrated me no end because I was on the wrong side of the plane for the best photos. But still got some reasonable ones of western Sydney. Since when does a line from Brisbane to Canberra go over Sydney tho? And we came in from the south at Canberra.. so really didn't win picking seats on the right side of the plane.
Today it was back to work. Which was not much fun, especially as I'd had so little time at home this holiday. It was a frustrating day of having to get other teams to fix things so that we could do our thing.
I finished the Millenium Falcon tonight. Well, sort of. I was missing two 2x3 grey plates, and a right wing (but I had a left wing leftover). So this is quite distressing me, and I haven't taken any photos of it "finished" yet until I can fix up the wrong bits that would be visible in photos.
Anyways.. happy new year and all that :)
2007. Interesting year. A year of upheaval.
The biggest thing to happen this year was quitting my job of ten years, moving to Canberra and starting a new job. Quitting my old job was tough, and I'd been putting it off for two years since I met Stu as I knew it was going to be difficult. I'd had it in my head that I'd stay for the full ten years and then move. Well last year they announced that there were likely to be mass redundancies, so I thought it would be a good time to leave, as I could also score a large payout. Except the redundancies never came, and in fact a couple of weeks ago they announced the plan to outsource had been scrapped. But I'd decided to leave anyway as I'd been offered a job in Canberra. Anyway, after six weeks at my new job I'm still not entirely sure what I'm meant to be doing. The whole place is very overwhelming and their server infrastructure is huge. In my first week I told someone to ask me again in a month how I was liking it. I should probably extend that for another couple of months.
On a lighter note, living in Canberra is nice. The traffic is infinitely better. Although I'm actually catching the bus to work so that I can read - something I've not done in over ten years. Is letting me actually get some books read, as I don't read at any other time. The main annoying thing with Canberra is major services and shops are only in a few select locations, which are quite spread out. And petrol stations are few and far between.
As far as wedding plans are going.. after being engaged for a full year now, all we've managed to organise is a wedding dress for me (found on eBay in February) and set a date and book a church. Reception, honeymoon and other important details have yet to be organised. Four months is plenty of time.. right..? ;)
I'm writing this in Queensland at our friends Chay and David's place. It's actually the third time we've been to visit them this year, driving up over Easter and then flying up in July. Traditionally we drink a lot, eat a lot and generally be merry, usually in the form of a lot of singing of Sing Star songs. This trip has been no exception, although we did bring a couple of board games to play this time. It'll be nice to spend New Years Eve with them, so long as I can watch fireworks at midnight :)
During our Easter trip we also got to stay with my fifth cousin twice removed Diana, and see lots of places close to Stu's heart.
The other major travel we did this year (other than the every other weekend trips between Canberra and Sydney) was five days on Lord Howe Island. It was as good as I remembered it twenty years ago, but with a lot more cars :) Stu loved it too, and we're sure to be returning to it one day.
In preparation for the move, I culled boxes and boxes of high school and university notes. I gave away and sold lots of toys and other bits and pieces from my childhood. I also freecycled a lounge chair, a table and a desk. My little brother replaced all the taps in my house, a Sydney Water plumber installed a water saving shower head and washers, and a tiler regrouted my shower. I was kicking myself that I didn't get the shower fixed a long time ago, it would have made it sooo much nicer. As it was, my shower was pretty disgusting for most of the six years I was there, until the very last week. Oh well. I still had a tonne of stuff to move though. What I couldn't tetris into Stu's place got put into storage. We have a twenty cubic metre storage unit that is very full. We hope to start looking for our own place after the wedding/honeymoon. Then we'll reevaluate everything we have.
All my fish survived the move. It did take a good half a dozen trips to get them all down though :) My major addition before moving was another white angel fish, this one a boy, to go with my girl angel. She laid eggs a couple of times after he arrived, but while he had successfully bred before and knew what to do, she had been single for so long, that she kept telling him to piss off away from her eggs, and then ate them all herself. Silly fish :) We currently have fourteen tanks with fish in them, and four that don't. Stu sold some of his juvenile Julidochromis transcriptus fish for $7 each. We're going to have to take good care of the other fry we have, as they seem to be little money-spinners :)
At the beginning of the year, I saw comet McNaught, after not thinking that I'd get to. We also saw the total lunar eclipse. And we had two astronomy nights in Spence in Canberra at someone who has a telescope mounted permanently in his backyard.
Our Christmas involved lunch at my parent's place the Sunday before Christmas (actually we were up for Jake's wedding reception on the Saturday and bundled the two). Then it was back to Canberra for Christmas day at Stu's.
Other things I did this year:
* decided to cut down the amount of orange juice I drank per day and lost two kilos
* went on lovely cruise on Lake Burley Griffin as an engagement present from Damien
* went to Cancon
* more poker nights at cia and work, with mixed success (success at work ones, failure at cia ones)
* saw the Queen Mary 2 and QE 2 in Sydney
* went up Sydney Tower with Mum and Stu
* discovered Google Sketchup
* walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge on the main deck, on the weekend of its 75th birthday
* dragged Stu up Black Mountain Tower to take photos
* participated in Earth Hour to save turning the timers on my fish tanks back an hour ;)
* saw the Amazing Human Body exhibition at the show ground
* saw the very last flight of Qantas' very first 707 jet
* saw the Kitty Hawk in Sydney
* read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the day (and day after) it came out
* dragged Stu to the Blue Mountains, down the Giant Staircase and up the Scenic Railway
* did a day trip to the snow to go skiing
* babysat Josh and Rachel at Questacon all day
* got the hiccoughs for the first time in a *very* long time
* shut down my eleven year old photo server conspiracy, after moving all the photos to a virtual host
* had a farewell at work that not too many people came to (probably about a quarter of the people that were invited)
* got a new computer
* decided very quickly that Vista sux
* met another blogger (Lil Lioness)
* got the latest Hogwarts Castle Lego set
* got the Millenium Falcon in Lego
* had about five different work end of year parties, but felt left out because I couldn't go to my old work one
* got my own Blackberry, switched to Optus only to find they are just as crap as Vodafone
Things I miss about Sydney (in no particular order):
* my job
* walking with George on Thursday nights
* lunches with Luc/cards in the office
* dinners at Alan and Marylon's
* living right next to a big airport
* my flat
* easy access to petrol stations (especially my regular one and the dude there)
* family and other friends
Things I don't miss about Sydney:
* the traffic
* my bumhead neighbours (we just have bogan neighbours here)
* Freecycle Sydney Central moderators
Have a safe 2008 :) Happy new year!!
So we went to the doctor yesterday. He took one look at my throat and said, yep that looks bacterial, and prescribed me some antibiotics. Within 24 hours the sore throat has almost gone. I also now experience the joyful side-effects of the antibiotics - runny poo! But I can handle that to be able to swallow again.
In the afternoon yesterday we went shopping for a fish tank, as they are inheriting a big angel fish, and don't really have a tank appropriate for it. So they found one they liked, and David played a good game of tetris getting it and the stand into his car. Then we all varnished it. Even the kids. There should be some photos of us all at it heh. It'll need another coat though.
Dinner was lots of evil pizza, followed by Name That Tune 80s and Buzz Hollywood. Then the others piked and David and I did much of Sing Star 80s. He of course won most of the songs, but I did beat him in one or two.
This morning we did take two on attempting to get to Ascot Provisions, this time succeeding. They've changed their kranskys which is a bit sad. Then wandered up to Sandgate to almost get blown into Moreton Bay. Then to pick up some supplies for tonight and tomorrow.
But right now there is a leg of pork roasting away, and I can smell it from down here... can't wait... :)
Merry Christmas to all. Was going to blog two days of photos, but spent all evening (four and a quarter hours) building Lego, and somehow didn't get around to photos.. oops.. :)
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.
That's a lot of Jelly Bellys...
This fly was stuck to Damien's syrup (he'd finished!). Made it easier to photograph :)
Lily being cute
Purple swamphen and chickie
