Category: General

Well, I’m rather proud of myself. Last night, on a whim, I decided to register a couple more domain names to play with (more on that at some point.) I then decided, on a whim, to actually buy some hosting instead of hosting sites on my poor old 512/128 Internode adsl connection.

So, I was left with a dilemma. How do I migrate my existing blog from my debian box here at home onto the new box?

After a very quick google, it turned out to be as easy as pie.

This post is an attempt to see whether it works. Then I’m going to have a bourbon.

May I say thanks to the good people at Hostcentral for hosting the site. So far things have been really smooth and painless.

OK, and as a footnote to that – the site is a bit rooted at the moment. I think a lot of the links in the site are hardcoded into it, and the DNS isn’t quite propagated yet (another day or two and all will be fine.) As a result it isn’t picking up the style sheet.

Hopefully things will look better soon, then I can crap on some more (and hopefully find some more interesting things to crap on about).

In the meantime, I’m going to get pissed. 🙂

It’s been an interesting few days. Friday was an interesting day at work – I have a new area manager, who’s a good guy. He’ll be pretty handy to have around, I reckon.

Then yesterday I get a phone call, outlining a couple of job opportunities elsewhere. Now I’m sitting here neglecting all the other things I’m supposed to be doing, and mulling over this decision, which I have to supply an answer to tomorrow!

All the pros and cons are starting to annoy me – but it boils down to two things really – money, and future opportunities. One offers much more scope for getting involved in other parts of the business in future, but my cost of living will increase substantially, and that isn’t something I want. The other offers cheaper cost of living, but is further away from the aforementioned opportunities.

In the end though, I figure if I want to get involved in these other parts of the business, I should be able to do some of it from elsewhere anyway.

Where I’m at now financially is probably slightly more important than the job that I’m actually doing. If that makes any sense.

Blah. I’m rambling. Sometimes I just wish that there was someone else here to make these decisions for me. She who shall not be named will be getting a phone call from me tonight, just to bounce things off her. I have to decide by tomorrow! Still getting over that part of it.

Anyway – must stop neglecting those things that I should be doing on my day off. This blog will hear the answers to my pondering soon enough.

It’s been pissing down rain for 2 days solid. Yesterdays drive down the coast was a complete washout – not a lot of fun at all.

And tomorrow I get to go to work on my day off – yay!

On a brighter note – I got a letter today saying the special plates I’ve applied for for the ute have been approved and ordered – I should have them in a couple of weeks – that’ll be sweet!

I ordered a DVD burner last night – a Pioneer 107 – plus a couple more 120 gig hard drives. I just never seem to have enough space. Hopefully I’ll get them fairly quickly, as I’m currently shuffling files around to make room for my downloads and things are getting desperate! I guess I could burn some CDs but I really could NOT be fucked.

It’s so nice to have everything on the hard drive and easily accessible. These new drives will make it, umm… 520 gig of storage in this box 😀

It’s really more like 490 when you allow for all the file system overheads and the space Windows steals for itself, but still. 3 x 120 gig drives and 2 x 80 gig drives. That’s a lot of space! 🙂

What a long day. So many little successes and failures can occur in the course of one day that sometimes it just feels like you’re riding a rollercoaster all day. Just gotta learn to go with the flow, I guess.

Tomorrow I have a day trip down to the coast to visit a customer. Hooray! Well, kinda – at least it means I get to be out of the shop for a few hours.

Two and a half hours each way, to be exact. That’s a lot of time on the road (but that’s OK, the novelty of the new car still hasn’t worn off) 🙂

There has to be something interesting to write about – but as yet I haven’t found it. Seems there’s been a little rut in the road, and I fell right into it. :\

Australia Day is almost over. What a wonderful day (actually the only reason I like it is today was a short day at work.)

So, let’s see, what’s new – I’ve been to Hobart on the weekend – I got very drunk at a mates place – but hey, it was fun.

Zimbabwe got caned in the cricket today – absolutely nothing unusual. Oh, my father decided to grace me with a phone call this evening, which was about as much fun as having my wisdom teeth removed.

Fair dinkum, I reckon parents are genetically inclined to annoy us – or us kids(!) are genetically inclined to be annoyed by them. I’m 27 years old and whenever I speak to him I just want to start cutting myself with sharp implements.

It’s not like I don’t care about the guy, honestly – he just drives me (more?) insane. I’m totally sick of playing the “see how long he’ll talk for without interruption” game – it’s pointless. I can place the phone down, go and cook some two minute noodles, bring them back and start eating them – he’d never notice, and his rantings would continue. Unfortunately I just tune out these days, maybe that’s why it’s so irritating to speak to him because I know that I’m gaining absolutely zero important information from the conversation.

Well, that’s not very nice I guess. He needs someone to talk to about his life, etc – don’t we all. It’s just that I don’t really care for a 25 minute spiel about the pond he’s building in his backyard. I’m sure it’ll look nice and all, but geeze! And I appreciate that he’s my father and he needs to hear that I’m doing OK.

The most infuriating thing about it is that I have a tendency to ramble on in conversation myself – and every time I do it my brain is screaming at me “you’re him, you’re him” and another, less tolerant part of my brain is telling me to shut the fuck up.

When this happens, it’s no wonder I can be a little shy and slow to open up with people. I don’t know whether to be a talkative annoying little prick, or a silent, creepy little prick. I’m still not sure..

OK, the above is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. A little, at least……

Let there be rock:

Pics are here, here and here.

It looks fairly tidy (and it doesn’t sound half bad either, just quietly) 😉

Not too bad without amps – haven’t had a chance to try out mp3 playback yet but my burnt CDs sure sound pretty good.

Played the really heavy version of Haunted by Evanescence on the way home and the bass was enough to cause a rumbling in the ol’ bowels.

New alarm is heaps better as well, I feel a lot more secure now – hopefully the insurance company will like it too 🙂

One of the most riveting games of cricket I’ve ever seen!

India batted well and finish on 4/296 after their 50 overs. Australia gets off to a fantastic start with Gilchrist smashing them all over the park, but after 9 overs a big storm comes over.

After the rain clears a revised total is set of 225 from 34 overs. Australia restarts with only one wicket down in the tenth over, and looking well placed.

However some good Indian bowling brings it right down to the wire.

In the final over Australia is 8/218 with 3 deliveries left. Brett Lee is on strike, Andy Bichel is at the non-strikers left. With the equation showing 7 runs off 3 deliveries to win – the game looks over.

Brett Lee hits a 6 over cover, and the crowd goes absolutely insane. I go insane! Probably half of Australia goes insane!

One run off two balls to win and it’s pretty much a formality, and Lee smashes another ball to cover which is misfielded, and they complete the winning run with one ball to spare in the match.

Did you really need that commentary? Probably not. But it was damn good to watch, so if you’re a cricket fan and you didn’t see it, then your loss! 😉

Stereo goes in tomorrow – man, this is soooo gonna rock. First thing I’ll be doing is taking photos. 😀

When I mentioned Jack Black before – how did I forget Shallow Hal? I’ve got the damn movie on DVD for goodness sake.

My interesting discovery for the day – did you know you can buy energy drinks like “V” from the supermarket in bulk? (I bought a couple of 4 packs.) 🙂

Is this dangerous? Will this encourage parents to buy them as a readily available drink for their kids? These things can cause side effects if taken in large enough doses….

This has probably been the case for a long time and I’ve just never noticed. Supermarkets tend to be somewhere I avoid, it’s only been the last month or so since I got back from a trip away that I’ve really been shopping regularly (a quest to lose weight – on a side note, I’ve gone from 107 kilos to 101 kilos in 4 weeks – it’s great to be seeing results without having to try to hard) 🙂

My second interesting discovery for the day, which is perhaps less noteworthy – AC/DC sound fucking awesome in the standard stereo of the ute. I shudder to think what it’ll sound like with the new one. Not too long till I find out 🙂

Man, I just watched this movie – Jack Black is impressing me more and more every day. About the only time I ever remember seeing or hearing about him is his role in Empire Records. There’s gotta be plenty of other times I’ve noticed him but that’s the only one that really comes to mind.

What the fuck has this guy been doing all his life? Man, he cracks me up!

Got the Tenacious D self titled album a couple of weeks ago, and some of the skits are just fuckin hilarious! I’ve been listening to it pretty constantly. Come to think of it, I just put it on then 😉

For those who’ve never seen this movie – get it!

School Of Rock gets my thumbs up for this evening 😛

Three days off, as of now. Absolutely stoked with that. On Friday I’m getting a new stereo installed in the ute, plus an upgraded alarm system. I will post some pictures when it’s done, it should sound fuckin awesome! 🙂

We got beaten in the cricket. Sucks to be Australia (actually to the Indians credit, they played pretty well. We gave it a decent shake but they were too good in the end.)

I don’t really have anything exciting to blog about – I could ramble about all the crap that’s going on at work at the moment but I’m a bit worried that one of the staff might read it, which wouldn’t be good!

RIP David Hookes. 🙁

Thank goodness for short weeks, and long weekends….

One work day to go!

😀

Been happily lying prostrate on the couch for the last couple of hours since I got home from work – India 2/303 from 50 overs look like they’ve set Australia an almost impossible task in the one dayer at the Gabba.

Nobody’s ever successfully chased over 300 at that ground. Hrm!

Also trying to read Dreamcatcher at the same time – I got almost halfway through it the other day on the flight back home, and haven’t picked it up since I got back.

For anyone who’s interested, the Evanescence concert absolutely rocked! Amy has a real energy on stage (although not quite as much as the lead singer of the first backup band) and the show was great, my only regret is that it was only short. They only played about 3 songs that weren’t on Fallen, and I think about 10 or 11 songs all up. Having heard a lot of their earlier stuff that was a bit disappointing.

But still – they opened with Haunted and played it HEAVY – just the way it should be played…the really heavy beat and bassline once you get into that song is what makes it so great. The whole place was vibrating, it was pretty cool. I just wish I’d brought my camera instead of relying on shitty phonecam pics.

Oh, just to add one thing to that last post:

CSS ROCKS.

That is all.

PS: OK, I lied, that’s not all. Man, I gotta learn this stuff! Very, very decent. Now if only I had an eye for colour. 🙂

The problem with blogs is that invariably if you spend a lot of time creating one, you have nothing to write. Or, like me, you end up screwing around with it and consistently breaking things, until you become so exhausted your brain can’t form a cohesive sentence.

Thankfully I’ve decided that at least for tonight, that’s not going to happen. I’ve been wandering around the web looking at what other people have been able to do with the (absolutely fantastic btw) WordPress template, and some of the more visually exciting blogs out there. However given that this is currently hosted on my adsl connection with a mighty 128k upload) and given that my experience with CSS and PHP is limited to, well…nothing…. for now, I’ve just stuck to changing a couple of colours.

If anyone wants to give me any pointers though, they’re more than welcome! 🙂

For that matter, I need some links. The right hand column is looking decidedly bare – the only site I seem to visit these days is Whirlpool, and perhaps the news.