Froosh. Stuff.

Along with incosiderate pedestrians, what gets me fuming are the twits who ride on trains and trams.  The have a sinister modus opperandi, one that makes me look like the twit when I protest their actions.

So, what they do is fiendishly simple: they get on a train/tram/bus a stop or two before it becomes crammed full and sit down.  “Easy!”, you say, “Settle down.  What could be wrong with that?”  Exactly!

It’s when these passengers need to exit the train that I get really annoyed…  For some absurd reason, they have chosen to sit down, remain seated as the train filled, loaf on their posterior as the train pulls up to their stop, and then act surprised and outraged that they can’t get to the door and off the train due to the congestion in the aisles and doorways.  Of course, “their stop” is normally only 2-5 stops after the train has filled to over-flowing, and this happens day after day.

Apparently, stating this to the passengers as they’re elbowing their way out of the train makes me “rude”.  As in “How rude!”

Just think about how long you’ll be on the train/bus/tram before you sit down and there’ll be no need for me to be rude to you!

I’ve been using WordPress for a while now and it just keeps getting better and better.  I actually started blogging with Grey Matter but changed over to WordPress fairly soon after and for a while updated regularly to the bleeding-edge-sometimes-broken-but-always-better SVN versions.  Until 2.0.  When 2.0 launched, I was content to stick with it and only bothered with the security updates along the way.  I haven’t even really neem paying attention to the development of 2.1.

The great news is, 2.1 has been released!  And what’s more the upgrade took less than 15 seconds (including the package download time)!

Absolutely awesome.  Complete kudos to the WP team!

And remember folks, if you want something from WordPress that it’s not currently doing, ask for it and vote on other people’s ideas!

It’s hard to accept the reality of the year ending. It seems to have passed so quickly; every year it seems a little quicker than the last. Remember when you were a kid? It seemed eternity between Christmas/New Year (“Holidays” now) celebrations. Ahh nostalgia, I remember you well

So, what’s news around the Froosh-iverse? I guess an update is in order…

!st, to news everybody (well, a few and you know who you are!) is waiting for: Yes, we have settled on the land part of the house-and-land package! As of 3:30pm on 21st December 2006 we became the title holders of a block in Doreen, Melbourne (In the Whittlesea area). Of course, we have a mortgage so don’t really own it – but who does these days? Construction of the house is expected to start in about 3 weeks and finished in 16 weeks after that. I say ‘expected’ in the expectation that things will not go according to plan … just look at the delay between when we signed to start the deal and the land settlement – about 50% longer than expected.

And now, a summary of other various happenings this year (not sorted for significance or temporal accuracy):

• We bought a new car and kept the old. ‘Zuki is joined by Stormy.
• We sold our dog off 2nd-hand. Kelson the chocolate lab is now living the farm life.
• Kim’s favoured grand-uncle passed away. Rest peacefully Keith.
• We got a new kitten. Compatibly named Cinnamon to match our other cat Cardamon.
• My brother and his wife had a daughter! Welcome Alexandra, to the Froosh-iverse.
• I bought an Xbox 360 and praise be to Microsoft for making the Tripod song “Make You Happy” come true – … the best present I ever bought for you … Both Seb and Kim get (almost) as much out of it as I do.
• My uncle and his wife had a daughter! Welcome Monique, to the Froosh-ivers.
• Sebastian finished his 1st year at a public school on an absolute high. $12,000/year public schools are not necessarily worth any of it, and public schools can so far surpass your expectations that it’s unfathomable. I’ll keep harping on about it I’m sure, but that’s the power of bad consumer experiences.
• More new ‘pets’ arriving in the form of a spiny leaf insect (Spikey) and some gold fish.
• Our remaining bunny passed away, seemingly of old age. He died in our arms and signals the end our bunny-ownership for a while.
• Currently residing in the disused bunny cage are 3 chookies of vague sexuality (pullets or cockerels – unknown at present). They’re on ‘semi-permanent loan’ from our neigbour until her country-based friends have facilities to house them – I’ll be spending New Year’s Day re-constructing our damaged chook pen to accomodate them until they leave.
• Kim has started working on a more regular basis with a casual job in retail sales.
• Seb began:
• • Roller-skating lessons
  • Piano lessons
  • Swimming lessons
  • Joey Scouts
  • Jazz and Tap … although they didn’t last the year out. Still doing ballet though.
• Some friends were getting to know quite a bit better packed all their stuff into our garage and moved to England for a year.
• Kim and I joined the management committee of a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting gaming and operating games conventions. I’m way behind in my duties in the web-site maintenance portfolio!

There’s probably more I’ve forgotten about and may update this later or add photos. Or, you know, whatever.

Exclamation marks…!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, so maybe I’m freaking out just a little bit.

We’ve been investigating buying a house for about a year, but things took a sudden and unexpected turn yesterday when we signed a land purchase contract as part of a home-and-land package.  Eeeek.

The house plan is nothing special, just a bulk plan-from-a-book called the Rosehill 210.  It’s simple, straight-forward, and probably more than we need.  The block of land is not too much more than required to fit the house, but is on a quiet street and has a playground/barbeque/walking track all in close proximity.  The living/rumpus areas of the house will be facing approx 10 degrees East of due North – a reasonable compromise between building a bulk home and catering to my Tree Hugger nature.

More news and probably pictures to follow as things progress.

Eeek.

In one of the most unprofessional IT moves ever, my domain expired over the weekend.

I am so ashamed. I rant and rail at other who do this, yet when the time comes apparently I can be just as incompetent.

The story goes like this: I received 3 expiry warnings from GoDaddy and blithely ignored them, as I had enabled the auto-renew feature where they simply charge the credit card used last time. Yeah good, except that I have changed credit card numbers and last years wont work. Stoopid. But recoverable at least. Fees paid and GoDaddy switched back the DNS within minutes. Very happy with their service so far. And to think I have Scott Sigler to thank for the recommendation – a horror podcaster would not have been my first choice for domain registration advice, but its working.

My most humble apologies to the various peoples who I have been assisting in their endeavors. I’ll have to step up my service level to win back your acclaim and trust.

My regular commute requires catching bus (571), having that meet a train (Epping station), in to the CBD, and back in the evening.

Now, the bus service is titled “TrainLink”. Train. Link. Far too many times (3 times this week) the bus has arrived too late to meet the train. Similarly in the evening, if the train is running late the bus does not wait for 5 mins. I (and others) then have to wait 30 (!!!!) mins instead for the next bus.

Train. Link. Not working.

And finally: I get substantially better service from the 571 route on weekends (and even Christmas day!) than I do during the week. It runs down Centenary drive every 20 mins on Christmas Day, why can’t it do that during the week??

Props to Dylan who sent me this piece of semi-useless trivia:

Post Code Power

Discover how different postcodes live, starting with your own. Brought to you by News Limited Community Newspapers, Postcode Power shows you just how well community newspapers know different postcodes and how you can use that knowledge to target any audience more effectively.

How awesome.  Not a lot of variation between suburbs, but some of them are very telling and closely match my experiences.

Oh well, I guess I can only enjoy two out of three.

I guess there’s nothing else to do except admit to being 33 years old. Last birthday was a fun one – I got to say I was 5 (2^5 = 32). This one, not so interesting. Just 33. Although, I’m thinking a 33.333* party in December could be fun.

I did enjoy the day though; work was not too busy, the extended family dinner was pleasant, and in general everyone was suitably considerate and salutary. And I got to eat too much pizza and cake.

The weekend was much more interesting though: At the ripe age of 33 and 1 day, I witnessed “snow” for the first time. Now I’m using the term snow in a rather loose sense – it was old, having fallen several days before then slightly melted and re-frozen into ice by the non-wintry weather. There was none of this gently falling from the sky stuff, or soft puffy drifts of it, just slightly less dense ice. Again, it was fun though. the experience immeasurably improved by co-operation with my six year old son.

Sunday brought a 5 hour trip to the Melbourne Museum and their Bugs Alive! exhibition, again enhanced by the presence of a 6-yo. I found it fascinating how they are using technology to market the science and history contained within the Museum. Kids seem to find it much more accessible and interesting, and learn far more than they realise.

Of course, I’m back to work today. Meh.

Oh! To top the birthday off, I had my name mentioned for the first time on the Whole Lot Of Nonsense Podcast. Coincidentally, I listened to WLON show 32 and 33 on my transition from age 32 to 33!

Final geek-iness: Post written and published with Windows Live Writer (beta). Not too bad, but I might as well use the web-interface to WordPress – it’s just as good.

I take exception to the mis-use of the term Podcast in the recent [redacted] issues.

If only you would actually follow up the link to Google you provide and use it to define Podcast, you would find this: “Podcasting, …, is a method of publishing files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new files automatically by subscription, …”

And from Wikipedia: “Podcasting is an automatic mechanism by which multimedia computer files are transferred from a server to a client, which pulls down XML files containing the Internet addresses of the media files.”

What you have is not a podcast, it is a manual download of an audio file. I would gladly add an RSS feed to my podcatcher and listen regularly as new shows are automatically downloaded – like a real podcast. I will not regularly be registering all my details on a page before manually downloading the audio and manually causing it to be synchronised to my MP3 player. I’ve done it once and will not be doing it again, no matter how compelling the content.

I used to have an “aside” kind of blog in a sub-site here, but haven’t really been using it recently. It was meant to be a test site for wordpress upgrades, plugins, development, etc but I’m spreading myself too thin and getting nothing effective done. I didn’t wan’t to lose the content (such as it was) and I like the idea of never breaking a link once established. I know I have broken some links, but the bulk of the content has been imported and most of the links are still working.

For the 1 or 2 people who were subscribed to the sub-feed, it’s now being redirected to the main feed and you’ll probably see everything twice.

So, what did I use to do it? Well, since WordPress does not include an “Import from WordPress” option I had to dodgy it up by exporting the sub-blog into MovableType format and importing that. Thanks to the WPExport plugin (needs minor edits – read the comments at the source site) it was a trivial task. The MT importer auto-creates the required categories and can auto-create authors or translate them to pre-existing authors on your WordPress blog. Very tidy.

Update: To be specific, I did this to make the plugin work for me (I’m using WordPress 2.0.4):

• Removed ‘SQL’ and ‘blogger’ from the $filetypes definition at the start of WPExport_plugin.php
• Renamed 2 instances of user_nickname to user_nicename in MT.php

“Backwards compatible just means that people who are backwards can use them!”

Thank you BOFH!

My 33rd birthday is soon (well, 17 days) and family are starting to ask what I want as a gift. Last year I had suggested the unrealisticly priced Death Star.

This year, I’m really liking the new LEGO Mindstorms NXT – you should watch the (slightly) hidden “Easter Egg” on the Mindstorms site (hint: Steven from BimP shows the way).

However. I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. The LEGO Shop at Home for US lists the NXT Kit for US$249.99. Google tells me USD$249.99 in AUD$ is AU$327.68. The LS@H for Australia lists it for $429.99. Yes. Thats right. AU$102.31 more than the equivalent US price. And if I want to do them a favour and pre-order it, I can pay either $45 or $100 extra for delivery.

Nope. Can’t do it. Sorry LEGO, you had me then you lost me. There is no way I’ll pay $150-$200 more than US Retail.

Now I just need to find something I want that I can justify.

Fedeeration Square’s Atrium will be hosting another Victorian Microbreweries Showcase tonight and tomorrow night (Wednesday 19th/Thursday 20th July 2006).

There will be some 15 different Victorian microbreweries in the show, of which I have previously tasted about 5. So I’ll be there!

Entry is apparently $20 for 20 tastings. Not too bad.

Melbourne Based MicroBreweries

• James Squire Brewhouse www.portlandhotel.com.au
• Mountain Goat Brewery www.goatbeer.com.au
• The 3 Ravens Brewing Co. www.3ravens.com.au
• Emerald Hill Brewery www.emeraldhillbrewery.com

Regional Victoria Based MicroBreweries

• Bintara Brewery www.bintarabrewery.com.au
• Bridge Road Brewers www.bridgeroadbrewers.com.au
• Bright Brewery www.brightbrewery.com.au
• Buckley’s Beers www.buckleysbeer.com.au
• Grand Ridge Brewery www.grand-ridge.com.au
• Hargreaves Hill Brewing Company www.hargreaveshill.com.au
• Jamieson Brewery www.jamiesonbrewery.com.au
• Mildura Brewery www.mildurabrewery.com.au
• Red Duck Brewery www.redduckbeer.com.au
• Red Hill Brewery www.redhillbrewery.com.au
• What’s Brewing Co www.whatsbrewingcompany.com.au

We had a 6.5 birthday party for Seb last Saturday evening, and it was without a doubt the best kids birthday party we’ve ever been to or hosted. Utterly awesome.

So whats with the 6.5 bit? Well, when Seb actually turned 6 we had just moved him between schools, it was during school holidays, and all his non-school friends were unavailable. We did have a birthday party – there was 1 other kid attending. Not exactly the most fun for Seb. Even though we try to play, it’s just not the same as playing with peers.

Seb has been enjoying rollerskating for the past few months, slowly getting better with practice and lessons. We’ve been to other birthday parties held at the skating rink and had quite a good time, but haven’t been totally happy with mixing the birthday party in with all the other general skaters in the regular public sessions. The solution: hire the whole rink for the party and invite as many of Seb’s friends as possible to get the best cost per person.

We had somewhere in the order of 50 people on the rink and another 5-10 sitting on the sides. The invitees (Seb’s complete combined 1/2 class at school plus his ballet class friends) brought along siblings, cousins, parents, etc and all were welcome to skate and enjoy. And enjoy they did! Everyone felt safe and secure knowing that their kids (one as young as 18 months) were safe on the rink and that everyone would be careful and respectful of their friends and family.

There was only one injury for the night … and he wasn’t even skating! The poor guy’s foot was run over by his wife…

We provided dinner, cake, and lollies for everyone (including rink staff) and for the first time in our party hosting history, we didn’t ourageously over-cater. Dinner was pizza provided by Margheritas Pizza in Lower Plenty – superb, tasty, and not at all greasy.

Everyone had an unbelievably good time (well, except for Richie and his foot), including those kids and adults who couldn’t skate – there was no pressure to skate, but also no judgement upon those who couldn’t. And just as well, because I don’t skate so good!

Free plugs to the Roller City Eltham folks who provided top-notch service to us, and to Margheritas Pizza for some of the best pizza I’ve ever had (and believe me, I eat a lot of pizza! )

I will not be recommending the SMS alerts service to anyone, and will likely unsubcribe from it due to it’s extremely poor performance.

I get nuisance notices early in the morning about how a service was cancelled and then not cancelled. I get notices about how the 6:25am from Epping will not run, but don’t receive them until 7:30am (for example).

And finally today, when there is a major disruption to all services, I get … bugger all. Nothing, not a single message. The Connex website does not even have a notice regarding the disruption. Thankfully the Metlink site had some useful information.

How on earth can we expect people to use public transport more often when we get such apalling service?

It’s Retrocon time!

Retrocon is Melbourne’s newest games convention and it’s still smallish. This means two things:

1. Retrocon needs you!
2. If you’re new to gaming or interested in getting into gaming (of a Role Playing nature more than Roll Playing ), then small is good.

If you’re even slightly interested, I recommend you at least register now as a visitor. It’s $2 per day or $5 for three days (allows you to play free demonstration games) and you can upgrade to a Player at anytime (yes, more fees required).

Oh? When is it? A little over a week from now: The “Queens Birthday” long week-end Saturday 10th – Monday 12th June 2006.

Be there!

Are you a fan of Jonathan Coulton? You should be.

Anyway, the esteemable (is that even a word?) Chris Miller of Unquiet Desperation has an interview with Jonathan, discussing his history, motivations, plans and how he managed to get the millionaire girlfriend and a wife. That last part isn’t really true though.

Now the bad news: Chocolate is cold comfort

A review of scientific studies has found that chocolate, long used as an emotional pick-me-up, more often prolongs a bad mood rather than helps it.

So what am I really saying here? Listen to Jonathan Coulton’s songs, and give him the money you would have spent on Chocolate!

Granted I’m not a high-profile site and I certainly don’t get a lot of traffic, but I get no spam. And I don’t resort to what John Dvorak used to tell us to do: Drop everything that isn’t from a known good address.

I had three problems with that concept:

1. What about e-mails from old friends who changed address (or current friends who like changing e-mail addresses every few months. Hi Andrew! )?
2. It was never a good idea to depend on a completely spoofable “from” address.
3. There is plenty of great software out there to stop spam in a much friendlier manner, and it’s been around for quite some time!

So what do I use an what are my results?

E-mail: SpamAssassin – And you thought the Apache group only did a rawking web server! Results? Maybe one spam a week gets to my inbox, and no false positives for the 3 months I was monitoring it. I’ve stopped monitoring it though – what’s the point of reading all that spam when I’m trying to block it?!

Blog: Akismet – This is by far the easiest and quickest anti-blog-spam tool I have ever used! Included free in WordPress 2.0 (or was it 2.0.1?) and as easy to configure as registering on wordpress.com (I occasionally post scripting/programming stuff to Scripting. Stuff. anyway). Results? I think I had one spam make it to the moderation queue once. Not to the live site, just to the moderation queue. I could be wrong – I might be thinking of a legitimate comment that got moderated because of my WordPress settings (moderate authors without a previously approved comment).

Easy as 1, 2 … err 2.

Conclusion: Free and Open Source software rawks!

Disclaimer: Your results may vary, not a guarantee, not my problem, etc.

Update: Just adding FSF and OSI links

I am generally not a beer drinker. This is for two reasons:

I’m alergic (or used to be) to something in a majority of popular beers. Just one beer would make me violently ill almost exactly 12 hours later. As the joke goes, I was never sure if it was the 13th or 14th But seriously, just the 1st and only beer would make me sick and so I learned very quickly to avoid beer. Guinness is about the only beer I will drink on a regular basis.

The second reason is much easier to understand … I just don’t like them. They taste like crap, leave an awful feeling in your mouth, and you can taste the skanky aftertaste for hours. Bleh!

However.

I have been listening to a number of beer and beer-related podcasts recently (Namely Michael and Evo’s Wingin It! and Speaking of Beer) and they peaked my curiosity. I’ve become interested in beer and I want to try a beer that’s actually good.

So, it comes to tonight. Out with the family for dinner (Pancake Parlour, where we’ve never had a bad meal – just some ambivalent service) and it occurrs to me that maybe they have some decent beer. I ask in my most timid please don’t think I’m a freak, I’m as normal as the next guy voice for an organic beer. The result suprised me, and now I want more!

I ended up with a Mountain Goat India Pale Ale. Actually, it was their only organic beer and I had coincidentally been looking at the Mountain Goat site earlier in the day. Thanks to the beer-casts I knew that an IPA was never going to be my favourite beer as I’ve not enjoyed bitter beers in the past.

Well, that may be changing. I don’t have the vocabulary to properly describe the experience, but it was good! It was bitter, but not distastefully so and an aftertaste that lingered briefly and then was gone. When in the mouth, it was light and clean and fresh. I could really grow to like this beer.

My favourite class of beer would have to be stout and Mountain Goat do an award winning stout – and apparently it has just won again at the 2006 Australian International Beer Awards. Their Surefoot Stout won Best in Class, Champion Stout and the Premier’s Trophy for Best Victorian Beer. Surely this must be worth a try?

To conclude? Beer me! Just make it a good one – at least as good as the Mountain Goat IPA.

It’s actually a support article: The system time runs too fast on a Linux-based virtual machine that is hosted in Virtual Server 2005 R2

I’ve always* used both Windows and Linux in my personal and professional lives, so have basically ignored most of the Microsoft vs. Linux (and GNU/OSS/etc) rhetoric out there. Hypocritically though I was suprised by the article – it was straight-forward, accurate, and there was no taint of “it’s all the fault of the open-source-hippies”. In fact it was the opposite, with an educational piece about the nature of Linux timekeeping systems at the end. Huh. Who’da thunk it? Learning something about Linux from Microsoft.

Wow. I really am very inconsistent. I claim to ignore the religious war, but just read that comment above… May I be tortured by dumbass users for eternity!

*always since Linux became available to me in late 1992 sometime.

Update: oops, forgot the credits! Thanks to the Virtual PC Guy’s WebLog!