hardly anything at all and never updated :)
Things done this year:
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Aka, I finally sat down and did the very simple Wordpress installation 
It wasn’t any problem at all and now I have a nice trendy installation that:
However, that is always a fun thing to look at and is something to do over the next few days - always assuming I stop levelling my undead Priest….
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So let me see - hmmm, this is 200.., yes 2006.
And the month is? uhhhh May
Right, ok, where did this year go? What happened to 2005?
The short answer is blog apathy, general apathy, work, Linux and that damn life-altering crack called World of Warcraft.
Things that are keeping me busy at the moment:
Things I haven’t done
In other things, the new Ubuntu version is rather nice, I’m even trying Gnome 2.14 (which is rather odd considering my passion for good ol fluxbox).
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An enjoyable Sunday morning down the South Coast of NSW is a very nice way to end the week. Listening to the rain come down, the thunder make loud noises in the not-so-far distance is all oddly relaxing (and looking around at the surge protection on everything to make sure that it all still looks ok…) Plans for today:
And that is about it.
Some more nails in the coffin this week about “climate change” or “global warming” depending on what you want to call it (in America, the answer to that question reveals what side of the political fence you are on). The interesting figure was that over the last 5000 years, the seas have risen by 1mm/year (as almost every nay-sayer will tell you) but over the last 150 years, the rate has doubled to 2mm/year. The expectation is that by 2100, the sea level will have risen by 40cm - I believe the only response to that is “oh crap”. Consider that for a few moments - the impact on industry, housing etc. Then look at the pictures of the shrinking Artic ice and think about ecological disaster.
Just in case you still believe the other side saying “this is just part of a natural cycle…blah…blah”, a 2 mile long ice core sample was taken in Antartica and shows that in the last 650,000 years, the level of carbon dioxide and methane has never been this high. Ever. Carbon dioxide levels are 27% higher and methane are 130% higher. Oh, and this is being published in Science, not exactly an unknown publication.
This sort of news makes me very proud to be a citizen of one of two major Western nations who haven’t signed the Kyoto Protocol and the country that has the highest per capita output of greenhouse gases (sarcasm in case you didn’t guess).
I see that certain family members are having what can only be described as an interesting time in England but it does make for interesting reading. It does show how used you can become to life in Australia and not realise that everywhere in the Western world has similiar standards or work practices.
The only question I have is now whether to do some perl stuff, play some World of Warcraft or settle in to start looking at databases again. For the first time in many years, I’m starting to have a need to use a database again. Flat text files are fine and can be very handy but for some of the work I’m doing, a proper SQL database would be much more suitable. Having to store multi-day data from various sources and compare/interpret gets rather difficult with only text files. I’ve setup and ran my own mysql databases for a number of years but I’ve never actually constructed my own. Decisions, decisions….
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A lazy Sunday morning when you’re not oncall, down the South Coast of NSW and generally relaxing doing nothing is wonderfull. A reminder that sometimes, just sometimes, there may be more to life than Linux (although probably not and why am I even thinking that….).
I’ve reverted my main templates (styles-site.css and index.html) back to pre mt3.2 settings to make the site consistant again. Although this has now broken the archives (well, not broken specifically but made them rather ugly). This is just while I figure out the new way of doing things in the new Movable Type and work out if I actually need any of it. However in saying that, the new style library is very nice and the style catcher plugin makes changing your “look” very easy.
List of issues to be fixed (due to my incompetence, not the product) are:
Now to actually do some of that.
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Finally, after having been thinking about this since September (having just found the previous archives I created then), I’ve sat down and actually gone through the (very easy) steps necessary to upgrade Movable Type from 3.14 -> 3.2.
It was an easy process - I didn’t even have to go through the whole “template refresh” process from last time as SixApart have added a nice “refresh templates to 3.2″ section.
Mind you, so much has actually changed in MT 3.2 that I now have to sit down and puzzle through a rebuild of my old look (which is now so old it is very dated).
Oh yes, and the significance of this post is it is not only my first post in 2005 but the fact that my job role is once again changing slightly and I might have the necessary free time to update this again
Although the down side and counter argument to that is World of Warcraft is still sucking all available time as is trying to play Star Wars Galaxies…
Ho hum.
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Or alternatively, how lucky are we? One of the great things about living in Australia is the beach but this has a downside (well, a few actually: global climate change causing the sea levels to rise will be interesting within my lifetime and lets not talk about skin cancer) that most of us live close to the sea (obviously enough). Having a holiday away like this in the little weekend shack is lovely but it is very close to the sea. So much so that when you see some of the footage, it is not nice to realise that if it had happened here, this house would just be a memory.
Doing my daily bit of internet browsing I came across some interesting (and thought provoking) links from a site in the UK (that linked to John’s site). The two particular days that made me think were a discussion on how much Britain spent on Christmas and the other was the fact that he had donated to the tsunami relief effort. So I toddled off to worldvision and did what I should have done a couple of days ago and donated.
The tricky thing about “donor fatigue” or whatever you want to call it, is that the West (or the rich nations) are always asked to donate funds to events like this - but why shouldn’t we? We have the money, we have the ability and in this era of flagrant consumerism, will we even notice the difference at the end of the month (ie what ever we actually do donate)? But a counter argument is that, for example, India spends rather a lot of money building up its nuclear ability, Indonesia has a very modern airforce (far better than Australia’s), so shouldn’t they spend that money? I have no idea what the answer is but it does tend to raise questions (and questions make people less likely to give - in my opinion anyway).
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Another year is almost over and as I look back, I wonder where it all went. Mind you, in the space of 12 months, it has changed a lot, new job, investment property purchased and, for the first time in years (if not ever), I’m actually happy in my day job (for some strange reason, I like going to work).
One of the highlights of the year has been the number of good authors I’ve come across (or who continue to write very well). In no particular order:
Science Fiction
Fantasy
In other things, I continue to play with MovableType and experiment more. Started looking into this whole concept of “pinging” other sites to announce/confirm updates and created my own technorati profile.
Anyway, things to do (for example head down to the beach and have a swim…)
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The upgrade of MT 2.6 to 3.1 was indeed painless (aside from not having the tmpl directory in the right location). Everything just worked…my existing templates were kept, entries stayed the same, the only thing I’m not sure about is whether the RSS/Atom feeds went haywire.
I then went looking for information on exactly what else might be needed to properly complete the upgrade. After all, everything stayed the same but there might be some new interesting things that I wasn’t taking advantage of. I ended up finding some very nice links indeed:
Now I need to sit down and start looking at moving the templates to seperate files so I can start putting them under subversion version control.
I then also need to keep reading my CSS book so I can start thinking about how to do a redesign of this site.
This year has simply flown by - it seems like only yesterday that I was leaving my previous role as a win32 SysAdmin and now I’ve had over six months as a Linux Sysadmin. Of the two, I vastly prefer the Linux role (and that is putting it mildly). There is nothing like the sheer enjoyment of working with Linux for a living, it changes your viewpoint on life. My favourite comment at the moment “Work is just a large extension of the home LAN”.
After a long pause (and being as I’m on 2 weeks holidays over Christmas), I’ve upgraded by MovableType install to 3.14 (from 2.6) and have started to use it again (obviously enough). The upgrade was the normal painless setup that SixApart have had in the past and the new version appears to have some very nice changes indeed. Unfortunately, I’m too much of a miser to go for a mysql account with pair, so I’m staying with Berkeley DB. I did (and still am) having a look at blosxom but I haven’t quite got my head around that at the moment.
In other news, I’m playing games again - World of Warcraft is currently consuming large amounts of my time. Being a long time player of Blizzard games (all of the Starcraft games, Diablo 1 and 2), this is yet another example of a superb production of a great concept. The game is so good, it is stopping me indulging in much Linux play at all
Now to see if this posts correctly.
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