JB's Blog

I had an awesome time at Nil’s 21st Birthday party at Magic Mountain on the Gold Coast. Since he’s come back from Japan for good it was somewhat of a double party as it was a chance for everyone to reacquaint with the little tiger.

I grabbed some mates (Megan, Steve and Jesus-Ben) we drove up to the sunny Gold Coast… We arrived a little late; probably because we were driving around Robina looking for that magic mountain (completely the wrong way – all was well after the map was taken away from the female in the car ). Our entrance was grand as always, mostly because we were carrying enough equipment to camp for a weekend in the bush (I like to sleep on beds).

It was a fun time catching up with everyone and especially with Nil’s and Kat who seem to be slipping into the domestic living brilliantly. The conversations were friendly and flowing making it nice to slip into ‘relaxed’ mode. Had a few nice dances throughout the night with the pumping ipod/cd music tunes. Hope to see more parties with Nil’s and Kat involved!
I probably drank a little too much – I could blame that on the bar wench Franger kept feeding whatever concoctions was on the table that no one else would drink.

Yes that’s me in the garden, I’m not quite sure how I landed in there…
Was a great night and I’m sure that Nil’s had a great time! Happy birthday Nil’s!

After paying off my Virgin Credit card I had a snap buy after spending half a day cleaning the old 1/33 Saleyard Lane. Deciding I couldn’t wait for OS 10.4 or the G5 Powerbook I decided it’s time to upgrade from my 3 year old 12" Powerbook to a shiny 15" Powerbook, yeah baby!

So it’s Saturday afternoon in Brisbane and for those that don’t live here there is about 3 maybe 4 stores in Brisbane that sell Apple gear. Everyone were closed or didn’t have a 15" powerbook with superdrive… except one. Infinite Systems were open and I illegally double parked my car in the city with a hung over Andy and Steve to take care of that I raced inside…

Me: Do you have a 15" Powerbook with superdrive available?
Sales guy: Oh hi… err… no, 15" Powerbook with superdrive’s aren’t in for another week
Me: ….
Sales guy: Oh hang on – there is a few old stock models available.
Me: Give me the list!
… So I grabbed the sheet and scanned through the spec’s, excellent there was one Powerbook 15" w/ superdrive from late 2004! ..
Me: I’ll take that one! Except I want a copy of iLife 2005 and 512Mb RAM
Sales guy: Ok! I’ll grab it!

Five minutes later I was $3,200 in debt to my credit card but more importantly had a shiny new powerbook 15"! When I got home I was surprised with the system install as it asked if I had an old Mac. I said I did and it asked me to connect the old Mac to it via firewire… after scrambling for a cable I got one in my bag of tricks and began the process.

About four hours later all my data, user profiles and applications were copied across to the new powerbook. It was like I had taken the harddrive out of my old powerbook and slapped it into the new one! Awesome!
So far so good! The machine is nice and snappy compared to the 867Mhz 12" powerbook and the extra screen real estate is simply brilliant. It isn’t as ‘portable’ as my old 12" but that is to be expected. My decision of a 15" was a development one, I needed a bit more power and screen resolution to get to work… so let’s get to work!

I had my first potentially cancer ridden mole removed today from the middle of my back. So far the stitches hasn’t been an issue with anything and I even went out on the town to The Real Mark’s 21st Birthday party. Since I love posting photo’s in my blog, here’s a snippet of the little tiger:

Nice and clean, in two weeks I’ll remove the stitches and it’ll be good as new… if that is the mole hasn’t been found to be horribly ridden with cancer….

This latest version just fixes some nagging issues like being able to post to default categories and poster. Enjoy!

wp-mail-0.312.zip

I’ll get around and explain how to use my wp-mail.php hack to be posted directly to in a few days….

Through reading a link on Slashdot on how the Ruby on Rails cool-aid is so much better then PHP (it’s apparently like comparing Java to Assembly) that I have done what I usually do and read tons and tons about Ruby and these Rails. Which brought me to a cute little movie on how to start out with rails featuring TextMate, the missing OS X editor.

I’m an avid fan of Vim, and I love it to death. I am also an avid fan of simplicity whilst Vim does provide in a convoluted way TextMate just seems to ‘click’. Whilst TextMate is quite new (ver 1 for a few months now) and it’s website front page has got enough moving things (albeit with a purpose) to make me sea sick there is definately a ring to it.

So I took the plunge this morning and downloaded a fresh copy, played with it for 15 mins and decided that it was cool enough to be placed permanetly on my dock. Then with a few clicks I purchased a copy (about $67AUD) through PayPal using the profits I made of selling some junk on Ebay… So now it’s Textmate time!

Let’s see if it makes me any more productive with my wp-mail hacks…

This weekend was a momentous one, as it marks the end of an era in my life, as it was the end of the geek house. I was the first person to move in and the last to move out of this rocking little townhouse where lots of good times were had. It was coined the geek house for various reasons and was a hub for many people to come and go; but always have a good time.
One of my housemates I was living with decided it was time to go and after talks we admitted defeat and packed to leave. For the last week I’ve been living by myself in the house, at least I had all the bandwidth available for me. I couldn’t find a house in two weeks notice I had so I’m moving back in with my family.

With moving comes lots and lots and lots of work, especially when you accumulate as much gear as I have. It required a rather large cull of equipment, junk and generally ‘useful old gear’. I am a general horde person (not just my preferred WoW faction) and like to keep bits in pieces ‘just in case’. Imagine my heart ache throwing out over half of tonne of useful stuff… like about 10 motherboards, 6 cpu’s, 3 tables, 7 chairs, 3 PC’s, 20 hard-drives, etc. Here’s a photo of a stack of hard-drives that made the journey to oblivion.

Don’t worry they were mostly 1gig to 4 gig.
I got a crap load of black boxes to put gear where I’ll be accessing stuff regularly. I use them at LanSmash and they’re quite useful; pictured here are a few of the black boxes of doom.

Thanks to my family and friends (well two friends) we made lightish work of the move. My girlfriend’s Mother’s partner was kind and lent me his truck for the the weekend. It was an awesome little Toyace that had a nasty overheating problem. Investigation showed that the radiator was severely low on coolant, but even after fixing that problem it still ran quite hot for a petrol vehicle.

I thought I might give the vehicle a bit of attitude so I slapped on a Mr.T magnet on the front of the truck. I believe it did give us an edge in the traffic jams (with the Bronco’s playing). My brother also decided to leave a message on the dashboard of the truck, something to the effect of ‘n00bz’.

All in all, it took two full days to move all the gear from one side of town to the other and a few fun times throwing junk at the tip. It’s always statisfying destroying stuff, but I almost shed a tear throwing out an old faithful trinitron monitor and my study table which had been with me since I was 13.

And the joy of all of this is that I get to do this again! As soon as I find a new place I’ll be moving, so thanks Wilko and Franger for helping me move and especially my family! Now it’s time to get back to work…