As part of my gearing up to head to Paris, I acquired some anti-snore products. I’ve been told that I snore like a foghorn, but that’s been after a late night out on the chop… considering that a flight to Paris is basically an entire day inside a plane, and that I absolutely abhor being in a confined space with other people, especially noisy children, I may be having a few drinks. Anyway, to reduce jetlag I’m going to attempt to powernap at appropriate times, and balance with sleep deprivation (something I am more than familiar with) to ensure that I arrive in the best possible state. So as a courtesy to my fellow passengers, I’m packing some anti-snore in my carry-on just in case. It may be that I don’t normally snore, but better to be safe than stabbed with a plastic fork.
So I decided to give it a shot, and these last two nights have been great – I’ve dozed off at a good time, woken up at a good time before my alarm, and I’ve been feeling well rested. I can feel my circadian cycle coming back into sync, which is probably not a good thing just before long-haul international travel, but I think I may be on to something.
I recently purchased a new jacket from Hallensteins without checking the pockets, assuming that hey – I’m spending a couple hundred bucks, pockets will be a given, right? Right?
Later on I discovered that the pockets were sewn over, and I was angry. My upper brain disengaged and I reverted to a less evolved state, where the world is viewed through spectacles of white hot rage. Then I had a beer from my brand new fridge (old one on Trademe here) and calmed down, my upper brain re-engaged and I got over it – meh, who needs pockets anyway when you’ve got a man-satchel? And hey – the inside pockets are real. Good enough for the cellphone and wallet!
Then I kept drinking, waiting for the 1am Rugby game to take place. I curiously poked around at the entrance to the sewn over pockets, convinced that there were concealed caverns of joy waiting to be used. The more I drank, the less I cared, and eventually I started to stretch one of the pockets – ever so gently – until the stitching began to gave way. Success! There were indeed pockets waiting to warm all that entered them. With the second pocket I was a bit more rough, and it initially put up a fight before giving in to a good solid thrust. I’d got my money’s worth, after all, and yes, I had just raped the pockets of my own jacket.
It turns out that this interesting waste of cotton thread does serve a purpose beyond weird blog posts – apparently kids these days have been getting into a habit of putting chewing gum and various other rubbish into pockets of jackets in the store, leaving them as store soiled and needing to be sold at a heavily discounted price. So it probably works out to be economical for Hallensteins to waste a bit of cotton thread to protect their products, but still – is it too much for a little tag to be added notifying customers of this? Or for the store clerk to mention it in passing?
I was tasked with auditing our work network to see what we have out there, so that we can inventory hardware and start to get a picture of where the weaknesses lie in our platform.
I could have gone PC to PC, device to device and manually mapped everything out, but I’m busy with a couple of other projects. And so the great Google search was on. I read askslashdot posts, I perused sourceforge, and eventually I struck upon Spiceworks.
I grabbed a spare workstation from the pile, installed XP and threw on Spiceworks and let it do its thing – and it’s instantly shown us that there is a lot of non-standard systems out there on our network. Basically you need to have administrative access on all the devices on your network to be able to gain information about them – and it seems we don’t have administrative access on all of the workstations for various historical reasons. So now we have to refresh our standard, pull everything else back in line with this standard while not stepping on any toes, and then give Spiceworks another run.
The only gripe I have with Spiceworks is that it doesn’t seem to do the user management as it should – while it should display all of the accounts you’ve entered, in Opera and Firefox it only displays the last account you entered. That’s just weird – what if I want to go and edit a previous account? I can’t delete deprecated accounts either, and the whole thing gets a little messy. Fortunately when everything is pulled back in line with the standard this becomes a non-issue.
Either way, it’s an amazing bit of software, and it will poll both Windows and Linux which is great for a mixed environment like ours. Now if only it would run on Linux… And the best part? It’s free (as in beer)
This should be on DVD’s instead of that nonsense MPAA bullshit. You know it really grinds my gears that when I pay for a DVD, giving them my hard earned cash, the MPAA still feels it needs to lecture me, a legitimate media buying consumer from New Zealand, about piracy. There are two ways to advertise a point: Irritate (like the radio ads with a jingle or two people talking to one another) or amuse, like this:
The other day I purchased the new LoopSelect DVD to see what all the fuss was about, especially with all the Microsoft propoganda affixed to it. And it turns out there’s some amazing multimedia on it, the one that really caught with me though was Paul McLaney‘s Let Me Count The Ways
But in Let Me Count The Ways he exercises a lot more vocal range and textures, with a folk/jazz ensemble keeping the groove. There’s a way where his voice variates from smooth to rough, like skipping furiously between folk rock and croon, that just seems to work. The music video is done in the style of A-Ha’s Take On Me which is a very cool and timeless style of multimedia IMHO.
The Loop DVD has a couple of other music vids on it, my favourite being Recloose’s Mana’s Bounce, a wordless track that just makes you yearn for the next kiwi summer.
Connected to my computer I have a Panasonic SA-PM28, a micro hifi with bi-amped bi-wired speakers. Not exactly a room shatterer but it goes well for its size and price, especially when hooked up to my sub.
But one thing has always bugged me about it – the bi-wiring. How Panasonic have manufactured the speakers just increases cable mess and it’s always been a frustration for me.
Today everything finally came together for me to sort this out once and for all. An offcut of 4-way speaker cable from Trickie Dickies, some gold-plated connectors and some heatshrink and voila! Instant improvement in cable tidiness with properly colour-coded connectors, and a pleasant side effect – the ground loop buzzing that I’ve been hearing is now gone, meaning a much cleaner sound.
Not being American it’s interesting to note how many people are watching the run up to the 2008 American Presidential Elections. And it’s not hard to see why.
So I give you ObamaGirl, an attractive young woman singing her support for Barack Obama. Now that’s an interesting twist for the Obama campaign, especially as he’s about the most internet savy candidate.
The other big hitting democrat candidate is Hillary Clinton, I say don’t bother – look no further than Mike Gravel, a man who appears to have no fear of speaking his mind, who doesn’t beat around the bush and is above all a realist.
Why should non-Americans care? As long as Americans keep on convincing themselves that their president is the leader of the free world, then they’ll keep making a mess outside their own country. And that becomes our problem, instead of putting our own tax dollars into our own matters, we’re instead dropping it into peacekeeping missions and aid payouts. Depriving first world countries of their own cash will hurt their health and education, affecting their citizens long term, and increasing the gap between the haves and have nots.
So it’s just a little important that the rest of the world is concerned that someone sane gets into the American Presidential Office, because it’s not just about America and Iraq.
Let’s say you’re like me and you’re a lazy blog admin. When it comes time to upgrade WordPress you simply extract the wordpress zip file over your blog directories and run the upgrade.php – and hey, it’s always worked right?
Not today. Today upgrade.php draws a blank, with the address bar stuck at /wp-admin/upgrade.php?_wp_http_referer=index.php
And here’s how to get out of this mess. Edit /wp-admin/admin.php, removing the following lines which can be found at the top:
This will stop WordPress from polling your install for the database version, allowing you to get into the admin panel. Disable all your plugins (wp-cache is probably the big culprit here, but disable them all to be sure), then edit the above lines back into admin.php and then invoke the upgrade – voila, it should work. Then, as they say, awaken the beasts – one by one re-enable your plugins.
Fortunately you can now use wp-admin/plugins.php?deactivate-all=true to save time
/edit: It seems like it could be wp-shortstat at fault…
