Life in the Bus Lane

In 2007 I bought 15 CDs, 75^[1] DVDs, and more books than I care to count. No wonder I’m skint.

[1] The 61-disc X-Files set and 39-disc Buffy set only count as one each though.

Apparently Freak Boy isn’t going to ride a bike outside tomorrow for the first time in 506 days or something equally insane.

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m sat at home with a cold rather than heading up to Kettering for a party.

Wordpress 2.3.2 is out, and the upgrade is a doddle, much easier than the MovableType upgrades were.

Apocalyptic

My christmas present to myself this year was a Samsung 2232BW 22" widescreen monitor.

So far I’ve very impressed with it.

It must be Christmas.

I actually sold some bike bits today. My "beefy" wheels^[1] went to a friend as I hadn’t used them for a couple of years. In fact the rear had only done a handful of rides since I built it.

Now I just need to decide what to spend the cash on, I’m 1/3 of the way to a Canon 24-105IS lens which is tempting.

[1] Middleburn on D321 and Hope Bulb on X729.

Or not as the case may be.

Public asked to decide whether interactive NHS body map images should have genitals.

4 cans of Guinness and a box of mince pies from the IT Help Support Service Desk.

"Slut" and "faggot" are back again.

Radio 1 backs down in Pogues row

"You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy beep".

Beeb censors Fairytale of New York.
Radio 1 censors Pogues’ Fairytale

Many years ago when I first decided to set up a proper blog type site, I looked at a few options and ended up running Movable Type because IIRC it worked quite happily with text files and didn’t need a full-blown database.
Over the years MT improved and got more complicated, but I sort of knew what I was doing so stayed with it. In September 2007 MT4 came out which was a fairly radical change so I rashly upgraded. I basically ended up having to redesign the site from scratch and certain functionality was broken, but I stuck with it out of a sense of loyalty.
However come mid December, for no reason that I can determine, MT stopped working completely. Every time I tried to post an entry or comment it failed with an error message. I tried to find a solution to the problem with no success, and eventually came to the conclusion that MT needed to go. It’s overly complicated and the peer-support seems somewhat lacking.

Fortunately a domain I’d been after for a while had become available, so I registered that, configured Apache to serve up the new site, downloaded Wordpress and had it running within 20 minutes. It was actually easier to import the old content into Wordpress than it was to get a complete export out of MT in the first place.

Having now played around with Wordpress for a few days it’s definitely easier to use and configure for what I want. The themes are far easier to install and modify, and plugins drop-in seamlessly. MT by comparison is overly complicated, but possibly more powerful if you can get your head round it and spend the time learning it’s idiosyncrasies. However the unexplained breakage is worrying and enough for me to avoid it in the future.

Wordpress also seems a lot faster as well which is handy.

…this

is on it’s way.

For the first time in many years, it’s actually cold in the office today. Usually we are bemoaning the over-enthusiastic heating and trying to cool the room down.

It must be all downhill from here.

Welcome to a new URL.

The local Somerfield is closed today due to "unforseen circumstances", i.e. someone broke in and nicked all the cash. Due to that I couldn’t have a nice healthy lunch and had to make do with a Chow Mein from the takeaway along the road. It’s a hard life.

Three cards have turned up so far, and I’m off for my first roast-Turkey dinner of the year tonight.

It doesn’t feel like christmas yet though.

From http://www.hmhb.co.uk/

Word is that a new LP will appear "earlyish in 2008".