bananas on toast

Well, it took a little forum chasing to work out my ampersand issue, but I have finally got this site 100% Transitional XHTML 1.0 valid and CSS Valid! Hence the reason I have put those two new spiffy icons over on the right there, aren’t they nice? I’ve always wanted to be able to put them on my website.

Basically this means that I have coded the website to be completely interoperable and should work in all browsers without giving any crazy errors. This also includes the javascript apart from the “onClick” on a few pages. Not bad, especially considering that it took me about an hour to take this site and two others from spitting out over 100 little errors each down to a finely oiled machine.

Challenge to other webmasters reading this site: Is your website compliant with the coding rules you are using? It doesn’t have to be XHTML compliant, but what about HTML 4.01? What about your CSS? Be sure to comment guys.

I’ve just added a fancy little emoticon function to the weblog. Mostly for commenters, as I don’t use the often, but they are pretty cool. These are all the icons that are available.

Click Here for the full list.

:assimilated: :bigeek: :biggrin: :bigrazz: :confused: :cool: :cry: :dead: :eek: :embarrassed: :laugh: :mad: :ninjaeat: :no: :none: :peace: :pie: :razz: :roll: :rolleyes: :sad: :shy: :sigh: :sleep: :smile: :smilewinkgrin: :stormtrooper: :uhoh: :upset: :wink: :yakuza: :yes: :yoda:

I hate this weblog.. Not for the reason that I hate other peoples websites, but I hate mine because it just falls into the category of a “weblog” and not a weblog. When I started my first weblog, The never-ending watermelon, I was about 14 years old and I wrote about school, absolutely boring crap about how much I hated my teachers and how mean my parents were, but I used to get anywhere between 500 and 1000 hits a week. It was called an “online journal” but in essence it pretty much equaled out to todays standard of a weblog. It was coded manually (things like Movabletype didn’t exist at the time) and it would get updated every single day with some of the most boring crap.

I am making no sense so far, but wait, my point is coming. Now when people ask about my website and I say “oh, it’s just a journal,” alarm bells go off in their heads and I can picture them thinking something, ‘another loser on the net who thinks his opinions matter.’ I look like an unoriginal uninspired buffoon because weblogs are the new best thing, but I just wished people understood.

On a far brighter note, while I realize that it is pretty late in the game, this morning I decided to help out with the WWdN Leukemia fund raiser and donate $10. It’s not much, but it’s all I can afford as a University student with a limited income, but I know that every little bit helps. If only all the other readers would just donate a dollar or two, they would probably raise a million dollars in no time.

Wil Wheaton has just unleashed the cover to his upcoming book, Just a Geek, on his website. Pretty good looking cover, especially when compared to most Autobiography covers which are filled with glamor shots and people striking a pose.

Wil is a terrific Author and also a terrific person. He has gained so much fame from his website, WWdN, but he also respects that fame so much and has never sold his fans short. His first book Dancing Barefoot was an absolute smash and my review of his book was listed by O’Reilly on their press release – w00t!

Make sure you buy the book (and his upcoming book when it is released) and make sure you visit his website, because you will not be disappointed.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

The nearest book I have is the user manual for my laptop, but the nearest novel I have is the book I am presently, and very slowly, reading, “Twilight (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Mission Gamma)” by David R. George III.

Page 23, Sentence 5:
“She had returned to DS9 with a strengthened resolve to help her people through these turbulent times – despite the Attainder.”

Idea stolen from Everything Burns

Mena from Movabletype has called for people to tell her how they use Movable Type. I want to help them out and I also want to see them get a successful liscencing system working, so I am only too happy to oblige. After all, 90% of the reason that Microsoft’s software is so pirated is because their liscencing system is so unreasonable and unrealistic.

I, personally, have a bit of a community setup. I have a members section with a few weblogs in it from my friends, my little brother and one of his friends and my girlfriend and one of her friends. The reason I host so many weblogs and so many Authors is because I had leftover webspace/bandwidth each month from my domain and I figured I would put it to good use. My biggest problem is that after telling my friends they could have a “free” weblog, I would feel pretty bad about turning around now and asking for money to help pay for a commercial Movabletype Liscence.

In total I have 13 weblogs, only 3 of which are inactive and I also have 11 users, one is inactive and one is an “Administrator” user so that when I log into my personal account I am only faced with my own weblog and not all of the other users’.

My throat presently feels like someone has thrown a bucket of sand down it. I feel absolutely rotten, so rotten that I’ve even made myself a honey drink – I hate honey. I am so sick that even after drinking this god awful concoction I just don’t feel any better. It sucks.

I’ve felt a little lousy for two days now, chomping down Vitamin C and Echinacea like they are going out of style. Everyone keeps telling me to use a stronger medication, but I firmly believe in letting your body heal itself and just giving it a little help here and there with natural solutions. One thing I don’t ever want to deal with in later life is a weak immune system. Hell, I am already going to have to put up with being ugly, a bad back and probably baldness, why add to it?

Would you like to know what I hate most about getting sick? (If not, stop reading riiiiiiight, HERE) I hate the fact that it costs like a billion dollars to get better again. It costs if you use medication, but it costs even more if you want to do it the natural way, like me. Vitamins are expensive, lozenges are expensive, Echinacea is expensive, tissues are expensive (well, they are when you are using a box a day), it just sucks – a man could go broke and lose everything he loves just because he got sick!

I’ve made some updates to the site lately and I’ve just been getting everything the way I want it. The Gallery now matches the main site (w00t, I’ve wanted to create a template for that for ages) and I will be updating the Media Database as soon as possible (probably tonight when I can’t sleep). I’ll also be changing the Sketch Gallery to a general art gallery and I will be moving all the stuff from deviantART and mirroring it here.

I was tidying-up upstairs and I walked downstairs with some rubbish. I tossed it into the bin and began rinsing some dishes as mum walked out the backdoor. Next thing I hear her scream, “Ahhhh, I’ve broken my ankle.”

‘Hahaha,’ I think to myself. ‘She does this all the time when she trips over.’

I turn the corner to look through the back door to see tears flowing from her eyes and her laying on her back. Shadow is standing above her, sniffing her to see what the problem is and she is trying to tell him to go away. He has tripped her a few times before and she has overreacted, but this time I don’t think she is overreacting.

“HEAL!” I bellow at the dog and he comes to me reluctantly. He knows he is in trouble, but has no idea why. “HEAL!!!” I yell again to make sure there is no mistake that I want him to come to me straight away. I tie him up and then with dad’s help we carry her to the car and dad drives away to take her to the hospital.

She didn’t break it, but it was a really bad sprain. She is still in pain and she is getting around on crutches, but it could have been worse.

In much better news, one of my good friends, Daniel, got married on the weekend. I know his girlfriend (or I should now say, Wife) a little, but Daniel and I have been friends for some time now. We played a few RPG’s together back in the day and although we’ve only met once or twice, we are quite good friends who keep in touch via MSN, ICQ, Jabber etc.

Congratulations Daniel and Naomi, may all your dreams together come true and may your vows be truly blessed! You guys rule!

Well I know my weblog looks pretty boring right now, it’s because I have just upgraded to version 3.0 of MovableType. I am just heading back out the door, but I will try and get it looking back to normal later on tonight or some time through the week. Until then…

I was just browsing the stats that Urchin spits out for me and noticed that I have received a lot of hits from google lately. I thought to myself, ‘I wonder what people could be searching for that brings them my way?’ And as the old saying doesn’t quite go, ask a stupid question, receive a funny answer.

There were all sorts of various permutations on my different blog titles and keywords inside those titles, which was no big shock. I’d have to say the one that made me laugh the hardest (it bought tears to my eyes to be honest) was this one.

Is that solid gold or what? Obviously someone fired up google and entered the keywords “Humping Photo Gallery” and were delivered to the beautiful picture of Me humping T-Bone humping Rays cleaning cart.

A truly breathtaking shot, but I am sure that this person was looking for something a little more pornographic. Don’t you love it?

Wow, check it out. I was just browsing my usual websites and came across this interesting little thing:

The current War on Iraq scares me so much. Not just because of the horrors it represents, not just because of the constant threat of terror, not because I fear that it will spread into our lands. It’s because of all those things, but mostly because my best friend is in the Army and I just don’t want him to be called to a duty over there.

I recently watched Bowling for Columbine and man did it open my eyes. Michael Moore is not only a really smart guy, but he has balls the size of cantaloupes. I think that his point is so valid, a lot of America’s problems are fear driven. I’d have to say that the scariest part of the whole film is that Marilyn Manson was the only person who raised a similar point of view to Michael Moore, and it was he that so many politicians choose to blame for our problems. I think it says a lot to think that this skapegoat is probably more intelligent than any of them. To anyone who hasn’t watched the movie; please go and watch it and open your eyes, you won’t regret it.

Wow, what a week it has been. Last week the server administrator asked me if I would like to move to a better server? I thought, ‘what they hell, better ram and better processor will cut down on movabletype rebuild times, sure!’ Unfortunately he forgot to mention (and I forgot to ask) that some of the specialist Perl Modules were not installed.

As you can see from the last entry, “Test,” I had to reinstall the Berkeley DB DB_File.pm before I could access moveabletype. These two modules are responsible for accessing the database that stored all the information for building the weblogs, so without them, we were screwed. Unfortunately it took a while for me to get in touch with the Admin and gain ‘root’ access to his server to be able to install it. For a lot of you non-geek humanoids this is probably a bit boring, but tough, I don’t make you read this.

I had a really tops weekend though, it was a lot of fun. Friday night we went to the RSL for the work force party at Zoo FM and charged out glasses for a couple of hours, followed by watching Van Helsing. It wasn’t a terrific movie, but I have certainly seen worse.

On Saturday night we all went to Breshan’s 18th birthday party, which was a great time until some jerk decided to pick a fight with us. It was pretty funny, because ultimately I knew at the start of the night that something would happen. When we walked in I said to my friend Luke, “Hey dude, we totally don’t fit in at this party,” and we both laughed at it. As I looked around the room I saw a bunch of jocks and tough-guys, and very young teeny bopper girls. Me and my mates however, all listen to Metal and Punk music, Luke had his hair spiked up in full punk style and Ryan too. We were also geeks, which hardly fits in with Jocks, and we also found their bunch as amusing as they found us. It seemed like such a harmless comment to make when I said it, but in retrospect we should have taken it as a queue to say adios and turn our tails. We didn’t, shit happened, oh well.

I am going to be working on getting a good resume put together tonight. I want to do some freelance web design, coding and/or tech support work, so it will make it easier if I have a list of my qualifications and some links to work that I have done so far. Speaking of work I have done, I have been doing some touch ups on the Zoo FM website, which is one of the nicest looking websites I have done in a while. I wish I had time to sit and really give it a little more flare, but unfortunately when I am not being paid for work, I can’t really afford to do that.

As for right now, I need to find something to eat and just give my head a rest for a bit. I’ve been going at it pretty hard lately, so I think I need a break. I have an assignment that I have to get done ASAP too, it’s overdue, so I am scared.

Testing that Berkeley DB and DB_File are correctly installed… :) :)

I crack the top of an ice cold Cartlton Empire and sit on the couch. Jessica Simpson is on the television being ditsy and generally extremely dumb. The beer I am sipping is the first from a case that Dean bought to my house 2 days ago. He bought me a case of beer to thank him for helping him out by moving various Minidisc tracks on CD for him, and because he is leaving town soon.

It’s funny, he has only lived in Dubbo for about 5½ months and he is definitely my best friend it town. This is due to the fact that I am too busy with University to do too much socializing and the fact that he is just a top guy. I am totally going to miss him when he leaves, but unfortunately this is just one of the things that happen as you go through life – friend come and go, but good friends are friends forever.

With any luck I will get the boys together this weekend and we will go out and have a blinder. We’ve had a million good times lately and it seems fitting that we send Dean off with a bang.

The more I watch Jessica Simpson on her stupid television show, “Newlyweds,” the more I just imagine this conversation happening.

Britney: Hey Jessica!
Jessica: Hey, what’s up?
Britney: Oh, I just wanted to say thanks!
Jessica: Umm… For what?
Britney: For making me look like a fucking genius!

Even after a 24 hour marriage, it is still obvious that Jessica Simpson is dragging the chain in the IQ gene pool. It’s just a good thing she has never hurt herself, because it would easily qualify as the Darwin Award with the most media coverage.