Blog entries from March, 2005

This afternoon around 3PM I noticed that I still had a copy of Transport Tycoon on disk ready to play and then around 8PM I noticed that it was dark and I was hungry. I had spent five hours emersed in one of the most engrossing games I have ever played.

It is the sheer satisfaction of being able to lay out the train tracks just so in order for the most efficient running…

Due to Good Friday, Easter Monday and Easter Tuesday all being university holidays I am now facing a five day weekend. Although I will end up sleeping or watching movies for most of it I might as well entertain the delusion that I might get something constructive done.

These things may be:

• Actually visit a number of bike shops in order to find a replacement as my current bike is getting very worn out.
• Move a signifigant number of items from my computer collection in order to be able to paint the room they currently occupy.
• Finish creating a WordPress template that mimics the look of this blog so I can migrate to it.
• Something else…

In an unprecedented move I somehow found the time this week to organise the photos that I took last Sunday around Springvale and Westall Stations. There are even descriptions this time.

I should end up with more photos to organise tomorrow as this weekend they are closing the interstection of Springvale Road and Burwood Highway for construction related to the tram extension to Vermont South. The plan is to stop by with a camera on my way back from golf…

One of my recent eBay purchases arrived today, a number of Apple Macintosh laptop parts. The outcome of this is that, using one of the power adapters from this collections of parts, the PowerBook 5300cs that I have had for a while can now turn on.

However it appears that the battery in the PowerBook is also dead so it cannot run without the power adapter…

Tonight I finally got around to sorting through the photos that I took back in February when the QE2 stopped by Melbourne. The final selection has been processed and uploaded for your perusal.

At some point in the future I will enter descriptions for the photos but that may be not for some time given that I have another large collection of photos that I took the other day of the rail infrastructure (sidings, yards, etc) around Springvale and Westall stations…

Today I came to the realisation that I am currently afflicted by NIH syndrome with respect to this very blog. Yesterday I was talking about how I was planning to modify this hacked together blog system in order to have more transparent URLs. This is just one of the features that I was planning to add.

For a while I have known about WordPress, an open source PHP and MySQL based blog system, which actually has all the features I was planning. So why should I spend my time writing something from scratch when I could simple take an existing system and adjust it to my needs? Good question…

Ever since I set up this site I have never prepended the domain name with ‘www’ when linking to it or telling people. Fortunately Google has indexed my pages as I want and most people who I have told haven’t added it in. However there have been a couple of people who insisted on adding the ‘www’ so I have had on my list for quite some time the idea of adding in a rewrite rule to redirect these misguided souls to the correct URL.

One other idea on my very long list is to improve the URLs of my blog by moving away from the current 12 digit identifier (it is the date and time but…) in the url for an entry to something more transparent with maybe a better delimited date and/ or the title of the entry. It was while I was researching what URL styles other blogs use that I came across a link to no-www.org which conveniently includes a sample rewrite rule…

Thus this site now validates at the Class B no-www compliance level.

On thursday night midway through a long overdue backup of my personal files onto dvd my Pioneer burner decided to just stop responding. It can read and burn CD’s fine but doesn’t even want to detect that a DVD (of any type) has been inserted. It is ironic that I had had the drive for one year and a day…

That said I went out today (after my golf lesson) and picked up a new one, this time a Pioneer DVR-109. At the same time I picked up some new RAM to take my main windows box up to 1GB.