Our Christmas present arrived
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Our storage unit was installed today. :)
Well, it's not really our Christmas present as such, it just happened to be ready in time for Christmas - we've been meaning to get one since we moved in (can't believe it's been a year and a half already) and finally started the process back in October.
One of the stipulations imposed by body corporate was that the wall behind the unit - which is made of open bricks for air flow - needed shade cloth installed on the outside to prevent anything like possums etc from getting in behind the unit. We've already had one possum crawl into a small space in the garage and then die, leaving behind a not-so-pleasant smell that took a while to locate.
So as the unit was being installed, I attached the shade cloth. I wasn't looking forward to doing this because it was not as easy as it sounds:
Obstacle #1: I had to drill 30+ holes into brick.
Obstacle #2: The shade cloth started over 6 feet off the ground.
Obstacle #3: The ground was on a slope, so the ladder needed a chunk of wood under one leg.
Obstacle #4: There were several trees and other miscellaneous plants in the way.
Obstacle #5: A 6-inch PVC pipe ran along the wall, anchored every 2 meters or so.
The building manager loaned me a few tools for the task, such as a ladder, a hammer drill, a crow bar to lever the pipe off the wall, and some chunks of wood to level the ladder off and hold the pipe away from the wall while I slid the shade cloth under it.
I must have moved the ladder at least a dozen times between the only two places I could fit it amongst the plants. On top of that, I'd say I climbed it several dozen times - I'd set it up at one spot, climb up, realise I forgot the drill, go back for it, get back to the top, then realise the masonry anchors were still at the other end, up too high to reach, meaning I'd have to move the ladder and start over again.
6 hours later, I was finally finished, completely exhausted, drenched with sweat, and feeling a little light headed. I managed to only have one close call with falling off the ladder, and only had one very minor injury when I forgot the hammer was on the ladder - I went to move the ladder and got quite a rude shock when the hammer literally landed on my head. :S
I'm so relieved it's done, but I can barely lift my arms right now. I dread to think what I'll feel like tomorrow :/
Anyway, here's the photos of how it turned out, starting with the storage unit itself.
Labels: apartment
Dexter is dead. Long live Dexter.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
"Dexter" - my MacBook Pro - died early this morning.
I put him to sleep last night, and when I got up this morning, he refused to wake up. The power light would come on, the DVD drive would make a sound, then the light would go out again.
I tried all the reset procedures, with no luck. So today I dropped him off for repairs, and strangely enough, I'm hoping a dead hard drive is to blame.
I'm hoping this is the case because I'd imagine a hard drive is fairly quick and easy to replace. Of course, at the same time, I'm also hoping my Time Capsule backup works!
So for now I'm back using my old G5 Powermac. It's actually not as slow as I remember it. I'm glad that I hadn't got rid as I was thinking of doing: I haven't used it for a few months now because a) it consumes a lot of power, even when turned off, and b) it can't run Snow Leopard.
Maybe if I wish really hard, and be good all day tomorrow, Santa will bring me a shiny new laptop for Christmas! (though I hear Santa already spent all his money on a storage unit for his parking space)
New design
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
A week or so ago I started messing around with a test page to learn a few more things about CSS, and to see if I could manage to make a nice-looking, XHTML-compliant page that looked exactly the same in all the popular browsers. After gradually messing with it more and more, I got to liking the simplicity of the page. A few minutes in Photoshop gave it a bit more colour, and I was sold.
And that's what you see here right now.
Technically, I believe the design itself is completely XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1 compliant, but the code I use for on the Photos page (Frontbox) seems to throw a CSS error or two, and basically none of my blog posts from Blogger do not comply with XHTML (especially all the embedded Youtube videos). Ideally I'd like to fix that, but it would be too much of a pain. At least this worked as a proof of concept that I may actually be able to make a fully compliant site. :)
Once the design was ready, it still took a few days of work to get it to play nicely with Blogger. In the end, I had to make a Blogger classic template that actually builds a PHP script with the content hard-coded into a few variables. This data file is included when the site is rendered, so that the recent entries etc down the right are always there, and always up to date.
Another change I made was to use the Smarty template engine to keep the data and layout separate. It's the first time I've used Smarty, and it was pretty easy to write all the templates necessary, so it's definitely something I may use again in the future.
The last part of the re-design was to include a Photos page, which pulls data from my Picasaweb albums via RSS. I'd done this over on travellingoakeys.com so it came together pretty quick.
The only thing I still need to sort out is the comments on the blog entries. Hopefully that's not too hard.
I think that's enough tech talk for the night. I hope you like the new design.
Update: I've fixed the CSS validation issues with Frontbox :D Also, you can verify my site is XHTML compliant by validating the Sites page. Just for that, I'm displaying the compliance badges on the right over there -->
Labels: design, hosting
This is how I roll
Sunday, November 22, 2009
I had my first game of Dungeons & Dragons today, and it turns out that it's actually pretty fun.
Drew, our Game Master for the day, is an old hand at it - he even met his wife while playing D&D, so it can't be as nerdy as we all picture it to be. :)
To start off with, we picked our characters out pretty much at random - I picked mine based off the big grin he had in the picture. Anyone that happy's gotta be a bit of fun to play, right?
Then the rolling started
My first few rolls were HORRIBLE. I'm talking 2's and 3's on a d20 (20-sided dice, numbered 1-20). I think in the first encounter I didn't hit a single target. My one saving grace was that my character has excessive amounts of armour. I may not have hit anything, but nothing was able to hit me.
In fact, over the next couple of encounters, my character shrugged off so many hits that when we all started drawing little caricatures of our characters, this is how I drew mine:
He ended up with the nickname "The Mailbox" because so few attacks got through that he might as well have been wearing a big mail box for armour. You can see he's named his long sword "Giselle", and as day turned into night (in real time, not in the game) Giselle started to inflict some very handy damage on a few key targets.
After about 3 encounters - one quite epic - for around 9 hours of playing, we finally came to a bit of a break in the game and called it a day. One of the memorable moments of the day was when this happened:
The guy in the whale had run away from the encounter to warn a couple of other guys, so he was outside the playing area. We'd written beside him (the table had a plastic cover over it so we could write on) his damage taken: 11. Then Haley drew the circle around him so we wouldn't forget that was his damage. From there, Ash & I added the rest to make him "beached as".
The funniest moment of the day, though, was when we were in the town, and Curt was asking every NPC where the hookers were. After unsuccessfully ending his search for hookers in the tavern, he said "oh well - I'll roll for epic dance moves instead". As it happened, at this exact moment Ash was in the middle of having a drink of beer, and after making some choked sounds and going very red in the face only barely stopped himself from snorting beer out his nose. :D
So in the end it was rather fun. Between the beached guys, the rolling for epic dance moves, characters named "Prof. George Phelps" "Dr Pronto" and "Poochie", and crucifix-wearing mailboxes wielding large swords named Giselle, I have to admit that I am rather looking forward to my next D&D session. :)
Labels: dnd, games
Some things I saw walking home
Thursday, November 19, 2009
During my commute home today I saw a gold stretch Hummer with the number plates "24CT H2". There were probably a dozen people inside listening to (and singing along with, if you can call it that) Nelly's "Must Be The Money". I wonder if they knew how much like douches they looked.
Then on the ferry, I saw a woman with a hair do shaped like the aliens' heads from Mars Attacks. It was quite freaky, and she even had that look in her eyes too. Needless to say I was among the first to get off the ferry (so that I could get home and blog about it)
Labels: funny
New server
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
After a few months of putting it off, I've moved this site across to a new server.
All seems to be going smoothly so far...
Labels: hosting
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