1/24/2006 10:18:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Another late evening and I'm tinkering with stuff that ain't broke. Feeling the need for a change in email client, I'm currently experiencing the joy that is importing Mail.app maiboxes into Thunderbird. Readers with long memories will know that I do stuff like this on a fairly regular basis. For those idiotic enough to try this for themselves, I would advise that I am having so much trouble, I am now enabling 'pop access from forever' all my Gmail accounts and downloading all three accounts back catalogue from scratch. Like I say, I must be bonkers.|W|P|113809799319321557|W|P|I must be bonkers|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/22/2006 06:40:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|For those who have endless time on their hands, the Falling Sand Game might prove to be a diversion worthy of an hour or several. Nice piece of coding.|W|P|113791203034245173|W|P|Slipping through my fingers|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/21/2006 09:58:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|"I was drowned by Montgomery Clift, run over by both Alan Ladd and James Mason, knifed by Robert Mitchum and strangled by Ronald Colman ... I couldn't understand a word Michael Caine said, I just waited for the gaps and then said my lines." Two of many great quotes by the late Shelley Winters that makes me want to go and buy her kiss and tell autobiography.|W|P|113788065703293466|W|P|The Winters Tale|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/19/2006 09:17:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|

Cranefly

That cranefly will be the next big thing is indisputable. The only things that are not clear are when, where, for whom and quite how it will all come about. In the meantime, the studio session and gig photos are great - if you've ever been in a band, you'll know why - and the downloads will give you a flavour of something a little different. Though in no way musically the same, to my lo-fi ears cranefly are tapping the melodic vein of earlier times in much the same way as Grandaddy (listen to cranefly's Knocked Down and then Grandaddy's Pull the Curtains) has in the US and, to a lesser extent, Wolfmother are doing in Australia.|W|P|113766227791861537|W|P|Like a stock market tip, only it's music|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/18/2006 07:30:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Until today, I had no idea that a smoot was a unit of length. I shall never see the ISO (International Standards Organisation) symbol again without thinking of Oliver Smoot.|W|P|113756940792564447|W|P|From the 'You couldn't make this up' desk|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/14/2006 09:41:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|A not so cool things about moving to New Zealand is that unless I maintain a credit card with a UK billing address - or go to the trouble of pretending at least - I have now joined the ranks of disenfranchised Kiwis who have no local iTunes Music Store portal. Luckily, the entrepreneurial comrades at ALLOFMP3 are happy to relieve me of my NZ$ without being sniffy about where I live. Another less than cool thing about iTunes 6 is that the mini store bundled with it includes a snoop feature that provides data back to Apple on your taste so they can recommend other stuff. Disabling it is no biggie but naughty not to be up front about it with the loyal Mac minions.|W|P|113723167310958484|W|P|From Russia With Love|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/14/2006 09:08:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|If you would like to see Moore's law exemplified in one photograph, then this one of a $40,000 Hard Drive should do the trick nicely.|W|P|113722971792751840|W|P|What a difference 21 years makes|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/10/2006 10:02:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Reading the last few mails and scan the last few feeds before heading to bed, I have just caught myself having the most ridiculous thought: Wouldn't it be nice to get a job in a place where they use Macs? I mean I have just secured a job in a great company in a new country and I have a thought like this? The underlying cause is the fact that like many a fence-jumper before me, I am really loving the Mac experience - not the ubergeek hype that goes with Powerbook ownership or the Holy Grail of attending MWSF (if you need to ask, you ain't invited) - just the ease with which I can do my mail, surfing and 'ordinary bloke who's a bit interested in computers and technology' stuff. A great example of the whole Mac thing is Quicksilver - a 'unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.' For those Mac users who, like me, are driven nuts by locked-down menu-bloated Windows machines in their workplaces, Quicksilver is the kind of thing you think about when clickety-clicking umpteen times to simply add a to-do to a text file on your USB thumb drive. And so to bed.|W|P|113696722329485941|W|P|Thoughts before retiring|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/08/2006 08:55:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|Want to know where your iBook or Powerbook were made and when? Want to know how efficient your 'book battery is compared to when it was new? coconutBattery and coconutIdentitiyCard will reveal all.|W|P|113671051971682017|W|P|Nuts|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/06/2006 09:09:00 pm|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|My history with NZ's cellphone provider Vodafone has not been an entirely happy one, what with being sold phones that they then wouldn't connect, refusal to raise farcically low credit limits and receiving three month's billing on a phone I handed back after 24 hours. However last night, in a call with the lovely Marni during which I again vented my spleen, things took a bizzare turn. Having worked through my various annoyances and agreed on downgrading my call plan, I asked to be placed on the basic minimal off peak use plan. "Ah, so you'd be wanting to go on to Gethsemane then?" said Marni. "Sorry?!" I said, wondering that Vodafone were now offering spiritual connections as well as telephonic ones. "You're wanting to go on to Gethsemane then?" she repeated. "Gethsemane?" "No - Get 70 - the Get 70 call plan!" "Ah" said I. Well, it's a mistake anyone could make, isn't it?|W|P|113658190136077889|W|P|Biblical cellular plans|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/04/2006 09:52:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|To paraphrase George Peppard in the of-it's-time TV show, 'The A Team', I hate it when a plan doesn't come together. My plans for the four day holiday that has just passed included:
  • Conducting an annual review of my GTD setup.
  • Getting some serious blogging done here and at No 8 Wire.
  • Beating my offspring at some retro games.
  • Researching running routes north of Auckland.
Instead, I managed to get my iBook to throw a hissy fit by:
  • Allowing a colleague to install VirtualPC against my better judgement.
  • Trying to get the aforementioned and Missing Sync to work.
  • Trying to bluff my way to fixing the ensuing chaos.
  • Managing to wipe out my iTunes library with a iBook reset.
  • Sending ecto into a crippling login/rsgistration loop.
Luckily, I stopped bluffing and fixed the iTunes snafu by doing lots of this kind of stuff and then got way too tired, gave up and went to sleep. Having had this gnaw away at me all day at work and the dentist[1] afterwards, I came home and did a lot of file trashing, back tracking and head scratching, followed by a bunch of stuff nicely detailed in here and fixing ecto by doing the clever thing. Lessons learned from the last fours days?
  • Install/load/attempt one thing at once - Macs don't like impatient humans any more than PCs.
  • RTFM - rather than blindly do the same thing over and over until your blood pressure's sky high.
In the midst of all this mayhem and destruction, I did happen across ZenCast and downloaded the latest podcast in the series, an excellent talk by Kusala Bhikshu who, as well as being a Bhikshu monk, appears to be an enlightened Mac user as well. This hour long look at 'Meditation - How and Why?' was just the calming influence I needed to see me through my morning and evening commutes earlier. With that, me, my karma and my Zen-attuned iBook will both now enter sleep mode. [1] $365 for a composite crown to replace a long-destroyed molar! Maybe it'd be cheaper to get to the third Buddhist state, where being at one with the pain means I would feel no pain because I would be the pain.|W|P|113636832542510216|W|P|Tired and emotional|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/02/2006 11:05:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P|IMPORTANT: Major security hole in Windows WMF - from Guardian Unlimited Jack Schofield writes:

"Your Windows PC can now be infected with the nastiest malware imaginable just by viewing an image, or just by (say) Google Desktop or Lotus Notes or some other software accessing the image without you even seeing it. Using a recent version of Firefox or Opera is an improvement on IE but does not guarantee safety. Worst of all, this flaw in Microsoft's WMF picture file and fax viewer is a zero-day exploit for which there is no fix, officially."

No iBook smugness here - the family use a PC so I'll be busy slamming this door tomorrow if I can.  |W|P|113620004770804813|W|P|Major security hole in Windows WMF|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com1/05/2006 09:59:00 pm|W|P|Blogger Br3nda of coffee.geek.nz|W|P|umm.. the fix would be to disable wmf libraries in windows.. right?
assuming it's a library...

i wouldn't put it past Ms to put wmf support in the kernel or something... but, so? replace the kernel.1/02/2006 01:47:00 am|W|P|bignoseduglyguy|W|P| This track and the forest beyond has become a regular haunt for me over the last week or so. Whilst I was running regularly back in London, I have lapsed severely since leaving the UK and have managed just one run each in Los Angeles, Rarotonga and Foxton. As we are now more settled and I'm no longer tearing around chasing interviews, I have started to get back into the groove. Thanks to the endless takeaways and a little too much beer and wine in this land of plenty, I guess that I am about about 5kg heavier than I was when I was in London. Add to this the usual Christmas and New Year festivities and you'll appreciate that it is proving to be something of a hard slog. However, I am now able to run amongst the tall firs of the local forests, swapping the pavements, car horns and fumes of London's East End for the birdsong, chirruping cicadas and pine scent of Riverhead. The difference is incredible, allowing me to enjoy the experience and focus on my running rather than watching traffic or teenage gangs out to hassle the unwary. All this is just as well because, somehow in amongst all the frantic activity of starting my new job, I have managed to sign up for at least one leg of the Great Lake Relay 06. The thought of driving down country in six week's time with a bunch of colleagues to spend the night running 160kms round the country's biggest lake has had a certain sobering effect, I can tell you.|W|P|113616792600359475|W|P|Run, forest, run|W|P|bignoseduglyguy@gmail.com