The lesser mabinogion

Well, George is having a sleepover tonight and tomorrow night.
George the cat that is.
I’m looking after him again for a couple of days…..hopefully he doesn’t repeat his yowling in the middle of the night this time…

Ok, so today started with me sleeping in a little, as I have a tendency to do on Tuesdays, and by the time I was out of the shower, I already had a call from Work.
Apparently there was some problem with something and I had to call someone who wasn’t in yet because there was a demo happening right now that didn’t work.

Well, that’s no more than standard for one of our demos, so once the person that knew about it was in, we got to work trying to figure out what was wrong (it was a piece of software I’d never touched before – the reason I was looking at it was because the ones that did know about it happened to be at a seminar). Whilst in the process of what is always a fairly frustrating procedure, I figured I’d make myself some coffee, as by this point I’d been up and working for an hour and a half and had yet to have either breakfast or caffeine.
I was going to just have instant…but then I saw the jar of ground coffee, and figured I’d have some real coffee.

I should have had the instant

Sometimes I use my coffee machine, sometimes I use my plunger. I was only going to have one cup – maybe two at the most, so I figured I’d use the plunger. So I boil the jug, and put some coffee in the bottom of the plunger. Then I look at it, and add another couple of spoonfulls – I felt like I needed it.
In between doing this and waiting for the jug to boil, I’m jumping between the kitchen and my laptop on the dining room table where I’m talking to my co-worker via IM – still trying to solve the problem that is holding up a demo.
So the jug boiled, and I poured it in to the plunger – just enough for a couple of cups, I definitely needed two by now. Then I push the plunger down just till it sits on top, and let it sit for a little bit while I quickly poked at the problem again.
Now, coffee nearly ready, the moment of Caffeine finally approaching, I push the plunger all the way down. But there’s a problem – it’s offering up more of a resistance than any normal hot beverage should. That, is because this is no normal coffee. No, this is Demon Coffee, sent to me this day to punish me for some sin known only to the Lords of Caffeine.
Well aware of the insistent flashing window on my computer, telling me that I should be making someone else’s lack of planing my own emergency Right Now, I push the plunger with a little more force – and suddenly, it’s easy. It goes right to the bottom in an instant, but in that same instant the most enormous fountain of gritty brown liquid shoots into the air.
It is over in a second, and I am standing there with coffee down my front, coffee on my jeans, coffee on the floor, coffee on the bench, coffee all over the jug, last night’s as yet unwashed dishes and in the kitchen sink, coffee in the unfortunately still open sugar jar, coffee on the walls, coffee on the ceiling!.
There is now a big brown fallout zone about a metre in radius with me at the centre.
So after staring at the destruction mutely for a second or two, I pour what remains of the muddy, gritty liquid in to my cup, dab at it ineffectively a couple of times, then go and sit down in front of my computer to face the rest of the day.

Well, I actually did manage to Get Stuff Done yesterday…The coffee did help. So did playing Nightwish albums loudly.
I spent a couple of hours gutting the CMS, as part of a redesign.
Previously I had it working well enough to be able to browse directories on the filesystem, and virtual directories in a database, and open simple files from either the database or the filesystem.
But it was kind of hacked together, and there were lots of ambiguities about how some of it should work. So I’m rewriting with knowledge of how I’m going to do it this time, and I’ve also started working security in too. I’ve set myself a fairly basic goal – basic filemanager functionality, eg. browser folders, add, delete, rename files. Once I have that base, I can start thinking about all the advanced stuff I want it to do.

I went to bed at about 10ish last night, reading Juliet Marrilier’s Wolfskin, and accidentally kept reading till 1:30ish. Not good, because I wanted to not be tired in the morning, and I also wanted to make Wolfskin and Foxmask last at least a week, I only bought them on Thursday.
I woke up at 10ish in the morning…and for some stupid reason, instead of getting up, I reached for the book again….and didn’t get out of bed until 1:30ish (pm) when I’d finished it. Doh!

I headed out to the Mall after that, to get some groceries, I told myself – but in reality it was an excuse to go have a coffee from the “Italian Bite Tratoria” in the food court, which is my favourite place in Canberra – or anywhere for that matter – for Coffee. It’d be even better if they weren’t in a mall food court, but oh well.
Anyway, had my coffee and a nice Chicken, Pesto, Eggplant and grilled capsicum Focaccia and headed off to Woolworths (where I didn’t actually end up getting any real groceries, just other stuff that I needed, and then home again.
I picked up two things of interest at Woolworths – first, a nice little pocket sized notebook. I’m hoping to use it to write down stuff that I’m always thinking about, but usually forget later when I need it – things like story ideas and lyric ideas, and how to approach various problems in programing projects both at home and at work. Often these things come to me when I’m either lying in bed, or sitting in the Mall drinking coffee, or some other place when I don’t have a computer handy. So now I can pounce on these ideas and trap them between little pieces of paper, to do with what I will…hehehehe!!
um…sorry.
Ok, the other thing I picked up was a 10 pack of DVD+Rs. Not particularly interesting in themselves, but they represent a rather obvious solution to a problem that I had. (It just took me a while to see the solution).
You see, I’m currently in the process of ripping all my music to disk. But I’m not encoding them as MP3, or some other lossy format (such as Ogg Vorbis), but to Flac – which is a lossless format. The general idea being, that If I rip them all to a lossless format, that I can re-encode them into whatever lossy format I want, whenever I want, without having to go through the laborious process of re-ripping. And it can be a completely automated process.
The problem I had, was that Flac, whilst better than raw .wav is still rather large – around 250 – 300MB per album – and I didn’t have enough disk space. I had been wondering what to do about it, as I didn’t really want to buy a new hard drive just yet – I’m trying to avoid buying _anything_ if I can avoid it (books excluded). But today, it occurred to me that there is no real reason why the .flac files have to be on the hard drive – they could just as easily be on DVD, as then I could just store the lossy version on the hard drive – for which there is plenty of space, and would only need to bring the DVDs out when I wanted to re-encode. It wouldn’t be quite as automated as if they were all on one filesystem, but since I can fit between 10 and 20 albums on a DVD, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as much of a pain as re-ripping.
So I spent what was left of the day and evening fiddling with DVD burning and with writing the script to automate the FLAC -> Ogg conversion for normal listening.

And now, I’m off to bed to start on Foxmask. Hopefully this time I’ll have a little more restraint ;)

Ok, I think you get the message. That’s enough alliteration for one day.
Today I have done nothing!
So I have no idiea why I am bothering to post anything here. Maybe it’s one more method of procrastinating….
I still find it rather bemusing that I procrastinate and avoid doing things that I _want_ to do. How does that make any sense?
Surely if i want to do something, then I want to do it, so I wouldn’t be trying to avoid it, right?
Maybe coffee will fix it. Though I heard on the radio yesterday that Coffee causes memory loss. Unfortunately they didn’t elaborate, so I don’t know any more than that.

Or maybe they did, and I just forgot.

Well, I survived the dreaded Inspection Ordeal…though in truth it’s hardly a big deal, though always a little kind of irritating when they don’t even _look_ at things that you spend ages scrubbing, dusting, or vacuuming.
Anyway, apart from having to arrange getting the carpet cleaned sometime between now and the next inspection in 6 months (which I’ve been considering doing anyway – it’s been looking rather in need of it for a while), I can again relax and let my mess spread once more!

Inspection tomorrow.
House status 90%
Dining room floor to vacuum, dishes to do, last minute vacuum and quick run around to do.

Going to bed now.

(I hate cleaning showers, bathrooms and toilets…ick)

I’ts cold. It’s raining. I need to mow the lawn and sweep the leaves before my inspection on Tuesday. The rego on the car was due while I was in Sydney and I can’t do anything about it till Monday.
And I keep getting spam messages on my sites.

Blah.

I finished reading American Gods last night…which is a pain, because now I have nothing to read until payday…I tried to make it last, but that’s just not possible when a book is good, and it was.

I came across an excellent article during the week – How to Mix a Pop Song From Scratch. It was full with all the information I didn’t have. I’ve never really known how to go about the production side of recording – usually I’m mixing as we record, and then once we’ve recorded everything, I have no idea how to make it sound _good_, if I manage it, it’s pure luck.
But now having read that article, I actually feel confident about the process now, and I’ll resist the urge to add any effects, or otherwise modify the sound during the recording stage, and then sit down and do a proper mixing session once we’ve finished.
Having read that article, I now understand the point of the console view in Cakewalk – I could never figure out why you’d want a whole view to just adjust some volumes, it never occured to me that you’d do it as an entirely separate step. I guess that’s because I’ve always done every step myself, it never occured to me that I should separate them logically.
I have yet to put the new information in to practice, but I mean to soon.

I’m getting rather comfortable with Mandrake now – It has really suprised me. The last version I tried was 6, or 7 and I wasn’t very impressed. It was really easy to use without knowing what you were doing, as long as you went down their carefully constructed path, but if you strayed off the path, everything tended to fall apart. And since I _did_ know what I was doing, I didn’t even want to be on their path, so all in all, it wasn’t for me.
But 10 appears to be completely different – it’s shown itself so far to be very stable, consistent and polished. To the point where I’m actually using the Mandrake supplied version of KDE, which for a user that has stayed on the bleeding CVS edge for 7 years is a big change. Though I think part of it is due to my change in attitude when it comes to Linux. When I first started using it, I loved that it was this whole new system that I could find out about, and learn, and also – it was still fairly imature as a desktop operating system. At that time, Fvwm and Afterstep were about it for desktop environments – apart from Enlightenment, which looked impressive, but was fairly useless. So I enjoyed following the progress of various projects, KDE being one, as I knew that I wanted a consistent desktop, not just a window manager – even though I’ve always been the sort of user that uses the window manager as a way of having multiple consoles on the screen at once ;)
So I’d go through this cycle of spending most of each weekend with my PC in the process of updating the operating system – first updating Debian (unstable of course), and then KDE from cvs, and recompiling. And if I was lucky, come Monday, I’d have a functioning system. If not, then I’d get by on Blackbox until I’d fixed the problems.
But since my time away from using Linux regularly, I think I’ve lost patience with the fiddling, recompiling, and trusting to luck that comes with staying on the bleeding edge. These days, I just want to Get Stuff Done, and Mandrake so far has not got in the way. Though I do wish the package management was a little more like Debian’s.

On the topic of Getting Stuff Done, I managed to get myself focused enough to do some work on my CMS / Personal Publishing system yesterday, not a lot of work, and nothing visible yet, but it was satisfying, and I’m confident that I’ll be able to start making large jumps soon.

Yesterday I also discovered how badly I suck at Soul Calibur II, as my 6 year old daughter beat me 3 times in a row, before I managed to scrape my way up to a 5-5 draw. And I only managed that by playing Cassandra a few times. I have no idea what it is about her that I find so easy. I tried Spawn in one game, and managed to make him float around – which was thoroughly useless, in fact in one floating episode, I came diving down only to miss whoever it was that Caitlin was playing, and then get bonked on the head and KOd. bah. And then to rub salt into the wounds, Caitlin played Spawn next, and she managed to make him to all sorts of impressive things that mostly resulting in me having the shit kicked out of me.

Maybe I should practice before Monday..heh

Today I did a little bit more work on the CMS, but mostly I spent the day locating a CD Ripper and encoder that suited my needs, and I settled on MP3c which I’ve used in the past, and has the right combination of configurability, stability, and support for other encoders (in this case flac) for my needs. The only con is that it doesn’t support background encoding, so it rips first and then encodes, but I’m not too fussed about that.

The rest of day involved setting up Subversion on my server, to use instead of CVS. Since I recently discovered that I was under the wrong impression about a couple of things – That it required Apache (it doesn’t), that it doesn’t do atomic commits (it does), and that it doesn’t version directories (it does).
As it was, I set it up with Apache anyway, as I liked the idea of being able to browse the repository via HTTP and WebDAV, and also I should be able to access it from work that way. It was very simple to set up – even with me putting it in a virtual host. Anyone whos’ ever configured Apache would have no problem whatsoever.
The only problem I faced is that the eclipse plugin for it – subclipse, currently doesn’t seem to work. Hopefully there will be a new version soon, as I don’t want to do too much more work without a proper SCM solution.

In other complete randomness – since I started re ripping all my CDs today, and I started from A, I listened to about 5 hours worth of The Alan Parsons Project. It’s been ages since I last listened them, and I had forgotten how much I liked it, and how much of an influence on my musical tastes that one fateful moment when I first heard “Silence and I” had.

I was about to set myself up for a day of working on stuff, on my new laptop, and had moved myself back in to the dining room, put the laptop on the stand I have, started plugging everything in, only to discover THERE’S NO PS2 PORT!!!
ACK!
So I can’t plug my MS Natural Keyboard in to it.
Which means I can’t use it on the stand, which means that using it for any length of time invovles hunching over and peering down at it – and my back already hurts from the last few days of doing that.
Nothing’s ever bloody simple is it. And it’s the wrong end of the month so I can’t just go out and buy a PS2 -> USB converter. arrrrgh.