It’s been a few days since I wrote a post, mostly because I had nothing to write about, but also because my interest in sitting at my computer is starting to wane. Today I have something to write, or more accurately rant, about.

I’m seriously sick to death of my current living situation. I live with my parents, who are pretty much unbearable. I don’t even know where to start with my frustrations, but I do know that I can’t live here much longer without going postal, and ending up like Sef Gonzales. I cannot sit down to watch television without being questioned when the show I am going to watch will be over so that my mother can watch some pile of crap women’s show like Judging Amy, or even worse - the worst two sports in the world - Netball or Tennis. I can’t listen to my music without hearing some whining that its too angry, and to turn it down. I can’t even have any of my stuff anywhere else but my bedroom. It’s like I’m not entitled to the same rights as them.

This rant sounds really petty upon reading it back, but I am so used to living on my own, that I am extremely frustrated with having to sacrifice not only some, but pretty much all of the freedoms I had.

I was invited to move in with a mate of mine in Brisbane on the weekend, and with each passing day it is seeming like more of a good idea. Never mind the fact that in Brisbane I might actually find a job.

So, these are the shows I’ve been to over the last couple of years. Not many, but its quality not quantity.

Madball / The Dead Walk! / Toe To Toe - Manning Bar, Sydney (Merch: Madball hoodie)
From Autumn To Ashes / The Bled / The Getaway Plan - The Gaelic Club, Sydney (Merch: FATA hoodie, The Bled shirt)
SOUNDWAVE 2007 - Parkway Drive / Hatebreed / Terror / many others - Sydney Park, Newtown (Merch: Hatebreed shirt)
Karnivool / Dead Letter Circus - The Roxy, Parramatta (Merch: Karnivool hoodie)
Boomtown Showdown - The Getaway Plan / Elora Danan / In Fiction / The Amity Affliction / The Vaine - Manning Bar, Sydney (Merch: The Getaway Plan hoodie)
Parkway Drive / The Warriors / Her Nightmare / No Apologies - The Roundhouse, Sydney (Merch: Parkway Drive hoodie, The Warriors shirt)
I Killed The Prom Queen / Bring Me The Horizon / The Red Shore / The Ghost Inside - Club 299, Brisbane (Merch: Mistake Clothing Hoodie, IKTPQ shirt)
Parkway Drive / Have Heart / Antagonist / Break Even - Byron Bay High School, Byron Bay (Merch: Antagonist hoodie, Parkway Drive shirt)

I think thats about it. There could be more, I just can’t really remember them all.

Stupid title, but its late, I’m pretty sleepy, and I never was one to be terribly witty.

I’m working on a custom WP theme at the moment, so that I can start the process of moving everything over to WP and finally do away with the blight on the last 6 months that has been ExpressionEngine.

The penny dropped on how to actually be able to use WP as a proper CMS (at least in my dodgy, half baked way at least), and as a result I can give up on EE. Woo-hoo.

Later

Enough of ExpressionEngine.

It looks quite good, works half decently, and I kind of like it, but its flaws are deal breakers. The categories menu is too hidden when you are posting an entry. It logs me out too frequently, and the bottom line is that it gives me the shits too often. As a result, I am going to switch over to a new CMS. At this point, I am only considering two. Textpattern and Jaws. At this stage, Textpattern is looking far more likely to get my vote. If I could get Movable Type working on my development server I would definitely be interested in getting it going, but only time will tell if that ever happens.

Anyway. I will continue to blog while I work on the new system. I have worked out a way to export all my entries into text files, so that will make it nice and easy to transfer them all over to the new CMS, and hopefully, there won’t be a whole lot of downtime.

Awesome!

A ‘landing” page that serves no purpose? Gone.

My interest in learning to develop with Movable Type and Drupal? Gone.

Any thoughts I had about actually considering myself a designer? Gone.

A lot of things are gone, baby, gone from my current situation. I just couldn’t give a damn about most of it considering the hassles they were causing, so they are gone!

As I wrote yesterday, I am getting extremely annoyed with ExpressionEngine as a CMS, and the way that it boots me every time I spend a little bit of time writing a post. As a result, rather late last night I started my search for a new CMS. I downloaded 3 - Movable Type, Jaws, and Drupal. Of all of them, I can only get Jaws to work, and it seems kind of crap to me.

The issues I had with Movable Type is simply in the getting it installed and working vein. You have to mess around with config files, and it uses CGI scripts - something that I have never come across in a CMS before, and my lack of knowledge of CGI has caused some massive headaches. I am sitting here extremely frustrated because I can’t seem to work out what I need to do to get it installed and working.

Jaw installed without a drama, but it looks kind of inadequate for anything. I couldn’t see any way possible to design a new theme/skin/template/whatever the hell you want to call it for the system, and to get any basic functionality out of it, you have to install a myriad of plugins. Aaargh.

Drupal just doesn’t want to work much in the same way that Movable Type doesn’t want to work, but its actually even worse because I cannot for the life of me find anywhere/anyone that has experienced the sort of problems I am having. I am getting “500 Internal Server Error” every time I try to access the installation file. It is pissing me right off, and I don’t know where to go with this one either.

At the moment, I am stuck with trying to learn how to use Textpattern to create a halfway decent site, and that is proving frustrating also. I guess I will have to stick with it and try and work it out.

I finally got around to watching Clerks II today, the sequel to comedic genius Kevin Smith’s first film Clerks (obviously). Its not a bad movie when seen on its own merits, and has some genuinely funny and touching moments, as all of Smith’s movies do, but ultimately it leaves me unfulfilled. Kind of like bad sex.

Despite the fact that its not a bad movie, it reminded me of the genius behind Smith’s other films, and that caused my obsession for the day - Kevin Smith useless information. He’s finished making a new flick called “Zack And Miri Make A Porno”. Just the title alone has got me champing at the bit to see it. I spent a few hours surfing the interweb following random links to more Kevin Smith articles. Its a good enough way to waste an afternoon.

I’m smoking again. I hadn’t actually told anyone of my plans to quit smoking as of yesterday, but it didn’t matter, because I failed. I have just finished reading this book that has supposedly worked miracles for countless others called “Allen Carrs EASYWAY To Quit Smoking”. My sister lent it to me. I probably should have deduced from the fact that she still smokes that it probably wouldn’t work, but I refuse to rule anything out in my quest to be smoke free. I was feeling pumped about my decision, and walked outside in the morning to do my morning routine (check my emails, read a few blogs, and check some forums), and I didn’t even feel like having a cigarette. Then my mother pushed the cigarettes sitting on the table my way, and I automatically pulled one out, lit it and from there I was on autopilot. DAMMIT! Oh well, I might give the book another read tonight or tomorrow, and I might just actually let my family know my plans so that shit like that won’t happen again.

Spent the rest of my day listening to some music - The Ghost Inside, Have Heart and Raised Fist (who I am still listening to) - and worked on a design for a new website I am working on - a kind of lifestream/portfolio type site on a throwaway free domain I got, and probably won’t re-register. It’s starting to take shape, but I have decided that I need to work with other content management systems, so I’m currently checking out Textpattern. Its pretty cool, but its another system where all the templates are held within the database itself (like EE), and it has a non-PHP coding structure of its own devising which is taking some getting used to. I might explore some other avenues before I decide to go live with Textpattern. I wonder if there are any dedicated lifestream CMS out there that can pull shit from places like Last.fm, Twitter, and Del.ico.us?

I may have just decided that I am going to put something at the bottom of each post - the track that I am listening to as I write it. We’ll see how long this lasts. Anyways, thats about it for today. I still don’t have a new project, so if someone has a cool idea let me know.

[EDIT]
ExpressionEngine is really starting to annoy the hell out of me. Any time I spend more than three minutes writing, when I try to post, it logs me out, and I gotta start again. Searching for a better CMS.

Raised Fist - Killing Revenues

I’ve taken a long look at my life over the past couple of days, and have started to wonder where it all went wrong.

I used to have a pretty sweet life. I had a decent full time job, a good bunch of mates, a fairly active social life, and a fairly happy home life. Now, I’m basically a recluse, who sits at home all day thinking of geeky things to do. Not exactly the way I had imagined my life at the age of 23.

There isn’t any option to be what I want to be in this area, so I have come up with a plan for action. Number one is employment. I have decided with almost certainty what I need to in order to have the career I want to have without going back to school. I’m going to join the army. Yeh, a geeky, strange person like me is going to become part of the “machine”. The reason I figure for this is simply to that nowhere else can I get a job with no experience, learn what I want to learn and on state of the art technology, and be taken care of so well as in the army. I have a good friend in the military, and he assures me that its not all drills and parade ground fruitiness, but more like a regular 9-5 job. Sounds pretty damned good to me.

Basically that encompasses my whole plan. Join the army, and from there it’s all “come what may"*.

“Come What May” is what the tattoo on my ankle says, and I try to live my life by it.

Now that I have finally got a design for this site that I am happy with, and I’m planning on leaving it up for at least the next 6 months, I am in desperate need of a new project or two.

I have a couple of idea’s. They are very geeky again, but nonetheless, they are things I would love to get done.

First up is a HTPC (Home Theatre PC). I have thought long and hard about what I would want, and how I would achieve what I want from this, and I have looked extensively at MythTV, and it looks pretty darn sweet, it seems to me to be more of a front end for various other packages, and being subscribed to the MythTVUsers mailing list, it still doesn’t seem to be quite mature enough to be a “set-and-forget” kind of option, which if I’m honest isn’t really what I want. Its just that the problems people seem to be having are sometimes such basic problems with certain parts of Myth that it has turned me off, and the fact that there aren’t any guarantees that it can record all channels, without extensive workarounds and hassles is kind of a deal killer. I have also been looking at perhaps Windows MCE, so that I might be able to buy a card reader (if you actually can do that), for my pay TV card, and be guaranteed that it will record, but I’m not a massive fan of having to use a Microsoft product. There are two more options I have been looking at, and they are the still in development Ubuntu Media Center, and Elisa. UMC is based on Elisa, so they are almost the same, but the fact that Ubuntu are extremely reticent to provide proprietary codec’s with their operating systems feels like a deal breaker to me. The actual Elisa project on the other hand looks incredibly promising, although it doesn’t do PVR/DVR, so that might be an issue if in the end I decide that I really need that functionality. Its all so confusing. I need more time to think about it.

The other idea I have at the moment is to build start an open source project - a standalone media database/media manager kind of deal. Think of a kind of All Music Guide, and IMDB, and whatever the TV equivalent it, but only for media you have, and all local and browseable through a nice interface. This would of course depend upon my actually being able to program, and at this stage I just don’t know how to do that well enough. If I ended up learning enough about creating such a project that I could do it, the next natural progression would be to add-on a media player so that you have everything in a nice all in one interface. This could even tie in with the HTPC project if that gets off the ground, and I could end up with my own HTPC software.

Unfortunately at this point the first is out courtesy of a lack of funds, and the second due to a lack of knowledge. If you have any ideas for things I could do, let me know.

As you would know if you have been reading, I have changed the design of this site three times in the last few months. Well, its time to up that count to 4, because I am pleased to say that my new design is live as of tonight.

I have been working on it for about a week and a half solid, and have finally gotten it up and running. I had stated that I would get rid of the gallery section, but I came across a very easily themeable gallery application called Zenphoto, and have been able to, in a single day no less, create a whole new theme for it, which matches the rest of my site, and have made it seem like it is fully integrated. Unfortunately it isn’t, and as a result, search from anywhere else will not include the gallery, and searching in the gallery will not include the rest of the site.

That really is the only downer about it all, otherwise I like to think its pretty nifty. It even allows you to customize thumbnail cropping, and as a result I have a fairly wacky thumbnail cropping mechanism. It’s kinda zoom crop, kinda not. You will have to check it out for yourselves to see what I mean. I also use a pretty nifty piece of javascript called Reflection.js, which degrades perfectly for all you people who refuse to enable it in your browsers, but looks pretty cool if you do have it enabled.

My only other complaint with the system is the lack of ability to create sidebar’s listing all the albums in the gallery. I might get around to customizing the php that runs it one day and build in that option so that I can get the last little thing I want out of it.

Aside from the new gallery, the only other major difference is the color scheme and graphics, which were all done by myself, and I’m pretty stoked on that. I’ve never been too good with the graphics design side of things, and I feel like I am finally getting better at it, and I personally think what I have come up with is pretty sweet.

Thats it from me for now, I be finishing up the last of the file server project soon, so once thats done I will need to find a new project to do.