Tag: geekery

DIY, and some not so DIY

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No posts for the last month, mostly because there’s not been anything of note happening. Yesterday, though… phew!

So, the path to the back room was pretty bloody awful.

kungfupolarbear had found a photo of a nice path design, so we decided to go to Bunnings and get the supplies for it. Long story short, about five hours and many sore muscles later, we have a new path!

As per pretty much everything so far, it took more work than expected.

And today we had an electrician come to replace the god-awful ceiling lights that were in the lounge room and kitchen, and to wire up some ethernet for us too. It’s so nice being able to put our own little touches on things now!

In other news, our annual bonus ended up being 12.5%! \o/ Of course, 45.6 cents in the dollar of that went to tax, but that was still a nice chunk of change. So I’ve ordered a NinjaBlock. Should be fun to play around with.

A new design

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One of the things I’ve done with my website is design and add an entirely new design, and the ability to switch between the current design and the new one. Check it out!

The “Dark” style is the current one, and the “Light” style is the new one. I’m really pleased with how it turned out, design-wise, even apart from managing to implement a style-switcher that stores the current selection in a session cookie so it’s remembered next time you visit. 😀

Oops

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Yes, I’ve forgotten to update LiveJournal for another several months. 😛 I keeping remembering at random useless times to update my LJ (like when I’m nowhere near a computer or am about to go to bed). I’ve now added a category to Things on my computer and iPhone so I can hopefully at least quickly add a reminder to blog things and there’ll be more frequent updates. 😛 (Yes I’m a massive nerd).

Biggest thing is that today is our third wedding anniversary! \o/ (Squee wedding photos squee). This is actually a Lily weekend, which was slightly annoying, but we went out to dinner last night after work, and I got some beautiful roses sent to kungfupolarbear‘s work which she spent the whole day squeeing about. 😀 Next weekend we’re going to Melbourne on Sunday and Monday, so we’ll eat lots of delicious food and take lots of photos. I can’t wait! It’s crazy, things just keep getting better and more awesome! BEST WIFE EVER.

In other news, Lily turned five last month. O_O And she’s already half-way through her first year of school. WHAT THE HELL HOW WHY WHAT.

On the subject of nerdy things, someone posted an epic rant back in April on how shit PHP is. My website was written in PHP, so that rant gave me the impetus to find something else. I discovered a Perl web framework called Mojolicious and have totally rewritten my site with that. It has all sorts of useful functions for reading JSON and such, so I’ve hooked my website into my Flickr, Tumblr, and it has my Last.fm stats too. 😀 It’s really been a lot of fun!

I was looking at my slightly older LJ entries, and saw the one from Christmas about the guitar input… I’ve basically not touched it or the guitar for like four months now. 🙁 I think the DVD that I bought (learning the chords by themselves) just doesn’t work for me, I end up losing interest far too quickly. That’s probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve attempted to learn, and I just can’t do it. I suspect I need to learn actual full songs, but I also have far too many another things vying for my attention that I totally forgot about the guitar input until I was writing this entry, heh.

…and holy shit, I also just realised that today not only marks our third wedding anniversary, but ten years TO THE DAY since my first LJ post! 😮 God damn. I’ve also been registered and posting on Ars Technica for over eleven years, and have been going by “VirtualWolf” online for a good thirteen years now. All of those numbers are more than a third of my life, which blows my mind.

Oops

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I know I said I’d update this more often, but not too much update-worthy has been happening! Work has been crazy busy this week, as we had an update over the weekend so of course there’s random things not working and exciting to bugs to deal with.

With regards to this post, I bought a book on Objective-C and am attempting to learn it so I can get my iPhone programming on! We play a lot of Magic at work, so I’m going to try to write an app to keep track of life scores. Dead simple, I know, but it’s a project for me to sink my teeth into, and also shouldn’t be horrendously difficult. \o/ It might even end up on the App Store (if there’s not already several apps like this I’ll be shocked), but that’s a lesser priority.

…and that’s about it, really.

All VCed up and nothing to code

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I’ve been getting my head around version control and have been using it for my website, now I want to code something more but I have absolutely nothing I can think of that I want to do! My website is pretty much just a bunch of links to other things (LJ, Twitter, Flickr, etc.), and there’s not too much more I can do with it there.

I’d learn Objective-C and make some Mac applications, but I really don’t have anything I want to create. I’ve found from previous experience that if I don’t actually have a pet project in mind, attempting to learn a programming language is doomed to failure. I don’t do anything outside of work that really would require any little scripts or anything, so that’s pretty ruled out too.

Of geekery, and bad movies

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I’ve been getting my geek on in a big way.

Since I’m supporting JIRA Studio, and it’s a lot more sysadminy (lots of command-line work, SSHing into hosts, etc.), I’ve signed up with Linode and have installed CentOS on it (CentOS is what we use at work for just about all our server machines) to get my learnings on.

I’ve got my own JIRA instance running on it, it’s also running Subversion, email (postfix and dovecot), and I’m using SVN for my web development as well (this is my regular website, and I test out everything on here). I’ve integrated JIRA with my Subversion repository, and have OpenLDAP set up for authentication for Subversion via Apache, email, and JIRA.

In another news, we’ve been doing bad movie night with gypocalypse on a semi-regular basis, and oh it’s such fun. So. Much. Snarking! We’ve covered a lot of video game movies (Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat 1 and 2, Double Dragon, all the FUCKING AWFUL Uwe Boll films, etc.) and our movie of choice for tonight is Robowar, and if we have enough time, BIRDEMIC: SHOCK AND TERROR.

😀 😀

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Still nothing on the job front.

In other news, I’ve installed VMware Fusion 3 on my Mac mini server and am going to install Windows Server 2008 on it, mostly for fiddling and learning purposes. A friend has a copy from MSDN with a legitimate key, so woo! Learnings are fun.

We’re busily sitting at work doing very little, and talking complete shit in the joint internal iChat server that the Tier 2s from both Sydney and Singapore are in. It’s fun!

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Whee! My new plan with Three was activated today so I can actually use all the stuff on it iPhone that requires data. So of course I’m sitting on the bus now on the way home and updating my LiveJournal! 😀

So so awesome, hee.

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w00t! I have unlocked iPhone goodness. I just have to wait until the new plan I’m switching to with Three kicks in before I can use data (should be the 7th of this month).

I’m also starting to get back into playing Warhammer 40,000. A few of us are having a big (in number of players, not number of points) battle on Sunday, and almost all of us have new armies.

I’ve gone Imperial Guard, which will be interesting… my other army is Eldar!

Actually, I tell a lie… those photos were taken a while ago, and I’ve just gotten back into painting them again. I’ve got another squad of ten Guardsmen finished too.