REverberations - Site News

Europe 2002-3 Blog Fixed

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:23:14 -0500

The link over to the left goes to the almost-daily blog and pictures we kept during our Europe 2002-3 trip. When I moved webhosts I neglected to quality check it and have only just fixed a few little issues which were stopping the blog from working.

Also, the "Time Machine" which provides a quick link to a certain number of years ago today is fixed so that we can re-live our trip each day, but in a much cheaper fashion.

This is all custom code and today (or even when we went again for our Honeymoon in 2006) I'd do it quite differently, using flickr and/or one of the many online travel blogging services which did not exist in any form in 2002.

Land Update

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:49:17 -0600

We're spending a reasonably amount of time just mowing our block of land, and the associated bills with no real benefit are driving us to focus on saving to move on there!

The first structure went up some time ago - I built a compost bin! Compost is rather difficult to move between properties, so our previous two have been left with a nice supply thanks to all our kitchen waste. There wasn't much point doing that again, so a bit of research and time later, and our land was no longer 5 empty acres.

We've cleared some of the fallen trees and turned it into firewood, discovering our local wildlife in the process.

Not long after we purchased the block, there was of course the question of how to tend so much grass. The answer was served up courtesy of an eBay-ed large commercial ride-on mower (diesel to run on 100% biodiesel, of course!) which we collected from the Hunter Valley thanks to the impressive grunt of the VW and a trailer we decided to buy to do the move ourselves. Both of these have proved great investments, even with a bit of repair work we needed to do to the mower.

Starting this coming week our fencing starts to go up. The neighbor we are sharing the fence with unfortunately started the relationship off on a less-than-optimal note by reneging on a deal we had, however this is hopefully behind us now.

The neighbor on the other side is a far different story - it turns out I used to work with him back at Strathfield Car Radios 13 years ago! One of those real small-world stories, and enough to completely overpower the let-down of the other neighbour. He fenced his block with the help of his father who lives around the corner, running an olive farm. This means he can borrow farming equipment as needed, although yesterday he had broken his slasher. The fact that he was slashing at given he has sheep on there shows just how much the recent rain has made the grass grow. Our block has sure taken some mowing in recent times!

For the fencing we have to clear out a section of odd fenced garden that is mostly in our property but goes into the block next door which we want to separate ourselves from with the fence, this is tomorrow's task.

The back fence is somewhat intact so we've asked the fencer to keep what he can to help keep our costs down, and I spent some time clearing away the blackberries and other overgrowth from the farm behind us with another new piece of gardening equipment we're going to need - a petrol whipper-snipper (using our electric one when the nearest power point we own is 3-4km away was proving a little difficult).

We have decided for reasons of cost not to fence the front for now, instead waiting for a final decision on where our driveway is to go (there's a drainage ditch which if we are careful we can drive across but this won't work in the long-term for delivery trucks, etc.)

Once that is done, we're pretty much done with the first phase of our project - get land and boundaries established. After that, the next phase begins - Services - where we get power, sewerage, water, hot water and phone available on the block in preparation for the following phase. This will be when we put up the barn with kitchenette, bathroom, heating, etc., then back in the caravan we purchased as cheap bedrooms and kitchen that we can sell later (currently sitting outside our rental property), and move onto our land!

Current hopeful plan has us there in spring, after the new baby comes along. We could be there far earlier but have to pace our spending according to our earnings.

I have a flickr set called Build on Razorback where I'm putting pictures of the process, and am also working on a more specific website to showcase our crazy plans as they evolve.

Everywhere

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:01:00 -0500

The house is now routinely in chaos when I return home from work, as Phoebe is crawling everywhere rapidly, and can climb to stand on most objects.

For a while there I was joking that at least she hadn't tried to use my leg hairs for this purpose. And then she did. I joke about this no longer.

She seems to have decided that food isn't the root of all evil and will eat many things at her own pace, far more often. We're still hesitant to call it a meal, because it's far from the recommended amount, but it is a significant improvement on even a couple of weeks ago.

Sadly, the sleep issues continue. There are clear improvements at times, but almost every night there's still a period of many hours where she just doesn't want to sleep. We're booked into Tresillian again next month so if she doesn't keep improving on her own then we'll all get a bit of a helping hand.

There are always more pictures being uploaded, and there is plenty more stuff I want to blog about but I just keep forgetting it! Perhaps I need to get the mobile blogging client working so all that time I'm on a packed train when these things come to my head I can be writing them instead.

Changed Webhost

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:13:39 -0500

Found a significantly better webhosting deal at Hawk Host so decided to jump ship from my crusty old one which has been patchy over the years.

Sorry for the rough ride, there's more to fix yet too.

Will trade money for sleep

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 07:33:18 -0600

But I don't think you can do that.

Actually, to be honest, it's getting better. Partially because Liz isn't waking me up during the night, she's just doing baby things by herself. This is nice of her, but not really fair, and I'm trying to get her to involve me more, but at the end of the day, since there is no feeding schedule yet, it's highly likely that Phoebe will need a feed anyway, so Liz will be involved eventually.

We had a bit of a scare last week with both of the girls going back to hospital for a couple of minor complications, but they seem to be mostly working themselves out. Our gut instinct that the local doctor's advice was rubbish proved well-founded after speaking to the hospital's top paediatrician.

Still going well with the cloth nappies, especially so since we got our new washing machine. And dishwasher, and big TV. Yes, we aren't supposed to be able to afford such things with a new bub and me off work, but that's the magic of 12 months interest free, and some times you just have to get things at the right time.

I've re-jigged Phoebe's homepage to point straight to the photos for now - less hassle for me to manage when we're between other things. Photos continue to appear there as we add them!

Belated Bulgaria Blogging

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 19:59:24 -0500

Well, it's belated no more. OK, yes, it's still rather late.

Anyway, check out the Bulgaria category for the latest installment.

Edit: Pictures now online also!

Europe 2006 Page Tidy-Up

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:39:42 -0600

I've just done a very long-overdue page tidy up on the Europe 2006 page. It's also linked over there on the left.

The previous version was last updated when we were in Paris, so it was a little inaccurate.

There's now a link to the photos and links to each of the sections we have blogged about.

My current goal is to have finished the blog entries no later than twelve months after they occurred. That means I'm right for another month or so but then have to get cracking to convert our notes into entries you might want to read.

Up to and including Macedonia is currently completed.

So much to do in life!

Site Hacked

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 12:53:05 -0600

This is the second time this has happened - this time some stupid index.php defacement again.

Sorry for the break in service, I'm chasing it up with my webhost who are paid to make sure this doesn't happen...

Edit: OK I think I've zapped them all now, please let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary.

Blog Feeds

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 15:10:34 -0500

If you access this blog using a RSS feed, please ensure you are using the latest - there is a link on the side of the main page.

Older feeds may still work but result in you only seeing the latest item or strange things like that.

CSS broken, website ugly

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 17:58:24 -0500

Sorry about the uglyness here, my webhost has changed some settings and my CSS files don't appear to be being loaded anymore. I've fired off an email and hope to have it fixed soon.

Edit 9:35 7/8/2006: They temporarily moved me to a different server which seems to have fixed things. Hope it stays this way.

Europe2006 stuff online!

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 17:43:00 -0600

OK, so I'm working this out slowly - if it takes me a while remember this is supposed to be my honeymoon :)
Photos are going to be available at this URL (go there and bookmark it if you like), or if you know what RSS means then you probably want to add this link to your RSS reader.

Luckily the internet cafe right across from our hotel room has both wireless and wired connection for laptops - not sure how often we will find this while travelling outside of big cities.

Pictures

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 10:34:40 -0600

Down a bit on the left are some pictures I upload now and then. Previously they were just static images, but I've changed over to the Flash version of the Flickr thumbnail viewer. This is because it shows much more than just the last three pictures I've uploaded, and in a way that grabs your attention a little more.
If you don't have a Flash plugin for your browser, this link may help you grab one.

By the way, there's plenty more pictures in there now too. Just click on one and start browsing, or you can view them all.

Comments tightened up

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 14:44:55 -0600

The spammers seem to be hammering me with comment spam right now, so I've tightened the rules up a bit and require that annoying "type these letters into this box" thingy on each comment.
Sorry, I don't like it much either.
Keep the (legitimate) comments coming!

Flickr

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 21:55:18 -0500

I'm playing around with Flickr, an online photo-sharing site.
All of my photos are stored in iPhoto, and there's a great plugin you can load into it to give it the ability to upload photos to Flickr from right within iPhoto itself.
So, it happens that about an hour after I had finished a gig with The Honeymakers today, I uploaded a couple of pictures and within five minutes other people somewhere had viewed them. You can find photos based on "tags", so for example I tagged these photos as "jazz", "music", "saxophone", etc. Anyone who searches for these keywords will find my photos, along with those of anyone else who has used the same tags.
Also, if you scroll down this page and look on the left you'll see the latest three photos I have put up on Flickr, without having to leave this page.
If you already track my RSS feed, you may also like to add this one, which will give you an entry every time I upload a photo.

Europe tidy-ups

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 15:12:10 -0500

Just finished some tidying up of the Europe 2002-3 section, since plenty of places seem to link to it. Yes, I know it's now closer to our next Europe trip than that one, but oh well.
I've switched to static rendering of pages that haven't changed since we got home, so it should be a bit snappier.
I'm basically waiting for dual-layer DVDs to become cheaper (I have a burner already), and then I should be in a position to burn off copies of the high-res images for those who would like them.

Faster

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 25 May 2005 11:32:20 -0500

My ISP recently sold his business to a larger company, resulting in a shift to much faster servers - hopefully the speedup will be noticable.

I'm still here

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 11 May 2005 12:16:11 -0500

If you want to find out whether people read your blog, stop writing it. I've lost count of how many people have asked me when I am going to blog again. I guess I'll take that as a compliment.
Stumbling across this site where you can create a customised map of the world highlighting certain countries, I went on to update my "Me" page showing where I've been and also the main Europe 2002-3 page with a Europe map showing where we went.
On that topic, it's now pretty much decided that after the wedding on 18th Feb 2006, we will head over to Europe for 2-3 months to sort of fill in the gaps of bits and pieces we missed out on last time.
Some other random news in point-form:

Some pictures of the "real" Penshurst in Kent, England. That castle is nice and all, but ours is more homely :)
The linux conference and associated week in Canberra was fun. I decided not to blog about it because there was plenty of other people doing that. Liz had a good time walking around Canberra but had pretty much done it to death by the end of the week. Both good pubs in the city were also sampled.
We have a new dog Max, a male German Sheppard. He's a bit of fun and is finally starting to settle down a bit. Doesn't eat much which is a bit concerning.
Work is busy busy busy, and music is taking up pretty much the rest of my free time. I guess that's one of the reasons why we still have plenty of boxes needing unpacking.

That's enough for this post, I'll try and do it a bit more regularly. Maybe.

Yahoo! Creative Commons search

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 00:05:00 -0600

I noticed that this blog is the number one result for "reverberations" over at Yahoo!'s new Creative Commons search.
Not entirely sure how this works, but as you can see from the right-hand column down there, I have tagged this page as being licensed under Creative Commons, so they must understand that somehow.
If you, however, don't understand what I'm going on about, go have a look at this page which explains that CC is basically a well-defined and easily understood way of defining copyright on my work here. It ends up giving a bunch of common-sense and quite fair rights to anyone else who wants to do things with my work like quoting it or linking to it, and is the polar opposite of people trying to restrict your fair use rights.
It's the first time I've ever come out as the top result for any web search (as far as I know). Wonder if it will ever happen again?

Website outage - over?

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:47:55 -0600

My web host had one of his servers hacked on the weekend, and I'm only just back online now.
As you can probably tell, there are a few blog posts missing which I may not be able to recover, about a week's worth.
This is most annoying, as I actually got a Trackback from Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett's blog, with reference to my Kyoto Protocol post which used to be at this URL. About the most exciting thing that has ever happened on my blog, and now there's no proof! Aaargh!
Well, it could have been worse, but I would have hoped that the backups were being done a bit more frequently than they have been. I'm going to see whether I can find anything in Google's cache.
Also, if you sent me any email since Saturday, please send it again, as I most probably never recieved it.

Edit: I've reconstructed that post below, URL is now this.

New Blogging Software

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 22 Jan 2005 13:35:00 -0600

I have been toying around with the idea of doing some internal blogging at work for a while now, and yesterday I finally got a small patch of time and sufficient links that I wanted to post to become inspired.
My previous blogging software, Blosxom has been working fine for me for years now - that's what I used while travelling around Europe, I've hacked the code to bits and know it inside out.
However, it wasn't going to work for me here. Mainly because the software I use to post to it, Blapp is quite limited and doesn't support multiple blogs.
Plus, there's plenty of new features around in other software, and Blosxom hasn't seen a release in quite some time.
So, I went shopping. Eventually I turned up the brilliant Open-Source Serendipity system. It has two main features I've always wanted in Blosxom - written in PHP and with a MySQL backend.
Up and running in minutes at work, I quickly got to posting through the web interface. Since it supports XML-RPC I could concievably use a client on the Mac, but I haven't explored it much yet.
As you have probably guessed by now, I liked it so much that I moved this site over to it also. All post-Europe2002-3 posts have been imported, along with comments (comment dates are all wrong though). Since it supports RSS importing, this process was relatively pain free.
Sure, there's quite a bit to learn, but it seems to be working nicely thus far. I've hacked the Idea style a bit to get a look I'm happy with for now.
Sorry to everyone though, you're going to have to do the update bookmarks thing. The URL you have bookmarked should be http://www.reverb.com.au/tgould/.
Also, if you are a user of RSS, you'll have to get a new feed into you aggregator, although I put an entry into the old one to point this out.
Post any comments if you find any problems, I'd like to get this working smoothly.

Europe Photos Fixed!

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 00:09:00 -0600

As a celebration of (almost) one year of being home, I've finally modified various scripts so you can now view thumbnails of the 5000+ images I took while away. There's more to come, I haven't organised them all yet.
If you click on europe2002 over on the left, you have two ways of getting at the images:

Go to the Itinerary / Photos link and click on the Photos link for the relevant set of photos. This will give you a view of all the photos for that chapter of our adventures.
Go to the Itinerary / Photos link and click on the name of the chapter, not the Photo link. Then each blog entry (typically one per day) will have a link next to its title saying "x photos". Clicking on this link opens a slide-show window where you can page through the photos for that day only.

As I note at the bottom of the second method, I can't possibly store full-size versions of all 5000+ online. You get the thumbnails. There are email links to request a full-size version, and a note that at some stage in the future I intend to produce a DVD of all the photos.
The way this will work is that the photos will be available locally on your machine, and you will use this website as a front end to view them.
Not sure when I'll get a chance to sort that out though.

Quickies

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 08 Oct 2004 15:18:00 -0500

UK Ministers are sorry for the Iraq error, but Howard isn't. To be fair, that's not the official UK position but we haven't heard a word to the contrary from the coalition.
The Labor position of not outright disgust at the war on Iraq is the one major thing that is stopping me from giving them my vote.
The war didn't need to happen, and on a global scale I'm disgusted that they did it in the name of my country.

Dispite the fact that weekend trains are now so bad that Liz and I spent more time traveling to and from the jazz festival than we actually did listening to jazz last weekend, and the reason for this is that more drivers are being put on standby to reduce peak-time delays, CityRail trains are running later than ever.
But, it takes a turn for the better at the end of this post because we live in the best city in the world. Agreed. If only our transport were better.

Site Move Complete

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 11:27:00 -0500

You should now find the site intact, including a huge number of image thumbnails from the Europe trip over in the Europe 2002-3 section. 100MB or so, infact, which is every digital image we took.
My long-term plan is to have everyone who wants the full-size images be able to get one or two DVDs, put them into your PC, and use this website as the front-end. It will actually work now assuming you have the images, but only Liz and I have them for now :)
There is a Setup page in the Europe section where you set a cookie to specify which local directory contains the full-size image collection. This will be referenced whenever you go to the journal, and you'll get a link with "52 photos" instead of "no cookie found" to the right of the title for the day's entry. Click on that and you get a slide show of the day.
All I need to do now is find a nice way to produce and distribute the DVDs to interested parties...

Changing Web Hosts - bare with us

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 16:16:00 -0500

I've bitten the bullet and am in the process of moving my web hosting to Goulding. The name is nothing more than a coincidence.
Comments aren't re-imported yet, and the entire Europe section is missing, but for the most part everything is moved over. Your DNS may take a while to propagate.
Thus far the technical support has been 110% brilliant, and the array of features available are an order of magnitude better than they were at my old hosting company. Oh, did I mention it is half the price too?

Europe History

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 18:05:00 -0500

Check out the new links over to the left which show what we were doing one and two years back. This puts you in prime Europe 2002-3 territory using a script I hacked together which Liz and I view each day to remind ourselves of our travels.
There are issues with the images, which are currently set up for offline usage only, I'm working on this to give people a way to view the 5GB or so of images that we took while travelling. Hopefully the format will be more interesting than several hours with a slide projector at someone's house for the night.

"Newband" Makes Progress

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 21:06:00 -0500

Quite a good turnout on the weekend - thanks everyone for coming along. For those who couldn't make it, we had about thirty turn up, mostly old Georges River people, but quite a few others, including some new faces.
I still think there's quite a few more who weren't able to make it and could have turned up at another time. The general consensus seems to be that we are going to move in and try to "take over" Kogarah band, injecting it with some long-needed new life.
The first time this is scheduled to happen is this coming Wednesday, 7:30pm. The band meets at Kogarah School of Arts, Bowns Ave. Come along and check it out.
As always, check out the "Newband" website, which I am going to make a point of contact.
There seems to be a reasonable amount of interest in a Stage Band aswell. At this stage, I'm not sure how that might play out - there are few other Stage Bands around the place, most in varying states of dis-repair. I hope I can at least stay in touch with those interested and somehow put something together. Not sure whether it will be an off-shoot of the above or a separate entity.

Site-redesign

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 03 Apr 2004 13:40:00 -0600

As part of the site redesign I've just spent the morning on, there's a few new features I'd like to point out.
One big change is that at the bottom of each story, you can now view and add Comments, giving me feedback on what I have written. You just know you've always wanted to tell me what you really think!
Other changes you will have noticed include the sidebar, all the pages have been updated, and you can search through the blog with the search box on the right.
Also, I have upgraded to a far newer version of my chosen weblog script, blosxom.
The reason I was so far behind in versions was that I had hacked my local version to let update times survive the FTP process. Instead, now I just use the metadate plugin, which deals with this all for me. Very nice.
I'm still in the process of producing an updated set of Europe 2002-2003 pages, stay tuned for that one. Yes, I know I've been home about five months now.