I’ve not long started reading Nightlord by Garon Whited. It’s a vampire story set in the present day and written in the form of a diary with the days forming each chapter. After some initial character development, there’s an interesting twist that allows for the story to venture more into a fantasy world.
Category: Personal
Hen Races at Bonsall
We went to the Hen Races at Bonsall yesterday. Yes, it’s what it sounds like… they were racing hens!
This is what the track looked like. It was setup in the car park opposite The Barley Mow, Bonsall.
What I’m reading
Recently I’ve been reading the Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. I’ve just finished reading book one, The Amulet of Samarkand, and I’m now onto book two, Golem’s Eye. They’re set in and around London, except it’s not the London that we know, there are magicians ruling the country and magical creatures being summoned to do jobs for them.
.mobi top level domain.. WHY?
Checking my email tonight I found that I’d received an email from a domain registrar regarding “the hot new domain format for mobile web content and services”
After having been involved in the .info, .biz and .name launches, all I have to say is.. WHY? Why on earth do we need yet another TLD (top level domain), and more importantly why do we need one for mobile web content?
Most mobile internet devices these days seem quite capable of displaying regular HTML so probably the only real differences are that the screen resolution is considerably less than your normal PC and you might not be able to run flash and java on the device.
Blog software upgraded
Following a week of 40-60 spam comments every night, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade. I’ve just upgraded from the old MovableType 2.64 install to 3.2 and then installed the default templates which is why everything looks a little blue compared to the green that I had before. I guess it’ll take me a while to make it look more like it used to.
Flat tyre
I had my first completely flat tyre yesterday and had to swap it for the spare. In the past it’s always been a slow puncture and I’d been able to get to the petrol station to pump it up again or to the garage to get it replaced before it got completely flat.
It took me a little while to figure out how to get to the spare tyre and where the locking wheel nut key was, but I got there in the end.
Technorati
I was looking at some of my old bookmarks today and came across Technorati. Normally when I bookmark something, I rarely revisit it, and yet the sites I don’t bookmark are normally the ones I want to go back to several weeks later.
Anyway, the next post (after this one) is the one that should help me claim my blog within Technorati.
What is a “Ding dong server” ?
I was checking the pages on Shartak tonight having recently added some new functionality (a Pirate class) and came across the most bizarre google advert.
Hard disks
I’m utterly amazed at how much hard disk prices have dropped in the last year or two. I was just browsing dabs.com and noticed a 500GB hard disk. I’ve seen disks of that capacity before but the price caught my eye – £195 inc VAT!
Maxtor 500GB disk
MediaWiki database compression
Recently I’ve been taking daily backups of a 4.2GB mediawiki (v1.5.6) database, about 3.9GB of which was in the ‘text’ table. It was all the previous versions of pages that were taking up the space so having looked at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Reduce_size_of_the_database I decided to give deleteOldRevisions.php a go.