Yes, this theme is not working for me in the least, and I have a redesign ready to hop (haha sry, I had to) but I haven’t coded it yet, but will do soon…
Time time, who’s got the time?
June 18th, 2010Sir Patrick Stewart
June 3rd, 2010
On June 2nd, 2010, Patrick Stewart received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace for his contribution to the theatre. Although he is best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek:TNG, he has been a notable stage actor during his 50-year acting career. Apart from his role on Star Trek, Patrick Stewart has been in several of my favourite movies such as Dune.
I was looking at IMDB this morning and found a little trivia factoid that said that when he first arrived to do Star Trek TNG, Patrick didn’t unpack his bags for six weeks because he was convinced that he was going to be fired!
“When it first started, I didn’t think that I would survive beyond the pilot. I did not unpack; I didn’t see the point. I thought the producers would come to their senses and realize they’d made a grave error in casting me. I was certain that I’d be on my way back to London…Eventually, it became clear to me that not only wasn’t I going to go away, the series wasn’t going to go away. I stayed, and have relished every moment.” (On his initial belief that he would be fired from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987)).
IMDB also notes that he’s been friends with Brian Blessed since childhood, another actor that I admire. (Who could forget Brian as King Richard IV in Blackadder I?)
Patrick, how we love thee
May 12th, 2010Here’s a little clip of Patrick Stewart talking about the digital age. He’s a big fan of his iPhone (just like my Dad, hehe).
Could it be time for a shake-up?
May 10th, 201030 days of new habits certainly seems like a very long time when you’re staring down the barrel of day 1.
I’ve heard experts that say that 30 days is enough time to develop new habits and if you do a thing for 30 days that it will stick. Well, it’s worth a try I suppose…
So what am I going to do for the next 30 days?
- Exercise!
- Blog!
- eBay Selling
- Stop skipping meals
I’m going to……exercise! Being a self-employed designer/techie/entrepreneur means that I sit at my desk all.day.long – and on the weekends I vid out with a bit of WoW, which means sitting around on the weekend too. Clearly evolution did not set us up with big butts to sit on all day (or did it?>>>) and so doing some exercise every day is a big step to not turn into a blob. I eat really well (vegan/vegetarian) and I think that if I didn’t I’d be enormous, and sometimes I have little bad girl snacks (mmmm soft australian liquorice, or mmmm banana bread) and I worry about overall cardiovascular health so I propose to do exercise every day, in some shape or form. Mostly I’ll be doing hokey workout videos with music I detest, but sometimes I’ll crack out the NYC Ballet workout and maybe even go for a run (I stress the maybe).
I also resolve to blog at least once a day, on any one one of my 4 blogs. One article per day on every one of them I think is too much but 30 days will give me at least a good start at building quality content and get me to a stage where I want to promote them (watch this space).
At one stage, I was an eBay Powerseller (which I find semi-hilarious so feel free to laugh) – and now I have a house full of stuff which I am “planning” on selling. I think that if I create listings every day for 30 days that ought to be enough to put a dent in my pile, and who knows, perhaps I will continue to sell after the 30 days.
Sometimes I get busy, and eat “lunch” at 4 pm. Henceforth, I am going to have an observed lunch hour (she says at 2:30pm).
Well, I will report back in 30 days (probably) and see how I’m doing. I’m hoping to be a few pounds lighter and infinitely more productive. There is always hope, right? 
No acid until you’ve cleaned your room
May 5th, 2010Possibly the most awesome video ever:
Baloney Detection Kit
April 26th, 2010This is a great video, well worth watching if you read your horoscope or if you love science. I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s a video that helps you separate fact from fiction which is a skill that’s growing ever more crucial in our age of information overload.
Leonard Nimoy sings about Bilbo Baggins
April 24th, 2010Behold, the ’60s in all their glory:
Leonard Nimoy sings the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins on YouTube (sadly they’ve disabled the embed code due to licensing. *shakes fist*
Read more about it on Wikipedia
And a lil tweet from Leonard about William Shatner’s public nomination for Governor General of Canada:
Got the Radeon 1600 with Jaunty Jackalope Blues?
August 5th, 2009It all started as an ordinary Wednesday morning, I booted my Jaunty Jackalope box and once past the grub menu, all I got was a corrupted display on my ATI Radeon 1600. I know it’s a working video card, (liveCDs work just fine) so I tried using recovery mode but whenever I started the xserver, I’d get the same corrupted video and I couldn’t switch terminals, keyboard input was ignored. My initial reaction was that I had to reconfigure xserver-xorg (#dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg) but it made absolutely no difference.
I hunted around Google and found various Ubuntu forums and bug reports about the ATI proprietary fglrx driver but none of the suggested solutions worked for me. (This thread has a number of useful suggestions for others encountering this issue.) For me, I could not “sudo apt-get autoremove xorg-driver-fglr” because I got an error that the package wasn’t installed and “sudo aticonfig –initial” gave an error saying that it couldn’t find any supported hardware.
My solution in the end was to run the following from the recovery root shell (with network support):
#apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx
I then rebooted and used the graphics fix option in the recovery menu and then booted normally et voila! Hope that helps someone out there on teh intrawebs.
Adobe CS4 OpenType Font Problems
June 5th, 2009I have been running CS4 for a little while now on my Win XP workstation (normally the one I use to play games but it’s a beast so I figured it’d run CS4 well and it’s cheaper than the fancy iMac of my dreams) but I had pretty much none of the fonts install properly during the initial installation.
I thought that perhaps the font problem had to do with my virus protection but I noticed even with virus protection disabled that installing some new fonts would fail, giving me an error that said that the file was corrupted or invalid and that I should contact the font vendor for a new file:
Cannot activate font "$font_name". Font may be invalid or damaged. Please contact the vendor for a new file.
After some experimentation I found that TrueType fonts installed for me just fine and the problem was only with OpenType (OTF) fonts. I did a lot of searching around on the internet, most of the advice was completely useless or stupid so I figured I should document this in case someone else has the same issue.
The problem was caused by the video driver. I found in my internet travels that some people running Windows Vista and XP had a similar issue with an NVidia driver (I use an ATI Radeon) so I thought updating my driver was worth trying. I downloaded the latest driver for my video card from AMD’s website and restarted (after all, it’s a PC). I then tried to install the OpenType font I recently purchased from Veer and it worked! I then copied the fonts over from CS4′s goodies folder and I now have my fonts available in my CS4 applications and life is sweet once more! Huzzah!
External USB drive won’t clear space using Backup Exec 11d
May 19th, 2009I’m using Exchange with Backup Exec 11d for Windows (on Windows Server 2003) and backing up our Exchange server to it.We are running extremely low on tape drive storage space and we can’t afford a new tape drive (thanks Great Recession) and so I’m doing a MacGuyver and using an external 500GB USB hard drive that we had around to run a nightly backup of our Exchange server. This setup had been working great, that is until the drive ran out of space.
When I noticed the low disk space warning, the first thing I tried was to recycle the media by putting it into scratch media but the backup didn’t seem to grab it when running, it would just sit there and ignore it. I tried to just delete the files and then ran an inventory to see if it would detect that the space is available but this just led to having a failed inventory run.
The next thing I tried was to create a new media set with a one hour retention cycle (as a test) and still Backup Exec wouldn’t overwrite the data. I even tried rebooting but the media still said it was available in the Backup Exec management console. Argh!
At last I figured it out and the way to get rid of the media files was to move the Backup Exec media that needed deletion to the “retired media” media set and then deleting it from there. I then paused the backup to disk folder from the devices tab in the Backup Exec manager, and then unpaused it. Space is now available again and crisis averted.