and if you got down on your knees

NEW LAYOUT, handily linked for everyone reading this from an RSS feed. I demand you come revel in its colourful awesomeness.

…seriously this layout was very difficult. It’s like I splashed paint willy-nilly all over the previously harmonious monochrome; you can count at least 4 or 5 colours which figure prominently, which is really odd but I wanted to experiment. The link hovers are really odd too (they are, however, growing on me in a strange way). There was lots of playing around with CSS and getting to know the 3-column liquid layout better. I am particularly fond of the yellow dot comments!

I am still not 100% happy with the header image (the red is weird) but, having worked on this layout since morning, I am too lazy to tweak it any more for now. I was also too lazy to restyle the comments section and probably won’t be restyling it as it looks adequate to me, at least (unlike the header).

And and, tangentially, I love the changes in Wordpress 2.7! The admin panel is now a thing of beauty and a joy to use.

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nine things about linux

I was going to entitle this post “Yay Penguins!”, then decided that perhaps a less cryptic title would be appropriate to something that’s going to be kind of long and rambly and unattractive to read anyway. Actually I don’t really know if anyone would be interested, but I really wanted to document this somewhere for myself at least.

My pet project over the past week has been to finally attain Linux mastery, or at least the ability to use it without stumbling every step of the way; I’ve been very intrigued by the increasing usability and popularity of Ubuntu and I’d been wanting to give it a go for a while.

Having run Linux for a week now, without booting into Windows the entire time (except once when I really wanted to use Photoshop), I am convinced that now is a better time than ever before for the average computer user to make the switch. Screenshots and a VERY long post - you have been warned - after the jump.

(I apologise now, by the way, if anyone reading this via RSS sees the entire post instead of an excerpt. I have no idea how it works.)

Read the rest of this entry »

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sweet child o’ mine

For a long, long time (since Christie implemented it at Avendesora way back when) I’ve been wanting an easy, idiot-proof way of including an avatar in my posts. Having searched high and low for a Wordpress solution a few years back and failed to find anything (other than tedious workarounds that would require me to memorise the filename of each image and type it into the custom field of every post), I kind of gave it up, but it occurred to me today that perhaps advances have been made since 2.2 and I really ought to see what 2.6.1 plugins have to offer. And I wasn’t disappointed! I found a fantastically straightforward plugin that works via dropdown menu - as all such plugins should work - and is so dead simple to configure that I didn’t even have to tweak my layout code beyond sticking a few lines of CSS into the stylesheet. And now I have an avatar on all my posts. I was so unnecessarily excited by this that I wasted a good hour or so uploading a tonne of icons, then going back and selecting one for each of my previous posts. Ah I’m easily pleased.

Here is a song to detract from the eyecandy-geekness of this entry:

It’s “God Knows…” by Hirano Aya, and it’s that song from Suzumiya Haruhi that my sister and I were supposed to sing at Animania last week. Neither of us had heard it before and the chorus gave us a helluva hard time (try it, it’s FAST!), but the song itself is really catchy! If you’re inclined to snag it, right-click on the player and you should see a “Download this song” option.

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tech envy

I’ve been deliberately avoiding most of the iPhone/iPod Touch hype, telling myself confidently that I have no need for such devices, staying connected all the time is for people married to their email, and when my old, trusty 4-year-old 3G iPod dies on me (which I don’t think will ever happen, considering how strong it’s going still), I’ll be happy enough to upgrade to an iPod Classic rather than a Touch, because why do I need an MP3 player than does anything other than play music? And perhaps store some videos for me to watch while commuting.

Sadly my resistance has been assailed by the glut of iPhone articles I have been reading on my daily trawl of tech blogs, and by my sister’s recent acquisition of an iPhone, which my parents got for her because my dad was involved in Optus’s iPhone launch in Australia and could get it dirt-cheap. It’s so… shiny. The interface is lovely. There are some really fantastic apps available for it. There is, I have finally succumbed to realise, a wealth of benefits in having internet on the go. You can check out Google Maps if you get lost in the city. You can input appointments directly into Google Calendar instead of storing them on your phone calendar and processing them when you get home. You can watch Youtube. You can listen to internet radio (!!!)… and the list goes on.

I’ve always been thinking of making the switch to Mac when I move on from my Vaio, but I must honestly confess that my Macbook lust has never reached the level of iPhone lust I’m currently entertaining. Frustratingly, it is really incredibly expensive in the UK so I really doubt I’ll be getting it if I’m staying there to work. And I just changed my phone last year so there isn’t really an excuse to get a new one (I feel like this is my penance for impatiently dumping my cranky Motorola last summer - I should just have stuck it out till now huh).

Ah, shiny gadgets… why are they all so outrageously priced?

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ikenai taiyou

New layout!

Every now and then, I go through a phase where I just want something dead simple. It usually comes after a layout which was very graphic-heavy and complicated, and goodness knows the previous one was. I was hoping not to use a single graphic in this layout actually but eventually succumbed to placing a teeny pattern background in the header to save the whole thing from becoming overly dull.

But the big thing about this layout, really, is that it is fully liquid (i.e. columns dynamically resize with your browser size and it should be cross-broswer compatible, give it a go); which is not such a great deal if you are a better coder than I am with CSS, but is a great deal to me because the 3-column liquid layout has been an elusive goal that I have aspired to for a long time now, and I never had the patience (till now, while dissertation-procrastinating) to carefully, slowly pick apart some sample CSS and try to figure out how it’s done.

I also have catchy new music to go with the new layout, available for download on the etc. page and for live preview here!

This is “Ikenai Taiyou” by ORANGE RANGE (theme song from the jdrama Hana Kimi), my song of the moment and one of the most incredibly catchy things I have ever heard. It is also my current jogging song. I have it pretty much on perpetual loop on my iPod when I run.

And this is “Exodus” by Maksim Mrvica (probably better known as just Maksim, of The Piano Player album fame). If you’ve been obsessively watching the women’s gymnastics Olympic events, as I have, you might recognise this as Anna Pavlova’s floor music. It’s by far the most amazing of all the floor routine background music and sent me on a mad hunt for the track when I first heard it. (Anna’s floor routine is also amazing, by the way.)

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a little housekeeping

It is truly shocking how much time I can bring myself to waste tricking out my site when I have something new and shiny to play with. Wordpress 2.5.x is such a big step up from WP 2.2 and earlier (which I stubbornly stuck with for the longest time ever because I was too lazy to upgrade) that it’s like stumbling into your favourite toystore and discovering they’ve added another floor of fascinating gadgets - built-in comment avatar support, smiley customisation, improved metadata handling - And I’m still at that stage of new layout love where I can stare at it all day and egotistically admire my handiwork. Not good for the dissertation…

Anyway, I have a couple of fantastic songs up in the etc. section now, so check it out! And I should get back to work.

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using ideas as my maps

Spiffing new domain, spiffing new layout, and you will not believe what went into coding this… I don’t even really want to think about it now that it’s done. I’m particularly proud of having successfully negotiated both horizontal and vertical centering and then relatively-positioning a text block within that div layer. I’ve also cleaned up a whole lot of old code by doing this up from scratch instead of appropriating and adapting an older layout, which is kind of the digital equivalent of cleaning out the dusty cupboard. And and and, the comment layouts have been revamped! (But you’ll have to leave a comment to see that.) /geek

It’s kind of empty right now though because I have literally spent near on eight hours just working on this layout, wrangling PHP and CSS, tweaking colours, tweaking code, doing things with block elements that I’ve never done before, &c and I am too braindead to think of how to fill up my etc. section. I was going to upload some music, but I’m afraid you all will have to wait to hear the dulcet tones of The Byrds (whose cover of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” inspired this layout).

*

I was stumped for something to write to make this a noteworthy first post for my shiny new (hopefully permanent) space, and then I remembered I had yet to post about the Matchbox Twenty concert.

L to R: kyle, rob ♥, brian, paul

As you can see from this photo, Jia Min, Jenny and I were in the unfortunate position of being stuck in the upper circle with many people’s heads and a lot of space between us and the stage. Sadly they’d decided to make the stalls standing room only, and as much as I love MB20 I wasn’t about to gladly sacrifice my feet for them.

But distance aside, the concert was wonderful. They did so many of their old songs - “Hang”, “3 AM”, “Long Day” all way back from their first album - and nearly all of my favourites - “Real World”, “Disease”, “Push”, “Downfall”, “Bright Lights”, “Unwell”, “Hand Me Down” - all songs that I’ve listened to over and over again, so so many times, songs that are so in my system that I could sing along to them in my sleep. Rob played piano on “Bright Lights” and I have such a weakness for my favourite musicians on the piano - so that was good. Undoubtedly (for me, at least) the high point of their performances for the night was “Bent”, which is probably fitting as it’s the title most people would name if you asked them to name an MB20 song off the top of their head. “Real World” and “Downfall” lacked a teensy bit of oomph - perhaps it was just that their live backing music was different from the CD backing tracks and I’m too used to the latter - but “Bent” was explosively powerful. I’m not actually such a big fan of the newer songs, I think the music isn’t as catchy as the Mad Season/More Than You Think You Are era and the lyrics aren’t as simple and honest either, but as always with a good band, hearing the songs live made me like them more.

The best thing about the show, as Rob himself said, was how many people were just so into it; he said the thing about being in the UK was that reporters always asked them what it’s like being here because they’re a band that’s so much bigger in the States, but then they do shows like this and they’re blown away by the realisation that there are so many people in the UK who’ll pay to come see them (the Manchester Apollo’s not a small venue at all, and it was absolutely packed). And it’s just… so true. I remember back in first year when my seminar group were having drinks at a pub and Beth and I were discussing the sex god that is Rob Thomas, and everyone else had never heard of him, and I’d always thought I’d never get to see them here because they just aren’t that famous in the UK. But everyone at the concert were clearly fans, everyone was singing along, so loudly that you could hear the audience as a collective voice singing their hearts out along with Rob. The girl sitting in front of me couldn’t have been more than 10. She was wearing an MB20 T-shirt, and she and her mom were clearly having a ball of a time, and her mom knew every word to every song.

rob at the piano

in all fairness, MB20 isn’t the best live act I’ve seen in my concert experience (that would be Michael Buble). But for some reason, some inexplicable reason that I can’t put my finger on, they’re a band that mean a lot to me; I remember the heartbreak I felt when Adam Gaynor left and it came back fleetingly, wrenchingly, when the band took to the stage and there was only 4 of them and not 5, I remember singing out loud in my room to Mad Season late at night when it was just me and my CD player and a last-minute assignment, I remember all these individual songs that spoke to me at different periods of my life - “Bent” and “The Burn” in secondary school, “Bright Lights” and “Unwell” in JC, “Mad Season” and “Real World” in university - so many times, I’ve just been listening casually to my iPod and suddenly the lyrics of an MB20 song would hit me with that yes yes yes feeling. I feel like if there’s any band I can say I grew up with, it would be them, they’re the one band from my teenage days that I haven’t grown out of and who’ve followed me all this way here to York. And seeing them live was such a big thing for me… I almost feel that I’ve come, in an odd way, full circle.

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