Islands In The Stream

Hi readers,
it’s been a while. Apologies again for the lack of posting lately, but my webhosting was maxed out until I was able to move it to this newerer fasterer plan. Plus you haven’t exactly missed much. Let me sum up the last few months:

work
sleep
drama at work with an overheating server room
work
sleep
relationship breakup *sigh*
started growing my beard back for winter
work
sleep
more drama at work
sleep

In more positive news, I’ve been spending a lot of time focusing on my Ukulele studies, and I’m at the point now where I’m starting to record myself playing in order to snowball the improvements made through practice. I did miss out on the Winter Workshops being held by the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra though

Either way, I might be popping some videos up on Youtube - embarrassing! But I’ll try to focus on some kiwi tunes at least. Also, Ukulele Acquisition Syndrome is in full swing, I want at least 3 more ukes:
1) an upgraded gig uke, likely selling off my Oscar Schmidt
2) a D-tuned makala dolphin, keeping my options open
3) another makala dolphin to hack, I’m hoping to make a resonator

On the technology front, I have sold my main PC and downgraded to an Eee PC and an Eee Box. I have yet to upgrade both in the memory and hdd stakes, so they’re both performing fairly averagely for me at the moment. Subjectively, the PC is better than the Box.

I experimented with the uke recording using the webcam in my eee pc, but the software (cheese webcam booth) doesn’t allow you to specify your output formats, so it defaults to .ogv, something the Atom cpu seems to grind with at 640×480. Also, getting the mic levels right is difficult, and there’s a bit too much background hiss.

So I got one of these gorillapod things for $30 at Harvey Norman. There was a similar product that appeared to be rebranded (Samsung?) for $15, so I got both and surprise - they appear to be exactly the same, so there you go. I’ve fixed this to my Canon A560 and the improvement was instant:

me playing my makala dolphin

In other news, I’ve lost almost 9kg in the last few months. I don’t know why, but my appetite just isn’t what it used to be, and I’m paying attention to my body now: if I feel full, I simply stop eating. Not shoveling fast food down my throat every other day probably helps too, plus having breakfast every day would be having an effect on the metabolism… either way, that’s almost 30kg down from when I first got back from France, that’s huge!

signing off, hopefully the next update won’t be months away

Moby - Disco Lies

Flax search is a search engine based on the powerful Xapian search engine. Basically it’s Xapian pre-configured with a nice UI and some extra features, and their business model is custom configuration and support, while offering Flax Basic as a taster. At the moment Flax Basic is developed primarily for Windows as a desktop search tool (a’la Google Desktop) but it can also be used as an intranet search engine, and it can be installed on Linux, like so. As root:

apt-get install python-cherrypy3 python-processing html2text
cd /opt
wget http://flaxcode.googlecode.com/files/flax-source-1.0.0.tgz && tar xvf flax-source-1.0.0.tgz
mv flax-source-1.0.0 flax
wget http://flaxcode.googlecode.com/files/HTMLTemplate-1.4.2.tar.gz && tar xvf HTMLTemplate-1.4.2.tar.gz
http://xappy.googlecode.com/files/xappy-0.5.tar.gz && tar xvf xappy-0.5.tar.gz
cd HTMLTemplate-1.4.2/ && python setup.py install
cd ../xappy-0.5 && python setup.py install
cd ../flax/src && python startflax.py --set-admin-password

They recommend starting startflax.py with --conf-dir=. to get it reading conf files held within the same directory, the python scripts seem to look in data/conf/ so simply issue:
mv *.conf data/conf/ (or cp *.conf data/conf/, or cd into data/conf/ and make some symlinks… your choice)

Then finally:
python startflax.py

Browse to http://localhost:8090/admin and login with the username ‘admin’ and the password that you configured, et voila! It’s all yours.

These instructions assume you have all the dependencies and tools necessary, the first apt-get should get you mostly sorted though. YMMV!

Kutiman-Thru-you - 01 - Mother of All Funk Chords

At work we have a 48RU open rack for our patch rack. To those of you who had that fly over your head, it’s where we make phones and network connections happen.

Neatpatch promises to sort that out. After some pretty poor service from the local distributor, I finally received 6 of these at work, choosing to source the cables locally (where I can get a very good discount by purchasing in bulk). And here are some results, using a pair of 48 port switches in my desk-top rack stand to show a dense cabling setup:

OK, so after going through their website and looking at the alternatives, I made the pitch to my employer to purchase these in order to fix up our patch rack. This work will happen when we do our VoIP rollout and our cabling requirements will go from volatile (i.e. constant phone repatches while manglement play musical chairs with staff) to set-and-forget.

Whenever I get something new, I look for what’s wrong with it, and, well… I have gripes with the Neatpatch kit.

1) They talk about dividing by 24 as an industry standard, yet they only provide 16 slots for the cables, meaning some get three cables, some get four. This kind of denser loading makes it trickier to remove some cables, and is also difficult to unclip the inside row of RJ-45’s.

1b) They announced that this was (albeit slightly) fixed with their new product revision, now isn’t that a gripe! They’ve made the slots wider. I’d have personally preferred 24 slots so that in a dense setup you’d have two cables per slot. But maybe there’s a good reason to leave it at 16.

2) We tend to telco mount our switches so that they sit a bit more balanced in our racks. The Neatpatch kits don’t work well at all with telco mounted equipment, so we have to flush mount them. This is ok once some unused rubber feet are put on the back top edge of the neatpatch, thus using the neatpatch to get the switch sitting level.

Apart from that, I’m very happy with the product, and can’t wait to get it into our patch rack

I’ve finally got some time from the last three days to blog-o-rama it up.

On Friday morning I got up early and left for work earlier than my usual snails pace. Before I had a chance to walk down the front steps my phone went off. It was a text from mum alerting me to dilation measurements and other such things to help you keep your breakfast down. I was going to be an uncle by lunchtime, or so it said. Yeah, right.

I went to work with a skip in my step… or something. After months of waiting, my prediction that I would have a niece was nigh…

Complications abound (she decided to come out sideways, drifting into the d-dimension) ruined that prediction and bets followed. I put a lazy ten down for a girl at about 9.30pm. Dad was a bit more accurate with 11.15pm, girl, via c-section (off by about ten minutes). I didn’t know that birth method was being taken into account, otherwise I would have added c-section, given the long history of big Blundell babies, and the fact that myself and my brothers are all c-section for life.

11.25pm, my baby niece arrived into this crazy world, with her father’s nose and all. Some time later myself and Rob arrived, only to see the new parents and baby for all of 50 seconds before being kicked out by a nurse. We drove all night, for just that. Not enough time to get a photo on even my cellphone. We saw the nurse showing Tamati how to wipe baby-poo, we got to talk briefly with the exhausted Sarah, and that was that.

Still, that nurse was lovely, in comparison to the bitch ER receptionist whose attitude problem mixed with my (minor) alcohol consumption may have resulted in cold fusion. Patsy, if that’s your real name, I’m thinking of two words, and one of them is “off.” You haggard arrogant cow.

What a relief that it was a girl, with the lovely name “Sadie Elizabeth Blundell.” The pressure has been on me for some years now to settle down and have kids, in the hope that I would produce a great grand-daughter for my grandfather. This was pressure from a small part of the extended family only, as a discussion with grandad indicated that he didn’t care either way, and would rather that I ran my life my way, rather than throw it away ‘for him’ as some may have preferred.

So congrats to Tamati and Sarah, I can’t wait to catch up and actually see my darling niece for more than a minute

Dear Apple Computer,
congratulations on the hard work you have put in to producing your greenest mac ever, I bet it was really hard work.

However, I must let you know about a few oversights on your part.
1) Outside of North America, in the rest of the civilised world, people who say “aloominum” are douchebags, regardless of officialities. Don’t be a douchebag. It’s spelled aluminium, you can pronounce it “al-oo-min-ee-um”. Want to impress those of us who loathe Windows constantly defaulting to EN-US as the language? Don’t discard the obvious syllable. Or at the very least, get a localised dubover.

It’s bad enough that we have kids these days calling Jam “jelly”, and Biscuits “cookies”, and the letter Zed “zee”. Insulting us (especially commonwealtheans) further does not make you sales.

2) Make the ability to give such feedback directly possible on your website, plzkthx.

3) I look forward to buying a mac tablet. Hurry up with that, and make sure it’s made of aluminium, not aluminum.

Hugs and kisses.

Me.

Wierd Al Yankovic - Don’t Download This Song

Last night I’d decided that I’d had enough of single handedly managing all my debts and bills, so this morning I went into my bank and consolodated my debt, with an agressive payment scheme.

Basically I’m NZD$12k behind for various reasons on a number of different things, and I’m paying anywhere up to $1.8k a month, which is making life hard, especially when I have no visibility of where most of the debts are at. The worst part is that there is one debt that varies quite wildly from $170/month to $800/month without warning - a stable $1.8k a month I could probably deal with, but an unstable total that’s all over the place just makes life complex sans reason or sense. With this consolidated loan, I’m paying $1k a month, which will get me even in a year, and I now have a tangible goal that I can check up on and aim for. I’m hoping next month to have some money in from people who are still owing me, and I can flick another $1k onto it. It may seem like a lot to take out of my monthly pay, but all up I’ll have more cash in hand each month, stability will be brilliant for a change, and I may finally be able to restart my savings.

It feels good to have my finances in order for a change, and now I’m inspired to really get on top of things. After this loan is paid for, I plan to attack my Student Loan, which is currently taking about $400 out of my pay. I figure I can change the $1k loan payments to a $600 payment (to top my Student Loan repayments up to $1k, while giving me $400 extra a month to reward myself for a year of knuckling down), and have my Student Loan all paid off within another year.

Look out ladies, I’m ambitious!

tHeDirTyJoHnSon - I just can’t help myself

Uh oh, I think I might have Ukulele Acquisition Syndrome (UAS).

I remembered that back when I was hanging out at the music department at school, messing around with drums, guitar, but more seriously the saxomophone, that there were practice guitars with sticky dots underneath the strings with the notes on them. So I figured I’d do the same with my uke, in order that I could learn the notes, and in turn scales and progressions etc

But my uke cost me damn near 2 hundy. I don’t want no sticky residue on my fretboard, I don’t want to devalue it and have it looking like some school instrument.

So I purchased my second uke, a red dolphin bridge makala soprano, then I stole the label maker machine from work and spent an hour and a half labelling the fretboard. I have guitar playing friends who bitch about the tuning of a uke, so now I’m considering a baritone to shut them up enough to just play. Yeah Ra, just keep justifying things to yourself… *self jedi mind trick handwaves*

Pictures of the soprano are forthcoming…

Sorry all for the long silence, I’ve been unable to type due to a snapped finger. As this is now on the mend, I have updates! I’ll probably just backdate them, so keep an eye here

Today I went for a wander into the city to have a look around. My intention was to go to JB Hifi and pick up an Eee PC for my upcoming trip to NZNOG, but they were all sold out. So I figured I’d go window shopping down Cuba St.

I was about a block away from Real Groovy when I noticed Alistairs Music, and in the window were a lot of Ukuleles. So I went in and had a talk with them and came away with two Ukes - a basic Makala soprano in black for my friend Benny, and a Oscar Schmidt (by Washburn) OU2E. The E stands for electric - yes, my Uke has a pickup

Another friend’s soprano, my concert, and a standard guitar for comparison.

This is going to be fun

The Barnkickers - One Less Tear

Carrying on from yesterday’s Baby notification, my friends Nate and Leah have added to their family today. Casey (I think that’s spelled right) has joined his brother Lachlan in the family.

Basic stats:
0456 hrs
4.1kg

Congrats again guys! Sleaze, you’re up next to have a kid bud