Tuna Shake (Baby!)
A good while back, while I was reading up on the Squat, I stumbled upon the Tuna Shake. Tuna is a very inexpensive source of protein and I’ve possibly eaten the equivalent of my body weight of it over the past year; I didn’t think it was possible to consume it in the form of a shake and when I learned of this preparation I immediately thought of the time, effort and money I could save myself by adding these into my diet.
Rip It Up And Start Again
I’ve just finished putting the changes I’ve been making to this site live. The front page is now an integration of my latest blog post, a random image from my gallery and a short bio of myself. Getting the latest post was explained well by this post and boils down to including the WordPress header file and calling query_posts() with the appropriate search criteria, from there it is a simple matter of making use of The Loop and Template Tags, just like when creating a theme.
XP on Kubuntu via VMware via VNC
I finally got around to doing something today that I had been meaning to do since I got Kubuntu installed on my home desktop, namely, setting up a virtual machine running Windows XP so I can perform DVD encoding/editing/authoring. I’m a relative novice when it comes to these techniques and I haven’t put enough effort into finding the equivalent native Linux applications, so it is a case of better the devil you know for the foreseeable future.
Firefox 2
I’ve just installed Firefox 2 on my XP workstation at the office, a week after my colleague Kevin installed IE7. The installation went smoothly and my extensions copied across ok and eventually got updated, but the theme I had been using wasn’t compatible, a new version of it wasn’t found by the add-ons manager and I didn’t like the default, so the first thing I did was look through the available themes and one that caught my eye was Mostly Crystal as it uses the Crystal SVG icon set I’ve come to love.
httpd Log Analysis
What a fun day yesterday was. I thought it would be interesting to know how many (if any) vistors I am getting to this site and proceeded to install and configure some tools to analyse Apache’s access logs. Through prior research I knew of the existance of Webalizer so I downloaded the source and attempted to build it. The build failed as I didn’t have the GD Graphics Library installed. I tried to build that but failed aswell, quite possibily because of another dependency.
Close Crop
Once again I got sick of the length of my hair: it had been a while since I had done anything to it and I felt it was looking untidy and I hated having no option but to style it in the mornings and after the gym, so last night I charged up the trusty clippers and set to work. I set the clippers to the longest setting and started off with a random swipe of my hair, thinking “this is it, no turning back.
Ruby On Rails
I decided last week to see what all the hype was about and have a look at Ruby On Rails. I’ve been meaning to catalogue my DVD collection on my site for a good while now but nothing ever materialised, so I’ve got something to work towards and if RoR delivers what it promises I should get something up and running quite quickly. The first thing to do was to track down some kind of reference material to learn from and this book seemed like the right place to start.
Ghan House
Early yesterday morning we were all bundled onto a bus and were delivered to Ghan House, down in Carlingford for a spot of staff team building. Turning up on time meant me getting out of bed earlier than usual, so from the get go I was less than enthusiastic about the whole affair, but I weighed in and did my bit regardless. We were split into 2 teams, with the objective being for each team to cook 3 courses of culinary delight.
Bialetti Moka Express
Yesterday the mood took me and I went hunting for some new coffee making appartatus. I didn’t get a replacement glass for my french press which was my original intention, but I did pick up a stove-top espresso maker and have spotted where to get the necessary component for my fallen Bodum, which shall be acquired at some point in the near future. It was a bit of a mission tracking this piece of equipment down, but just when I had given up I bumped into a work colleague who pointed me in the direction of Habitat who could thankfully satisfy my needs.
My Brain Hurts
I’ve just finished hacking new features into a web-app my colleague Kev developed. Yep, I was deep into M$ country but as always nothing beats the sense of satisfaction that problem solving brings (for me anyways.) Any time I’ve went back over my own code I usually ask myself “what was I thinking of here?” so over the past few days I’ve felt pretty much like that what with stepping into some one else’s work and trying to understand what is being done, how it is being done and getting acclimatised with a foreign coding style.